Princess of Cups

The fundamental lesson for the Princess of Cups is to maintain as much as she can of her original sensitivity and cultivate her own subjective truths in a world that’s not always friendly to opening up. Maintaining a sense of wonder means learning to let traumas, fears, and insecurities pass without toughening up. This could mean limiting her exposure to the larger world, but it even requires strength and courage in the smaller worlds. She will be looking for the hearts of the matters, her core feelings, the most important ones, closest to home, the most true to who she is. She will be the most studious here. By original sensitivity is meant not cluttering her heart with a lot of extraneous emotional distractions, boiling things down to essences and essentials, valuing or treasuring the things that mean the most. It’s an heroic effort and no small matter to stay kind-hearted and true, compassionate and affectionate, tender and thoughtful in a complicated world, thus the need to keep things simple. Such a sensi- tivity doesn’t need to be overwhelmed to be fulfilled. The cup-bearer image suggests humility and service. The cup is meant to move the wine, not to hold it. But the art of giving is also good training for learning to receive with grace. The substratum of relationship is symbiotic, give and take, sharing and taking with gratitude. The value of a sacrifice is more than its price or worth, but this aspect is much misunderstood. To sincerely offer something up is not to ask for more: it’s an expression of gratitude for things already received. Those who get this back- wards are just begging to be unsatisfied. We learn a lot more from our humbler perspectives, our places of learning and service. But this, too, recommends against doing this for results. We can’t feed on the gratitude others might show us, we can’t live for the happiness that others might choose not to feel. This is just codependence. We find our rewards in the experiences we own. There is a bit of the Japanese tea ceremony in this card, a simplicity that distills the experience to its essence and draws more mindfulness than shallower minds might think it deserves. The word re-spect means to look again or look closer. This is cultivating the ability to find value in the ordinary and the everyday, which opens up the way to a deeper and more reliable sort of enrichment. There is parsimony here, and economy, taken in its original but nearly forgotten sense. Developing an appreciation for what we have is key to the most satisfying next step we can take: learning to want what we have. There is another great key here as well: if we are holding onto some- thing of negative value, then losing it is a win. We lighten our burdens considerably by dumping the things that are not worth carrying with us. We also help ourselves to fill up by plugging our leaks. When we can enrich ourselves with what is already available to us, then we can save ourselves a lot of trouble, suffering, and running around. We are often caught between being true and being hurt, between being authentic and being accepted, and between being impressionable and being a fool. We learn to place fuses that dim or cut off our sensations and feelings before they blow larger circuits. We get scars through which we can no longer feel. There are good arguments for cultivating finely tuned sensibilities, for staying more simple, innocent and pure, but these also argue for choosing to live in a world that might be a little too small for our larger purposes. There is no magic solution that avoids getting twisted up or numb inside, other than waxing more philosophical about our emotional pain and learning to let it run or pass through us, and giving it no place to dwell. The Princess is said to be artistically inclined, a little dreamy and romantic. Her fertile imagination is the power to give meaning and substance to contemplation and fantasy. Manifesting her subjectivity would be a function of her enhanced aesthetic sense, her ability to appreciate even a relatively impoverished environment. She should have a good sense of her gifts, and a sense of gratitude that would not want to waste them. This is also a way of creating new wealth, even if it only adds to the richness of her experience. Her art would tend to be artless, a simple expression of her natural sensitivities. The Yijing counterpart, Gua 41, Decreasing, shows a lake (big cup) half full or empty, reflecting a mountain. It’s not a time of abundance or overflow, but the things we learn in this state, such as appreciating what we have, and learning to do more with less, are a great make-up sort of wealth that also serves in times of plenty. On the cup half-full or half-empty question, you might say the Yi weighs in with the cup being twice as large as necessary. Decreasing is about paring life down to the real essentials and finding wealth there. The turtle shown in several Tarot decks, also figures in one of the lines. The turtle’s shells were used in divination, but while they represented wealth, they served no purpose if they were not used up.