[0:01] Hello, and welcome to My Tiny Tarot Practice. I'm Amelia Hruby, and this podcast is My Tiny Tarot Practice, where I explore the tarot card by card, starting with each suit of the minor arcana. Today's card is the Ace of Cups. In the Rider-Waite-Smith version of the tarot, the Ace of Cups features an overflowing cup held by a single hand, the water flowing out of the cup is flowing into a pond or an ocean or a river that has beautiful lily pads on it.
And then above the cup, we see a bird, a dove, holding what looks to be a wafer, a communion wafer, if you're familiar with the Catholic tradition.

[0:50] Many historical interpretations of this card view this cup and the combination of the cup and the wafer and the dove as the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, the cup of all of the King Arthur tales and the searching, one of the most sacred mythical objects of Western civilization. I don't personally take such a religious or mythopoetic view of this card or perhaps mytholiteral view of this card. But when I look at the Ace of Cups, what I'm reminded of is simply a cup that floweth over and the abundance of, water in flow, the generative nature of flowing water. If you've listened to any of the other episodes on the aces, you'll know that I believe that the ace of each suit holds both the first moment, point zero of the suit, as well as the entire journey of the card. The same way that each seed is both what comes before the plant, the very beginning of the plant, and the entire your life cycle of a plant if you're a gardener or a sometimes gardener like myself.

[2:09] This card is often interpreted as a peak emotional experience, particularly an experience of love or of falling in love.
And if you've ever drawn this card in a reading or had someone pull this card for you in a reading, that might have been what they described.
I think that that's certainly what it can be. But when I look at the card, I think of the cup as my heart and the ace of cups of that moment of emotion, of feeling overflowing the heart.
Sometimes I'm so full of emotion, it feels like my chest cannot hold it, that it is pouring out of me or that it has to pour out of me somehow. My body can't contain it. My cup needs to overflow.
And if I try to hold it in or repress it, that will only harm me and harm the feeling itself.

[2:57] And this I think is the magic of the Ace of Cups. The Ace of Cups is simply those moments where our feelings overflow our bodies, where our embodied selves cannot contain the depth and richness and abundance of our emotions. And in those moments, it's not our job to do something with our feelings. It's not our job to make something of them or create something or anything like that. It's simply to allow it to overflow, to be receptive in those moments, to actually receive all of the feeling and let it flow into the world. Because I love how Jessica door in her book, Tarot for Change, reminds us that perhaps our emotions are not simply ours.

[3:43] Feeling is a receptive relationship between us and something in the world or the world itself.
And so our feelings don't simply belong to us. They're not simply our individual experience or responsibility, but rather they're an invitation to open ourselves.
To the world, an invocation to open ourselves in the world. The reality of what happens when we do open ourselves to the world and we have feelings, we feel each other. And so, in her book, she talks about the cups as being receptive and feelings as being shared between us and the world and other people in the world and even along our ancestral lineages. And in Tarot for Change, she writes, emotions are living energetic currents with life cycles of their own.
They tend to survive down the vertical and horizontal lines of human relationships, through generations, through communities, until they arrive to the place where they can be fully experienced and expressed. That can take a while, but we can open ourselves up to the forces that are trying to be expressed through us and maybe learn to take it a little bit less personally.

[4:55] Emotions come from all kinds of places. We can be like the cup and make a space to receive them.
And this, I think, is the invitation of the Ace of Cups. To be like a cup. To receive and to overflow with abundance.
Our feelings, our emotions, are not a scarce resource. They are infinite. Just like our relationship with the world can be infinite.
Be infinite. And this returns me then to love, one of the frequent interpretations of this card. And in 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack, talking about the Ace of Cups or the Suit of Cups reminds us that love cannot be seized, only accepted. We have to be the cup that can receive love and hold love and cherish love, the Holy Grail of love. This is the journey that the cups will take us on, that is all already here and present in the ace.

[5:57] Thank you so much for listening to this episode of My Tiny Tarot Practice.
If you'd like to find any of the books that I referenced in this episode, you can head to the show notes.
You'll find a link to my bookshop page there where I share these books and many others that I recommend for learning more about tarot well as decks and some fun tarot related things and witchy things. All of that's at that link in the show notes. If you make a purchase through that link, I'll receive a small affiliate payment that helps me keep making this show. Thank you again for joining me today to explore the Ace of Cups. I wish you an abundance of overflowing emotion in the beautiful, brilliant cup of your heart.