The Ten of Cups offers us the deepest of fulfillment, what we might even call happiness. The feeling of happiness is slippery to define. What constitutes happiness for us is dependent on culture, personality, and those who taught and modeled adulthood for us.
Many among us feel superstitious toward good feelings in general. We might believe enjoying our moments will mean they must be taken from us or that they are only an illusion or they will mean we stop striving or that we must carry burdens that belonged to older generations or that our various privileges mean that we have no right to feel good. These are all incorrect and deserve our interrogation. When good feelings sweep through our minds and bodies, it is in the best interest of our personal growth and our ability to create social justice to feel them completely.
It is possible to feel angry without forgoing a deeper feeling of love.
Feelings are generally not isolated. It is possible to feel angry without forgoing a deeper feeling of love. It is possible to carry enormous grief and feel contentment with our career advancements. The compartmentalization of feelings might even indicate that we could benefit from gaining some professional insight into our emotional and mental health.
The Ten of Cups in the Tarot deck invites us to both find and thoroughly enjoy both the simple pleasures and the intimate relationships we have in our lives. This card suggests that we engage fully with the time we have with children while they’re young and elders while they are still with us. This card tells us to slow down if we are too busy to give our emotional life our full attention or to completely experience our time with those for whom we work so hard.
In The Lord of the Rings, we follow a group of characters on a series of adventures that are at times so harrowing that it takes a hundred pages of story to cover a mere forty-eight hours. There is a brief coupling of sentences, however, in which Tolkien tells us that the adventuring group had spent two weeks in relaxed happiness and therefore there was nothing to say about that. This is the experience of the Ten of Cups. A gentle and simple state of happiness that eventually gives way to our other human needs for adventure and achievement and general survival. But don’t miss out on it. When a period of meaningful rejuvenation enters your life, enjoy it.
May neither greed nor self-denial prevent us from making memories of the most basic good times.
Author of Daydream Tarot: A Basic Guide for Visionaries
Read Michelle’s monthly Tarot column in ANTIGRAVITY
Listen to Michelle’s podcast SECRET ANTENNA
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