TAROT

Lovers § Page of Cups § Six of Wands

The Lovers is a card everyone likes to see in their reading, and we can certainly welcome it for the month of August. While these figures can—and often do—signal romance, there is an even richer world beneath its surface. This Tarot key will support us right now in strengthening and broadening our intimate relationships of every kind. We have what we need to investigate our expectations, experiences, and means of engagement within intimacy. Let us spend real, honest time with how we relate to our companions and communities. Do you offer both support and acceptance to others on their own terms? Are you told you don’t listen? Do people get frustrated with the ways you try to offer assistance? Maybe it is time to consider what is not working in our approach and why. We too often label our most controlling efforts as care. We can stop doing this now. We can simultaneously come home, so to speak, to ourselves and allow others to enjoy who they are fundamentally.

The Page of Cups is ideal as an outcome from our honest self-interview on how we relate to those around us. Whenever we find a personal quality that minimizes or dismisses others, we come right up against our most embarrassing and hard-to-admit fears. The good news is we don’t have to tell anyone what we found. We don’t need to let a detractor be right or give away our most tender secrets in order to come into difficult self-knowledge. The Page of Cups is youthful and creative. She is both the unbroken heart and courage to love even after a lifetime of betrayal and abandonment. Her appearance means that we have the option to choose a playfulness or a sweetness that is protected by making better decisions about with whom we engage and how. The Page of Cups is humble in a manner that others find endearing if not utterly disarming.

The Six of Wands is victory and it is already ours. We are accessing places in ourselves that we have never known until now. These final weeks of summer, until the autumn equinox, will support us in coming to terms with the ways in which we assist in creating many of our own problems. This is a highly personalized season and it might feel overly individualized for those of us doing the work necessary to build community and mutual aid networks that will last, but we can and should use this time to buttress those precise undertakings. The Six of Wands rounds out our reading for this month and specifically addresses the kind of victory an individual can bring to their community. While we are still living through cultures that create celebrity for a variety of reasons both practical and often surprisingly esoteric—we will find our way beyond these constructions. In order to gain the autonomy and interconnectedness of a social future focused on well-being and satisfaction, we need the greater self-awareness and capacity that we might achieve individually at this time. If it be our desire to use these weeks wisely, we will demonstrate the kind of confident humility found in the Page of Cups and do so for all to see, just as the victor in the Six of Wands does for her village. May we allow our competitive urges to be soothed.