Nine of Cups - The Secret of The Wish Card

What do you wish for? I'd love to know. Do you believe in luck?

Wishes for me are more about luck, which I don't really believe in, in a superstitious way. When someone wishes me luck I often ask them, just to say a prayer, because I know that works. The answer may not always be what I want, but it is certainly always, the answer I need, and I can let go of trying to bargain or plead with the Creator to grant me my prayer. All you can do is ask, and we can't do anything to control the outcome. But it is important to ask.

It is however such a joyful and affirming thing of faith, when your prayer, regardless of how small is granted, as mine was today, and it was just as important to me as any prayer.

The prayer is not necessarily the what matters, because many times we can't find it within ourselves to pray, even though we have a desire to prayer. This in and of itself is enough, when we feel this way, because it is a prayer.

All the Creator requires of us is to be willing to be willing, and to have a desire to pray even if we can't find the words, are dry, and poor in spirit.

 “What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.”
― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters: The Essential Collection

Eight of Cups - Hope

When the Eight of Cups is drawn, I immediately feel a sense of trouble and  evoking feelings of despair and disappointment. But immediately after, I have thoughts of hope.

In fact it is a card of some resignation, and I think of the saying, no one's getting out of here alive! The Eight of Cups is a card of letting go. So many cards in the Tarot are about just that, letting go, which is a good thing, because much of life, if not all of it, is about letting go of the people, places and things we cannot control. It sure isn't an easy lesson to learn, because life has an ongoing succession of things we are having to let go of; loved one's, our youth, beauty, homes, children, life and the list goes on and on.
  Life is transitory, always changing and we are either moving ahead or backwards we never stay the same. I say it's all about our attitude toward our personal struggles and obstacles.

In the Eight of Cups we see Psyche who has a final task that Aphrodite has requested of her. Psyche leaves the eight golden cups behind,  and voluntarily gives up hope for the future, and descends the staircase to the underworld, knowing she will not return from this desolate and desperate place.

 If and when we find ourselves in this kind of circumstance, we can choose to try to manipulate the future, trying to "make a deal", bargaining our way through , we plead,  we may even bully, in a desperate attempt to hold on and change the situation and the " will of the divine, " or we can choose to let go and choose hope.

We can't not control life, but we can control is ourselves. Once we let go within ourselves, we will find hope.