Blogging the Tarot: Six of Cups

The 6 of Cups, from Golden Universal tarot deck.

The card that comes off the top of the deck this week is the Six of Cups.

They call this one the Inner Child Card.

It depicts two children with cups overflowing with flowers, the bigger of the two kids handing a fresh bouquet to the smaller one. What a lovely depiction of sharing and generosity. What a world to imagine these kids having all their needs met and their wants provided for. What an existence to know only overwhelming beauty and abundance. And yet, very rarely do I have someone sit down with me in a reading where this card comes up as a literal representation of their childhood. That’s because this card is not about childhood – it’s about the child. And how, best I can tell…

the Inner Child version of each of us is the highest expression of our Authentic Selves.

I get asked the question about Good and Evil fairly often.

I get asked if there are just inherently evil people by nature or if we’re all born “good.” It’s true that if there is light energy there necessarily must be dark energy – or at least the absence of light energy. If there are high vibrational beings, there have to be low vibrational beings. When asked about heaven and hell, I’ll agree that there’s probably both – but hell is most likely this lived human experience. Heaven is freedom from human form and therefore human imperfection. When asked about people being good or evil by nature, even the worst of the worst, I will contend that there is no such thing as evil by nature. At our core, we are light beings. Our Authentic Selves are angelic – we are pure perfection. We are bits of golden stardust that are a small part of the greater collective consciousness, which is essentially Love – and love is never evil or selfish or spiteful or in any other way Human. The human part is what makes us less than perfect. The way we treat each other, the things we experience on this planet, the overwhelming nag of our human egos – that is the breeding ground for evil.

When I see a person – physically and energetically – I see a warm chocolatey center wrapped in a hard candy shell. That candy shell is our human form which comes pre-programmed with a lot of human baggage. Some of that baggage we are evolutionarily predisposed to carry. Some of that baggage is our parents’ baggage passed down to us in our DNA. And a lot of the baggage is honestly empty bags that will eventually hold our most influential experiences. We are a walking repository of trauma and euphoria and love and hate and anger and disgust and anxiety and fear. The human experience by nature – at least at this point in history – is a really challenging one, which is what necessitates that hard candy shell. Because underneath that exterior is a soft, boundless, flowing, gleaming, vibrating mass of light. A mass of light that knows and recognizes other masses of light hidden beneath hard candy shells. A mass of light that has the power to influence everything within the known Universe because it already is everything in the known Universe. We can go down the rabbit hole of quantum entanglement if you’d like, where we discuss how something that one particle experiences or exhibits in one lab will match the behavior of another particle at the exact same time in a lab on a different side of the world.

There is intelligent design at the level of vibrating energy inside all of us that our poor little human brains can only begin to understand. And what I’m saying is that the vibrating source of light is infallible; the humans that house those lights are less so.

Shop local and find this in store at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville.

So no, I don’t believe any of us are born bad or are bad by nature. There are some of us that are born far deeper in the hole than others because of genetic predispositions and familial and systemic traumas. And our experiences from the minute we’re born begin shaping who we are and how we relate to the world, so the baby that’s held and cuddled versus the one that lands in the hands of chaos are both going to integrate those experiences into their human body. Have you read The Body Keeps the Score? It talks in great detail about the physiological effects of trauma, even traumas we can’t remember because they happened before our brain was formed or because our brain was clever enough to splice out the memories for us. The effects are still left behind in our cells, which goes back to the point too that our parents’ already-traumatized cells are the ones that make us up in the first place.

That ball of light at the center of everything, though.

That ball of light is perfect. And we are closest to that little ball of light when we’re children.

When the innocence of our existence is still strong. When the world is still relatively new. When we trust our early attachment models to be good to us, to love us, to provide for us because that’s what you do for your own kind – you take care of that which is yours and that which is You. Except as we get older, the distinction between “us” and “them” grows more cutting. The teams get split so many times and so many different ways. Suddenly “us” is no longer, “Beings of light.” Instead, it’s people with the same gender, race, regional association, education level, financial status, religious affiliation. You can only slice a pie so many times before you’re left with crumbs, and it seems that’s what society has us doing with each phase of life we move through. The further away we get from our Inner Child, the further away we get from ourselves and our true nature.

We like to think of the experiences we have in life as happening sequentially. We like to think of time as being linear; once something is over, it’s over – we’ve moved on because time has moved on. Energetically, however, we are having countless experiences simultaneously that are not all tethered to the current date on the calendar.

Your inner child, for instance, is still a child. She doesn’t age with you, she stays 6 years old existing in a reality in the 1900s where maybe she’s crying out for help; or being scared by a big dog; or having to manage her nervousness at a new school; or feeling excited to watch that tv show with the little gnomes in the woods; or scream-singing that Billy Ray Cyrus song whenever it comes on the radio. Even with the passage of time and the physical change in the hard candy shell (aka the human form), the visceral wants and needs of that 6-year-old still persist in your energy field.

When I was 6 years old, my grandfather had a farm with horses.

He suffered with macular degeneration, so he lost more and more of his eyesight as he aged. That didn’t stop him from maintaining the farm though – as I recall, he had something like 11 acres that included his little ranch house, a barn with at least 6 stables, and a huge garage that was more like a museum of old tools and toys. My mom, his eldest daughter, would go to his house almost weekly to take him to the grocery or cut his hair or pay his bills – and my little brother and I would go with her. My grandfather had a big sweet German Shepherd named Baron, tons of feral barn cats we stayed away from, and horses. I loved the horses - Peaches and Shoogy and Thunder and Dude and Buck and Bo and lots of others. We knew which ones we could feed and which ones to steer clear of, and they knew which fence we’d be at when we had hay to hand out. Despite the mice and the spiders and the aggressive cobwebs and the itchy piles of hay, the barn was my favorite place to play. The smell of leather still reminds me of his tack room with all the saddles, as does the sweet smell of the horses’ oats.

My grandfather passed away when I was 14. All the horses were rehomed – he had lots of friends that he rode with, so I’m sure they were all taken good care of – and his property was cleaned up and sold. After that, though, the property never seemed to be occupied. Every time I’ve driven past there in the last 20 years, I’ve noticed the buildings falling into a worsening state of disrepair. By 2021, all of the buildings had gaping holes in their roofs, the fields were overgrown, and humongous trash piles had accumulated all over the property. It was such a bummer to see the place forgotten, and yet I still felt a nagging desire to investigate.

One night in the fall, I rallied one of my friends to ride out there with me. We parked on the street, not daring to put the car in the driveway. The brick house was still standing strong, but the landscaping was out of control. Several windows had been broken, the shutters were askew, inside was piled with junk.

But then…

there was the little creek my brother and I used to play in. And that was the tree that had the swinging rope on one of the branches. Those are the back steps and that’s the back porch with the rocks that sort of tickle the bottom of your feet when you walk barefoot. That’s where the hot tub used to be. That’s the fountain that’s been here since forever with the concrete angel on top that’s a little scary…

We walked passed the house, down the hill towards the barn. We walked through the field where the arena used to be, over the threshold once protected by an electric fence. We emerged in the landing at the entrance to the barn. I took a slow 360 spin and felt the most realistic flashback I’ve ever experienced. It was like I was literally taking in the view as my 6-year-old self. The barn with the huge garage doors that open into the stalls; the sliding glass door that goes to the tack room; the rickety wooden steps that lead up to the hay loft; the gate where the horses would gather when they saw us coming; the hill my brother and I used to skateboard down in the grass. I was flooded with memories I forgot I had and a level of excitement and enthusiasm that reduced me to sobs. Nearly 30 years later, I was seeing this space as I had when I was a child. And the child in me remembered being here like it was yesterday. For her, maybe it was yesterday. She had vivid visuals of when it was tidy and clear and thriving with life – and to her, it felt like it still was. It was a similar feeling to déjà vu… or like the grainy 1990s kodak images from my younger self were perfectly and cleanly overlaid with the crisp, clear digital images my 2021 self was projecting. It was the closest I’ve ever been to experiencing parallel realities at exactly the same time, the energy of which was undeniable.

In some space not bound by time…

my 6-year-old self left her little timestamp in that part of the world. The loop of her experience still plays, and those of us that know the frequency can see it and feel it and experience it too. My 6-year-old self has left countless timestamps all over the city, most of which I will likely never find again – and in many cases, that’s probably for the best because on the other side of these euphoric memories we get to strum are triggers we accidentally bump into. That’s the other side of the 6 of Cups coin, and that’s the piece that comes up in readings often. If there was a reality where your inner child was asking to be picked up and she never was, she’s still standing with arms outstretched waiting for someone to hold her.

When the 6 of Cups comes up in a reading…

It’s a reminder to spend time with your Inner Child. Whatever she loved, whatever she wanted, whatever she needed - she stills loves and wants and needs those things. The beautiful part of all this is that now you’re an adult, and now you’re positioned to meet her needs maybe better than anyone else. In turn, she’s in a position to remind you who you are - she’s there to help you remember what’s important to you, what you’re good at, what makes you feel alive. Nurture the relationship with your Inner Child, and see if you can uncover what you can both do for one another.