Six of Cups: A Gift from my Dad
I had never seen my Dad as happy as he was out in wild, open spaces. He had a deep respect for the natural world, a natural affinity with it, even though he was very much a city boy who had lived in Liverpool all of his life. Mostly, his love for Nature shined when a wildlife programme was on the telly. If a big cat took down a gazelle, my Mum – whose heart always wanted to protect the defenceless – would turn away from the screen in anguish, her heart pouring out for the weaker animal, but my Dad seemed amazed by it all. ‘That’s Nature’, he would say, genuinely fascinated by the cycle of life, eyes lit up on the sofa with a vodka and coke in his hand.
Sometime during his 40s, whilst he was struggling to compute the death of his Dad, a childhood friend of his – who he hadn’t seen since he was a teenager –contacted him out of the blue. Something came alive in him that none of us kids had seen before. In the midst of his moody life, he began to regale tales to us about how he and his friend would go wild-camping as a child ‘over the water’ (meaning the Wirral, over the River Mersey – the posher bit of Merseyside where the most green space is).
My Dad and his friend would lie to their parents, saying that they were away for the night to sleep over in each other’s houses. They would take the journey (big and scary for a child) over to the Wirral from Liverpool to sleep under the stars; they had no tent and hardly any food but a thirst for adventure. In response to these memories resurfacing, he started taking us camping to the places he used to go as a child, leaving me with some of the most precious memories of my entire childhood.
Above: A photo of my Mum and Dad back in the 1980s.
I can recall a simple evening walk through the woods that we once took, with him at the head of the convoy as day turned to night. My Mum was frightened as he led the way alongside the wooded pond with torchlight. I felt like we were entering the jungle on the wooded edge of that little campsite.
The next morning, a gigantic swan came strutting towards me from the pond, pissed off about something and, for some reason, wanting to blame me. Being the camp child that I was, I began to squeal and panic, noticing as it waddled forward that its beady eye was most definitely on me. My older brother Chris thought it would be hilarious to push me towards the swan; I slipped in the mud and went skidding underneath the bird like a baseball player sliding in for touchdown. I lay there in the mud, screaming and panicking at the top of my girlish lungs, looking up at the monstrous bird who was honking and flapping its wings over me, threatening to peck my eyes out. If its eyes had been coloured red, it couldn’t have been any more malevolent to me, flapping around as I rolled around beneath it, trapped like a worm beneath a hungry blackbird. Of course, my loving family were far too busy laughing to help poor little Stephen, although I eventually got dragged away by someone (who, I don’t remember), somehow retaining my eyes for future camping trips.
My dad and I went camping alone once, just the two of us. He wanted to encourage my love of animals (which all too often took the form of trapping pets in cages) out in the wild. In England, working class folks (by and large) live in cities and towns. Countryside living is often for people with more money than we ever had. (I used to think that it was like this all over the world, but in Poland – for example – it can often be other way around.) My Dad could never have afforded to live ‘closer to Nature’ (a silly term, as everything is Nature, but you know what I mean) and I often wonder now if this is something that he would have liked. I sometimes imagine him visiting the rural village in Scotland where I live with my partner now, and I know he would have loved it. I can picture us pitching a tent down in the local glen, wild camping by the river, or at least taking a walk and spotting some deer, watching them silently and in awe.
Above: Six of Cups from the Waite-Smith Tarot.
The Six of Cups in the Waite Smith tarot is a strange and beautiful image. In the background, there is a castle tower and a cottage. In the foreground, five cups are filled with white flowers; they are arranged tidily on the ground and upon the wall. The sixth flower-filled cup is being offered from one figure to another, two strangely proportioned humans. The taller figure, who offers the cup, is as fresh-faced as a toddler, and yet he towers above an adult woman who appears to have shrunken to child-size. (Some people see two faces in the tiny woman’s head, but that’s another story.) The word ‘nostalgia’ is often associated with this Waite-Smith card, and it’s easy to see why. Why is the toddler bigger than the adult? For me, it captures the strangeness of memory, especially where love and emotion (the suit of Cups/Water) are concerned. The gifts that we are offered in childhood can come back in adulthood, transforming our lives for the better. My Dad’s love of Nature – which he consciously tried to pass on to us – came back into my life in a big way in my 30s. The child who I once was offered me a cup full of flowers, urging me to do something with it. I accepted.
My Dad was probably about the same age as I am now when he started to take us camping; a child from his own past had appeared, offering him a cup full of flowers, and he passed it down to us. As I project my gratitude to him, it is on behalf of the child in me. The child is grown, but he is still a child in there, and this card shows my gratitude for my Dad, the adult who, in the space of the next decade, I will outlive (if I live that long, obviously). I only need to make it to 55 to do that. If that happens, the child becomes older than the parent, and the image in the Waite-Smith Six of Cups takes on yet a new meaning.
My Dad died in 2004, over 20 years ago. Cultivating a love of Nature in me was the greatest gift that he could have offered. It has begun to yield so much peace and happiness in my adult life, and he played a significant part in that. The child has grown, but the adult is forever his child. As I associate the number six in tarot with reciprocity and beauty, in that spirit, I offer my gratitude to my Dad.
That’s all for now, friends. Thank you for being here – and please check out my Therapeutic Tarot Sessions and my courses embracing Tarot and Nature if you’d like us to work together. You can also sign up for the Tarot Blog newsletter (different to my main newsletter) below to receive occasional email updates (roughly monthly) with the latest posts.
Smiles from Scotland,
Stephen
