Every castle falls

 

To Love Someone Long-Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be

The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer.

The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore.

The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out;

to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.

It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.

Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.

Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

- Heidi Priebe

Today I pulled the Five of Cups and thought of what Heidi Priebe wrote.  A lot of people think of this as only applying to long-term romantic relationships. I think of this as applying to all relationships, including family, friends, pets and ourselves. For me this is not a poem about growing apart (though it can be). To me it's more a poem of accepting the nature of impermanence — this constant evolving and churning and beginning, middling and ending that is the nature of everything.

I am invoking the Tower in recognition that every castle falls. It may be it will fall in a crash and a bang or it may be that it will fall slowly, over years, one brick at a time.
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As always when I speak of life, love and Tarot I speak only for myself. This reading is part of my Divination/Manifestation Practice.

The Five of Cups is from The Modern Love Tarot, by Ethony
The Tower is from The Light Seers Tarot, by Chris-Anne