“Luna’s Sweetpeas” Tarot Cards:The Moon & The Eight of Cups

It was a Sunday in June, early evening, the kind of golden hour that makes everything feel suspended and more precious than it is. I came home to tension already living in the kitchen, the quiet kind that had been building for weeks. Before I could even settle in, my dear friend and roommate, Ashley, asked if I wanted to go pick flowers. We got into her brand new Fiat, and as she drove, she told me she had decided to leave the Hawthorne house.

She had been my very first friend since moving to Oregon, the first person who held me while I was becoming someone new. We had built a language of small things—homemade tomato soup, late-night laughter, the comfort of being witnessed. Ashley was a spitfire who yearned to be loved fully, yet could fold inward and hold emotion in the most tangible way. The house adored her for all that she was and all that she wasn’t.

As she told me she was leaving, we stood in the June sunset picking lavender sweet peas, gathering them in our hands without fully understanding we were holding a turning point. The light was warm, but beneath it I could feel something shifting, like the tide pulling under a full moon—instinctive, quiet, irreversible. I wasn’t heartbroken. I felt instead the tender sweetness of something ending while it was still beautiful. I knew we would still love each other, but I also knew nothing would ever exist in quite the same way again.

I remember recognizing the feeling, because I had seen it before in the faces of people who had to be happy for me when I was the one leaving. The particular tenderness of celebrating someone while quietly preparing to miss them. Loving her meant allowing her to go without asking her to stay for my sake. It was its own kind of ritual—an unspoken agreement to honor what was calling her forward. This is what the Eight of Cups feels like to me: not abandonment, not collapse, but the brave act of outgrowing something that once fit perfectly. The people who love you see it, even when it hurts. They steady their voice. They bless your departure. And in doing so, they change too.

In the painting, a golden lobster holds the sweet peas inside its open body. The lobster comes from the Moon card, a creature that lives in shadow and tide, that must split itself open and shed its old shell in order to continue growing. It is both vulnerable and armored, both instinct and survival. The sweet peas bloom where the body once closed itself off. Transformation does not happen without rupture. Growth asks something of us.

Years later, when sweet peas found their way back into my hands, the memory returned with such clarity that I had no choice but to paint it. Ashley was one of the many travelers who found sanctuary in the Hawthorne house, and when she left, the shift of a new era began. This piece is about that moment—the picking—the instant you understand that loving someone sometimes means letting them evolve beyond the version of life you shared. It is about the quiet knowing that none of us are in our final form.