Four of Cups
At 15, 16, I wanted little more in life than to freely wander the roads and rails. And so I’d practice the hobo life. The walk to my job where I fried chicken was a mile, maybe two, along a five lane highway nowadays so busy it roars. Some sparse woods off to my left and along the way a bridge you’d hardly notice over a creek almost narrow enough to jump. I’d go crouching down below to squat beside the near-stagnant water and peel oranges and contemplate whatever counted as my troubles then, hide out from the ensuing future. And maybe I thought if I could hold fast there long enough I’d become a sort of ghost. I’d haunt all this concrete and flatness and the hardscrabble trees.
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While the three has its plunging mysteries, the 4 first strikes one clear: stability, groundedness. Four legs on an animal and four wheels on one’s cart. And the simplest of houses has its four corners, the foundation is four-sided, and so too your cell and your bed, your dollar bill, and the blank sheet of paper that is my highest called-to home.
And in one’s most entropic moments—the aftermath of a car-wreck, of a furlough, of a sickness unbeckoned and finally boiling through the unbeknownst—who wouldn’t want a few hours of peace and stability. Isn’t that, truly, what we’ve all made ourselves slaves to these past thousand years? To be able to sit quietly in the warmth, bellies full, strife little more than a story we tell ourselves.
Peace.
And then the boredom comes. Of knowing what is going to happen. Of having the same conversation again and again, the same meal. And how long before, as Dostoyevsky said, you begin to desire the most uneconomical absurdities just so something will happen, just so you can prove that you are a human being and not a piano key.
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Our friend has lost interest in the three cups before him. Drank them up, perhaps, emptied them out. And whether their contents were stimulating or not, they now provide him nothing but a memory. He needs something new. Some call this the Hedonic Treadmill and it’s as much human nature as love and anger.
What you’ll see when you look carefully enough, when you walk away for a minute and then come back as our friend beneath the tree inevitably will, is that the whole commercialized world has put us hamsters on the wheel. The economy, the spreadsheet we’re all living in, has a requirement to grow at all times lest it fall apart under its own weight. See the Tower Card. See Babylon. See cancer. And so it needs its money-spenders to keep spending and the surest way to render this is to keep the treadmill turning. To make you slightly dissatisfied, to innure you to your stimulation. And so there is always another thing to purchase so as to juice that dopamine. Another drink to try, another pair of pants, another video to watch. And when you run out there will not be a moment of smug satisfaction that you’ve bled this world for all its worth—there will be a resentment of its boredom. And for some of us perhaps this is the route to the World. A palace of wisdom found at the end of the road of excess. But one must take all visions along the way as serious as a heart attack.
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Tree of Life and Tree of Death. Yggdrasil, the World Tree. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The axis mundi. The arbor vitae. The Bodhi Tree where Guatama sat his world-weary ass in cosmic refusal to ever stand again until he knew. The etching of paired initials in a heart. Below the foliage is a place we can return to for rest and contemplation. And we know there’s some means of climbing it to our higher selves. There is some protection it offers from the wind and rain and sun.
My wife and I bought an enormous square of trees far from where I sit. There are black oak and sugar maple, hornbeam, white pine and birch and others I do not know their names. Untouched since the dawn of man, so it seems. And I took a long weekend away from my worldly life to cut a swath through these—an ax and a saw and a jug of water. They let you cut them if you share a few prayerful words, if you see them a moment for what they truly are. And the space I cut was so we could spend our time among them. Learn what there is to be learned, hide out from the ensuing future. One day we will build a home there among the trees. I hope they come to see me not as the man who killed their friends, but as the one who appreciates them the most, who loves them the best for who they are.
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You will grow tired of this world. That is in the way of things. You will see that every miracle modernity pulls out of the mud comes with a new layer of bureaucracy that snags your shirt and burns up your precious seconds. And the traffic jams will clip your soul like a bird’s wing. And people will need things from you that you struggle to give, try as you might. And there will always be expectations and a lacking. That is as much the human story as love and anger.
And, too, there will always be a tree you can sit beneath to simmer, at first, in your frustrations and your disillusion, the smaller of your failed dreams—because it cannot all happen the way you want and it’s not clear you would want it to. And maybe, if you are lucky enough, quiet enough, if you do not lament too much what was once in your cups...maybe you can sit quietly a moment and from the ether itself—from your boredom and your emptiness—will come a new reason to live. If even for a moment. If even for just as long as it takes for a single leaf to drop.