Seven of Cups

You have to choose. Ever since they ate the apple, that’s been the way. And the options proliferate like a field of tulips, like cancer cells or space junk, wise investments. The cool drinks are lined up in fluorescent, sighing banks at the back of the store and you want one without sugar, that will set your heart racing, one that tastes of a popsicle you ate as a child or one clear as glacial meltwater. Somewhere, perhaps dusty and expired behind all these, is the one drink that will finally quench your thirst. That you can live through and savor, that will not drain empty until you’ve had your fill.
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In the Seven of Cups, all possibilities appear. And so there is the kingly solitude and there is untold treasure, there is triumph in the world—note the skull etched into the chalice here—and there is a coiling dragon, a beautiful woman, the wise and deadly snake. And then there is the mystery, as bare as one’s visions will allow. A cloaked and radiant figure, arms spread wide. Emblems, each of these, for a choice you are free to make. But note their shared pedestal is no more substantial than vapor. Pick a cup, it says, and the others, the choices you might have made, will burn off like morning fog.

Notice the figure in the foreground: alone among the teeming Tarot populace, he lives in the dark, in bewilderment and awe—paralyzed by choice.

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There are now things that I could never become. There are more of these than those I could. I was to be, at six years old, an Olympic long jumper and a leathery rock star and a scientist of worldly acclaim. A writer too, in there, something born-in, like a defect of the heart. And later I was to be a hobo riding rails and cooking my dinner in an old pot hung over the fire, one step ahead of the law. And still later, I was to be a smokejumper, parachuting from old war-planes kitted out to fight fires and landing among the raging old growth with nothing but an ax and my wits. You have to choose or the thing will choose you.

Deer, as you know, will freeze in the beam of your headlights, stock-still with their eyes wide. And they say there are evolutionary reasons for this, though I don’t know. It might be that after millions of years, this high-powered light cutting through the well-known dark is simply too much for their reality to bear.

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The Tarot assumes you have Free Will. The cards make little sense otherwise. Maybe it’s a lie, an illusion. But if there is something to be learned from these strange objects, it’s that dichotomies are contrivances, glossings over. There must be a spectrum of will with every choice somewhere on it. Every person. And we’ve all known ghosts pushed through the world as if some reckless child were behind the controls. And we’ve heard tell, too, of men and women who’ve mastered themselves: monks who can control the temperature of each finger on their hand, can deprive themselves to starvation. What biochemical impulse would lead us down that tine of the forking garden path.

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What starts as a daydream can be extruded through the membrane and become real. What torture if it were otherwise. You’ll hear artists, athletes, business-people, and they’ll claim their enviable achievement was as accidental as stepping into a puddle. There are mistakes along the road, but I’ve yet to see an accident. There is always some hum in the pattern moments preceding, and to prevent the glass from tumbling to the floor it may require a return to the very moment of your birth. A million different choices than the ones you made without a thought. These victors we admire have done nothing by accident. What they mean is that their dream was ineffable, unclear to them until it was coming true. Perhaps the voice they heard sounded like delusion, though it matched the cadence of their own. Or they chose their chalice so long ago and clung to it through such wild vicissitude they no longer remember that first sip.

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As your tooth grows, the choices seem to narrow, harden—it’s a shuffle step to the left and no faithful leaps remain. This happens to the best of us. Your potential life as a child this branching and efflorescent tree and yet those furthest reaches now blown to ash. You’ll have to make peace with that. The choice you’re making when it seems there is none other. Is this misfortune happenstance or the world’s inherent malice? Is the subtle pattern hierophany or emptiness? Shortfalls as final failures or a footnote in your curriculum.

I would not have picked how I spend my days now, can barely trace the route. But choices still remain. And if the Seven of Cups is any guide, then to see this winding path as all regret. . .that’s to choose a door that does not permit return. Is to tiptoe out on branches that will not support my weight. So, I’m to be no smokejumper, no hobo or Olympian. But if I can keep a steady hand, perhaps in this next room—or the next, the one long after--I’ll find a little shrine of peace.