Nine of Cups

Commonly called the ‘wish card,’ the more superficial interpretations predict that we will have a stroke of luck in attaining our happiness. This is the wish of the silly people, who only use Tarot to have their fortunes and futures told. If you have a wish out there, it is going to come true. Be careful what you wish for. It’s your fate: you don’t have to do any work or anything. This is usually nearsighted, and with unfore- seen consequences. What is not often mentioned in the books is that this is almost always a temporary state, a little shot of neurochemicals that soon wears off. The deeper question this card poses is only hinted at by the frequent cautions against smugness and complacency. That is, if we want to have a more durable sense of happiness or satisfaction, we will probably have to trade wishing for working, and dreaming for diligence, and feel our way into a way of living that has happiness as a symptom, or a sign that we are on the right path, and even then with no real guarantee of satisfaction. We will tend to get what we position ourselves for. We give up the chasing of wishes and fantasies for the pursuit of higher activities, engagements and purposes that secondarily bring us more lasting emotional rewards. These provide a more resilient foundation (Nines and Yesod) for the continued ups and downs that are sure to follow this moment’s up-ness. There may be problems of renewal and replen- ishment without change of context, unless the attitude is nimble enough to provide the motion. The Nine of Cups, regarded as a skill set, will develop the emotional intelli- gence needed to either make satisfaction last longer or to be more accepting of its comings and goings. It will also help instruct the whole being in how to find itself in this position more regularly. Time or duration is the big question here. Most people have a squinty-eyed view of shallower time, like the sensationalist newspapers looking at wildly fluctuating curves instead of long-term trends and reporting ‘crime rate soars’ one day and then ‘crime rate plummets’ the next. We want a less ephemeral view here. Many books imply that the satisfaction or happiness predicted by this card will last. It almost certainly will not. And affect itself is too naive to have longer time horizons or a more mature relation- ship to change. Ongoing satisfaction is a more dynamic process that stays a course only by dynamic efforts at navigation. The pursuit of happiness is an unfortunate phrase when we pick this for something to follow. The degree of our happiness is just a reading on a dial that may or may not tell us how well we are doing. We don’t live for this readout, we live for doing well and the dial says what it says. Our best chance for sustaining happiness is simply doing what we love doing, or what we do best or well, finding a rewarding groove, and earning ourselves some self-esteem. There is nothing inherently wrong or inferior with having wishes and wants, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to believe in magic. Of course we want to be careful what we wish for and want. But these are just eddies and waves in the longer flow of the stream. Confidence wants repeated successes more than future assurances. Deep and lasting satisfaction actually requires impermanence: it needs to move and adapt. Both moving water and moving through water are fundamental to the symbolism of both the Nines and the Cups, as well as their ties to Luna and Yesod. Heraclitus phrased this as panta rhei, everything flows and nothing abides, and asserted the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice. Laozi had much to say about the way that water moves and what this has to teach us. Bruce Lee wrote, “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” To be present in this way earns more luck than it stumbles into. We tune our ability to find the right place at the right time with the right attitude. The universe will stand behind someone on the right path, but the right path is defined as the one that has the universe standing behind them. The Yijing counterpart, Gua 29, Exposure, picks up the same double-water images and concentrates on the dynamic qualities of such a combination, activities that get the blood pumping, like traversing or running a river that’s running white through a gorge. The hazardousness of the image is often mistakenly interpreted as a prediction of danger, when in fact it's a good incentive to use such exigency to come more fully alive, to awaken more completely to the realities we are moving through, to be more fully present in the flow of things. Deep water over our heads is not a bad place to be if we have either learned to how swim or learned how to learn. The trick is to keep ourselves centered and on our true path. Feeling here is a verb, and by feeling our way we learn what true means. The real happiness is in the difficulties and challenges that life can meet authentically and surmount. It has nothing to do with being given good luck or good fortune. We might have some plain old luck, but even there we must be present to win.