Seven of Cups

Today, I picked the Seven of Cups.  I guess it's nice to add a hopeful note.

Sevens serve as our instinctual side, perhaps even a demiurge.  Coming out of a balanced Six, energy along the Tree of Life manifests dualistic.  One branch is our creative potential, the other, how that is manifest in society.  The sevens are  the former.    They are particularly transitory precisely because they represent only half of a true state.  By nature, they are incomplete and ephemeral, a tarotic Snapchat, if you will.

Cups have several associations, mostly emphasized in the Celtic, or Celtic Wannabe community, as the Divine Feminine.  On a practical level, this translates into love, creation, reflection, and emotion, especially emotion.  Cups represent potential, but not in an intellectual way.  They are artists' inspirations, feelings, sudden pathos.  I am not so easily drawn into essentialist caricatures, but they are, at least, symbols of the right brain.

And so the Seven of Cups could be a self-reinforcing card.  The creative urge.  The emotional inspiration.  When I read for people, I stress specific aspects in which this might show up.  For example, "play," "imagination," "lust" are all monikers associated with this conjunction of ideas.  I don't think they have any lasting value in and of themselves.  They are simply moments of (emotional) intensity potentiated.

On the one hand, our society needs more pathos.  We continually demonstrate the "a-" or opposite:  apathy.   We are callous when we need to be open, pour forth when we need to receive and reflect, more into the high than the doors a good tab will open.  The Seven of Cups reminds us of what we lose in our frenetic, anti-Earth, inhumane life in which we tend to amble.

We tell children they can be anything they want.  We encourage creativity and independence, emotional openness, and hugs...when dealing with the very young.  Somewhere, in our institutions, our diet sodas, our Officer Unfriendlies, we beat that out of youth.  We teach young people to listen to us, to listen to "maturity," but rarely, to themselves.  We teach them to look away from the spiritual (and too often conflate it with the religious).  We are at odds with ourselves.

And in traditional American overkill, when we correct for this, we go overboard.  We still cling to immature notions of romance, as if we are defining our very adult situations by carving names into a tree.  We still cling to unhealthy relationships, be they codependencies of lovers, drugs, shopping.  We do excess very well.  Our cups runneth over, yet we can't get enough.   Our empty cups our full of hungry ghosts (to mix a metaphor) and are, in a word, unhelpful.

Overly in our cups, and with that irrepressible "can-do-ism," we overshoot, literally.  Unbalanced and unhinged, we shoot up schools, Naval bases, ourselves.  We fly into road rage, taking out a bicyclist here and there.  We binge.  Empty, we do it all again.  We forget that the Seven of Cups is temporary, is periodic.  And so, to come full circle, we are otherwise without pathos, sociopathically sleepwalking through our days then suddenly coming  alive.  "The Purge" is an apt concept, regardless of how it was articulated.

Take the card as a reminder.  All you can eat doesn't mean we should.  We need to slow down, reflect.  Let's avoid giving over to the moment everything when we carry our guns locked and loaded.    Let's keep our cruise missiles in their silos, not sent away in a sudden masculine fit of masturbatory fantasy spilling our deadly seed everywhere in favor of oil and its related foreign policies.

As those lovely hippies said, "make love, not war."  I think the Seven of Cups suggests we should, but to also practice safe sex.

Until next time...