Illustrator: Dave McKean

Author: Rachel Pollack

If this card is right-side up, it says:

Witness the perfection of art:  desire, beauty, sensuality. Count your blessings. Live in the moment. Enjoy the good life. Contentment with your accomplishments forms a foundation for the future. Balance is always needed, but right now is more a time of enjoyment than of suffering the negative consequences of such pleasure.

If this card is upside-down, it says:

Frustration. Your wishes may not have yet come true. Perhaps you are being unrealistic. Wishes do not manifest of their own accord. Something is missing deep down. Be careful not to over-emphasize your fantasies or gratify your own desires at the expense of others.

I am especially unfocused today— as opposed to my regular, generally unfocused self. This being the Vertigo Tarot, my thoughts meandered around the request, “Tell me something about dreams.” (I also thought, “Give me an idea for a boy’s name,” tho not so seriously.) Although every card in this deck may be linked to Dream, the Nine of Cups is generally a dream card: daydream. Rachel Pollack writes, “…the dream here is of the body… We spend a great deal of our imaginative energy on sexual images… The artist takes these fantasies and uses them as a vehicle for something less personal, even serene, as if art, in its universality, transcends physical desire…”

This card tells me I have a tendency to daydream rather than get about to doing the work necessary to follow through with my ideas. I know that: I have a house full of things that could potentially, when I get around to it, be fixed up or made into other things. My most intentional work of art— my wicked deck of cards— moves toward completion at a snail’s pace. But who among us is not a dreamer? Nonetheless, Nine of Cups shows emotional, physical, and sensual satisfaction. Perhaps if I was less satisfied, my daydreams would be more than dreams.

Some say happiness is an attitude of choice. If my biggest dream in life is to be happy—and in the end, whose isn’t?— than I am successful. I have accomplished— with some hard work— the most important dream. Every other daydream is just icing on the cake.

Om Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
May All Beings Be Happy

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