Seven of Cups: Unknown Pleasures
Writing isn’t just about finishing a significant project but unearthing your story about yourself. You might unearth a story in a frenzied week, or it might take a lifetime.
Whether you write journal entries, cosmic poetry, recipes, paranormal romance, or self-help books. You are inviting readers into your consciousness.
You dream new worlds into being.
By doing the work, you invite in patience, devotion, and curiosity.
You create community and build cosmic connections.
But most of all, you invite in unknown pleasures.
Seven of Cups — Unknown Pleasures
The Seven of Cups is associated with fantasy, illusion, and overwhelm, as well as with abundance and opportunities. It all depends on how you look.
This card offers you a chance to explore unknown pleasures, as well as to practice discernment in taking what you need and leaving the rest.
The card is full of beautiful and frightening choices, all available to the figure looking at the cups.
There are so many options available here, and when you are faced with such a choice, it is possible that in choosing one alternative, you might lose out on something much better. Decision fatigue can lead to either fantasy or overwhelm. The equation is something like this:
Fantasy: if I do x, y, z, I will make this happen.
Overwhelm: If I don't do x, y, z, I will fail to make this happen.
Different gifts might offer you different outcomes, but this is where your discernment comes in. You don't need to keep a gift that isn't working for you. And you don't have to make all of your choices at once. Being open to multiple possibilities might mean taking a risk, but it also means expanding your capacity for pleasure. For living itself.
Sobriety, for me, isn't just not drinking, but it is the experience of opening up to the exquisite pain of living. Love expands into everything. The risk is in feeling it at all, and in the not-knowing.
A story can be like this too. Genre readers (like me, and perhaps like you) want recognisable genre tropes to feel pleasure, and even community with other fans, but not the same ones in the same order.
The Seven of Cups is about working with a familiar container to make something fresh.
In life, as in storytelling, how can you be a curious reader of your own work? How can you create a curious draft?
Artmaking and Fantasy—The Curious Draft
To a writer, the gifts of the Seven of Cups can be used in so many different ways. A snake isn't worse than a rose if you are looking for a way to kill a character. A jewel isn't better than a tornado if you want to move the action of your story somewhere else. A wreath might be the perfect image for your nonfiction book on mourning rituals, but it might augur badly for a book of nourishing recipes, or perhaps not!
However, there is something even more powerful that The Seven of Cups can do.
Sometimes, the unexpected gift, the surprise image can offer you the key to unlock something that felt stuck, stale, or formulaic. What happens if you need to use a snake in your nourishing recipe book? It could lead to an investigation of poison cures. After all, a therapeutic dose can become a poison dose in anything from venom to water, and a poison dose can equally become a therapeutic dose if we treat it carefully, and with respect.
By including an unexpected connection, image, or treasure in your work, you will pique your own curiosity which in turn will offer a keen pleasure to your readers.
In your writing projects how would it feel to use curiosity as a guiding principle? The curious draft offers a way to find out about the work through the writing.
Curiosity allows you to go back to the river of the original idea, and to refill your cup, even when you wander away from your original purpose and vision.
The curious draft encourages you to take time away from it, to absorb its lessons, to nourish yourself with reading and learning, to have conversations, and to bring all this back to the draft when you are ready.
One way to nourish the curious draft, and yourself, is to work with the lessons of The Seven of Cups.
Seven of Cups Ritual
Take your imagination on an adventure. Pick seven things to do that combine the known and the unknown. Nourish yourself with safety, and spark your imagination with unknown pleasures. Some suggestions:
Think of a places to visit. It could be somewhere you know will bring pleasure, or somewhere you aren't sure about yet. If you can, ask for a recommendation from someone else.
Pick a book up from the shelf. Any book. Read it for at least ten minutes.
Got to NTS and pick something by genre, or by mood. Go for something you wouldn't usually listen to. Sit with it for at least ten minutes.
Write notes on your experiences of unknown pleasures. This could be reading, watching, listening, tasting, moving, conversing, stretching, or spellcasting.