The Tarot’s “Wish Card”: The Nine of Cups and the Provisional Life

A line in Mary Oliver’s oft-quoted poem, The Summer Day, seems to have become a touchstone for the way we spend our time: “Tell me,” she writes, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Back in 2019, I came across this line everywhere: in books, on a podcast, and even in one of those cheesy made-for-TV movies where the heroine used it as a personal tagline. In a way, the repeated encounter with this line carried with it a kind of synchronicity. I was seized with questions around personal meaning, so stumbling on this probing question was undeniably apropos.

A little over a decade ago, I was on track to becoming a bona fide historian (as one permutation of Mercury in my eighth might suggest). One of the things I adored about reading letters and diaries from hundreds of years ago was encountering the very themes of hope and anxiety, happiness and despair, that seemed inextricably linked with the human experience. Delving back to the classical world, Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life,” is a startling reminder that the very questions with which I was preoccupied transcend time. Even in the ancient world, people were pondering the meaning of life and how to optimize the seemingly short amount of time we have on earth. Seneca wrote:

“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of…