We Bring Our Destiny With Us

Or, being happy as a snail in the here and now

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The last time my husband and I drove down to San Diego for a weekend trip, we found ourselves on an emergency rescue mission, having to act quickly and resourcefully in a matter of moments to save a life.

After circling a downtown block a million times looking for a tiki bar that Siri kept telling us was RIGHT THERE on the left but was in actuality nowhere to be found, we gave up on the idea of a trendy afternoon drink and headed to dinner early.

(Apparently, the entrance to the tiki bar False Idol, which is what I had entered into my Maps app, is hidden - speakeasy style - inside the gastropub Craft & Commerce, which is what we kept seeing on the street and losing our goddamn minds. Follow me for more travel tips.)

Back to the life-saving mission.

We pulled into a parking spot and while my husband tried to read the tiny screen of the parking meter under the blinding glare of the sun, I noticed a juicy little snail trying to slide its way across the sidewalk back into the cool shade of a hedge.

I rarely see snails out and about in the dry heat of southern California. This one was really cute. I could see its little head and antennae peeking out from under its iconic spiral shell. Just like in the Nine of Pentacles (at least in the original Rider Waite Smith tarot deck).

“That’s not good,” my husband remarked, glancing down at it.

“I know, I almost didn’t see him. Someone’s going to crunch him to death!”

“Well yeah, that too. But it’s also way too hot. He’s never going to make it back into the dirt and out of the sun in time.”

“IN TIME!?” I was beside myself. “Let’s just pick him up and put him in the dirt. Should I—?”

“No, wait! We can’t just pick him up. That’ll kill him for sure.”

(Apparently, you can’t just pick up a snail by the shell, even gently. It can irreparably damage the muscle that connects the snail to its home and that can lead to their death. If the snail is curled up completely inside the shell, then it might be okay. But as I said, this snail was hauling ass.)

So I saw two options. We could poke or prod or try to scare this snail into curling up inside its shell so that we could airlift it more safely. Alternatively, we could get the snail to crawl onto something and then move that entire thing to the hedge, kind of like a car driving really, really, really slowly up a ramp to get onto a ferry that will get him back to the mainland. In fact, trapping a spider in an upside down glass and then sliding a piece of paper under him is my husband’s arachnid removal strategy of choice, which I at first thought was ridiculously sensitive but now I quite admire. Plus, no spider guts to clean up afterward.

Back to our episode of Snail 9-1-1.

The first strategy didn’t work. This was the boldest little snail I’d ever seen. He just looked up at my antics, unamused, wondering when I’d tire and leave him alone.

Onto Plan B. Of course, we had just cleaned out the car so for the first time in our lives, not a single sheet of unnecessary paper was floating around that we could have slid under our little friend for transport. No receipts, no tickets, no nothing. I tried with a Starbucks napkin from that morning, but it was too flimsy to get under his slimy little body.

“A leaf!” I exclaimed.

“Yes!” My husband agreed as we turned to the hedges to pluck a good-sized one off a twig.

Would you believe that there wasn’t a single leaf in sight? Not a one. The particular type of hedge lining this street was made up of clusters of tiny leaves with the circumference of a ladybug at best. Between that and the 30-foot tall palm trees at the end of the street, we were screwed.

A man walked by and saw us looking down at the ground searchingly.

“Did you lose your keys?” He offered to look with us.

“We’re trying to save this poor snail!” I explained.

“Oh.”

He walked away.

And soon we did too. Our parking meter was running. We had to get this show on the road.

I was reminded of this snail escapade when I drew the Nine of Pentacles this week. And while I normally love this card, I find myself resisting its message right now.

The Nine of Pentacles is about luxuriating in the beauty, peace, and sensory pleasures all around us. Stopping to smell the proverbial - or literal - roses, closing our eyes to relish that first taste of our favorite dish or the warmth of our first gulp of morning coffee deliciously cascading down our throat.

The setting of the Nine of Pentacles is often described as a garden. But it’s not a garden, my ego argues. It’s clearly a vineyard. There aren’t flowers around this woman but lush grapevines heavy with fruit.

So what? I’ll tell you what.

This woman doesn’t strike me as an English lady taking her 500th walk around her English garden because she’s lonely or her nerves are shot or it’s a lovely day and there’s nothing else to do. This tarot card is actually giving more Italian signora who has worked her butt off to grow the vineyard to the largest one in Tuscany and is now surveying the beautiful life she knew she could create for herself and her family because she dreamed big and never gave up.

And there’s the rub for me.

Is the Nine of Pentacles telling me to feel more appreciation for my existing circumstances?

Or, is this tarot card telling me that a life of luxury and the comforts that come with it are within reach? That I, like this woman, am a strong, self-sufficient little snail of a badass who will slowly but surely get there one day as long as I don’t give up? After all, the guy in the card before the Nine of Pentacles - the Eight - is a paragon of work ethic. Isn’t this card the aftermath of that?

And this, friends, is why reading tarot for yourself can be a challenge. Because my ego wants it to be the latter, but my intuition is telling me it’s probably the former. (And also probably both, but not without mastering the former.)

Since I’ve broached the topic of sequences, let’s take a look at the Ten of Pentacles as well to help us interpret this card. Because if we’re talking about surveying the fruits and legacy of hard work, that’s the Ten, not the Nine.

So if the hard work is in the eight, and the legacy we achieve is in the ten, where are we in the nine?

We are enjoying the journey, the process, the meanderings and doldrums along the way. We are treating ourselves to rest and pleasure because we deserve it, even if we haven’t achieved all our goals yet. And, in doing so, we are actually better embodying the prosperous, luxurious version of ourselves that knows the abundance of the Universe is ours to claim.

It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But lovely or not, it’s a huge challenge for me. I don’t want to enjoy the process! I hate the process! I’ve been doing the process for too long! It sucks! When will it pay off already!?

Let’s take today for instance.

I started out writing this week’s newsletter in my “home office” - either contorted on the corner of my couch or with my feet up on the coffee table which, by the way, is covered in course rosters, mythology books, a Norton Anthology of American Literature from 1865 to the Present, a 2023 witch’s almanac, an unopened tarot deck, neon page flags, three lead pencils only one of which has lead in it, two coasters only one of which has a mug of now-cold coffee on it, a couple old receipts, and two new hairs every time my dog so much as bats an eye lash. My back is killing me and I’m so burnt out I have yet to use the massage gift certificate my husband got me FOR CHRISTMAS.

Any time I reach forward for my coffee, I pray that neither we nor the neighbors get a package delivered at just that moment because my dog will hear it, launch across and over me and attack the front door as if what’s being delivered is a grenade that will blow us all to bits, leaving me coffee-covered, swearing and screaming in his dust.

And y’all, after years of doing this because our apartment is a shoe box and my dog is crazy and my husband’s recording studio gear took over the room that we started out sharing as a workspace, my nerves are shot. I’m fed up.

And you know what? I feel like a terrible person for feeling this way.

And since, according to everybody I know, I can be prone to dramatic extremes, I feel like the Nine of Pentacles is telling me I will never get to the Ten unless I become a Zen master constantly awash in gratitude and never complaining. Because there are so many people who have it worse. Because one day my dog will be dead and I will yearn for these moments. Because I chose to marry a musician whose amps and synths and guitar cases will perpetually barricade my path to precisely the item I need at that exact moment for the rest of my life (or the rest of our marriage, I guess). Because I could have been a miserable lawyer still and never spent any time at home at all and would I prefer going back to that?

I’m having trouble balancing my bone-deep desire for more with sincere gratitude for what I have.

And this is coming from someone who actually has a longstanding gratitude practice that she does almost every day. Radical thankfulness is actually part of my daily anxiety-soothing ritual. My anxiety disorder wakes me up early in the morning with really uncomfortable stomach aches: cramps, nausea, hot flashes, the works. I used to fall for my brain’s tricks and make a run for the bathroom, thinking I must have eaten something bad the night before or lost track of days and was experiencing a little unexpected premenstrual pizzazz. But it started happening so often that I realized it’s just my disordered anxiety waking me up to start another day, and if I breathe through it and wrap myself up in the equivalent of a mental hug, it’ll usually calm down. And how I do this is to place my hand on my stomach, thank it (I’m serious!) for being so protective of me as to send false signals of disaster and calamity, and then proceed to list every single gratitude I can think of in that half-awake state as I gently rub my belly and try to fall back asleep. (No, I don’t know why this works, and yes, I feel a little crazy doing it, but here we are.)

So you see, I think I am actually way more aware of my blessings than the average person. And yet, because I am so ambitious and have set such high expectations for myself (being named “Most Likely to Succeed” by my high school senior class sure didn’t help), I remain restless and dissatisfied a lot of the time.

This call to appreciate where you’re at is perhaps more widely experienced through the quote, “Bloom where you are planted,” which has been sending me into a tizzy since, like, 1998.

If I may allow my inner child a word: I don’t wanna bloom where I am planted! It’s not fair! I want to move my pot to the better garden I deserve so I can bloom there.

Are you familiar with the legal concept of ratification? In first-year contracts class, we learn that in some situations, if you are technically in breach of a contract or are doing something that wasn’t actually agreed upon but all the parties to the contract have been going along with it and haven’t called you out on it, they have “ratified” that action and can’t now cry to the courts about it. And I feel like if I bloom where I am planted, so to speak, the Universe will say, “See? She loves it! Look at her go!” and I have essentially ratified the shitty terms of our cosmic contract. (Follow me for more legal advice. Just kidding. Nothing I say here constitutes legal advice. Boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. Please honor your contracts.)

Somewhere along the way, I have picked up the belief that making the best of a situation is settling. Isn’t it more desirable to have the courage and vision to not settle? To give up the good - the perfectly adequate - to go for the great? Or at least to dream about it?

The Nine of Pentacles is suggesting maybe not. It invites us to learn how to stop making life a constant striving for more and to start appreciating where we’re at in this moment.

Which brings me back to the inconspicuous little snail in the corner of this tarot card. In Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot, we are told that the woman - complete with her snail companion - in the Nine of Pentacles is based on the character of Rosalind from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In the play, Rosalind is a witty, sharp-tongued heroine who repeatedly tests the love of her suitor Orlando. In one scene where she is disguised as a man and Orlando is role-playing with her (him) how he would woo Rosalind (who is actually her), Rosalind (again, in disguise and merely playing Rosalind) teases Orlando and says she’d rather be wooed by a snail:

ROSALIND: …for though he comes slowly, he carries his house on his head—a better jointure, I think, than you make a woman. Besides, he brings his destiny with him.

A portrait of self-sufficiency and austerity (what you see is what you get), the snail carries its very home on its back, teaching us that there’s no dream circumstances or dream destination at which we will finally have what we need to feel happy and fulfilled.

The snail BRINGS HIS DESTINY WITH HIM.

We already have everything we need to live our best life, and we actually carry it with us always, everywhere we go. We bring our destiny with us.

Considering the play as a whole, As You Like It is Shakespeare’s most light-hearted work. In fact, so much so that unless you love it, you might quite dislike it because it feels a little plotless (especially compared to something like Macbeth). In many ways, it’s just a bunch of people hanging out in the forest talking and there’s not much drama or suspense or climactic action.

A collection of present moments.

Enjoying the journey.

Stopping to smell the roses on the way.

Appreciating the beauty and amusements around us.

Hmm, sounds like a tarot card I know.