Summertime Sadness and the V of Cups

It’s already halfway through July. That means it’s halfway through summer in my way of thinking. Summer lasts from June to August here in Vermont. That’s it. So short. Only for these 3 months is the world a verdant wash of green. The fireflies twinkle. The days are long. The sun warms us to such a degree that we are compelled to jump into every lake and river.

The promise of summer feels infinite in the lead up to June. We can go camping! We can go hiking! We can have BBQs with all our friends that last late into the night. There will be the annual family vacation to the beach. We’ll spend afternoons at the pond. This year the garden will be gloriously abundant and we’ll figure out how to grow beets. We’ll hit every outdoor concert and dance the nights away. Anything is possible, there is time for all of it, we’ll never get tired.

Then, in a blink of an eye, summer is halfway over. I haven’t found time to go to the pond. I got sick and slept for most of my birthday. Work is so busy, I haven’t been able to go on any of those backpacking hikes I dreamt about. We are trying to get a lot of house projects done so there hasn’t been any tubing down the river. Everyone is booked up so it’s hard to plan get togethers with friends.

The V of Cups from the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck.

The halfway over feeling of summer reminds me of the V of Cups. There is a sadness to halfway through summer. There is regret. Maybe I should have done things differently, planned better, been healthier, pushed myself harder. If only summer was working out a bit differently, I would be happy all the time.

That’s the thing about summer, just because the weather is warm, it doesn’t solve all your problems. It doesn’t make a busy schedule less busy. It doesn’t add more hours to a day. It doesn’t magically transport you back to childhood when there was so much open time and space. You still have responsibilities. Things still need to get done. There are always more chores, errands, and projects than time. None of it feels quite as splendid and fabulous as the summer you fantasized about on those muddy, bleak, and cold spring days.

This V of Cups feeling comes for me every summer. It’s not a new thing. There’s even a nostalgia to it. It has a sheen of the bittersweet. Life is fleeting. Seize the day. It’s a very Enneagram 4 feeling if you know what I mean.

It’s another summer of trying to learn important lessons. The lesson that time never stands still. The lesson that being busy does not mean that everything gets done. The lesson that getting things done is not the secret to happiness. The lesson that grasping at magic moments is the easiest way to make sure that those moments never come or get fully appreciated.

The figure in the V of Cups is fixated upon what is lost. She looks at the amount of summer that has gone by and laments, “How can it be going by so fast? Look at all that I’ve lost.” Then there is the lesson that there is still half of the summer left. She could turn around and focus on that. But what’s the point? What’s left is the dwindling away of the summer- the shorter daylight hours, the back-to-school vibes, the crowds of people in grasping at the same scraps of fun so that it feels like there isn’t enough to go around. Who wants to focus on that?

This is also my birthday season, a time when I realize that another year has gone by. What have I accomplished? What do I have to celebrate? How could I have let another year slip away without completing that big goal or fixing that big problem? I have even less time with the ones that I love left now. I’m getting older and there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to do everything with my life that I’d like to do, see, and experience.

Summertime sadness…

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of happiness and joy in my summer. The summertime sadness is an undercurrent, it’s not the main emotional base for my mood. I just like to acknowledge it instead of pretending it’s not there. Like I said, it’s bittersweet. I revel a little bit in the melancholy of loss in order to balance myself out. There would be something inauthentic and shallow about a summer of unadulterated pure bliss.

Or maybe I’m just too afraid of how good it would feel to have the best summer ever… Would that mean that every summer thereafter would be a let down? The V of Cups, being a five card, is that balancing point in the middle, that halfway in between energy. We create conflict in that five energy, a tension between the set up and the culmination. It’s now that we can see what we have created and decide how we want to carry that to completion.


How do you want the rest of your summer to play out? True to my usual form, I intend to see this joy thing out to the bitter end. I’m going to turn around, see the Cups that I have left, and drink my fill. I’ll probably even do my usual maneuver of coopting September into the summer, willing it to have hot sunny days of swimming even as the water cools with the earth. I’ll wager there’s plenty of time to go backpacking in the fall and keep putting shorts on well past the start of frosty mornings.

Like the V of Cups, I will pine, and regret, and hold lost time close even as I revel in the moments of sunshine, exhilaration, and fun. My emotional world is volatile, eccentric, and whimsical. I will try to learn the summertime sadness lessons of the V of Cups at the same time that I hold out hope for magically finding time, energy, and people to enjoy the best summer ever alongside. Life is a mix of the good and the hard. Let’s all allow sadness and happiness to coexist simultaneously in our lives.