Seven of Pentacles

The Seven of Pentacles is a farmer leaning on his hoe, looking at a bush hung with seven coins. He planted it long ago, he's waited a long time, and now he's taking stock. It's the card of patience, long investment, and the uneasy question of whether the harvest was worth the work.

Nothing in nature waits quite like a periodical cicada. In the eastern United States, broods of Magicicada spend thirteen or seventeen years underground, sipping sap from tree roots, and then they come up by the millions within the same few weeks, climb the trees, shed their skins, and fill the woods with song. Seventeen years of investment for a few weeks of harvest.

Massospora cicadina waits too. Its resting spores sit in the soil and infect the nymphs as they dig their way up. Within days of emergence, the back of an infected cicada's abdomen, including its genitals, drops away and is replaced by a chalky white plug of fungal spores. The cicada doesn't seem to notice. It keeps flying, keeps singing, keeps trying to mate, scattering spores everywhere it goes. Infected males even flick their wings the way receptive females do, which draws in other males who then leave carrying spores. Researchers have also found chemicals in infected cicadas that are related to amphetamine-like stimulants. Nobody yet knows what they do to the cicada. It keeps on singing, which may be the point.

So the Seven asks the farmer's question, but more sharply. You've been investing for a long time. Now look at the harvest honestly: is it yours? The song is still going, the chorus sounds healthy, and all your plans still look like they're working. But a system can go on performing abundance well after something else has quietly taken the profits. The opportunity of the Seven is the pause. This is the one card in the suit that tells you to stop working and look. The risk is to keep singing because stopping would mean admitting what happened to the back half of the plan.