Hobbling, but make it creative
Virgo 1 & 2 // invisible care and other small things
Hello from a drizzly, grey morning that I am trying to procrastinate away. We’ve entered VIRGO season - the most wonderful time of the year! Get grounded! Get organized! Get your shit together because winter is coming! And yet, I woke up with a hovering existential dread and a sense that it was going to be a weird day. After wasting quite a bit of it on social media, noodling a bit on the guitar, and finally sitting down with a hot cup of coffee…I have very little time left to write…
It’s sort of a perfect intro for today’s cards.
Which is to say, rather than putting proverbial pen to paper, I’m choosing to procrastinate and just let the thoughts swirl around in my head. Today’s cards, the 8 and 9 of pentacles1, are really the perfect medicine. Pentacles are in the material realm, get out of your head and get your hands in the dirt! they say. I’m also including the Chariot2 (because that’s the card of the year) and the Hermit3 (virgo’s card) for good measure.
These are cards of slow, steady work. They are cards of practice, and being ok with good while letting go of perfect. They honor the little things that add up to make a life. The 8 of pentacles shows a figure at work, mastering their craft with persistent actions (Act, don’t just think about it!). It’s the honing of your craft over the long haul. The sitting your butt in the chair to just write the thing. The getting up at the crack of dawn so you can ready yourself for waking up kids and rallying them for school. It’s all the little things that can easily go unnoticed, but literally hold everything together. The invisible labor, the cooking, the phone calls, the caring, the holding.
Needless to say, I need this medicine because I feel like I am HOBBLING4 into this school year. There are so many mundane tasks that need to happen in a day and it feels like my family's wellbeing hinge on them! And also, am I even doing this thing right? Where’s the instructions? Where are the grown ups??
I’m very late to the party, but I started listening to Big Magic last week. I actually saw
on her tour with a good friend back when the book came out, but I hadn’t even read it yet! (I had too many babies and too little sleep at the time). But this only confirms my belief that books find us at just the right time5. I thought this book would inspire my creative pursuits now that my kids are in school, but what I didn’t expect was to feel inspired to live a more courageous life in general.
Liz makes it clear that there is no roadmap for a creative life. And there are no experts. You will never attend enough classes, get the right degrees, listen to enough podcasts, read enough books (say it ain’t so!). You just have to begin - in your creative expressions, yes, but also in your life. And this is exactly the sort of validation I need in my own small, sweet life right now.
The back-to-school-emotional-rollercoaster is taking us for a ride. With older kids, and kids with different physical & emotional challenges, I often feel like I am frantically treading water. Babies you hold, toddlers you play with and take on walks, but what do I do with an angsty tween?? As I walk alongside tiny humans, knowing I am just learning as I go, I swing between feeling overwhelmed at the best of times and absolutely terrified6 on the more difficult days. I’m looking at you school mornings & IEP meetings. The courage that it takes to show up every day for your creative practice, is the same courage that I’m finding I need to cultivate to show up for myself every damn day.
The Chariot is a card about will and momentum and practice. The Hermit is a card of introspection and solitude and walking your own path. These two cards together offer the exact medicine that Big Magic prescribes when the mundane gets heavy: “creative living requires love, courage, and persistence.” The Hermit lights her inner lantern and follows the path before her straight into the unknown. No one else can show her the way7.
This tenacity to keep putting one foot in front of the other can lead us to the 9 pentacles, a card of thriving and abundance. What mundane tasks are you doing right now day in and day out? Are you packing endless lunchboxes? Making space for exhausted humans at the end of a long day? Squeezing an art practice or workout in before everyone else is awake in the morning? Working long hours, just to come home and help with homework? I see you. I hope you can find ways to bring some love and attention to these tasks, because they are creative and sacred.
For me it looks like letting my kids watch TV when they get home from school every day. I used to be so uptight about screen time but our family needs the decompression & my kids need more autonomy. It’s also basically making the same 5 simple meals every night for dinner. Fed is best. It’s also being oh so gentle with myself when the train seems to be going off the rails in the morning - taking a long quiet walk or doing a loving kindness meditation after everyone is off to school. Resetting myself even when there are mountains of laundry or an unswept floor.
Only you know how to best love your people and build your life. Remember to let fear have a seat, but don’t let it drive the bus. Trust yourself. Take the next right step. Find the magic in the moments. These are mantras from wise Liz Gilbert & the 8 of pentacles that I will hold close to my heart every day this month.
And may I commend this to you from Kai Cheng Thom’s lovely collection of essays Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Make a list of 5 things you do to care for others, and in the next two weeks find time to do them for yourself.
Pentacles are just a fancy word for coins with a five-pointed star on them. This suit of the tarot corresponds to the element of EARTH. It was traditionally the cards about wealth/career, but also connects to legacy, family, the body, and the material realm in general (as opposed to swords, for example, which are thoughts/ideas).
2023 // 2+2+3 = 7 // The Chariot
As
wrote about this week with honesty and mirth. She writes lovingly about the minutia of life and that is very 8 of coins energy!And speaking of magical timing - Liz JUST started her own substack!! A perfect combo of writing + self compassion!
I want to write a whole book on Virgo and how the harvest virgin archetype was so off putting to me at first because of my virginity baggage from purity culture, but I will limit myself to a footnote. Virgin in ancient mythology was a woman sovereign unto herself. She could be sexual, she could be a mother, but she makes a life for herself and walks her own path. She needs no permission. She follows her own inner light. She is Dorothy Day, Beyonce, Galadriel, Hekate, Circe daughter of the Sun and tamer of lions.
No joke....just finished Big Magic last week! I too felt like it was a read that I “had to be ready” for so to speak. It was so, so good.
Lovely read! I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who needed that …