Tarot receives the lonely creative
Hello, friends. How are you doing today? I am coming to you after being away for a couple of weeks because I have been in the process of moving homes, and it's been very exhausting. I tried to record this episode last week when I was by the beach, and then when I transcribed it, it just was really garbled, and a lot of it didn't make any sense. So I went back to listen to the recording, and I was sitting by the water, and there were cars behind me, and my voice was barely discernible in many parts.
So I decided to do it again, but it has taken me over a week to come back to it. It's been a time of being really experiencing flares in my body and fatigue, and I've had a relatively good baseline the past few weeks, months, and so it just kinda felt like a dip in my energy --- healing is cyclical, so it happens. And, yeah, I'm in the process of releasing, my upcoming offer. It's called Illumi9ate. I am so excited to be coming closer to the launch.
Illumi9ate is a creative offering, where we are going to dialogue and explore these intuitive technologies of astrology, Tarot, human design, and poetry, and it's for people who are light bearing leaders who are making a big leap towards being the free architects of your own creative life. You're likely doing this because you are in the process of letting go of the oppressive boxes that demand that you dim your light. And in this four part transformative journey, you'll be invited to inquire and release illusory fears and thought prisons that try to keep you stuck or small so you can remember and to reclaim your dream, playful, creative self. It will be coming in a couple weeks!
This is the third part in a, I thought it was gonna be four parts, but now I'm realizing it may be more like five part lead up to the launch of this program. So last week, I talked about astrology. And before that, I talked about who light-bearing leaders are, and I highly recommend checking out the past two episodes if you haven't been keeping up with them so far, especially if you're interested in working with me in this container.
So this week, we're talking about Tarot. If you are completely unfamiliar with the Tarot, it is a card deck that has a very similar approach to cards as the 56 cards of the playing cards, except it has a slight difference in the, Jack, King, Queen component. In Tarot, unlike the playing cards which have those three, there are Pages, Knights, Queens and Kings, and then there's the four suits, which are referred to in the Tarot as Swords, Cups, Pentacles and Wands. They also have elemental associations. And on top of these cards, the Tarot also has 22 Major arcana cards, and they represent archetypes, like, the emperor and The Empress and the wheel of fortune.
These are major archetypes that we navigate, whether it is, people archetypes or situational archetypes. And together, the major arcana is 22 cards and the minor arcana is 56 cards, combined to become a 78 card deck. The particular Tarot lineage that I'm most familiar with comes from this deck, called the Rider Waite Smith deck or the Smith Waite deck in order to put, Pamela Coleman Smith, who is the, designer and artist of this deck, in the first place since in the last, I wanna say ten years or so, there has been a revival of understanding the contribution that Pamela Coleman Smith made to the deck and how it was not recognized nor was she paid very much for it in the time that she was alive.
So, yeah, I wanted to say too that this program, Illumi9ate, was actually inspired by the Nines of the Tarot, and, I'm counting from the major arcana, the nine card, which is The Hermit, the 19 card, which is The Sun. There's also the four nines of the suites. So Nine of Swords, Nine of Wands, Nine of Cups, and Nine of Pentacles. They can also be, described through elemental associations. So, Swords would be air. Wands would be fire, Cups would be water, and Pentacles is earth. And these associations aren't always the same depending on the deck you have or use or are interested in or look up on the Internet — the associations may change. There are so many decks out there right now, that comprise a wide variety of artistic styles, focus areas, themes.
When I started to learn Tarot, I felt like I needed to start with the Smith-Waite deck in order to know what everything else is derived from. And it's not the only deck that things are derived from. There's a a couple other decks that are considered closer to source decks that then there is a tradition around, but this is the one that I have learned, and and I'm most familiar with at this moment.
While I did feel like I needed to start with the Smith-Waite deck, and I it also provided, a lot of hesitation for me because it felt very white European, and I was hesitant to learn the Tarot itself because it just felt like this practice that came from eighteenth and nineteenth century European occultists, which is true. The deck that we use and the derivatives of that deck do hearken back to that to that lineage. However, with the help of learning from liberatory, Tarot readers — for instance, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson taught a workshop on spiritual sovereignty where they went into how these archetypes, even if we don't queer them or change them, provide us a way to think about what is actually going on in the systems of the world, who is it trying to describe. If we take those meanings into consideration, then we get something that helps us describe the systemic influences and the archetypes that exist in order to keep the systems of colonial capitalism going. And these archetypes are not just present in the outside worlds, but they are also inside us.
So the emperor or The Empress, when it shows up, even if it is the Smith-Waite deck and you are looking at this very, colonial power showing up on the deck, it, helps us connect to these archetypes as what kind of internalized colonialism could exist within us that can be reflected through them. And/or you can also buy and use decks that are actually really diverse and queer, and there are lots of entry points. But I do think it's helpful to trace the sources a little bit. So being that this is not a podcast about the history of the Tarot, I will talk a little bit more about how I have connected the nines of the Tarot to this program, just briefly, and then I will tell you a little bit of a story about why and how I got into the Tarot and the gifts that it has brought me in my creative practice and working towards my creative freedom, especially in the realms of feeling a sense of belonging and collaboration in my work. So as I was saying, this program, like, the four weeks of the program are tethered to the nines of the Tarot.
And the first week, we will work with the Nine of Air or Swords realm, which depicts the thought prisons that kind of keep us hostage and don't let us go to sleep — the limiting beliefs, mental anxieties and repetitive loops that keep running in our head —that prevent us from even believing that we can take big risks and go towards our own sovereign creative freedom. And this is where I find astrology to be super helpful, and this is what I talked about in the last episode. And even though I didn't mention the Nine of air or Swords, that's the underlying anchor for that week. And then we get into this week, of the Tarot, the second week, which is about, the Nine of fire or Wands where you get this kind of picture of loneliness and grief and separation from a sense of community because of having to make certain choices that set you apart from the group and then kind of feeling alone from that, feeling a sense of loss from that, and how the Tarot has supported me, in that journey is kind of what we're gonna talk about today.
This will lead us into the third week of human design where we're gonna anchor to the Nine of Cups of water, and this will be a way to, feel into what is the dream and where are we feeling this sense of scarcity that we can't even begin to connect to our dream because it feels like it will never be realized even if we take those steps. And how can we work with, this practice of human design where we get to understand who we are and how we operate on such a practical level that it allows us to see how those dreams can be brought into reality by working with ourselves and releasing this illusion of scarcity and believing in the possibility that the world could be well and the world is being remade anew as you, dreamer, light bearer, take these steps towards your dreams.
Then we flow into week four for poetry where we're working with the Nine of earth or Pentacles that is this beautiful lush card where you can see the fertility and the beauty and the sense of rewards and success that comes with working in a reciprocal, relationship with your own desire and with your ecosystems. And to release this kind of self and systemic censure against choosing pleasure so that we can begin to reveal, like The Sun card, which is what we're going towards, the 19, to revel in our shining beauty with our hands outstretched. I think poetry provides a beautiful path for this and connects us to the sensorial realm of pleasure and reclaiming what is hidden due to shame and letting that be free.
So that's kind of the the arc of the program. The nine major arcana card or The Hermit who in the Smith-Waite deck is kind of this wise old person who is, holding up a lantern. It looks like they are on top of clouds and they're looking down, and this is the work that we're doing. We're gonna be holding up this, like, gentle light, like a candle, solar lantern, an oil lamp, and looking into the shadowy realms, and coming back out so that we can, with the information that we have, with the new perspective that we have gained, it allows us to see things differently. And when we can see things differently, then a new reality can exist because our perception informs our realities.
That's the overview and how the Tarot, connects with this program. And that said, I wanna tell you the story of how Tarot received me at a time of grief and loss of friendships and why I chose to weave the Tarot into my offering in the first place.So I asked the Tarot to help me read this story for you using this beautiful deck that I love. It's called Gentle Tarot, by Mari in the Sky.
And this is what they presented. I'll have the image up on the post so you can see it. So there was a card that I had pulled for myself that day, and it was, in this deck, the Harvest of Thunder, which is the king of Swords. So, like I said, different decks map these things differently in order to have a diversity of ways that we can engage with these cards, because not everybody resonates with kings and queens and Swords and Pentacles. So Harvest of Thunder was the card that I pulled for myself, and it was a confirmation for me that I can speak into this clear narrative on the power of the Tarot, to connect us with an ecosystem that we already belong to and to heal from grief, and I do that by trusting in my power to communicate in queer and radical and healing ways.
I also put down the Nine of Wands as the query, the card that we're working with this week. As I was talking about, the Nine of Wands for me, suggests this experience of dis-belonging in community after making choices that alienate you or pull you into the shadows. It presents the sense of needing people, but not wanting to get hurt from being with people. Where the Nine of Wands presents a sense of loneliness, it also suggests the sense of taking action and the Wands, being this element of fire definitely suggests the sense of taking steps, taking action, moving forward, and doing that from this place of self agency. My Nine of Wands moments have happened over the years when, and specifically, I had this experience, I wanna say, a year and a half ago, where I had been in the process of creating and supporting these creative projects and artistic collaborations that I had put a lot of work into and time into.
Ultimately, I ended up losing, those friendships and collaborations and the projects, from eventually getting a sense that I couldn't actually get any of my needs met, or my vision couldn't actually be represented in those projects because because I wasn't being seen as a collaborator, but as somebody that was going to be following orders. And I think that if I had been more connected to my needs and hadn't been as focused on making sure that I have collaborators because I had been feeling so lonely in being a solo entrepreneur, that I would be willing to shift and massage my goals and interests into whatever was needed to help the group move forward... And once I clued into the fact that, oh, I'm also an artist in this collaboration, and my artistic needs also need to be represented here, and I can't just assume that they are going to be. And the moment that I insisted or even just tried to insist on what I needed, then I learned that that wasn't actually true. So, yeah, anyway, these relationships ended.
And I also had top surgery at this time, and so I was just kind of feeling this massive sense of severance and grief and loneliness. And I went from having somebody to talk to about what was going on for me in a regular basis to not having that at all. And even if in retrospect, it wasn't a friendship that I wanted to continue, it was still really hard at the time. I think too, collectively, since the pandemic especially, and with the amount of polarization that we're experiencing in these fascist times, it's been hard for, many of my friends and many people around me to find a sense of belonging in community and are often dealing with interpersonal rejection, loss and separation from close friendships due to ideological differences, and that has definitely been a theme of our time, whether it is like, coming out as queer and trans and losing your family, taking some kind of step because you are pro Palestinian and you told, somebody in your job something about that, and then that results in material impacts, including the loss of livelihood or stability.
All of these ways, that we stand up for our values and we act in support of our values and learn that we can't also keep our really a sense of belonging when we do that --- that, to me, is is the place of the Nine of Wands. So the three cards I drew, to narrate what happens in response to this Nine of Wands where, 13 Death, 3 Empress, the Five of Stones or Pentacles.
I'm looking at this Death card I think about, there's this hermit crab here. It's like there's a shell on top, and then they're kind of, entering this new cocoon. So the sense of, shedding a shell in order to enter a new possibility. And Death isn't about literal death all the time, but there is some kind of dying that's happening. And the dying and the process of grieving often leads way to entering a new shape. And even though there might be a period of, darkness that's associated with that, it also provides us a path to choose to be alone in order to get perspective, and that is what I did. I felt at the end of these relationships that I needed to reclaim my agency, to focus on my own artistic practice and what I wanted, and to stop ceding them to this illusion of having this one big happy family of collaborators and artists who just get each other and aren't going to hurt each other. This kind of all utopian vision that was being presented to me at this time, that I don't think I resonated with. Because inside, I was like, well, all of these collaborations will lead to conflict, and when it leads to conflict, and we will work through them. And then on the other side, we will be stronger.
And I think that I was a bit too theoretical in that time. And even though we had gone through some conflict, it had mostly about me taking accountability and apologizing versus me asking them for something and, saying what I was having a problem with. I think I wasn't even fully aware of what I was having a problem with yet, at least. So, yeah, I went through this period of death, and I was like, I'm gonna focus on myself. I'm gonna try all these things.
I'm gonna experiment. And there were some downsides to this — becoming almost too hardened in this new cocoon and feeling like I couldn't actually show up to working with people just yet because I was feeling so burned at the time. But taking space and releasing my old shape allowed me to experience new things. So, yeah, I had taken a poetry class at the time. I was studying some psychology. I tried lots of different things, and I found Seeda School and Ariana Felix's work at the time, and then I started to work with them in remote classes or group containers and then one on one containers. And it started to create so much more, of the the transformative or transformation aspects of this Death step started to come to light.
So then from there, we go into the second card, The Empress, and here we see, this Caribou, with majestic antlers standing on this, grassy green land with the mountains in the backdrop. There's some pines towering over them. They seem to be wearing the sun as a halo. And there's just all these beautiful pink and white flowers that are surrounding them. It's just very green and lush. I think about The Empress as a card of Venus, which is a common association. There's a sense of attraction and connection with nature and especially in this card, with nonhuman kin. There's a sense of being present to your sensorium, to slowing down, to see where you are already calm, where you always belong no matter what, and how this lush, nourishing, creative life energy runs through you, an Earth being. No matter what community you are in or who your friends are in this moment, you already belong to an ecosystem. And that is at the root of your creative power, and that's what The Empress tells me.
And I do resonate with this. This next part in my story of really taking the space to --- when I didn't when I didn't have strong friendships to converse with on a day to day basis, and then I felt like I didn't have any collaborators on my projects --- turn to the tree outside my home, the plants on my table, the jars of moss that I made into little moss mossariums, that I had gathered from torn pieces of moss on an island, in a retreat that was once again an example an an example of community spaces where belonging is really fraught. And, yeah, the moss came with me, and the moss jars are on my table connecting with me.
I started to watch birds. I started to take photographs and really allow my creativity to open up and started to see how the people that I had found --- as I was talking about with Seeda school, and all the community spaces that I was engaging in from this place of feeling rooted and connected to, Earth itself and the Land mother, the Moon grandmother, and the planets, the stars, Astrology, and Tarot. They just started to provide for me this sense of being so grounded and rooted in myself that then I could show up to these community spaces that I was now part of --- that did have a very different vibe from the community space I was used to because it was so much more discerning now --- And also, to come in with very different expectations, very different boundaries, and really own my creative intelligence.
And then we have the third card, the Five of Stones. Looking at this card, we see this turtle. They look a little concerned, and there's five stones at the bottom of the floor. There's light streaming through. We see a person who is dipping their head into the water and looking down at the turtle. And the guidebook of this deck talks about how turtles are prone to being impacted by the amount of plastic that's in our waters and how there's this need for, recognizing that what goes around comes around into the relationship with earth, Pentacles, Stones.
When I think about the larger arc of the program that I'm building, it feels to me like from the realm of air where we're talking about astrology and limiting beliefs and thought prison, to then get into the fire element where with the Nine of fire where we talk about Tarot and the ecosystems that we belong in, we get pointed towards Water and Earth in this card, from the anxious Nine of Air to the lonely Nine of Fire, we have overcome. We maybe are sleeping better, and we're looking around us, and we're starting to feel connected to life. And from here, the dream world calls, and the dream world is where we're gonna get into with the Nine of Cups. There's an ancient call to being in reciprocal relationship with your body and the lands and waters of the earth, tugging at you. And cautiously, you're approaching the watery realms of the dream world knowing that you are a spark of creation itself. To remember who you are and your role as a light-bearing leader.
I wanna reflect that the Tarot in this way has created for me, this connection to the rich cast of characters, archetypes, and images that speak to me and connect to my intuition and mirror to me what's going on, show me the things that I don't tend to see on my own because we aren't very good observers of ourselves when we are inside ourselves. And through this process, it's made me feel so much more connected to getting advice from my own intuition through reading cards or through literally going out into the world and touching trees and touching grass, that I already belong.
Tarot has provided me ways to make decisions for my business. It's provided me ways to play with randomness and chaos so that I can come into like, this very podcast where I can draw some cards and I can talk you through the story rather than feeling really frozen about what is it that I'm even going to say or write. It's cleared the sense of writer's block or artist block or entrepreneur block — I don't know if that's a thing, let's make it up. And showing me that I don't need other people to validate what I'm doing when I can trust my own intuition, and I can have a conversation with my own spirit and guides by drawing cards and reading them. It puts that kind of power back in your hands, and it does it by using this very visual, very practical, very easy to access system that also provides you like, gathered context from all of the ways that that particular card has, resonated for other people. Cyrée Jarelle Johnson talks about the notion of using the cards as ancestral citation, and I really like that. Because when I was doing, coaching outside the context of integrating astrology or Tarot, I did find that I could get I found that I couldn't validate what I was saying necessarily because I was trying to speak from, what was coming up for me, but I am a human who has emotions and what not. And how much ever, I could be careful about not letting those show up in this space, I do think that it's wonderful to be able to read Tarot cards or Astrology charts, and there is a reference. There is someone else, something else that is also speaking with us, and that's our own intuition, the field between us, other beings potentially talking to us, through us, depending on your own belief systems. And the very cards, like, the deer, the turtle, the hermit crabs, the Caribou on the cards are also speaking with us.
My invitation to you, lonely creative, if this resonates with you is, Who is already in conversation with you, when you slow down to listen? That I believe is the medicine that the Nine of fire or Wands is offering to us.
I just completed a an eleven week program with Christopher Marmolejo who wrote this book called Red Tarot, a Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy. It was such a beautiful cohort and interactive dialogical program where we went into reads of the cards that were visual, intuitive, socially attuned to understanding what is the shadow, what is it that we inherited in this system that was, created through a a variety of occult systems weaved together by a European occult group and really breaking that down so that every read of every card can be infused with this kind of 360 view. It's been such a joyful journey for me. And through this process, the Tarot has become so much more alive in my day to day life.
I'm very excited to bring the Tarot into illuminate as the second week, and I hope you will continue to tune in to the next couple of episodes about Human Design and poetry. Send me a note if you feel like it. Thank you for being here, and take care friends! 🌈
Links from this episode:
- Cyrée Jarelle Johnson: https://cyreejarellejohnson.com/
- Seeda School: https://seedaschool.com/
- Ariana Felix: https://arianafelix.substack.com/
- Christopher Marmolejo: https://www.theredread.com/
