Divination and Digging Deep as a Writer

Methods of divination have probably existed for as long as people have existed. I find it interesting that we have, historically and culturally, so many choices for attempting to interpret what is not visible to our naked eyes: scrying, astrology, tarot, palmistry, runes, reading tea leaves—not to mention reading fire, grains, animal organs, animal bones, moles on your body, flight patterns of birds…the possibilities have been and are endless.

Personally, I practice, on occasion, astrology (I’m an Aquarius) and more frequently, tarot. I don’t use the traditional Rider-Waite tarot though, I use The Muse Tarot by Chris-Anne. As an artist, I find this tarot helpful in examining and enhancing my relationship with creativity. The suits in this tarot deck are recast as emotions (cups), inspiration (wands), voices (swords) and materials (pentacles).

I typically think of a question as I shuffle the cards and last Thursday, before I sat down to write, I wondered, “What should I focus on today?” This is the card I pulled:

The 8 of voices card describes those times when you feel stuck in your creative processes, believing you have no choices to move forward. It is a card that declares, maybe you aren’t stuck; maybe you have created your own prison without realizing it.

I grew up in a small, rural Maine town: my elementary class had 41 kids and we were the largest class the town had ever had; we had one all-purpose store which claimed, “if we ain’t got it, you don’t need it” and they sold groceries, shotguns and wedding dresses, along with major appliances in their basement; we had nothing beyond a few stop signs and to go to high school we had five choices in other nearby towns—the closest 30 minutes away. The only true grocery store was a good 40-minute drive away.

I grew up with a limited view of “what could be.” The reality of alternative possibilities was so far away, mostly on television or in movies, that it was practically non-existent. In addition, I grew up in a home filled with abuse and neglect; small pockets of safety and peace were a rare gift. To see beyond my own miseries into how the world could be vast and wonderful at all, let alone for myself, was unimaginable.

For those early reasons, I have, historically, lived small: make no waves, reach out into the sunlight rarely, don’t speak your needs—assuming you can even identify them, and be grateful for what you have. I am used to waiting for opportunities to reach out to me and consider myself amazingly lucky when it does. I have lived most of my life feeling consistently stuck—my choices have mostly felt made for me and my life has been a series of scrambling to either work around those choices, emotionally despair as a result of those choices, or heave a sigh of relief that my life isn’t horrible in a certain instance.

The 8 of voices felt like a revelation: I chose, two years ago, to put my writing and art as a priority. But I am most likely still operating with that old mind-set of “I have no choices…I am limited,” I have to ask myself in what ways am I spinning ropes around my own wrists and pinning myself to a wall?

Most of us understand that the patterns and habits we struggle to change in our lives are not ones that show up only once—they are ways we’ve practiced feeling safe, but no longer serve us. That doesn’t mean, however, that we are able to just stop enacting those patterns or habits; they’ve likely become very ingrained in our ways of operating in the world. I may have decided to take myself seriously as a writer, I may have begun chipping away at my limiting beliefs, but I may also still be enacting limiting beliefs I am not aware of currently.

I have worked on incorporating the following beliefs into my relationship with my creativity:

Take consistent, baby-steps at your own pace. * Sometimes the creative process is stagnant or uncomfortable and that’s okay. * Making bad art is the only way to make good art. * Most of the artist’s suffering comes from avoiding the art. * Stop trying to prove yourself: just create. * Feeling insecure is simply a sign you’re leveling up. * Don’t hoard your art. * My art helps people feel seen—I am brave for sharing it. *

I remember I would said to my husband, “If I only had a place to go where I could write—a cafe or studio,” and he would ask me why I couldn’t just write at home in the hour before bed when there was some down-time. I would get so upset with him—I told him I felt he wasn’t supporting me. The truth was, I wasn’t supporting myself; I was limiting myself because I felt I had to have an ideal environment to write, (and therefore couldn’t write) and I got angry with him because he was pointing out that fallacy in my thinking.

Does it sneak into my everyday writing? How do my limiting beliefs hinder my writing progress and potential? Do I not allow myself to play enough? Could I share my poetry more? Do I not take enough risks when I am writing: am I digging deep enough to say what could be said; am I trying different forms, pushing myself to expand the ways in which I can grow as a writer? Am I reading a variety of different poets and learning from the ways in which they lay words on the page?

In exploring this concept, I may be able to catch glimpses of what could be barely visible to my naked eye: what is it that I don’t know I am doing to limit my beliefs in what I am capable of achieving? I just need to, like in a bowling alley, keep myself between the gutters of perfection and excessive risk-taking in order to knock down some poetic pins.

What about you, dear reader: are there ways you may be tying knots around your own arms, allowing yourself to twist in bonds on hopelessness? How can you begin to identify them and slowly work at loosening and throwing them into the wind, to move more freely and playfully in your creative work? And while this is a super important question for you to answer for yourselves, it is also a helpful theme to share with and talk about with other creatives—it’s such an inherently isolating endeavor sometimes.

Maybe we could visualize how being constrained by our own beliefs feels. What does our constructed prison, if we’ve made one, feel like? If we can identify feelings about the ways in which we limit ourselves, can we think about what our prison looks like? Can we draw it out and design it? How would it feel to begin chipping away at its bricks/cement/iron bars? If we are able to identify and name it, we may be able to take away some of the power it has over our creative process. That, in and of itself, would be a kind of divination, yes? Seeing what is amorphously living in our heads and making it real, taking away some of the power it holds over us?

As we continue on this never-ending journey, I offer us a toast: here's to the strength and perseverance we carry within ourselves as creatives to change and shift our realities!