Hello friends,
The weather has been especially chilly this past week, the rain hitting my hands and face in chilling pricks, the wind making my jacket inadequate. I wear full sweaters and thick socks around the apartment and even sitting outside is a struggle. You can’t see the stars at night under the insulation of viscous clouds, blurring the slowly lengthening day back into night.
With this dreary, mid-winter weather I have been experiencing my own inner dark nights. Beyond a host of inner movements around boundaries, the fear of being open to be touched, what it really takes to resources myself while still loving others, I have struggled with finding a groove in my creative projects. After the first verse and chorus of a new song spooled out of me wholly intact a few weeks ago, every day this past week I have approached the altar with my guitar and disliked any attempts at further fleshing out the song. I do my morning pages, meditate, pray, give offerings, and still the well is dry.
So today, for my own sake and for the sake of any other artist following along, I wanted to address creative blockages. Any creator knows the attendant frustration, even fears of inadequacy, that come with them. Here I offer vignettes that are not quite activities or pieces of advice but assay, attempts at elucidating this negative creative space and providing some movement for those who need it.
I imagine these pieces as something to return to when your faith in your creative process is tested and you need a reminder that you’re not alone, that there is still work to be done and fertile soil to till during the lean times.
Read on to take what you will.
Carrying Stones
The other day, someone complimented the crystals around my neck. He successfully identified my agate, telling me he used to be a “rock guy” himself. Not anymore? I jokingly asked and he laughed. “Well, they’ll still be there if you want to return” I told him and it’s true: for the foreseeable future, the earth is not going anywhere.
I can scarcely imagine all the epochs the mountains and boulders and sand have seen. Though tectonic plates do shift and mountain move, the slowness of their changes make them seem immutably eternal. Some things that are also ever-present in my life have the same agelessness: my breath, my awareness, the inner void that stares back when I quiet my mind and sink into the moment. My teacher used to tell me to sit like a mountain during meditation and I would overthink how to do so when, really, it’s quite simple— you just be.
In my favorite Zen book, “The Light Inside the Dark,” John Tarrant talks about carrying stones as a metaphor for the activities we do during our dark moments to prevent ourselves from descending fully into Hell. Hell, here, is a place without movement or change. Purgatory, by contrast gives us movement, “even if slow; and, because there is movement, the stars are visible, there is growth”.1 Carrying stones allows us to affirm that we are participants in this life “because we want to exist in the world”. We carry stones as an act of faith, unsure if or how they will lead us to our next creative breakthrough but knowing the creative process is not merely extractive and does not exist on our limited timeline: “The purpose of carrying stones is to slow us down so that we may become present to our lives, so that we can enjoy carrying stones”.2 Put another way, carrying stones helps us rebuild a relationship with the world and stay still enough to notice what it is saying to us, even if the only speech it returns to us right now is silence.
Each moment is meant to be witnessed. Isn’t that why we create art? To bear witness to the unfolding of our lives and give it meaning?
Some ways I carry stones: meditation, morning pages, stellar ritual and gnosis sessions, Venus theurgy, practicing scales, putting together a personally pleasing outfit, lighting fragrant incense, cleaning my apartment, altar crafting, protecting my creative time, asking my friends for advice
Spica
A star I have consistently turned to for aid in creative blockages is Spica, the sheaf of wheat in the hand of Virgo, the maiden. She is an agricultural goddess, and accordingly, Manilius tells us this constellation “bestows skill in occupations without which there would be no bread or any benefit from the grain,”3 which includes not just the ability to cultivate crops and mill flour but to understand the dirt beneath it. Though it teaches humanity how to creates sustenance and benefit from what they plant on top of the earth, there is more beneath its surface: “rich indeed was the lot of those well-fed folk when on a time deposits of silver and gold lay hidden from mankind”.4 This line speaks to my own gnosis with Spica, containing a brilliance and artistic genius that is often under wraps.
There is also a melancholy faith to her, as there is to anyone undertaking a garden, working on a big art project, daring to fall in love. As she devotes herself to the process of skill-building or creation, she is devoting herself to something that may or may not coalesce of succeed. I am reminded of this Anne Carson poem that speaks to this quality:
On Charlotte
Miss Bronte & Miss Emily & Miss Anne used to put away their sewing after prayers and walk all three, one after the other, around the table in the parlor till nearly eleven o’clock. Miss Emily walked as long as she could, and when she died, Miss Anne & Miss Bronte took it up—and now my heart aches to hear Miss Bronte walking, walking on alone.”5
Spica natives are often protective of their love, their gifts, their creative endeavors, oftentimes finding the scrutiny of the outside world— or the inner critic— too harsh for their delicate process. In my visioning with her, I see people purposefully hiding in cornfields; a mother goose nesting with her eggs, hissing at anyone who comes too close; beehives and pomegranates— ornate chambers of sweet life covered over by humble exteriors. Spica natives value the process of acquiring new skills, or creating truly transcendent pieces of art but they also know this experience is not on their timeline and that rushing it can wreck the final outcome. Like our seasons, that means there is time for fruitful harvest, and there are times our gifts are buried in the earth.
I find that spending time with Spica helps me accept the process that brilliance entails and even helps open things up for me when I get stuck. You can honor her by conducting a ritual when the Moon is at 24º of Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Gemini or Leo. She likes green, any grain products or produce. In my personal experience, I also find a sympathy between Spica and magnolias. Light a candle, maybe some incense and say hello. See what buried treasure she may bring you.
Emerging from the Underworld
One of the biggest blocks to my creative process is my constant check-ins and worries about the quality of what I am making. Is this actually good? Will people like or understand it? Doesn’t that seem too simplistic, complicated, silly, serious? I often envision it as a tension between the 2nd and 5th house in my chart. The 2nd, often seen as the house of money, holds all that we consider worthy and makes judgments on what is a viable resource. The 5th, on the other hand, is a place of enjoyment and play: it is where the creative impulse resides. Forming a square, or a tense aspect, between each other, I often feel their relationship as a struggle between the creative freedom needed to make something and the value judgments that decide if what I’m doing is worthy. The truth, of course, is that art is useful just for existing, but not every pieces of art brings in resources or acclaim for its creator.
I often find myself shying away from more creative or floaty forms of writing or art because I don’t know why or if others will find it compelling: if I write an essay about Virgo, for example, teaching some traditional perspectives on what it really means, I have sense that others will enjoy it because they can learn something concrete from it. But that sort of writing is not where my heart is.
I am struck thinking about how the 2nd house represents our resources: the money in the bank, the art supplies and books and records we have to sustain ourselves and our practice now. We know, on some level, a piece’s work by looking at how our bank account changes after putting it for sale. In Hellenistic astrology, the 2nd place is called the Gates of Hades. Firmicus tells it “shows increase in personal hopes and material possessions,”6 as it rises up from the chthonic depths towards the horizon. Hades, being hidden with the Earth, also knows how to harvest the precious metals from the soil and turn it into something profitable. The 5th, on the other hand, is firmly rooted below the horizon and moves toward the 4th house, the deepest and most nocturnal part of the sky. While the 2nd house tries to turn the dark into useful light, the 5th house luxuriates in the mystery of the night, in the secrets of matter and what grows without our effort.
Among other things, the 5th house rules how we are remembered after we die. In the absolute sense, the latter has more lasting value than our current resources but it is also impossible to control or predict: it is literally forged in your absence. Part of the creative process is being okay with blindness and forging on anyway, regardless of whether it yields immediate inspiration or more waiting.
Can we see the creative process like this? Working towards creating a feeling or body of work, the results of which are none of our business? Our job is just to put our heads down and do whatever work is available to us in the moment, regardless if we see its endpoint. Maybe that means painting a picture that isn’t quite right, or sitting down to compose a song and nothing comes out of you. The useless output is still meaningful, perhaps shifting something so the Next Big Thing has room to come out, or perhaps for some other, ineffable reason. From the same unknowing darkness springs the real source of our art anyway, which is not just our sall self. The 5th house is also a place of gifts and what is a piece of art but a present bestowed by the universe? Pure grace.
My Book are Open for March
If you want an initiation into the mysteries, help with your creative process, or just some orientation as to why you are the way you are, you can currently book an astrology reading with me for March. I offer natal, timing, fixed star and creative practice sessions for anyone who wants more intimacy with their life, both within and without.
My friends have kindly reflected my gifts back, as quoted in the photos abov, to help you determine if my services are a good fit for you.
Magic to me is not separate from the cup of coffee in front of me, from spending time with my dog or my loved ones or strangers, from sleeping, walking, writing, crying.
I want to help you feel the same intimacy with yourself with the divine and with your life I do so through one-on-one consults primarily but also through classes, my weekly newsletter and more recently my fashion guidebook (there’s more where that came from!)
My place is not to tell you the right way to create or connect with your life but to inspire a curiosity to look and decide for yourself where the beauty, the wisdom and the art resides
I am a moved again and again by each person who I meet in a client setting because each person is truly their own world that I could spend my whole life exploring and I am privileged to just spend an hour or two with you.
If you feel ready to approach your own mysteries i just opened my books for March! you can book a reading or find more of my offerings by clicking below:
For now I leave you with this poem by Robert Lowell:
Until next week,
Love,
Chloe
John Tarrant, “The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul and the Spiritual Life,” p. 161
ibid p. 161
Manilius, “Astronomica,” p. 323 5.82-83
Ibid, p. 323 book 5 79-80
Anne Carso, “Plainwater,” p. 56
Deborah Houlding, ‘Temples of the Sky,” p. 27