Love notes from your creativity

On falling, and staying, in love with our creative practice

Hi little coven! Just a reminder that on Sunday 18th February at 6pm GMT / 1pm ET / 10am PT, I’m going to be interviewing tarot reader and author Maria Minnis about her incredible book Tarot for the Hard Work: An Archetypal Journey to Confront Racism and Inspire Collective Healing. The event is completely free to everyone. Maria’s book is an absolute triumph, and I hope you’ll join us. Register for free here.

---

The author aged BABY, with a tissue-box craft. It’s tangentially relevant, I promise.

Growing up, I attended three different elementary schools in three different states. While curriculum and culture varied widely between them all, there was at least one custom that transcended the miles between these institutions: the Valentine box.

This was the kind of homework assignment I lived for: a creative task with very few rules. The brief: create a box where your classmates can deposit cards on Valentine’s Day. Every student would make one, typically using a tissue box as a base, and could infuse into the design our own unique personality and creative sensibility.

While every school had different rules about the cards (sometimes they had to be homemade, sometimes they could be store-bought; sometimes you had to present a card to everyone in your class, often rendering them impersonal; sometimes you were allowed to choose who would receive your Valentines — much to the distress of many an anxious, lonely child¹), the idea of the personal desktop post-box was fairly ubiquitous.

I loved the creative ritual of crafting a vessel for Valentine’s Day cards — I think the meditation of making it offered a distraction from its anxiety-inducing purpose: social capital. Even in circumstances where you were required to write a card for every member of your class, there was so much pressure about which card design would go to which classmate, whether or not to write a personal message, what it meant if you received a personal message (or didn’t), who taped your Valentines to their folders and who threw your cards away

In retrospect, while the politics of elementary school Valentine culture was a source of real pain and occasional pleasure, the truth is I don’t remember who gave me cards and who didn’t, or even which years my box was full or empty. What I remember is the emotional salience of the ceremony that came before: the act of using my creative gifts to prepare a container for love. Unlike making cards, which needed to please other people, making a box pleased me. It was a communion with my own taste, an act of optimism and self-expression amidst a sea of insecurity.

That I grew up to build a life around connecting to my creativity — and helping other people connect to theirs — through cards, of all things, feels like the closing of a magic circle I didn’t know I’d been drawing.

Last year, I found myself deeply creatively inspired by the reimagining of Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to romanticise our creative experiences: I devised a workshop called Fall in Love with your Creativity ( a new, pre-record version and accompanying workbook will be available to full-access subscribers to The Shuffle next week), and I developed limited-edition Love Letters From Your Creativity readings - deep, personal messages from your creative soul, channelled through tarot cards (Love Letters are back again this year - claim yours before the end of February here).

In revisiting those offers ahead of this year’s V-Day, I had to confront the fact that I’ve been snuffing the love out of my own creative life lately. I told myself it was a necessity - that staying on track for my deadlines and obligations was commitment enough to my creativity - after all, how am I supposed to write if I can’t eat? But the truth is, my creativity needs and deserves more than mere maintenance. It deserves my wonder, my joy… the kind of escapist abandon I used to apply to my Valentine’s post-box homework as a kid.

And so I gave myself an assignment: to create a new Valentine’s post-box — a task which felt frivolous until I found myself in the throes of designing washi-tape book-spines. Suddenly, inexplicably, for a brief and beautiful moment, it felt like the only occupation in the world.

I tasked myself to create a modern Valentine post-box that would delight 8-year-old-me. I used found images, stickers and other materials from my junk drawer, and slipped the Queen of Cups tarot card inside.

As I bent over my transformed junkmail, tracing the outlines of flower doodles with rusty scissors, I found myself energised, engaged… swept away from the monotonous demands of what pays the bills and pleases everyone else. I remembered what it feels like to lose myself in the act of making for making’s sake. How long had it been since I’d set out to create something that had zero onus on it to be “good”?

And when I held the box up to the light - this weird little thing I made, not to make money or to make “Art”, but to remember the joy of making at all, I couldn’t help thinking of the Queen of Cups tarot card — a personal favourite, which I’ve written about before, as a metaphor for letting go of an ideal creative circumstances. Please indulge me in quoting myself:

The Queen of Cup’s Extra-with-a-capital-E chalice is maybe my favorite detail in the entire Rider Waite Smith deck. It’s not the functional goblet that dominates the rest of the suit. It’s detailed, it’s original, it’s kind of weird. And I’m not entirely sure it can be drunk from at all, at least not without a straw attachment.

Here’s what I like to think: The Queen didn’t go on some quest to hunt down an elusive relic, or send some valiant knight to do it for them. They crafted their own Cup. They made their own rules. If the rest of the suit is a lesson in accepting that flow comes and goes, then the Queen stands as a next level epiphany: if the flow ain’t there, make your weird shit anyway. You may never get the grail, but you can fashion a cup out of pretty much anything, any time.

I placed the Queen inside my new post-box like a spell. Like a love note from my creativity…. I imagined her unique vessel and mine as kindred spirits on my creative journey, as containers for love, and as promises that when I love my creativity, it loves me back.

To risk some cheese as this letter comes to a close: it turned out that my true Valentine was my own creativity all along. •

---

Join the conversation in the comments:

What did this piece bring up for you? I’d love to know:

• Did you make Valentine’s Day post-boxes as a kid?

• When was the last time you made something for the absolute sake of it?

• What tarot cards feel like creative love notes to you?

• Anything else you’d like to share

---

Support The Shuffle

If you enjoyed reading this letter and you’re in a position to help sustain this newsletter, I’d love it if you’d upgrade to a full-access subscription. By subscribing for as little at £1/$1.25 per week (annual subscription price), you wouldn’t just be making my day and supporting the hard work I put into writing, you’d also be getting some much-deserved extras from me, including 20% off 1:1 tarot sessions with me, access to creative workshops, and bonus material sent straight to your inbox. Subscriptions, especially annual ones, help me project how much time and energy I can commit to this letter, and how much additional work I need to take on to keep the lights on.

If you’re not in a position to add another subscription to your budget, I get it! You can support me for free by sharing this piece with your friends and followers now — I’d be so grateful for your seal of approval!

Thanks for reading x

1. It’s me, hi.