(Re)balancing act: a creative toolkit for Libra season
Including: a tarot spread, creative prompts, an exclusive creative ritual, and Libran playlist
Hi little coven, how is your Libra season going so far? Thanks for your patience while I’ve taken my time recovering after some travel and a book launch. Now let’s talk about the sign of the season…
Libra appreciates balance and order, but also style, fun, and community - Libran energy knows that everything has its place and its moment, and is open to considering all opportunities and points of view fairly.
While this Air sign is often reduced to the Scales image that has come to represent it (more on that later), there’s more to this Zodiac season than an emphasis on law, order, and fairness. Librans are thoughtful, engaged, active. Their interest in “fairness” is not rooted in maintaining compliance, but in ensuring everyone, including themselves, has access to what they need, and feels at home in the world1.
Libra invites us to tune into the world around us, discover our place and our power in it, and act to create a world we want to live in, take part in, express ourselves in.
Let’s consider two quotes from Libran writer Ursula K. Leguin2 that illustrate Libran energy perfectly:
First, in her novel, The Lathe of Heaven, Leguin meditates on our inherent connection to the world around us: “After all, [the world] is on my side. That is, I’m a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.”
Then, in an essay in her collection, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, she describes both her own social values and her creative process in one: “To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”
Leguin reimagines order in her writing. In the first passage, she conjures a sense of balance through the interconnection of things. In the second, she describes a creative act of finding, and creating, order that serves us all for the better: equity over equality. Balance is not some perfect but precarious state, but an excursion into the liminal… an opportunity to rediscover what it means to be part of something… to add value to the world, rather than try to fit the perfect number on a scale.
Creatively, this shift from prioritising perfect balance to imagining a more creative and inclusive order is a crucial one. When I meet with clients 1:1, finding “balance” is often at the top of the to-do list. But so regularly, many aspiring creatives’ relationship with balance is mechanic — a math equation rather than a compassionate exploration; it’s goal-oriented over experience-oriented. A lot of our work together becomes about exploring the creative world we actually live in, instead of trying to enforce specific criteria for order and balance upon ourselves.
Because no matter where we hope to be in our creative worlds someday, we are already part of our creative worlds now. We can explore where we are, work with where we are, find balance and order where we are. Instead of trying to get the world to submit to our idea of what it can be, we can learn to find beauty in balance in where we are.
To help us discover a new relationship with balance in our creative lives, we can look to two Libran archetypes: the Scales and the Justice tarot card.
Scales loom large in Libran symbolism, contributing to the sign’s reputation for fairness and balance. In my recently published book, Tarot for Creativity, I lean into this motif: exploring how Justice can help us create equity.
But, I’ll say it again, there’s more to the scales and more to Justice than law and order as we know it.
In the Elemental Power Tarot by Melinda Lee Holm (with whom I recently had the absolute pleasure of speaking!), the imagery for Justice comes from symbolism in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
In the Book of the Dead, after a soul has journeyed through the underworld, they are faced with a final judgement before finding eternal peace alongside the gods: their heart is placed on a scale, weighed against an ostrich feather. If the heart is heavier than the feather, the soul can’t pass - it’s swallowed by the crocodile-headed goddess Ammit and destroyed forever. But if the heart balances with the feather, the soul is free to pass.
Of course, a feather and a heart have different weights, so on the surface, souls are set up for failure. But the underworld depicted in the Book of the Dead is not our world, does not follow our rules, and invites us instead to reconsider what it means, and what it takes, to create balance.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the feather in this tale is no ordinary feather. It belongs to the goddess Ma’at, who rules over justice, balance, fairness, and truth.
And so, the heart must be balanced against truth.
Balance, the rites in the Book of the Dead suggest, happens when the heart tells the truth.
And when the heart tells the truth, when it balances on that most important scale, it is welcomed into a new world. In a way, telling the truth creates the pathway into that world.
In her book, a Walk Through the Forest of Souls, Rachel Pollack writes on the subject of Justice and the Egyptian tradition:
When we open the heart to Justice, we discover something really amazing. We do not have to face the hugeness of existence all by ourselves. The sense of a tiny, isolated self alone in a cold universe becomes and illusion, and we discover ourselves connected to … ‘a power greater than ourselves’.
In the Eyptian after-death, the person who has passed the test, whose heart carries no burdens and so does not weigh down an ostritch feather becomes dressed in the clothes of the God in preparation for a passage to a greater existence. They do not become God, whose costume they wear, but they become attached to the god, in the deepest sense possible. This attachment carries the soul through death to new life.
When we make the heart lighter by telling our truths, we rebalance the scales. We create a vision for a new world. We do what I believe Libra truly does best: find the edges and build upon them, creating a new kind of stability - one rooted in honesty, kindness, and full-heartedness.
Creative Prompts for Libra Season
Use the following prompts as jumping-off points for your own creative exploration of Libra season. These aren’t homework — try what feels good or interesting to you, and know you have my permission to ignore the rest.
Journal about the scales and the Justice card
How do these archetypes make you feel?
What memories, desires, and questions, do they bring up for you?
What similarities and differences do you notice between them?
Consider the quotes shared from Ursula K. Leguin. Sketch, write poetry or songs, paint, or journal about the world you live in and are connected to now AND/OR the world you wish to create.
Feel free to draw some additional tarot cards to spark some ideas
Create an art work, poem, or essay inspired by the weighing of the heart from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Consider what weighs your heart down, and what truths might free it.
More creative resources for Libra season (including a tarot spread, a guided meditation for Libra season, a Libran playlist & more) are available below for paid subscribers.
If you’d like to dig deeper into what creative gifts Libra season has to offer you, and get access to future creative tools for every Zodiac season, you can become a paid subscriber to The Shuffle for just £1/$1.25 a week (annual subscription rate). Subscriber support means that I can keep regular resources like these coming, and continue to focus on developing quality writing & resources at the intersection of spirituality & creativity.