Resisting the Muse

A confession, an invitation, and some news

Hi little coven. Here’s what you’ll find in this letter:

I. A short essay on my personal relationship with my “Muse of the year” tarot card.

II. An invitation to join us this Sunday to recalibrate your own relationship with your Muse card & a link to catch up on my Meet Your 2025 Muse workshop (for a limited time, I’ve removed the paywall from the original workshop replay).

III. An important update on my Daily Tarot Journaling tool

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In Monday’s mini-muse letter, I announced that this coming Sunday in our weekly instalment of tarot journaling club we’ll be “resisting our Muse of the Year card”.

The word I meant to use was revisiting—at the beginning this year, when I guided us through a journaling exercise to discover our Tarot Muse for 2025, I promised that this wasn’t a one-and-done event. That we’d take time to check-in and recalibrate our relationships with our Muse cards regularly throughout the year.

I, for one, find myself in dire need of that check in and recalibration… this error made it all too clear.

Once a friend pointed out the language slip, I was confronted by the fact that my mistake was a message from the very Muse I was referencing. My email had accidentally exposed an uncomfortable reality I’m grappling with in my own tarot & creative practice—something it’s time to face in my own revisitation this weekend.

I’ve been resisting my own Muse.

And now, two and half months into the year, I owe it to the card—not to mention myself and those of you reading along and unpacking how to work with your own Muse—to peel back the layers as to why.

I’ll confess: I have a hunch.

I knew when I drew the World card in our Meet Your Tarot Muse workshop that I had layers of work cut out for me. I knew that the implicit expectation I couldn’t help but read in this card—to finish a certain creative project, already tinged with the flavour of resistance, this year—would be confronting for me.

I haven’t made the tangible progress I’d hoped to on this piece of work, and so, by extension, the resistance that tinged that endeavor has blossomed out, conspired to co-opt the World as judgmental symbol of what feels, in this moment, like a failure.

But in revisiting the card, in revising its context, in reminding myself it gets to be my Muse, my guide, my companion on my creative path—rather than my boss, my jailer, my critic—I get to reclaim it from the depths of resistance. I get to reimagine how we’ll work together next.

The World, from the Rider Waite Smith deck on my bookshelf

A tarot card’s message is never fixed. Its direction is never a dictation. Collaborating with one card for an entire year is an exercise in witnessing the kaleidoscopic experience every card has to offer,

In the optimism of new year plans, I assigned a certain expectation of a certain kind of success to my relationship with this card. For a while, that imagined success story was the Muse I needed. In interpreting the World, the final card in the linear Major Arcana sequence, as a Muse for “completion,” I did make some progress. I discovered interesting things, and I deepened my understanding of the project. But I also got lost along the way. And in that lost-ness, I assumed my Muse a flashlight—narrow and focussed and illuminating one path and one path only. BI feared that stepping out of that narrow light would suck me into a void I wouldn’t have the power to escape. But really, the World is not a single-function tool—it has the capacity to operate as my floodlight, opening up opportunities beyond the path I thought I’d trapped myself on, showing me there was never a void in the first place, just other directions to be inspired by.

In the first quarter of this year, I’ve resisted the invitation to flip the switch from narrow view to wide-lens. But this weekend, I’m planning to turn the dial all the way up. To see everything the light touches. To remember that the World is my creative companion on this journey, and we’ll figure out a new way forward—one that feels inviting and expansive rather than singular and rigid—together.

This weekend, you’re invited to join me in shining new light on your own Tarot Muse.

If you haven’t completed the first workshop—Meet Your Muse—you can find it here. I’m making it available free for this weekend only.

Then, join me Sunday in tarot journaling club for a bespoke journaling experience for illuminating the full wattage of your Muse, and the full capacity of your creative potential this year.

Journaling club is available to full access members of The Shuffle, and meets at 6pm UK / 2pm Eastern US / 11am Pacific US. Subscribe to The Shuffle now to join us on Sunday.

I’m sad to say that my free tarot journaling tool will be down indefinitely.

My server host recently detected and prevented a severe hacking threat. To ensure continued security, it's now undergoing a full rebuild and reset.

The journal’s coding was designed so that none of your data was ever stored on the site, meaning your personal information was never at risk. Your email addresses remain securely stored here on Substack, which is unaffiliated with my third-party journal host.

I’m currently exploring alternative hosting options, but at the moment, I don’t have access to the journal’s backend. This means I’m unable to transfer the domain or retrieve the code that powers the journal.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. In the meantime, if you'd like to continue your daily journaling practice with me, you can join the free Shuffle chat here on Substack—I’m sharing daily cards and prompts there.

Questions, thoughts, reflections?

I’d love to hear from you! Head on down to the comments and let me know what’s on your mind.