I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Jessica Dore in Tarot for Change, writing on the Queen of Wands:
To build and maintain a slow and steady burn, a proper burn, requires knowledge, dedication and the right materials. If you can get a little fire going using some tiny bits of wood and paper—I’m talking shreds here—you’re laying a foundation for a bigger fire. Our creative lives are often what nourish and illuminate our lives through the nights and winters. So if you journal every day for ten years, you may be lighting the coals for the memoir you’ll write later, or for whatever it is that you think of as your “real” work.
The one argument I have with this is that journaling and other creative activities that are only for yourself can be your real world. You need not seek external validation or recognition for your creative life to matter.
Dore continues:
I can’t explain why but it just feels like there’s meaning in learning to make something from nothing, in walking that path from the Page of Wands to the Queen of Wands, where you start with a spark that you have to cup your hand around to keep lit and arrive eventually to a place where the fire in your life—the stuff that inspires, tells you that you’re alive, even reminds you what you’re uniquely here to do—burns steady.
Just this — telling you that you’re alive — that’s enough.