Oh, man. Deep breath. Shake the neck. Move the shoulders. Deep breath again.
And sigh.
After moving swiftly through the first three powers of creative flow, I’ve hit what I always knew was coming: the perfect storm of having to write the full descriptions for the 14 Stones cards. I’ve been procrastinating on it for days, unable to write a sentence without deleting it immediately afterward. SHALT NOT DELETE THIS PARAGRAPH.
The struggle is real. Blocks like the ones I am working through are like psychological and mental warfare. First I blamed the procrastination on seasonal depression and a high gas bill. Then I decided I had to focus on getting through the downturn, so I spent three days drawing and painting because #mentalhealthmatters. Then I decided to do something I truly despise rather than start writing: researching artificial intelligence stocks. More psychological warfare, really, thinking about whether I should be investing in humanity’s replacement, but I spent two hours just trifling through information I don’t understand because I was still procrastinating on these Stones. (Though in my defense, Stones hold the power of wealth and finances, so maybe just thinking about all these Stones had me also thinking about something else I try not to focus on: Money. Money, is of course, a major power or theme of Stone cards.)
Why, I ask myself, am I struggling so much? But I know why: It’s because almost all of my own personal creative blocks are associated with Stones: with having and not having, with internalized systemic ideas of success, with traumatic failures, low self-value, being born into the scarcity mindset of two extremely frugal, struggling parents, with the anger and rage I feel toward billionairism and wealth owning the government and the rich funding the culture wars and the entire corrupt capitalist structure in which I am forced to exist.
Okay, so now, I am riled up. That’s… progress?
The Stones Power cards all deal with blockages that come from the material, outer world world: the support we receive from those around us, the resources we have and how we use them, the wealth we generate — or the support we never received, the things we wish we had or think we need, the credit card debt. And while I am confident in my creative knowledge and skills, in my spirituality and my life experiences — the Powers of Swords, Stars and Wands — I sorely lack any confidence related to Stones. I admit I have never received any support for any creative endeavor I’ve ever pursued. My parents didn’t support creative pursuits when I was growing up — “You’ll be homeless on the streets” if I pursued art, they told me — and they did not hold the fundamental beliefs about creativity that I have come to hold in my adulthood. And though I went to a great college, I didn’t choose to go into a wealth-generating industry like tech or the law. Instead, I went into newspapers and government, and watched as I slowly lost all aspects of the rat race that so many friends and people around me were winning with their jobs in cybersecurity and programming.
I would be happier if I didn’t have to write about the Stones-related aspects of living a creative life. But this is why I created Creative Flow Tarot in the first place: to help people get through creative blocks, not just around them. As much as I’d love to just start painting or illustrating, I have to write these descriptions. I cannot put them off forever. Blockages can become stepping stones; constraints are starting points and direction arrows to solving challenges. But of course it’s tempting to want to just go around a blockage rather than working through them. For instance, I know I can use chatGPT to write my descriptions for me. Every day, I’m bombarded by ads and antedotes of people who have claimed to have sold thousands of copies of AI-generated books and stories. How do I feel about that? Pretty sad and shitty, I guess, but how much do my complicated personal feelings really matter? Should I use chatGPT to write my descriptions for me?
AI is the epitome of a Stone flow or blockage: It’s a resource we have access to that threatens the financial security of billions of people around the world while promising to make an elite few rich beyond our wildest imaginations. Part of the population strongly supports machine learning and artificial intelligence, believing that an ever-growing supercomputer algorithm is the only thing that can solve the world’s biggest challenges. Others think that AI will lead to the end of humanity. It’s hard to imagine AI not being dangerous. Among writers and artists, AI can be viewed as an existential threat, stealing our jobs and mimicking our skills. But it can also be a tool or medium artists can use to stay competitive in our fields, increase the efficiency of certain tasks and to help our own creative ideas come to fruition more quickly. I’ve spent the last year both completely fascinated with what Midjourney can do while screaming into a void about how easy it is to use its powers for misinformation, scams, conspiracies and revenge, and how empty it makes me as a human being feel to know that, from now on, my voice will forever be overshadowed by the programming of algorithms. It’s this kind of deep condundrum that leaves me paralyzed: to use something I find morally dubious at best in order to give myself the best chance at succeeding, or not? In the end, though it would save me a lot of time, it just wouldn’t be … right, or right for me.
Which brings me to another major Stone theme: Time. Time is the most valuable resource we have, the most limited, the most used, the most wasted. Time is something that must be carefully traded, and yet we often don’t have the time to carefully consider the trades we make. Time is also something that is valued vastly differently at the individual level than at the macro level: Individually, we can all value the time we are given on this Earth, appreciating every sunset, or we can waste it all away, feeling trapped or bored by the confines we create. But at a societal level, the way our time is valued is vastly different and dependent entirely on the amount of profits and money generated per minute. Some people’s time is valued at $10 an hour, while we offer billionaires tens of thousands of dollars every minute for how they spend their time, regardless of how much good those billionaires are actually adding to the world and to our lives. The amount of time a person has to invest in their creativity is a huge limiting factor to their creative pursuits, or a huge gift to their creative spirit.
