I pull a tarot card every morning and last Saturday, I pulled the Ace of Pentacles from The Spacious Tarot.
At first, I didn’t understand the invitation. I’ve been feeling creatively inspired lately and have been experiencing enormous bursts of energy—made even more notable after a really tough, really cold, really long winter, during which time I was mostly sick with various illnesses and bodily ailments (including Covid, ugh.)
But I didn’t feel like the card was reflecting my current creative inspiration; I have always thought of the Ace of Pentacles as more the germination or seed of an idea, the beginning of something, the planting. I also have always thought of it as having more “new moon energy”—and there I was, pulling it on the Full Moon in Libra.
Whenever a tarot card doesn’t “match” my external experience, I actually get really excited and curious (thank you, Lindsay Mack!). What new secret is this card here to whisper?
In The Spacious Tarot, the Ace of Pentacles is illustrated as what I call a “helicopter seed” (does everyone call them this? because they look like little helicopters when spinning to the ground?)
What always gets me about these seeds is their inherent hopefulness. A tree sends off hundreds, maybe thousands, of these emissaries off into the wind with the hope of reproducing elsewhere. The trees will never know if they are “successful”—and with deeper thought, their “success” seems to be the least important part of the whole endeavor.
Last spring, I saw these seeds everywhere on walks—in some places they covered the ground. Right around the same time, I was newly collaborating with The Spacious Tarot deck—and at that time I was pulling the Ace of Pentacles fairly regularly. I remember making the connection—and thinking about seeds and trees a lot.
On these walks, I reflected on how cool those seeds were—full of the potential to become trees. But then I realized: the majority of those seeds weren’t actually going to become anything. I was stepping on them, for one (there were so many this couldn’t really be helped); for another, most of them were collecting into the street gutters. Most of the seeds I saw (full of potential, yes) were not going to become anything more than a see. They were never going to burrow into soil, or put down roots. The thought made me sad, at the time.
But on Saturday, a new thought occurred.
Imagine if the tree knew most of those seeds would end up in a storm drain. Imagine the tree got really sad about it and decided that since only one or two of the hundreds or thousands of seeds would actually become trees—why waste the effort? Why make any seeds at all? And imagine the tree gave up. No more seeds.
No more trees, either.
This idea reflects how I’ve been shifting as a writer, an artist, a creator.
The fact that most of those seeds will not burrow into soil has nothing to do with the tree. The tree creates these seeds regardless and sends them off onto the breeze: a radical act of hope and trust in the mysterious spirals and dances of life. They will never know if all of their seeds became trees, or if none of them did.
More and more I am coming to think it is the same for the artist.
When I used to pull the Ace of Pentacles, I thought it was a seed or a germ of an idea. The potential for some new project.
But, now, I wonder: could the seed be the art itself?
The novel, the novella, the painting, the photograph, the poem, the IG post, the TikTok, the Reel, the tweet, the tarot deck, the mural, the podcast episode, the presentation, the paper, the text, the album, the song, the film, the newsletter, the blog post, the coffee mug—these are all seeds.
They are the seeds we as artists send off onto the wind, hoping they’ll land in the rich soil of another’s heart and take root: blooming and blossoming and growing into new artists, who will send new creations out onto the breeze and keep our lineage of creation growing, spreading, evolving. To be an artist of any kind is to have the radical hope that our creations will have an impact—to trust that the endeavor itself is worth it if it touches and changes just one person for the better.
Of course, our ideas can also land on concrete, on cold or unready hearts, only to be swept away and forgotten. That’s part of it, too. It doesn’t stop us from creating.
Time has no meaning here.
Our job as artists isn’t to worry about who will engage with our work, or if they will like it, or if they will like us. Our job is to be true to ourselves, to show up, to devote ourselves to our craft, and to keep sending our seeds into the world. We can’t see and will likely never see all the many spirals, the ripple effect of our creations.
This realization has been liberating for me.
And so, with this, I welcome you to the inaugural issue of Portals & Prisms: a mystical missive with prismatic reflections on magic, tarot, creativity, mythology, storytelling, and more. Consider this a seed I’m sending out into the ether, with the hopes it will land in the soil of your heart, and take root.
And in this wild, nonlinear way: may our creations transform the world.
Take care,
Lisa Quigley
A Poem for April
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Instagram (@ursulakleguin) shared her poem “Hour of the Changes” earlier this week, and it so aptly describes how I’m feeling right now. I mentioned above—it’s been a rough winter, and I am so ready for spring. I’ve been finding the early spring dance with late winter to be exceptionally maddening—gorgeous sunny 70-degree days couched in between wet, grey 40-degree afternoons. I don’t know about you but I am really ready to come out of hibernation and lay in the sunlit grass for hours, like a lizard.
“Hour of the Changes” by Ursula K. Le Guin A wild early April strangeness, crazier than any autumn evening, mild air full of flooding wind, motions of storming branches, a queer, creaky, crying sound way off, as the rain advances— What’s that? A thud of thunder? a big tree going down? the sound of the untime after? No, only the hour of the changes, uncanny, ocean, smelling of hyacinth, ozone, daphne.
This poem appears in Finding My Elegy by Ursula K. Le Guin
Happy Spring!