Follow Your Bliss

Or, how the Knight of Cups tells us to forget purpose and follow curiosity instead

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Tonight marks the beginning of Pisces season. My birthday season! And as such, I wanted to write something about the Moon, which is the Major Arcana tarot card ruled by Pisces.

More specifically, I started writing about fears and facing them or befriending them or at least illuminating them instead of hiding from them or pretending they don’t exist. I wanted to write something heavy and important and impactful. And good.

But Thursday and then Friday rolled around and I just couldn’t flesh out the newsletter. I faced a big fear of mine this week and while I was really excited to share it with you, it suddenly didn’t seem heavy enough. Important enough. Impactful enough. Or good enough. Or maybe it did but I was feeling too embarrassed to broadcast it at just this moment.

Instead of continuing to bang my head against the wall, on Friday morning I stepped away from my laptop and tarot tomes, burned some frankincense, and sat down with my cards.

I first pulled a card from my Inquire Within deck of tarot questions (which I cannot wait for you to be able to use as well!). I created this deck precisely for - among other things - moments such as this one, when I am feeling so scattered that I don’t even know what question to pose to my tarot cards. The card I pulled asked:

“What path does my intuition want me to follow today?”

It made perfect sense. (Also, my deck works! I thought to myself with a relieved thrill.) I haven’t been listening to my intuition, which is why I feel so scattered. I was listening to everything but my intuition! It was my ego that was nagging me about my Substack newsletter, berating me to hurry up and think of something worthwhile to say. And it was my anxiety, not my intuition, incessantly reminding me of the unfinished Romeo & Juliet materials I still have to send to the campus copy center. And it wasn’t my intuition but my perpetual guilt still harassing me about all the writing I failed to produce last night even though that was the reason I skipped a friend’s band’s show. And my overwhelm, which is pretty much my default state at this point, was telling me to follow the path of skipping the little museum date my husband and I had planned for today back when the more optimistic version of me earlier in the week had convinced herself that my newsletter would be finished by now.

But what path did my intuition want me to follow? The response that came from my tarot cards? The Knight of Cups.

This tarot card immediately made me think of the advice Joseph Campbell had given in his now-famous 1988 PBS interview series with Bill Moyers, which is what I was admittedly watching instead of writing Thursday night:

Follow your bliss.

Moyers and Campbell were discussing the mythological hero’s journey, and Moyers had asked what regular people like you and I could do to figure out what our heroic adventure or calling in life was. And Campbell responded with the advice he always gave his Sarah Lawrence students: Don’t worry about that - just follow your bliss. Do what makes you happy, lights you up, and brings you to life. Vital people spread vitality, he had said, and that’s how each of us can help save the world.

I loved that the seemingly non-heroic deed of simply allowing beauty and pleasure and love and joy into our lives could have heroic implications. And here I was, the next morning, drawing the Knight of Cups to echo this magical yet simple truth about which my intuition apparently thought I needed to be reminded.

The tarot knights are zealous experts who lead by example with their dedication. In the case of the Knight of Cups, this tarot expert is dedicated to appreciating the love and beauty around him and sharing it with others.

Mary Greer and Tom Little in Understanding the Tarot Court describe the Knight of Cups as an artist, a romantic, a music lover, and a “knight in shining armor” type. (Talk about Pisces season, am I right!?)

And while this idealistic character type is often demeaned as too caught up in imagination and fancy, Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom draws an important distinction between those two words. While “fancy” tends to yield escapist fantasies that produce no real meaning or value, “imagination” often leads to spiritual truths. And the Knight of Cups is an expert at nurturing his imagination, particularly helpful medicine for when we are facing a creative block, wouldn’t you say?

And so, I decided that the path my intuition - unlike my ego - wanted me to follow today was the path of appreciating the beauty and imagination around me. So when my husband peeked his head into our bedroom to ask if I still wanted to go to the Norton Simon Museum that afternoon, I said yes. My unfinished newsletter, overwhelm, and menstrual cramps be damned! I was going to follow my bliss!

If you aren’t from southern California, the Norton Simon Museum is a gem hidden in Pasadena and a mere ten-minute drive from my house. And when I say gem, here are just a few of the photos I took of pieces in their permanent collection:

Just a little Van Gogh. No big deal.

A Matisse (my personal fave)!

And a Picasso!

Spending that beautiful afternoon at the museum tracing the thick, luscious layers of oil paint in Van Gogh’s Mulberry Tree and sharing a surprisingly sublime ham and brie sandwich on the softest toasted-to-warm-perfection baguette with my husband in the sculpture garden was a necessary exercise in creative refueling.

It turns out that taking a break from my writing even though I had decidedly not “earned” one yet wasn’t irresponsible procrastination. The Knight of Cups (and my intuition) had reminded me to stop for creative and spiritual fuel.

We cannot pour from an empty cup, after all.

I had spent the past few days trying really hard to come up with something deep and meaningful and purposeful and helpful to write about to no avail. But when I finally let go a bit and just allowed myself to blissfully and easefully follow my curiosity - a PBS interview, oil on canvas, trees in the afternoon light, blueberry lemonade - the next morning as I straightened the pillows on my bed, the entire outline for this newsletter started imprinting itself in real time in my mind and it was all I could do to rush to my laptop and spit out bullet points before I lost it.

In Big Magic (I know, I know. When will she stop it with the Big Magic!? She’s already mentioned it here, here, and here for cryin’ out loud), Liz Gilbert advises us to

Keep [our] eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day.

In other words, sometimes we need to stop trying so hard. Here’s Liz Gilbert’s refreshingly blunt advice to writers on the matter:

Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, Oh, please don’t. Please don’t try to help me. I mean, it is very kind of you to want to help people, but please don’t make it your sole creative motive, because we will feel the weight of your heavy intention, and it will put a strain upon our souls.

We don’t have to set out to change lives.

We don’t have to set out to make a difference.

We don’t have to set out to discover a soul-defining purpose.

The Knight of Cups (and Joseph Campbell and Liz Gilbert) offer the possibility that if we simply stay curious and open to beauty, love, and imagination, and follow those things, our purpose may just find us.

If you are feeling particularly strained and disconnected from your intuition lately, I created a special three-card tarot spread for you so you can expand on the question I pulled this week from my Inquire Within deck of tarot questions. Here it is: