Tea with the Muse

Shiloh Sophia

Encouraging stories, images, poetry, inquiries and dares from the Muse at Intentional Creativity® teawiththemuse.substack.com

  1. JAN 25

    You might feel better if...

    Tonight’s illustration acting as prayer… This might sound so simple. You will feel better if you pick up a pen and put it to paper. Your hands are craving the invitation to move. I am telling you the truth. These times require that we tend our hearts and bodies and minds. Pen and paper can help, really. We need to tend our energies, not just once in a while. Every single day, several times a day, right now, is a good time to breathe. The stress mounts and the stories confound. Our reality as we know it is shape-shifting. Our bodies and brains struggle to know how to be. But I will tell you this. Breathing happens when the pen moves. Right now, you can pick up a pen and begin to let your energy flow out the end in shapes, marks, and sparks. It doesn’t matter what you draw. Just move the pen as if it has a life of its own. Let your pen be a wild pony. You can even close your eyes. As you do this, you say to yourself, or something like, I am releasing any energy that is trapped inside of me that does not belong to me. I am letting go of what I am holding so there is more space to love and learn and be present.Right now as I move this pen, I become more myself again. It is happening now. Right now, you can pick up a pen and begin to write what comes. It doesn’t matter what you write. Just move the pen and let the words fall out the end. Watch the end of the pen as it moves on the paper.Pretend it is a thread emerging from within the inner tapestry of your body that must be stitched into creation now. And as you write with your magical thread, say to yourself, or something like, The energy inside of me that feels impossible to hold is being released right now. As I move this pen, I regulate myself,I care for myself, and I know there is enough space to love right now. I choose presence right now. I am here. I am alive and I love and I’m becoming more myself again and it is happening right now. My mother used to say we can write a poem anytime.Just pick ten things right around you and make a list and string them together like beads. Oh, won’t you… Right now, you can pick up a pen and let the energy flow out. Your body isn’t made to hold all of these images and stories and headlines. Picking up the pen allows them to spill out of the too tight places and squished up, tangled up, emotional landscapes. They need light and pens and paper. The sorrows around us, it is all happening, but it did not have to happen. And we grieve because we know this isn’t how it is supposed to be,but it is how it is right now. The desire to help and serve can feel maddening because sometimes we feel helpless. Self-expression turns helplessness into life force. We are not helpless. We are helpful beings. We are walking each other home. We remember it will not always be this way, Yet the turn in the story toward what our heart desires isn’t in sight yet. Right now. Will you pick up a pen and just keep that energy moving? Don’t let it freeze in place. Don’t let it get stuck. Those images and energies, they don’t belong to you. You cannot hold them all inside.It won’t help anyone for you to try to hold the pain of the world. You can love just as much without digesting the pain. Your empathy is being overtaken by the collective suffering, and that is understandable, but, dear one, right now, you can call it back. Mark the page with your truth, your shadow, your angst, your love, your hope, your optimism. You know, the optimism that won’t go away?Bring it, bring it, bring it, bring you. The page does not fear your grief. The pen does not resist your pain. When I say you might feel better by picking up the pen... It is not so that we don’t see what is happening or to bypass reality. Rather, it is an invitation to feel just a little tiny bit better so actions are more clear and energy is more available and heart is not defended. It is hard to not have a defended heart, the pen and the paper open. Consider saying this or something like this. Right now I call my energy back to myself. Right now I release holding what isn’t mine to hold. Right now I love with my whole heart without taking on someone else’s pain. Right now I pick up the pen and self-express the impossible. If this gets me through the next day or hour or minute, So be it. If this clears my mind and shows me the actions I need to take, that is good enough. If this keeps me from being frozen and numb, I will take it. This pen and this paper hold my prayer. Dear One, your hands are craving the invitation to move. Dear ones, my prayers flow together with yours in this great river of life. Tonight, as I draw the elemental feminine rising up from stardust dreaming, I express my pain with a pen. I am stardust dreaming of becoming earth and tree and bird.I am stardust dreaming of becoming water, sparking life into creation through lightning. I am stardust dreaming of becoming fire, the sun shining on smooth skin. I am stardust dreaming of becoming the sky. The clouds rise up from my mind. The sun and the moon and the stars are in my pen and in my paper. Without the sun and the rain and the tree, there would be no paper, no pen. Everywhere I look,I am stardust dreaming of returning home to myself. When this world has become too dense for beauty to reveal herself, then I remember I am stardust dreaming of becoming me, and that is enough. One day long ago, a star dreamed of having an identity, and that identity is me. When I create, I remember the ancient stardust that I am. ”We are all cooling sacks of stars” says Sue Hoya Sellers.Prayers and candles and pen and paper from Minneapolis and all that are hurting for so many reasons. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is. And so we must choose to continue on in a good way, loving, healing, and becoming. Start us dreaming. Thich Nhat Hanh says, if you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain. Without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. Sending love from my heart to yours. Can you feel it? Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

    11 min
  2. JAN 23

    Quantum Love - a new personal professional bridge from where I was to where I am going

    Stardust Bones 2025 - Teaching Painting from one of the last Intentional Creativity Certifications, this is the painting that sparked the change. This is my story in a single image with hundreds of stories within… Dear Ones, Today I’m reminded of a letter that I received in 2020 from our Elder Carmen Baraka. It was written to me and Jonathan, and here’s one quote that I love. “To know you are between worlds, the I am that I am. I am most comfortable here in this place of giving and receiving. In this place of quantum identity where you find out and can feel this realm in a profound way. An actual view that we are all interconnected in alignment with the stars. When you can actually experience what you feel is your deepest truth. Hold it in your hand and have it be tangible. That is the gift. That is pure joy. That is the awakening.” Carmen Baraka. For those of you that don’t know, Carmen was our indigenous elder within all of our communities. We got to guide ceremony together for over 10 years. She walked into her future in 2021 right before my mom, Caron McCloud So today, I’m signaling a change (breathing) And I want to begin with acknowledging that everyone in our community of Musea is a part of my life. MUSEA means many museums and many muses in the plural. MUSEA goes on. The Intentional Creativity Foundation, our 501c3, will continue with Musea. MUSEA is the greater community, a collective. My art studio, is just one MUSEA, albeit it’s an important one. Yet I am taking my position as another artist in the lineage of Intentional Creativity Teachings, and I remain the Co-founder with Jonathan McCloud. Yet, it is essential for me at this time to curate my personal part of our work. Since 2008, the first legend, I’ve been bringing forth the lineage teachings as they came through. Nine certifications later, I am complete with that particular transmission with the last Legend and the last Color of Woman that I will personally lead. And all of that completes in March 2026 with our All Tribes Gathering, which is for Graduates and Guild members of the certifications. Legend was a significant course for me. Because before 2008, I had already created a million dollars worth of revenue with my paintings. I had galleries in San Francisco and Sausalito, Sonoma and Mendocino. I was living the life of a fine artist and having pretty incredible success, all things considered. But then it occurred to me…. And I remember because I was with Mary MacDonald, it occurred to me that maybe what people wanted instead of my paintings, well not instead, but like more than my paintings, is to be able to paint their own. They were drawn to my images so powerfully, it was more than just about a painting. We took the huge leap and we decided to teach the first legend. Mary, my mother Caron, and my other mother Sue sat down at the table that’s right in this room with me, that I call the Feast Table of Love. We sat down and we reverse engineered a way to make a painting. ALSO let it be known that it was Mary MacDonald that said - “Let’s turn on the camera and see what she does”The rest is herstory. Because even though I had the opportunity to be trained in painting, we say Painting with a capital P, which is a more fine art way of painting, I did not take well to it. And Sue had to create what she called “a way of working” which is not, in her world, painting with a capital P. It’s like making a way through for someone who really isn’t able to follow the how to paint instructions. And so Legend was literally the reverse engineering of the 13 steps of how to make a painting, if you don’t know how to paint, that Sue designed for me. And we labeled them and named them. And now we’ve taught it. literally to thousands and thousands and thousands of people and probably over 800 graduates who learned the 13 steps. And it literally still works to this day… and when I’m teaching paintings of the feminine form, I still use almost the exact formula because it’s basically a build. My husband at the time, Isaiah, was so concerned that if I taught people my method, we would lose all of our money. And guess what? I thought we wouldn’t. And guess what? We did. There was a moment at the completion of that marriage, actually, when we went to zero after creating so much abundance for ourselves and investing so heavily in community. It turns out Intentional Creativity and the feminine image is what women wanted. They wanted to paint their own image more than they wanted to purchase my paintings. I still sell paintings, by the way. I have lots available lol. But now thousands and thousands of people have their own images instead of mine. What an incredible journey. So it took a while to rebuild with this model. But at that moment, something happened… I moved out of the individual serving my own creative desire and I moved into this bigger framework of serving the community with the feminine image. There’s so much behind why that matters, and why that’s important and how we’ve had 40,000 years of images of the feminine and then the past 5,000 to 8,000 years intentional silencing and erasing of the feminine and her presence. When women reclaim the feminine image it is so huge, and to do that instead of my own paintings has been so powerful!!And it’s also emotional because my style changed dramatically to reverse engineer it for others. I look at my paintings before I started teaching and I wonder where I’d be.. how I might have developed… a but I really did put my work in service to creation. I really did do the great work of the Ancestors. I really did bring through what my mothers taught me, and with the help of Mary MacDonald and Jennifer Owen and Elizabeth Gibbons in particular, brought forward Intentional Creativity at an all gorgeous level. I then taught it since 2008 until this year. I didn’t expect to get so emotional. Tears flowing. So it is essential for me at this time to begin my own work with painting and writing. And it will still be in service to the community, but in a different way because it won’t be certifications which require such a high level of integrity and management. The certifications will continue to be managed by the Intentional Creativity Foundation, our 501 c3. My own work begins now and of course it’s still connected with all of you. It’s called the Stardust Lineage. It’s the evolution of Cosmic Cowgirls, whose anniversary founding is today in 2004. I have no idea what my new work is going to be yet, and I suspect that the new work is the old work in different forms. Especially this year because I’m crossing a bridge of change and going one step at a time across that bridge. I’m not running across. I still have lots of work to do to complete, and it’s utterly overwhelming to complete a legacy while you’re alive. (More tears) Of course, whatever I do will be connected with MUSEA. Of course, whatever I do is coming from the Ancestors, and it’s also my work now. Of course, Intentional Creativity will continue. That is my work and many of our work. But it’s time for me, having delivered what feels like the great work of the ancestors, to now begin to reveal my own. The work started when they were living, but continues after. And so many of the teachings, they came through my “shiloh filter” but they weren’t really from me. I could never just bring that out. I think of Carl Jung’s Red Book where he said that there was more than enough material for one lifetime and that it was so much that it threatened to break him. In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke about the Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated: “The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.” For me, there were moments when there was so much coming through, I was like how am I gonna get this all down in time??!!?? And I did it. And I did it with all of you who participated in the certification. I don’t know what my work is going to mean from now on. I know that I had to do Path of Mystics, guiding women to develop their intuition and their spiritual gifts as a part of it. I have a teaching for healers and entrepreneurship. That’s a part of it. I mean, I’m going to keep teaching because that’s what I am. I’m just not going to do the certification. I’m also changing the name of the Sonoma property from MUSEA Center to Stardust Ranch. That’s a part of it. Stardust Ranch is a MUSEA Center. It’s just that holding and financing the entire container for the community isn’t something I can physically and financially do anymore. I have to make it more personal to me and my work because most of the time, I’m there by myself. it’s a huge space to be in, 6,500 square feet and it’s a community space but the community is not there like except for events and that’s like one or two times a month. So I have to make it my own somehow in order to continue. But we’re still a MUSEA Center. All right, let me get through this. The truth is that my brain has been entirely occupied with the certifications and the structure of the community, aka the corporation, the legality, the paperwork. Oh my gosh, I have like four corporations. It’s just insane. I want something much more simple for myself. And I haven’t had the spaciousness to develop my own work. I really haven’t. I haven’t developed my ow

    22 min

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Encouraging stories, images, poetry, inquiries and dares from the Muse at Intentional Creativity® teawiththemuse.substack.com