I talk a lot about Spirit being involved in the creative process. On July 29th, I am once again hosting a MEET YOUR MUSE ritual workshop for folks to meet the Spirit(s) involved in their current creative project. 

But a lot of folks, while spiritually curious, don’t feel confident in talking to or listening to Spirit, let alone identifying when they’re around or influencing the work!

We all start somewhere in our spiritual journey, and sometimes, that “somewhere” is the foundational basics of learning how to even start a relationship with Spirit in the first place.

We’re going to briefly go over:

The question “what is Spirit?” could itself fill multiple philosophy books. Some people understand Spirit as their intuition, or sixth sense, or inner knowing. For me, intuition is a very real but separate thing from Spirit. When I say Spirit, I mean actual Spirits — incorporeal (to our world) beings who co-exist with humanity.

My understanding of Spirit is rooted in an animistic worldview, which understands all beings as enspirited. When I talk about the planets doing things, I’m sometimes using metaphorical language but also sometimes not, as I understand them to be enspirited beings.

With that in mind, let’s go through some foundational questions that you may be asking prior to MEET YOUR MUSE:

Relationship with Spirit is like any other being — talk to them! You can speak aloud, or write notes/letters, or engage in what St. Teresa of Avila called mental prayer. You can go for a walk and invite them along, silently being intentional about shared time.

Over the years, I have come to call my time spent with Spirit “prayer,” but it means something different to me now than it did when I was in the church. Relationships with Spirit are relationships. They go two ways. They are reciprocal. It’s why offerings are not given out of the kindness of our heart in hope that they might maybe do something for us; offerings are payment for services they can render. This depends on the Spirit, but we tend to be on more even footing than those of us with a high-control religious background may assume!

Some people hear audible voices (I do, which is why this has always been an integrated part of my spiritual practice from childhood — whatever I talked to usually talked back).

But most folks don’t — and that’s normal! “Listening” to Spirit is being awake to life, attentive to patterns; it’s noticing synchronicities as much as it is noting somatic feelings in the body that arise when you communicate with them.

To offer a personal example, I could not get away from stag imagery between 2023 and 2025, to the point that it became comical. Gradually, I came to strongly associate the stag with one Spirit in particular who had arisen in project research, for whom stag antlers are an essential part of his character.

Once I got a tattoo of stag horns and started more directly addressing that Spirit, shocker: there was less stag imagery in my life. Through the concentrated repetition of imagery, Spirit was getting my attention (over… and over… and over! sometimes it takes a while!). Once I actually sat up and paid attention and did research and started talking to him, the “WHY IS THIS EVERYWHERE” abated.

This is why I so strongly believe that research and education are an essential part of a spiritual practice — to know who someone is, we have to learn about them! This is especially relevant to working with deities, planets, etc. about whom there is a significant written tradition. It’s why I side-eye white women on the internet who say, for example, that The Morrigan is maternal. Like, sure? Maybe if you squint sideways? But all the written tradition strongly indicates the opposite.

My favorite example of research making a difference comes from my own life. I had a reading with a gifted psychic maybe five or six years ago, and she identified a Spirit who came forward as Thor. This felt off — at the time, I was not working with masculine spirits, but more to the point, I had never been a Norse mythology girlie, and my family does not have Scandinavian heritage. But no; the psychic INSISTED it was Thor. The surrounding imagery was indisputably him, she said. I mostly dismissed it, because she had noted other things that were helpful, and I don’t expect everyone to be 100% spot on all the time. Cut to years later, and I was doing research on Slavic mythology (which is both my family heritage AND a culture I grew up connected to). And one deity immediately jumped off the page: the similarities to Thor were striking, down to all the imagery the psychic had noted years before. Given that I had been working with my father’s paternal ancestors, a paternal deity from that line coming forward clicked in ways Thor never had.

It’s not that the psychic I saw was wrong, per se; she just did not have the exact reference (no one is an expert on every deity from every world mythology!). To her, lightning plus other things plus masculine equaled Thor. This is what I mean when I say reading and research is an indispensable part of Spirit work!

A quick note: people can have different, individual experiences or manifestations of a Spirit’s nature, but if what you think you’re witnessing is contradictory to everything you’ve ever heard or read about a particular Spirit, that Spirit is probably not who you think it is. However, personal gnosis and personal omens are also real, although it is a knowledge and awareness that develops over time.

Another quick note: some Spirits won’t give their name; you identify their character by the imagery (if you see things) or by feelings in the body (somatic awareness). Ancestors from very far back are often nameless, and you can simply address them as “well wise ancestors.” You do not have to know an ancestor’s name to call on them!

SO MANY!

Like, so many.

I’m just going to give a small sampling here of classes of spirits I personally have experience with, by way of what I would consider to be examples of them in art and literature. Sometimes it is very literal (e.g. representing a particular goddess IN the art itself), and sometimes it’s a more symbolic or archetypal connection.

Be flexible! None of these are hard and fast rules! I literally wrote this draft in one sitting so I have almost certainly left things out!

(Please note that this is not commentary on any of these artists’ spiritual practice; I’m simply noting what I would personally identify as Spirit working in the art, however conscious the artist is — you probably are not surprised that I think work becomes especially potent when we directly engage.)

There are many kinds of ancestors: of blood (natal family — which is why we see LOTS of ancestral activity in pretty much every memoir!), but also of lineage and community. Think of Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre, so devoted to the exploration of the Black American experience across time and space. Her books do not have to deal with exact ancestors of blood in order to call on and call in ancestors of community.

Think also of Natalie Adler’s recent debut WAITING ON A FRIEND, which features a lesbian hospice nurse who can see ghosts during 1980s NYC in the middle of the AIDS crisis. The spirits of our community’s dead feature prominently.

We might also think of ancestors of place — those who tended the land we now call home generations ago, as well as the Spirits of the land itself. Bad Bunny’s halftime show (that YouTube rudely will not let me embed!) featuring all things Puerto Rico was a stunning tribute to ancestors of lineage, of community, and — so noticeably — of place, with the recreation of the sugarcane fields.

This is what a lot of folks think of when talking about Spirit, which is to say, deity work. This is the class of spirits who there will probably be the most written work on, especially if they are from a tradition or part of the world that prioritized written transmission. (We always have to be mindful that much of the ancient world’s work on non-Christian deities was translated and edited by monks!)

When I think about deity involvement in artistic work, I think Beyoncé and Oshun, especially from the Lemonade film but also Black is King.

I also think about the singer Madonna and her namesake, the Mother Mary:

Or, me and Lilith in my memoir Heretic:

Low-key, I see a lot of my work as facilitating and bringing people into relationship with the Planets. I understand the planets and stars as embodied beings with entire courts of Spirits involved in their work. It’s important to note that there can be thematic overlap with deities, etc. (e.g. Beyoncé’s explicit work with Oshun is inherently Venusian, because Oshun’s domain is the stuff of Venus — beauty, love, etc.). Artists like Kiki Smith and Hilma af Klint have done powerful work with explicitly celestial motifs and influences.

For more guidance on the magical side of working with planets and stars, I would refer you to my dear friends Maeg Keane (astrology) and Sasha Ravitch (stellar witchcraft).

The last class I will address in this too-brief newsletter are what I am very loosely identifying as “folk spirits,” which is a mixture and mash-up of: stories of place, stories of lineage, stories of community.

As someone who is writing a novel that is a fairy tale reimagining, let me tell you: fairy tale characters have so many associated spirits! These are stories that have built up over time, like egregores, and that have attracted so much attention that they have their own kind of power.

You see this kind of spiritual activity in the best of fantasy, romantasy, and horror, and if write in any of those genres, it might be helpful for you to consider the archetypal characters you’re working with (e.g. witch in the woods, persecuted heroine) and what kinds of spirits might be associated.

If you have further questions, get in the comments; this is an absolutely ENORMOUS topic that many people have written on, and I will do my best to either answer or direct you to other helpful sources.

And! If you’d like a guided, contained experience n which to meet a Spirit that is connected to your creativity (WITH AFTERCARE!), then I’d love to invite you to MEET YOUR MUSE! on Wednesday, July 29th from 10:30a-12p Eastern. There will be a recording for folks who can’t join us live. Hope to see you there (click here to sign up!).