Tea with the Muse

About Tea with the Muse

Encouraging stories, images, poetry, inquiries and dares from the Muse at Intentional Creativity® teawiththemuse.substack.com (https://teawiththemuse.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Shiloh Sophia

Category

arts · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Sept 2022

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

271 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Oct 2026

   A Case for the Muse

   Making a Case for the Muse Well, it’s a silly thing to have to explain, making a case for the Muse, because anybody who’s navigating an insurance claim for a fallen tree or received a speeding ticket because the Rolling Stones came on and you just couldn’t help but dance and you pressed so hard on the pedal. I just can’t get no, no, no, no... satisfaction. I mean anyone who forgot to renew their driver’s license and got turned away at the airport understands the need for amusement! Come on, just look at the text thread. You are perusing through right now. Almost every other text is asking you for something. How about the people who got a hold of your phone number and won’t stop inviting you to apply for that job or apply for a loan that you already qualified for or better yet tell you that your mother lost her phone and she’s trying to reach you. And she died three years ago. Rest her soul. Can you see how much the muse is needed? Can you see? If we don’t start laughing more...and soon This whole thing will try to convince us that this is reality. Imagine that! And still you wonder, what if it is Mother, reaching from the other side? You light a candle for her just in case There is definitely a need for the Muse when suddenly you have more doctor’s appointments than long lunch dates with girlfriends who call you darlink’ and batt their eyelashes at you, like Marlena Dietrich. It’s just rough these days. When you finally got into a routine of happy hour and found a beverage that tastes just right and makes you chill out immediately and then your doctor tells you it’s going to turn to sugar and you just can’t have sugar anymore. WTF is going on here, people! And then there’s all the paperwork and the whispers of divorce and diagnosis all around you and the password hell? Don’t get me started. Right now, there’s more than one friend who’s having delusions and the dementia articles won’t stop showing themselves. You can’t help but click on that one tip that will keep you from forgetting your dog’s name. Do I need to convince you there’s a need for the Muse, for goodness sakes? How about this? The reality that a woman can grow a mustache in her 50s? Uh huh. Overnight! And suddenly there’s more hair on your inner thighs. Ew. And you’re just so grateful if you happen to have a lover who appreciates you getting more furry because there’s more fur coming, you know? The hair in your eyebrows migrated to your chin, and that is just no good! Then there’s that innocuous mole that you like to call a beauty mark that has one black hair and one white hair growing out of it and they seem to appear overnight and you don’t have white hair or black hair. I mean, what the actual flying F! If you keep them there for amusement, they will eventually curl at your chin! Sometimes I wish I could talk to God and ask Them about certain things. Do you have a list like this? God, do you have a moment? Please. Couldn’t you have made it so that we don’t have violence built into us as a possibility and we could still have free will? Couldn’t you have made the instructions for healing a wound a little more readable? Why would you allow bizarre things like extractive capitalism to even enter our minds? I mean, the list goes on and on, y’all. What’s on your list? Yet more than a list of complaints, I have a list of gratitudes that runs all day long. Dozens upon dozens of anemonies in my garden, soft magenta, yellow centers. The regal Valley Oak and the large Band-Tailed pigeons from California, and that the sun is shining through my window, even though one of the trees had to be taken down, the neighbor asked me, and I did, and it’s sad, but now I can see the mountain and the sun. The gift that when my heart is hurting, my kitty will come and sit right on top of my heart and purr without being petted. It’s far longer, the list of gratitudes than the list of complaints. There’s definitely a need for the Muse because amusement is medicine that everybody needs. The muse always prefers leopard over beige. She definitely has a preference for rhinestones over buttons. She really likes fried chicken and mashed potatoes instead of broccoli and fish without butter. The Muse cannot conceive of a world that does not have butter, I mean, can you? Or chocolate? That’s a whole food group for the Muse, y’all. But here’s the thing. If you invite the muse in, she can be extremely disruptive to whatever invented balance you pretend you’ve created in your household. She wants to disrupt your life. She used some giant golden scissors to cut you out of your box, the one you made! And you’re standing there questioning if you should step out or not because you don’t know what you’re going to find out there and you’re not sure you can make it back from wherever you end up by Monday morning at 9 o’clock. Sometimes you just don’t care and you walk out of that box anyway, and you find the blue sky, you always knew was right there. Do you think about quitting your job 10 times a day? I mean, just admit it. I do. I may not be employable, however. Do you wonder why that person you love so much has a sticker on their bumper for the opposite side of the party you decided is the most right choice? When you see someone smiling in the grocery store for no apparent reason, while they’re gazing at the crackers, gluten-free or wheat? Why don’t you just walk up to them and ask them their secret and tell them how glad you are to see them? What have you got to lose anyway? Nuthin’ Make their day. What if each day you could just smile as often as you think about it, just break into a full scale, non-beautiful, unapologetic, toothy grin. That’s just one of the ways to let the Muse in. I’ve got lots of other tips and tricks, for the seduction of the Muse when you’ve been having a dry spell. Lubrication definitely helps to get things going. And let me tell you, you better get things going. Don’t wait too long and let your body go to sleep on you! If you invite the Muse to come into your life, she’s going to request more action between the sheets if you know what I mean. Whether you are having a lover now or not, she still has demands for getting the juices flowing. Just for today. I know exactly how I will court my muse. It helps to start with the leopard underwear and the push-up bra and the rose oil on my nipples, the sparkling lip gloss that makes huge lip prints on my pink cup in the pink cowgirl boots that stomp with abandon, all that helps out! Your Muse has a different kink than mine, of course, what is it then, that your Muse requests of you? There is definitely a case for the Muse, because the news is just bringing us to one dumpster fire after another, and I’m not saying we don’t have to keep taking out the trash. I’m saying we need to adjust our schedule and our priorities to create spaciousness so the Muse can take up residence in this house you call “my life”. Give her chocolate and striped it socks, red ones, and purple butterfly barrettes and play her songs by the purple man, Prince. Make her a cup of tea for you and me, and let’s hang out in the imaginal land where everybody’s already free. And of course, there are flying unicorns and fairy cake. I’m headed to the giant canvas now, where a circle of women is gathering in colorful clothing, the Council. They arrive with baskets and crock pots full of the yummiest food to Stardust Ranch. I made my famous lentil soup and hummus from dried chickpeas in preparation for the party! And the Phoenix woman, yeah, the one who rose again is appearing on my canvas. She has lots to say to me and the Muse is the gateway for hearing her voice, and I am listening. The truth is, today I’m walking with a limp. Like Jacob, I’ve been wrestling with an angel, and I won’t let go until the angel blesses me. But in the meantime, I’m walking softly and carrying a big lipstick and a walking stick. Honey, I just know deep down in my stardust bones, that we all need to invite the Muse to tea and offer her a giant paintbrush. I just know these things. Like Dolly Parton says: Decide who you’re going to be and do it on purpose.”Join me on October 3 (https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/enscSS/a18983/) Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe (https://teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   This is no time to turn back

   Ancestor Ceremony - 24X48 if you are interested, it is available at 40% off. Please let me know! All upcoming events including in person circles, and free classes and book launches are available at www.musea.org (http://www.musea.org) Join us for the Elements of Grace book launch - with Bethany Zare - I illustrated the cover and the inside art. No Time to Turn Back This is no time to give up on what matters to you. This is not a time to surrender into despair. The signs of the times are not a sign to stop. We are weary and it is good and normal to admit it. These times are also not a sign to use all of your energy in fight mode. We need to reserve our strength. To choose ever so wisely how we will steward our life force and where we will put our resources and how we can live our lives not in constant reaction. The power over structures and constructs want us to be caught up in their power struggles. Women’s voices shouting into their deafening silences. We are rightfully dismayed and disgusted but we will not be stopped for our sacred work.What you love and care for and desire can still be at the center of all of your choices. Each day we choose again and again to serve the highest good while not exhausting ourselves. We can choose to find the beauty everywhere while not turning from the suffering. We can cultivate the depth of community that we long for and not wait for someone else to do it. You do it and I do it and we do it. Call the circles or come to those of us who are calling them ourselves. These are hard times indeed. Our grandmothers warned of them.My grandmother called this “the end times”. These are times where goodness is alive because we are co-creating it. Move forward according to the power you have in your heart and body. Each day, whatever it is, is enough. Trust that power in connection with the sacred and the natural world. Choosing always what is right and good for you before any other choices. Many of us, oh so many, are here beside you. Sound women with sound voices and sound medicine are gathering now. On the mountaintops, in the forests, in the valleys. We are always gathering. We’re gathering each other. Now. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe (https://teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   26 Sept 2026

   When I stop trying to be more…poetry happens…

   BE HER NOW The sun is setting over the soft magenta anemones with golden centers where the bees drink. And I can’t stop wondering about where all of this began, this narrative to be more, do more, become more, achieve more, more, more than you are. More. More than you need to be. More. By someone else’s standards. More. To the degree that you lose whoever you already were. For a time, of course — whoever you already were can never be lost, because that’s all within you anyway. But the narrative of strive and drive and carry the burdens of the ancestors’ crimes is too much to ask. The band-tailed pigeons are fluttering in the valley oak, both of them on the watch list right here. I listen to the sound of their wings. And when the ravens come and the squirrels run, how they all communicate together. I can’t help but wonder where that whole narrative started. Whose grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother first had to step out of the matriarchal framework into the dominant framework in order to survive, and how this errant thought that there was something better over there to become. Something better over there to have. Something better than what she had. Something better to achieve, to receive, to compete for. To even ask for, but worst of all, to want for. To want for something other than what there is in one’s own self and life and being. Something better stirring us to look outside of ourselves. And I just can’t help but wonder about those moments in each of our lineages when we are striving towards something better, which really makes whatever we have seem somehow less, and us seem somehow less as a result of it. The hummingbird is pausing at the rose, red-trimmed white petals blooming beside the golden sun-kissed tomatoes and the mint, the basil. Everything wants to be enjoyed. It doesn’t want to be compared. It wants to be appreciated for what it is. The tomato and the rose and the mint do not have a story of needing more or being better. They become the fullest versions of themselves in this sun, in this full moon energy. And I’ve been writing for days, decades, to articulate the unarticulatable. To share that which I cannot find the words to share. There’s a sacred urgency humming in my stardust bones. And it’s about this: how everything we really need is already here and innate. It’s with us. We don’t have to earn it. We don’t need more. It doesn’t need to be better. But the riddle is that isn’t how we experience it, and it’s not what we’ve been taught, and it’s not how it feels in the daily struggles of our lives. And yet there’s this sacred unhooking that happens when we realize, or just to come from, for a cycle or an afternoon or an hour or the length of a poem walking through your heart, that everything that is needed is innate. That there’s no place else to get to, nothing more to add, and nothing better to become. And that doesn’t mean we don’t wish for a small patch of grass to lay on our back and look at the moon. That doesn’t mean we don’t wish for sturdy, solid boots that will last for more than one wet winter. That doesn’t mean we don’t wish for everything to be organic and sustainable, and the salmon to not be farmed, and the strawberries to not be GMO’d. We do wish for these things, but it’s how we internalize them, how we make it mean somehow that we’re something less. Everything I’ve been moving toward is toward this idea of revealing ourselves to ourselves as the ultimate act of sacred sovereignty: to not need more, not be better, not need to be seen and acknowledged. Not need to have a title or a designation or an affirmation by others, but to simply acknowledge the innate majesty of who we are. And the journey, really, of recovery, of making new promises to ourselves. Not promises about more and better, but promises about being. Not promises about needing to belong somewhere else. Not promises about needing to heal some ancient wound that happened before we were ever born that we’re trying to heal this lifetime. And not just to simply be here now either. More like be her now. Like even for a couple of seconds. Right now. Right now. As the butterfly bush dies with the purple rain-colored flowers, beckons for a kiss from the passing flutterby, just looking for that connection through the sun and the air. A place to be met within one’s self. A space and a place where identity just rests in itself through this expression of soul that has always been here. That is so easily forgotten, not because we forget, but because it is hidden from us. Some gorgeous way to access the truest voice which is held within us and set it free from the constraints of silence. Some way to curate this gorgeous consciousness that we are so we can design our own minds and liberate that self-expression which is begging for form, for matter, for energy equals matter at the speed of light to become matter at the speed of light. Plus love. Approximately equals the stardust bones that you already are in this cooling sack of stars. Where you can source your own presence enough to embody your sensuality with more pleasure than you could ever have imagined belong to you. To manifest the prosperity which is in alignment with the generosity of all of creation. Because everything we need has been provided, and it’s so hard to remember that when scarcity is enforced. When the morning light came on the pink lady apples and there were enough apples to eat throughout the day. What generosity, what generosity. Prosperity manifested, to see it as such and love it, to be in love with the apple. To be so in love with the apple that you could spend an afternoon or an hour or five minutes catalyzing your calling, not to have or be more or better than, but because it’s just innate and natural for you to want to create beauty. Not to save the world, but just to create beauty because your hands want to, because your heart sees some potential. Not to rescue, but just because it’s f***ing beautiful to make beauty. And it’s enough. And you are enough, and you know this. You know this deep down in your cells. That you are a sovereign initiate of this cosmic unfolding. That you, like me, are part of an ancient futuristic Stardust Lineage. That we don’t need to do anything to become it. We just say yes to it. And then the practice is the lifestyle. A lifestyle of pleasure and beauty and self-expression with intention of continually arriving in the now. Be her now. No permission, no apology, no need to become. Just being for the sake of being is the beauty unfolding right now, as this poem runs through my body like a wild horse looking for a view of the harvest moon. Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe (https://teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

9 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 43 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

59

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

71

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