In recent weeks of my weekly video reading, “Monday’s Tarot Message from the Muse,” one card showed up several times—the 10 of Wands. 
The suit of Wands is the element of Fire in the realm of spirit, creativity, career, and work. In this card from Ciro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine Tarot, the man is so overburdened with his creative projects and passions, he has to crawl to get where he wants to go. Kind of like how I felt trying to finish my manuscript these last few months.
Remember that the tens in the tarot are that place between finishing and beginning anew.
Because all endings carry within them the potential for new beginnings.
Kind of like spring after winter.
In other words, when the writing or creative project gets boring or difficult so that you feel like you are crawling on your belly to get anywhere, you keep going so that you can finally reach completion. The experience of completing prepares you for the experience of beginning.
Often, when boredom or creative fatigue sets in with a current creative project, the temptation is to start on a new one, because starting is fun (even if a little frightening). Ideas are fresh, possibilities seem endless, excitement is strong. But it is easy to become a serial creative starter and never a finisher.
It’s important to finish.
Finishing lets you begin the new project with more focus, more energy, more creative space, internally and externally.
This past week, I finished. I finished the many layers of revisions and the final typing in of those revisions for In the Land of the Vultures. I put it to bed so that I can turn my attention to finding a publishing home for it, and to playing with story ideas and characters for a new fiction series I have in mind.
Finishing is freeing. I’ve worked on this project for the last seven years. Now I have this wide vista of possibilities open to me and I look forward to beginning again–even though I may end up at that place of the 10 of Wands with the next project.
For now, I am at the Ace of Wands, a new beginning empowered by creative fire and passion.
Where are you with your creative project? Do you need to finish? And then begin?