🎴 Bear Bones Tarot: Thursday, March 26, 2026
Five of Swords — Not Every Sword Is Yours to Carry
On conflict, broken systems, and the radical wisdom of knowing which battles are actually worth your energy.
🖊️ Part 1: For the Writers
The Five of Swords has a reputation.
Pull it in most decks and you’ll see a figure collecting swords while others walk away — defeated, dejected, heads down. The traditional read leans into themes of conflict, loss, and the hollow feeling of winning something that cost too much to win.
But look at my bear.
She’s standing under a cosmic sky — stars burning, nebulae swirling, the whole impossible vastness of the universe spread out behind her. She’s holding one sword raised. She’s gathered others to her side. And in the background, another bear is simply... walking away.
Neither of them looks destroyed.
They look like two creatures who just figured something out.
“Not every sword on the ground is yours to pick up.”
Here’s what the Five of Swords knows about the writing life that we don’t talk about enough:
We are extraordinarily good at accumulating battles. The query that didn’t land. The review that stung. The platform algorithm that changed overnight. The reader who didn’t get it. The income that didn’t materialize the way we planned. The system — publishing, medical, financial, bureaucratic, take your pick — that failed us through sheer grinding indifference rather than any particular malice.
The swords pile up fast.
And somewhere along the way, many of us developed the habit of carrying all of them. Every slight, every setback, every place the world didn’t meet us the way we needed — we picked it up, tucked it under our arm, added it to the collection. We told ourselves it was resilience. We told ourselves we were prepared.
What we were actually doing was exhausting ourselves before the real battle even started.
The Five of Swords — especially this Five of Swords, with her raised blade and her cosmic sky — is asking you to do a weapons audit.
Of all the conflicts currently living in your nervous system, which ones are actually yours to fight right now?
Not the ones you feel guilty about. Not the ones other people think you should be fighting. Not the ones from three years ago that you’re still somehow relitigating at 2am.
The ones that are yours. Today. With the energy you actually have.
Because here’s the thing about the bear walking away in the background — she’s not a loser. She’s not defeated. She made a choice. She looked at the swords on the ground and decided which ones were hers to carry and which ones she could leave. And then she left them and kept walking.
That takes more courage than picking all of them up.
A few questions worth sitting with today:
What conflicts are you carrying right now that aren’t actually yours to resolve?
Where are you spending creative energy on battles that have already been fought — or that were never yours to fight in the first place?
What would your writing life look like if you set down every sword that wasn’t essential to carry today?
🌿 Today’s Practical Magick
Try this — it takes three minutes and costs nothing:
Write down everything currently taking up space in your mental and emotional bandwidth. Every unresolved thing, every low-grade worry, every background frustration. Get them all out.
Then look at each one and ask, simply: “Is this sword mine to carry today?”
Some will be yes. Pick those up with intention.
Some will be no — not today, not right now, maybe not ever.
Set those down on the ground.
You don’t have to solve them. You don’t have to pretend they don’t exist. You just have to stop carrying them in your body while you’re trying to do the work that matters.
The bear under the cosmic sky only raised one sword.
One was enough. 🗡️🐾
🔒 The personal pull is below — for paid subscribers
This is where The Mojo Mama Bear gets bear-bones honest about what this card stirred up this morning and what it looks like in a real, unglamorous, unsexy day in the actual life of a working author.
