November 2020: Being Foolish Together
Dear Friends,
This month’s newsletter is the deep breath I’m taking before I submerge again into electoral work for the Georgia Senate run-offs! In case I’m not able to squeeze out another newsletter before the end of this year, I’m serving you up a heaping helping of inspirations, and some of the practices that have been getting me through this time. I would love to hear yours!
Watching the margins narrow and flip in Georgia in the days following the election was thrilling, and the final outcome is a relief, to be sure. And: I continue to be amazed at the ability of one human nervous system (mine!) to run through so many strong feelings at the same time—relief, rage, joy, fear, hope. It’s a lot.
The Swing Georgia Left campaign I’d been taking part in since June organized over 3,800 SURJ members to call over 1 million white voters in Georgia. We had 36,000 conversations and got 21,000 people to commit to vote—and it WORKED: we saw a significant decrease in white working-class communities turn out for you-know-who in GA this election.
There is so much work to do to get those Senate seats, and SURJ is once again following the leadership of Black- and people of color-led organizations on the ground in Georgia. Can you join us? There are a few ways that you can help:
1. Sign up to phone bank with us! You can read all about it here, and I’m happy to answer any questions you have
2. Make a split donation to support SURJ PAC and the New Georgia Project Action fund
3. Signup to send postcards through The Frontline
I am wishing all of you warmth, safety, pleasure and peace as we enter more deeply into this season of light and dark. With so many living in the precarity of pandemic, State violence and poverty, I urge all of us to learn about and explore mutual aid, and to give what we can to those in our community who need it right now.
Finally, to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways—sending loving words of encouragement, sharing my newsletter and blog posts, sending beautiful handmade gifts, and making donations—THANK YOU. It means more to me than you can ever know.
In love and solidarity,
shea in the catskills
What’s Inspiring Me Now (so many things!)
- The Resistance Revival Chorus’s debut album “This Joy.” Every. Single. Song. Put this in your getting-through-winter survival kit.
- adrienne maree brown. In conversation with Angela Davis, with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, with Jonathan Van Ness, with her sister Autumn about witching, plus her new book! She is the apocalyptic doula we all need right now.
- And speaking of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, her new book: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Yup, you read that right!
- Tahlula Potter’s solo show Transmogrifications at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum. From the 16-year-old Potter’s artist statement: “Through painting, I have attempted to come to terms with the inevitable: I am my body. And my body does not end when I die. My body is simply transforming into something else.”
- My Octopus Teacher on Netflix. I mean: this octopus.
- “Don’t Hesitate” by Mary Oliver
- This clip of a dombra performance by Marzhan Kapsamat. The 23-year-old musician is playing in Lake Köbeituz, a salt lake in Kazakhstan that turns pink every several years.
- “Becoming a Real Human Being” with Ilarion Merculieff (thanks, Barbara, for sending this my way!). The Womb at the Center of the Universe? Um, yes please!
What’s inspiring you now? I would love to hear about it and include it in my next newsletter…
Card of the Month: 0 The Fool
I love this unconventional image from The Spacious Tarot. Traditional depictions show a figure about to step off the edge of a cliff, carrying their few belongings in a bundle over their shoulder, a small dog nipping at their heels. Here, however, we are that figure. This makes me think of koans, a spiritual technology unique to Zen Buddhism in which a practitioner drops a question into their body-heart-mind and must merge with it—must become the question-answer itself. Instead of looking from the outside at a figure who we may or may not identify with, the artist here puts us in the middle of the action. The Fool is us.
The twenty-two cards of the tarot’s Major Arcana are often referred to as “the Fool’s Journey.” This is because the archetype of The Fool—number 0—is the animating force of all twenty-one archetypes that follow it. The Fool is pure potential, the Void—not empty, but actually full of limitless possibility. How this life-force animates each archetype is the unique and complex form the Fool’s Journey takes for each of us.
I try to take in what is happening right now: a person in the US dying from COVID-19 every 48 seconds; nearly half the US population without employment; the disproportionate impact of this on the most vulnerable—the unhoused, the undocumented, the incarcerated and detained, the poor, the disabled and elderly, especially those who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. The rot spreading throughout our political institutions. I heard recently that the climate effects we are experiencing now are the result of what we were doing in the 1980s. To the extent that I am able to take in any of this, I have a lot of feelings.
I empathize with those who turn away, or lose themselves in fantasy, distraction, entertainment, numbness and addictive behavior. I empathize because I do it myself! The realities of old age, sickness and death are hard to face under “normal” circumstances. The blunt truth of how avoidable so much of this current suffering is? It is So. Much.
So why am I thinking about The Fool? Why do I keep looking at that peachy-purple sky beyond the narrowing cliff’s edge? I believe the time for a single heroic figure to emerge and lead us all out of this wasteland of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism is a fantasy that we must consciously renounce. In the words of June Jordan: We are the ones we have been waiting for. The Fool is us.
In my studies, chasing down and collapsing into the arms of the Great Mother, I keep hearing about my heart’s desire. Pray for your heart’s desire. Drop down into the heart, and listen, attune, commune, drift, dream, divine, plumb, float, trust, play, pray. This is Fool’s work for sure. What is my heart’s desire? I should know, right? As I navigate attuning to my heart’s desire, I notice what’s so often in the way: fear, doubt, numbness, insecurity, a dulling of the imagination, shitty messages from the overculture.
No one else can tell me what my heart’s desire is. Racial capitalism does its level best to try, but the desires that arise from advertising and propaganda are not my heart’s desires. Neither are the desires of others, even those who know and love me. In my experience, it takes time outside of time, space, trust and faith to tune in. I have to want to tune in. The doubts are always circling. But with practice, I’m becoming more adept at listening and trusting.
I try to remember to do this in micro-ways every day. In a moment of anxiety or agitation, or just blindly putting my face in a bag of chips (no shame!), I will stop. And ask: what do I really want right now? In this moment, what is my heart’s desire? Learning to stop and listen here, where it’s small—a bath, a rest, a walk, music, calling a friend, having a cry—trains me to listen more accurately when it’s large: YES, release your monastic vows. YES, sign up for those 27 phone bank shifts. YES, be vulnerable and ask for care.
No matter where I am, no matter what I’m facing, this is a question I can always ask myself: What is my heart’s desire? What do I want? Every good Buddhist knows—every “good person” knows—how to desire things for others. But I’m talking about what we desire for ourselves. “Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them” notwithstanding, desire is, as Starhawk puts it, “the glue of the Universe.” It’s the engine that drives everything. If we don’t get in touch with ours, we are susceptible to others’ desires for us.
Ilarion Merculieff speaks about what happens when we expend all of our energy trying to stop what we don’t want: all of our energy goes to what we don’t want! To be sure, there are moments when we absolutely must do that. But if we never stop and turn our time, energy, attention, creativity, and resources to what we do want, it will surely never happen. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff talks about this in terms of framing political messaging. I talk about it with tarot clients: if you frame your question—your desire—around what you don’t want, your subconscious doesn’t actually register the negation. Instead, your energy gets wrapped around the opposite of your heart’s desire.
Knowing how to affirmatively frame our needs and desires, i.e. without using the words “not” or “no,” is a crucial and useful practice that we can become more skilled at. Okay, so we don’t want a neofascist psychopath as president—great! What do we want? What kind of world do we want to live in? What does it look like? What does it feel like? Can we imagine it? Reclaiming our imagination from the overculture is no small task, and it’s one worth engaging. Every day, at all times. Again: Fool’s work!
adrienne maree brown says: what we pay attention to grows. (I once heard in an Al-Anon meeting: “Worrying is praying for the worst outcome.” Life-changer!) There’s so much to be afraid of, to be legitimately worried about, so much to hate and deplore and reject. To choose to put our attention on our needs, our dreams, our hopes, our desires, our pleasure and joy—it seems...foolish, doesn’t it? (If it sounds or feels selfish, I invite you to consider whether that’s actually the overculture talking.)
The Fool is ruled by Uranus—the illuminator, the rebel, the shatterer of old forms. The planet of originality, invention and discovery. Uranus is unconventional, unpredictable, a disruptor. To stop and turn and look and see what lies underneath, tangled up in, hidden inside of our conditioning by the overculture—like a shining jewel in a shit-heap—is to commune with our heart’s desire. I believe that doing this is a deeply radical act. A disruption of the overculture, and a step in the direction of a world we must imagine into being. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute! (Pure Fool poetry by Wendell Berry.)
To me, this feels like a time to leave it all on the field. To leap, to dream, to imagine, to desire from our heart—and to do this with others. “Community” comes from the same root as “commune”—to have dealings with, to talk intimately. Do our communities support this? Do our relationships nurture this? Are we in community? The communities that I am a part of right now are helping me to do exactly this kind of Fool’s work—to pray for my heart’s desire, to flip a red state blue, to create intentional relational organisms, to imagine a new world into being one interaction, one encouragement, one mistake, one miracle at a time.
I’ll close with the words of ancestor Anne Braden: In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.
Here’s to being Foolish. Together.
Find out more about my tarot work.
Card of the Month pulled from the The Spacious Tarot.
