August 2021: Solitary Pleasures
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
This month marks my 15th year in the Catskills! It’s cool here right now—sunny days, crisp nights with perfect-for-moongazing clear skies. Good windows-open sleeping weather. And today is the midway point between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, known as Lammas, or Lughnasad, in the pagan Wheel of the Year. This season—the beginning of the end of summer—feels so poignant to me. I wonder how it feels for you?
Did you know that the Perseid meteor showers peak mid-month, August 11-13? Here’s to clear skies!
In September, I’ll be inaugurating an ongoing monthly Tarot group study called the Study Tarot Series. I priced this offering as an alternative to a one-on-one reading with me. For the same price as a private tarot session, you can gather with me + other beginning and experienced tarot enthusiasts to learn tarot yourself. All the scheduling + logistical details are on my website.
There’s still space in my upcoming Moon + Tarot 5-week workshop that begins Sunday, August 8th. The next Tarot 101 class happens on Thursday, September 2nd at 5:30pm est. And as always, my tarot books are open for one-on-one readings.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.
In love + solidarity + collective imagining,
Shea in the Catskills
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- There should be a word for the deliciously fizzy feeling when two of your favorite people have a podcast conversation. This happened recently when Amanda Yates Garcia, host of my favorite tarot podcast, sat down with Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk. SO. GOOD.
- It happened again when a friend told me about this conversation with Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Esther Perel on what happened to our relationships during the pandemic. It named things I only had feelings for and made me cry, in a good way. Still thinking about it…
- My friend Peg Conway wrote a memoir called The Art of Reassembly: A Memoir of Early Mother Loss and Aftergrief, and it’s coming out in a few months. I can’t wait to read it and pre-ordered a couple copies already. Pre-orders are super-important to the life of a book, so if this sparks you, please consider pre-ordering it now!
- A friend recently emailed to ask if I’d ever heard of the book On Becoming an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician by Catherine MacCoun. Strangely (or not…), the book was in my closet, where I’d left it after buying it last year and not being able to “get into it.” When I picked it up again last week? #rightbookrighttime Despite its moments of disappointing heteronormativity, I appreciate MacCoun’s pragmatism and realness about a true spiritual life (spoiler: messy + embarrassing #relateable). I’m finding it an interesting backdrop for making sense of my former zen training + my current rosary devotion and tarot studies.
- The Gentle Tarot, a deck by Alaska-based Indigenous artist Mariza Ryce Aparicio-Tovar aka Mari in the Sky. I’ve long been on the lookout for a non-RWS tarot deck for my own personal use and client readings, and I think this is the one! I’ve been pulling a card a day to get to know its unique style, flavor + symbols, and it is proving to be a deep and liberating well.
- A gift given to me by fellow Way of the Rose pilgrim Caroline R—a copy of the beautiful and currently out-of-print Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age by Clark Strand. This is a book I want everyone to be reading right now…
- “White Anti-Racism Must Be Based in Solidarity, Not Altruism” by Jesse A. Myserson. I came across this article through a workshop I’m taking with White Awake, and it says so many things so clearly, like this: “In the ‘privilege’ framework, racist inequality induces white people to feel guilty, which produces inaction. In the ‘universal-rights’ framework, it induces us to feel fury, which inspires action.” Frameworks matter!
Card of the Month: 9 of Pentacles
In honor of Venus in Virgo, and experimenting with new forms of expressing my love for tarot, this month I present to you a visual collage I made for one of my very favorite cards in the deck + a curation/collage of my favorite meanings for the 9 of Pentacles from my favorite tarot readers.
Wishing you solitary pleasures…
Venus in Virgo | Pleasure through self-mastery
Mary K Greer: Everything you can gain from your work and skills, including the luxury of leisure and solitude.
Rachel Pollack: Success, as in creating ourselves out of the material given to us by the circumstances and conditions of our life.
Jessa Crispin (Spolia Tarot): You have to make your darkness, your shadow, useful to you, that’s where all of your gold is hidden.
Jessica Dore: Turning inward, listening, learning what pleasure feels like, in a radical way that redefines what “success” means for all of us, in the sense of true security and belonging. (pre-order her book Tarot for Change!)
Mariza Ryce Aparicio-Tovar (The Gentle Tarot): She has worked hard to enjoy herself in this perfect space.
Find out more about my tarot work.
