January 2021: Looking for Encouraging Signs
Dear Friends,
Here we are: 2021.
Today, I’m doing the last GOTV phone bank into Georgia for the Senate run-offs. As folks on the ground there have said numerous times, we likely won’t know the winners tonight. So! To all of you who I saw in the Zoom rooms these past weeks and who donated and who supported and encouraged: THANK YOU.
I also want to offer my thanks to all of you. Because you purchased artwork and tarot sessions and donated to my tip jar, I was able to give away almost $2,000 in 2020—to my local food pantry, to mutual aid funds that center the care of Black trans folks, and to SURJ.
In a recent financial ask I did for SURJ, I spoke about money as a medium, a material I can use to create the world I want to live in. Money is one form of energy—along with time, attention, creativity and relationship—that I can use to say THIS is important to me. THIS is what I love. And I couldn’t do it without you. Thank you!
Even though the daylight is ostensibly getting longer, I often find these post-holiday weeks the darkest and most exhausting of the year. And that’s in a non-pandemic year! So I’m inviting you into a project to create signs of encouragement for our communities.
What’s a message you’d like to offer your neighbors during this dark part of winter? It can be a quote, like on our lawn sign (above), or your own words, or something visually nourishing and beautiful. No rules, folks!
But PLEASE send me pics if you do this; I’d love to make a gallery of them to share. And feel free to pass this on to people who you think would be into it—kids, classrooms, anybody!
As Grace Lee Boggs said, “The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.” Caring for our families and friends. Checking in on neighbors and those we haven’t heard from in awhile. And, if you have the means to support a mutual aid fund in your area, please do. The numbers of people falling through the cracks and needing their immediate survival needs met grows every day.
To all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways—THANK YOU. It means everything.
In love and solidarity,
shea
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave—this book will stay with me forever
- Antiracist organizing. Especially all the folks—from all over the country—who’ve been canvassing on the ground in Georgia in the midst of a pandemic. Check out this powerful piece that appeared in the LA Times from one of our phone bankers
- Creative community like the #makedontbreak challenge
- Way of the Rose non-denominational, non-hierarchical prayer meetings. Hearing someone talk about the Sorrowful Mysteries as the tragedy of believing you can reform Empire and the Glorious Mysteries as reclaiming our imagination? HERE FOR IT
- adrienne maree brown, always—especially this convo with Prentis Hemphill and this one with her sister Autumn
- Two tarot masters talking about the Three of Swords
- Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen. However you identify, this book turns the jewel to reveal new facets of the meaning of sexuality in our culture in a way I’m finding super-illuminating
- COLLABORATIONS. I see you, fellow Cancer-risings!
Card of the Month: XIV Temperance
With the New Year, I’ve started using the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck that belonged to my friend Michelle, who died last June. I avoided this deck in the beginning of my tarot studies because of the medieval aristocratic Christian imagery. I’ve since come to appreciate the depth of meaning Pamela Colman Smith packed into her illustrations (for which she was poorly paid—surprise!). And working with a deck that belonged to someone I continue to commune with feels powerful.
Temperance ends the second line of seven cards making up the Major Arcana. In the first line of seven cards, we establish our “outer selves”—the sense of self we make out of our socialization by family and the overculture. It includes the ways we’ve learned to move through the world, feel safe, make choices, and get what we want and need. (Or not!) In the second line, we descend more deeply into the self, to discover all the ways that this constructed persona, while necessary, limits our capacity to live out our true life.
First, we gather our patience and self-compassion with VIII Strength, turn deeply inward with IX The Hermit to observe the larger cycles of nature in X The Wheel of Fortune. We begin to understand how our actions create our experience of the world with XI Justice, and then stop our activity—or are “stopped” by external circumstances (hello, 2020 shelter-in-place!)—to discover something beyond our habitual activity in XII The Hanged One. What we discover can lead to a dissolution of what we thought was true and solid (XIII Death) about ourselves, others and the world. Which brings us here.
In Temperance, we’re learning how to reconfigure ourselves in a way that is responsive to life—our inner life, our outer circumstances and our relationships. We could say that passing through the Death card has softened our rigidities, perhaps made us more permeable and flexible. Instead of dissolving into dissociation or hardening into aggression, Temperance shows us what it might be like to have solid Earth under one foot, and the other foot submerged in the flowing waters of feeling, intuition and creativity. We’re given a chance to meet life—which includes ourselves!—in a new way before our confrontation with XV The Devil.
In this card life is flowing and we are flowing with it, trying new combinations and selecting new and old ingredients from the pantry of our inner selves to respond to life on its own terms. Instead of enacting and repeating our worst hurts, we begin to identify different possibilities. Maybe we are inspired by seeing how someone else handles a conflict. Or we have enough space to ask a question instead of tumbling into our reaction. Or when we do tumble into reactivity, we learn how to hold ourselves in it with tenderness. We begin to learn who to go to when we need to be seen and received well in our messy humanity. We’re willing to let necessary conflicts arise and trust that they can be generative.
Aleister Crowley called the Temperance card “Art” in the Thoth Tarot deck. Lisa Frankel, in her book Mindful Tarot, says that this is the card of spiritual practice. All readers I’ve come across say this is a card of action and movement; it’s not abstract or conceptual. In fact, the angel in the card is in the process of pouring water from one vessel to another. In a way that appears “impossible.”
In this way, Temperance combines creativity, spiritual practice/devotion and magic in ways that I find pretty delicious. When we let old forms die—old ideas about ourselves, our relationships, our work, the world; old structures that felt safe at one time but now feel confining—we have a chance to engage differently. To meet ourselves as we actually are in a moment, instead of how we’ve “always been” or think we “should” be. To meet others as they actually are, instead of how we think they should be. To meet the wondrous, beautiful, heartbreaking world as it is. And to see what else might be possible.
Being willing to experiment, to combine ingredients in a new way, try a different way of responding, making choices, and then closely observing the results—this is Temperance. An artist playing with her materials, a child creating an imaginary world, all of us imagining a future that we long to live in. A world that feels good, that is safe, abundant, beautiful, sustainable and caring. A future where we feel like we belong, where our relationships and communities are places where we can both be ourselves and be accountable to living in alignment with our values. A future where humans live in right relationship with the non-human world.
It may be hard to believe, but the composed angel in this card not spilling a single drop is associated with Sagittarius, the fiery archer of the zodiac. See that orange upward-pointing triangle on their robe? That’s the alchemical symbol for fire. While Temperance is a card of discipline and rigor—doing what we say we want to do and observing the results with careful discernment—it is not a card of obligation or drudgery. “Temperance” can sound like a drag, a muddy middle way, watered-down wine. But that fire symbol over the heart chakra is the angel’s enthusiasm for their task. There is desire in the heart, fueling the process of experimentation, of trial and error, of play and curiosity.
While the I The Magician has all their tools laid out before them—symbols of earth, air, fire and water—this angel embodies their magic. They are magic itself. Defying the “possible,” partaking of miracles, trusting in their elemental nature. To me, Temperance is an invitation to step into the possibilities of alchemizing our experience.
The shame I felt after leaving my first phone bank early back in July becomes a point of empathy with a caller that makes her feel seen enough to stay for the whole action. My regret at the rage I’ve let fly at the wrong people over my life becomes understanding for those whose pain expresses itself as anger. The harm that others have done to me becomes a recognition that none of us gets through this life without hurting and harming people, especially the people we are in deepest relationship with. The recognition that, as visionary Black feminist Alexis Pauline Gumbs says, “I can’t say ‘you’ without meaning ‘me.”
And all of the self-doubt, those persistent feelings that something must be wrong with me? This begins to sharpen into a clear perception of the unending, seemingly “personal” preoccupation and insecurity that serves an overculture hell-bent on preserving its own power. Even at the cost of life on Earth. Keeping us isolated from each other, questioning what’s real, estranged from deep feeling, and distant from our natural gifts. To borrow adrienne maree brown’s lancet of a question: Who benefits from our feeling this way?
I’m bringing all my grief, heartbreak, joy, anxiety, creativity, and inspiration into 2021. I’m vowing to put it all to use creating the world I want to live in. Through my thoughts and words (air), my passion (fire), my emotions and intuition (water), and my behavior (earth). A walking, talking, making, writing, singing, dancing, laughing, sobbing, celebrating, mourning, hoping, praying magical miracle—just like you.
Find out more about my tarot work.
