July 2021: Plugging into our Power
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
As I write this, the thermostat in my bedroom reads 90 degrees and I wonder how you’re holding up in the heat + heart of summer. I continue to see bald eagles on my morning walks, along with a shy great blue heron. The creek is low and thrumming with tadpoles and trout.
I’ll be on a teaching + social media hiatus for the month of July, but my tarot books remain open. I got to teach my first Tarot 101 class last weekend, and it was super-fun! I’ll be doing it again in August and September; check out the dates. And my 5-week Tarot + Moon workshop returns in August.
Finally, I want to let you know about The Rest Rail! Friend + collaborator Robyn Love and I chose The Rest Rail to receive 100% of the proceeds from our Let’s Talk About It!: Money series. We wanted every part of this series to reflect the practice of seeing and using money as a magical tool + creative medium to create the world we want to live in now. We wanted to reach beyond overcultural narratives of “donating to charity” and instead enact financial redistribution that centers community and relationship. Learn more about The Rest Rail here.
To all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways—THANK YOU.
In love + solidarity + collective imagining,
Shea in the Catskills
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici. Did you learn about the European witch-hunts in your history classes? Me neither. And yet that centuries-old Church/State playbook was exported to the so-called New World and is still being used today by the World Bank and IMF to separate people from their land and control women’s bodies. Federici vividly fleshes out what remains a historical footnote that has totally shaped the world we live in today.
- One of the worst-written books I’ve ever actually finished, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku is impeccably researched and incredibly compelling, even though it reads like a 10-year-old’s book report!
- This truly amazing conversation with Perdita Finn + Clark Strand on praying the 54-Day Novena for your heart’s desire. And Perdita Finn’s recent posts about working with the dead and praying the Hail Mary.
- The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. A truly gutting feminist retelling of the Trojan War. The writing is just [chef’s kiss] perfection. Her new novel, The Women of Troy, is coming out any second…
- Through the Night, a tender and riveting documentary by Loira Limbal about a woman and her husband who run a 24-hour daycare center in New York.
- I Will Not Be Purified, an essay by Sophie Strand about the ways that capitalism, the medical industrial complex, and love-and-light spirituality fail those with chronic illness and disabilities.
- The new season of Between the Worlds podcast with Amanda Yates Garcia. Pentacles season, baby!
- And speaking of podcasts, I’m picking up Octavia’s Parables again. There are no two other people on this entire planet I’d rather hear talk about the apocalypse than adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon.
- And finally: this episode of How to Survive the End of the World podcast about what movement organizing and space exploration can learn from each other.
Card of the Month: Page of Wands
A young person, standing alone in a desert landscape with a pale clear sky. They are dressed in a yellow salamander-printed tunic, red tights, yellow boots with fancy fringe. They wear a voluminous yellow wrap and a gray bowler hat sporting a single red feather—sticking straight up—right at the front. This figure holds a wand with both hands, and is looking at it...intently? Curiously? Devotedly? Lovingly? Bemusedly?
Describing the visual of a tarot card is such a rich place to start—whether you’re a rank beginner with no idea what the card means, or (especially) if you are a seasoned reader who feels pretty confident that you know what the card means. Because revisiting the visual details, prior to any storytelling about it, generates such mystery.
Is this figure seeing something they’ve never seen before? Are they fascinated? Curious? Bemused? Bewitched? Enchanted? Impressed? In love? What on earth are they doing in the middle of the desert dressed like that? What are they doing dressed like that, period? Who is this Page of Wands?
The Page of the tarot is sometimes referred to as Daughter, Student or Child. They are the youngster of the court. And what they lack in experience they make up for with their enthusiasm, curiosity, and freedom from worry about making mistakes. They are a student of their suit and element, and a student of learning in general. They are willing to take risks, apply themselves, and learn through trial and error. When we encounter a Page, we are being invited to return to beginner’s mind, to a mind of child-like play and exploration.
So this Page is the student of the suit of Wands—the fire element. Fire is the fastest moving of the elements. It is our life-force, Spirit and the realm of direct experience. Before we think or feel something, our heart-mind, our body, registers it first. This is the realm of Wands and fire.
Wands are the suit of desire, passion, erotic energy. Our culture tends to cram all of that into a box marked “Relationships + Hook-Ups” or “Sex + Sexuality.” But really, the erotic is the realm of deep feeling, the source of our greatest joy, fulfillment and power. I personally believe that it’s our collective and cultural estrangement from the erotic that has allowed us to burn up the planet we live on and participate in systems of domination and oppression that are deadly and dehumanizing.
And so I also believe that reclaiming this life-force, this erotic power, is essential to changing that culture, of moving from estrangement to an intimacy so deep that it feels...mysterious. And strange. Instead of the distance and numbness of estrangement, we begin to encounter the mystery and full feeling of being alive amidst so much aliveness.
Which leads to another facet of the suit of Wands and the fire element: creativity. We call it a creative “spark,” don’t we? A flash of fire in the dark that needs to be fed and protected in order to grow into something that can give light and illuminate a dark corner. The things that light us up, inspire us, move us to create and share our creations—this is fire, the Wands, Spirit and life-force.
And the Wands and suit of fire are about the energy of human beings sitting around a fire, something we’ve been doing for longer than we’ve been technically human. The feeling of warmth, of gathering, community and life. The collective life-force of a group of people—sharing food and warmth and stories.
So our dandy Page of Wands is an up-and-comer in this realm of passion, devotion, eroticism and creativity. And she offers us a clinic in how this is done: first, she removes herself from the bustling world of human activity and heads to the place where humans have gone forever to seek spiritual connection: the desert. One way to think of this desert is as a place where all the external sources of juice have dried up—everything we use as a substitute for our own deep juiciness.
Next, she dresses for it. She wears her favorite, fancy things, which may very well not be the things that everyone else is wearing. But she is learning to differentiate how her adornment feels from the inside, versus how it looks from the outside. Even when looking at herself in a mirror, she sees herself from her own inner vision. Without externalizing a gaze that has an opinion or a criticism or a suggestion for improvement.
And this self-containment feels like a part of the Page’s magic worth emphasizing. We are all so deeply conditioned to be concerned about how we appear to others. But for women and femmes, this externalization of a male gaze that sizes us up (and finds us wanting) is deep, historical, violent and pervasive. Reclaiming my own eyes to see myself, apart from this external gaze, is an ongoing, intentional and liberatory practice.
And the tarot is so powerful because it provides images of what this might look like, and also: how it might feel. Because our Page doesn’t need mirroring or approval from the outside, she is able to absorb herself in her passions and inspirations, her desires and enthusiasms and projects. Her power. She frees up all that life-force energy and can direct it where she chooses—not where she’s been told to direct it, or paid a wage to direct it, or where her Instagram feed suggests she should direct it.
What does it feel like to be absorbed in the act of study, creation, positive obsession? What’s the experience like? For me, it has been an experience of generativity, of heat and light that moves outward and is able to touch others—my friends and communities, the people I read tarot for and teach classes to, the people I work with and buy my groceries from. The people I pray with and create with. By liberating myself to commune with this erotic energy—in streams and rocks, in books and paint—I become a channel for that energy in my life. That’s what a wand is, after all: a conduit for power, a way that we can consciously direct it.
When self-doubt and self-criticism arise—when doubt and criticism of others arises—I think always of adrienne maree brown’s question: “Who benefits from this?” The overculture depends on our energy—our power—being congealed, stagnant, scattered and misdirected. Used against ourselves and each other. It fears the moments and movements where this power gets collectively harnessed and directed, like in the 2020 uprisings, in ongoing labor organizing, in global feminist movements, in movements for indigenous sovereignty.
Sometimes it takes a young person to show us how it’s done. There is so much wisdom in the generation of young people coming up in this time of pandemic, climate crisis, and uprising. And I believe that each of us investing in our own life-force energy—our desires, passions, enthusiasms, devotions and inspirations—is some of the most powerful work we can do.
This is accessible every day, at all times. When we stop and ask ourselves, “In the next five minutes—right now—what do I want?” When we attune to and align with our preferences and pleasures and desires on a micro-level—registering the question and answer in our bodies—we are plugging into this fire energy, this realm of the erotic, the energy of life itself.
When we become practiced at attuning to and moving toward our desires at a microlevel, this can begin to function at other levels in our life. When we do this attuning and moving toward our desires with others, the power generated isn’t additive; it’s exponential. Incalculable, really. To encourage ourselves—and each other—in our passions, creations, inspirations and enthusiasms: what becomes possible?
Find out more about my tarot work.
