May 2021: Editing as a Creative Act
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
So April was apparently all about a makeover—from a new design for Shea in the Catskills, to a whole re-think about my work. As much as I loved the idea of doing my work by donation or exchange, the reality is: it wasn’t working! Late-stage capitalism doesn’t offer a lot of roadmaps for creative + spiritual workers to value what we do. Fortunately, with a little help from my friends in the seen and unseen worlds, I’ve been working it out.
My tarot books are open, and I am charging a flat fee for readings. For those who can’t afford a 50-minute one-on-one reading, I will be opening my zoom room on the fourth Friday of every month from 6:30-8pm est to offer free mini-readings and answer questions about tarot in a group format. If you’re interested in coming to this, let me know and I’ll get zoom sign-in info to you.
I’ve also been doing a test-run of a new five-week course about learning the Tarot. We’re all having a frigging BLAST, and I encourage you to check out the full workshop description and the June, July + August session date/times to see if one works for you. Testimonials are coming!
My comrades at SURJ are hosting monthly one-hour Action Zaps focusing on Defunding the Police + Abolition. (Rumor: I will be co-facilitating the June Zap…) Come hang out from 3-4pm est on May 13 and June 10 and get some political education, make some phone calls + send some emails with LOTS of other people. At the end of the hour, we’ll celebrate the impact we make when we take collective action together.
If there is a mutual aid fund that you would like me to shout out in my next newsletter, please let me know. It would be my pleasure to do so.
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
- Apparently I’m into post-apocalyptic novels now? Please don’t send me recommendations; they’re so hard to read. But these were particularly gorgeous: The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott and The Bear by Andrew Krivak.
- Call of the Wild: How We Heal Our Trauma, Awaken Our Power and Use It For Good by Kimberly Ann Johnson. She names a lot of things in here that have helped me make sense of my own experiences, particularly as a long-term meditator and as a woman. And in case it needs to be said: just because the book centers the experiences of women/femmes doesn’t mean it’s not for everyone else. (I’m talking to you, fellas.)
- The Art + History of Talismans with Natalie Labriola. Yes, this program costs $17 to view and: Labriola is a magical encyclopedia of esoterica. Let’s normalize paying people for spiritual work that changes the way we experience ourselves and the world.
- This podcast interview with my friend Bethany Saltman about her book Strange Situation had me crying on my way to a doctor’s appointment. In a good way. Here’s to having all the feelings!
- adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown have an incredible and incredibly nuanced conversation with Yaba Blay about her newly reissued book of photo portraits and personal stories—One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, which is BEAUTIFUL and sitting on my kitchen table right now for me to dip into and marvel over.
- Speaking of adrienne maree brown, I just pre-ordered her newest—Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. You know it’s going to be AMAZE BALLS.
- I am truly not a fan of the New York Times (please don’t @ me about this; it’s fine if you enjoy it!), but this interactive piece about a tiny work of art blew my mind. It’s the NYT at its best. Thank you Mary B for sending it my way.
- A new holiday! Corporate Colonizers and Greedy Patriarchs Day by my friend Perdita Finn.
- This beautiful piece by Clark Strand captures an essential facet of why I pray the rosary, even though I’m not Catholic. And since I’m going there, I’ll include this one, too. Thank you, Clark, for giving words to an experience.
Card of the Month: Seven of Swords
When I think back to the handful of times I rummaged through my mother’s tattered deck of Smith-Rider-Waite tarot cards, this is the card that stirs the most feeling of mysterious nostalgia. I remember how much Death and The Hanged Man and the Devil scared me. But this card was more of a childlike, heebie-jeebie WTF!?!
Who is this light-stepping figure in blue tights, tan tunic, and fur-trimmed red boots? What’s up with that red pillbox hat and that look of sneaky self-satisfaction on their face? Where are they coming from, with those colorful, flag-topped tents in the background? Where are they going in that glowy yellow dawn light with all those swords anyway?
If you remember when I discussed the 7 of Cups a couple months back, I like to see the Minor sevens in terms of complexity and nuance. Other readers suggest that the sevens invite a sacred pause, or are about initiation. I love this, too. In a framework that invites complexity, the answer for me when it comes to tarot is always YES. More, please. In the airy realm of the Swords, we’re talking about the mind—thought, perception, attention, awareness—as well as about communication, written and verbal. Messages, truth, wisdom, justice and conflict are all the concerns of the Swords.
Minor sevens also correspond to VII The Chariot in the Major Arcana, a card that is complex and weird, as someone in my tarot workshop aptly noted recently. In that card, an armored figure is in a vehicle where he actually looks sunken in a giant block of cement. Not exactly traveling light. And instead of horses to pull him along, there are two I’m-not-going-anywhere sphinxes. There’s lots of other symbolism in this card, but for now I’ll just leave it at this: this blocky card is ruled by watery Cancer. Wtf!? indeed! In this card that we think is about getting somewhere, we’re looking awfully weighed down.
Which brings us back to our sneaky thief in the 7 of Swords. This is a card that is typically interpreted as being about sneakiness, lies, betrayal and deception. And: that’s not wrong! This was a card I pulled over and over and over again a couple years back, using the Wild Unknown deck, where the depiction is of a seemingly sleeping fox peeking right at you with one eye open. Six swords are arranged neatly above them, and this furry fox lies directly on the blade-edge of the seventh sword. I pulled this card so frequently that eventually I took it to a therapy appointment and generated a lot of really interesting meaning from it.
Several times over the past couple years I’ve thought that I’ve landed on why I pulled that card with such frequency during a tumultuous and change-filled time of my life. I think every insight has added meaning and nuance, but it was only this past week that I felt at a deeper level what that card was pointing at back then. I was telling myself a story about what was happening to me. It was the story that I needed to be true, but it was not the whole truth. Not by a long shot. Hello, 7 of Swords.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the 7 of Swords as the Editor of the Tarot. I recently wrote a series of posts for my rosary group about the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries that centered on my experiences at the Monastery, namely leaving the Monastery. Before I began, I told myself I was absolutely not going to write about this, because I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t digested the experience enough yet. I sat down at 7am and by 3pm all three posts were out of me. And they were all about the Monastery. Sometimes, we don’t get to decide.
Turns out, writing those posts was a huge piece of digesting and metabolizing my experience. Whereas I thought I had to wait until I had processed the experience before I could write about it, what happened is that the storytelling itself was a vehicle for, a means of, that very digesting and metabolizing. And what was so incredibly interesting to me about that process were all of the many micro-decisions I made in the writing about what to focus on, what to leave out, what to show and what to conceal. This is the 7 of Swords in action.
We are never seeing the whole picture, and we are never revealing the whole picture; it’s impossible. Our information and understanding are always only partial and constantly changing. If we’re not thinking about it, we’ll conceal and reveal according to our habits and reactions. We’ll keep telling the same story over and over again, regardless of whether it’s “true” or helping us.
But when we take up the tool of the 7 of Swords consciously, intentionally—to tell a true story, a useful story, a complex and rich story, a new story—we have magic in our hands. And in our pens. Or keyboards. Or mouths. The 7 of Swords as Editor can mean editing words and writing, but it can also mean the way we edit a life. The things that get left on the cutting room floor to make the life we actually have. The yes’s and no’s and the things we didn’t get to choose or consent to that make up the story we’re living now.
Editing isn’t what we do after we create something. It is an essential and integral and powerful part of the creative process itself. It’s the magical tool that can give meaningful and potent shape to the raw material of our life, all the swirling chaos of “what happened.” This sneaky figure is taking what he can use and leaving the rest. And they look pretty freaking happy about it.
There’s so much fear-mongering in the culture. We must be sneaking, lying and betraying, as opposed to joyfully and playfully choosing and creating. The overculture counts on our mistrusting and doubting ourselves, thinking we’re “bad,” keeping ourselves swirling in stagnant pools of stuckness and self-sabotage. Don’t look behind the curtain of your own heart! The overculture’s power-hoarders want us to believe it's all big, bad and scary so that we won't go looking for and claim our treasure.
I say to you: happy sneaking!
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