November 2021: Elemental Trust
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Here in the Catskills, the mornings are dark and the night songs of tree frogs have gone silent. It has been cool and wet, and while some fiery patches of foliage remain, the mountain is shedding and baring its bones as we move into late fall. I wonder how this seasonal change is sitting with you?
I’ll be offering Tarot 101 one more time this year, on Thursday, November 11th at 5:30pm est. Perfect for the tarot-curious and for those who’ve dabbled but haven’t been able to get hooked…learn how to develop your own entry points and relationship to the cards.
There’s still a little space in the Monday evening Study Tarot Series for November—Experiencing Pleasure + Abundance: The Empress and the Minor 3s. We are having a blast diving deep into card constellations…and I just added Series dates for The Emperor + 4s, The Hierophant + 5s and The Lovers + 6s for early next year.
And: my books are open for tarot readings in November. And yes, I do offer gift cards for tarot 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
In light of Indigenous People’s Day last month, I want to draw your attention to a federal court case—Brackeen v. Holland—making its inexorable way to the Supreme Court. You can learn all about it by way of Season Two of a remarkable podcast called This Land. Indigenous journalist Rebecca Nagle is your trusty guide through this timely exposé about how the far right is using Native children to quietly dismantle tribal sovereignty and advance a conservative agenda. Deep investigative journalism + storytelling at its very best.
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- CALL THE MIDWIFE. This TV series has been my antidepressant of choice as the season darkens, and with ten seasons, it should keep me cathartically crying through much of winter!
- A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa. I know I feature a lot of books in my newsletters, and: this might be the most beautiful, haunting, compelling and riveting read I’ve had the pleasure to lose myself in all year. Here is a short video of the author introducing the book.
- Sophie Strand in conversation with Richard Povall and Mat Osmond as part of the Borrowed Time series. They discuss chronic illness as an entry point into ecological awareness. A vulnerable and urgent conversation that I really hope you’ll watch.
- Speaking of rich, compelling conversations… Tami Simon of Sounds True in conversation with adrienne maree brown on Embracing Pleasure, Fractal Responsibility, and the Power of our Imagination. “We want to imagine futures that actually work for the majority of us.”
- Super-dark, but super-good: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.
- To cleanse your palette: All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks. I’m a bit late to this party, but these teachings are more important and urgent and relevant now than when she wrote the book over 20 years ago.
- This conversation between professor, lawyer, organizer and author of Mutual Aid Dean Spade + mycologist Peter McCoy about applying the characteristics of fungal networks to the political work of resource distribution and solidarity. “Capitalism and colonialism are spells we’re under.”
- Some juicy novels I got lost in last month: Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth, Kingdomtide by Rye Curtis, Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller and Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
Elemental Trust
Last month, the Study Tarot Series took a deep dive into the High Priestess and Minor Twos, and I learned so much. Above all: that the wisdom generated in a group is far more complex, faceted and medicinal than anything I could learn on my own.
One medicine I’ve discovered in the High Priestess is trust—in our wholeness and integrity, in our non-rational ways of knowing, and in the power of non-doing within a culture hell-bent on progress, producing and speed. If the High Priestess depicts a fully realized capacity, the Minor Twos offer invitations to meet the everyday, nitty-gritty details of our life in a practice of trust unique to their respective elements…
Two of Swords
Sometimes trusting ourselves means knowing when we’re not trustworthy. So in the airy suit of swords, where the mind sorts and divides and separates, the invitation is to pause. In the Smith-Rider-Waite tarot, the image of the Two of Swords is reminiscent of the High Priestess herself: a still, blindfolded figure seated in front of a body of water, two swords crossed over the heart chakra.
It’s an image of turning inward and listening. Of respecting the power of the mind to cross our cognitive wires—as the swords are crossed here—and lure us into the morass of either/or thinking. This card invites us to trust not-doing—no small feat in a culture that says: go, go, go—and defer action until we know on a deeper level than this-or-that.
Two of Wands
As we studied these cards, we couldn’t help but see the colonial overtones of the Smith-Rider-Waite image of the Two of Wands, and it was helpful to look at this card in other decks to see how other artists have imagined this key. In the fiery suit of Wands, the invitation is to trust the stirrings of the heart, which move faster and truer than our thoughts, feelings or actions.
There is power in choosing. In addition to our social and cultural context, the choices we make create the life we’re living. Where and how we choose to spend our attention, our energy, our time—these non-renewable resources are the base ingredients of our experience. The culture is all too happy to separate us from these resources in service to the inexhaustible maw of racial capitalism. To use this power consciously, intentionally, in alignment with our deepest longings and values is to take seriously the gift of life while we’re living it.
Two of Pentacles
In the earthy suit of pentacles, the invitation is to dance with the stuff of so-called “ordinary life”—things we might otherwise overlook as boring, or nothing special, the things we have to “get through” before we can attend to the “important” things. For both juggling and dancing to work, we need to suspend our plodding, thinking mind and trust the instinctual wisdom of our bodies, our senses. And juggling, after all, is a kind of play that requires gathered, focused attention. Serious play.
When multiple things vie for our attention at the same time, this card invites us to tap into the High Priestess’s deep trust that we can indeed hold multiple things simultaneously. The overculture would have us use this capacity solely to work harder and do more. But the invitation offered by this card is more profound than multitasking. Rather, it calls us to hold seeming contradictions—ordinary and transcendent, spiritual and material—as graceful expressions of our spiritual life.
Two of Cups
This card depicts a version of the High Priestess, in her blue and white robes, joining cups with a version of the Fool, in their flowered tunic and yellow tights. Red Mithras—lion-headed god of mutual obligation—watches from above. The Fool is drawing the High Priestess out of her still, silent realm into the realm of relationship. In this watery suit, the Two invites us into our relational selves and all the chaos and joy that relationship entails.
We are both sovereign beings and relationally constituted. Yet another example of a seeming contradiction that the High Priestess and the Two of Cups invites us to explore and contend with. It is within relationship—with ourselves, each other, our communities and the more-than-human world—that we are called to expand and extend beyond our boundaries and honor our commitments. The Two of Cups asks us to trust that we can see and be seen by the “other”—within us and without—and that this occasional merging has the potential to make us more whole.
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