August 2022: Something to Remember, Something to Practice
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Late summer here in the Catskills is almost unbearably beautiful. The annual nighttime serenade of katydids has begun…I wonder how this poignant season is finding you?
I’ll be offering Tarot 101 on Monday, August 22 at 5:30pm est.
And the Sunday cohorts of my Study Tarot Series resume next month! The Lovers + Minor 6s: Relationships + Choices meets at 2pm est + The Wheel of Fortune + Minor 10s: Cycles of Time meets at noon est. I asked folks who have been in this study with me—in some cases for nearly a year!—to say a bit about what the experience has been like for them. It’s been a BLAST for me!
My books are open for readings in August.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.
White rage is lethal to democracy and progress and if we’re not organizing white people around their suffering, we can be sure someone else is.
— Linda Burnham
You Might Be Interested
- Episodes two + three of The Ritualists podcast, where me + my friend Peg talk about all things ritual + liturgy!
- Tarot as Questions, my new + ongoing series of posts inspired by Ithell Colquhoun’s Taro as Colour
- Text bank with me + a group of folks from Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) on Thursday, August 11 6:30-9pm est. It’s very chill + easy!
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- a perspective check
- a sermon from adrienne maree brown: “You fight for freedom by practicing freedom, because freedom is infectious.”
- MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN: THE LANGUAGE OF SYMBOLS (thanks, Barb!) at James Cohan’s online gallery
- 14-year-old Marbletown, NY resident Hudson Rowan’s “I Voted” sticker—a young person with his finger on the pulse of this cultural moment
- Alok on friendship: “I really believe friendship is the answer to most of the existential questions in the world.”
- Olivia Juliana using a congressman’s fat-shaming of her to raise $1.5 million + counting for abortion funds: “I know that the people out there who hate me are trying their hardest to get me to be insecure about myself and it’s not working.”
- “Thoroughly Loved” by Mary Porter Kerns: “Flowers have been evolving for over 125 million years. Their ability to know what they want, to generate their deep longing, their Eros, into the visible Love we call Beauty, is a model that could be life-changing for us all, if we as a species could begin to revere their deep wisdom.”
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
Important to Remember, Important to Practice
One of my Study Tarot Series cohorts last month asked the tarot for some advice about how to navigate #thesetimes + I’ve been thinking a lot about the two central cards that showed up in that spread ever since…
Something important to remember: ACE OF SWORDS
We cannot pay attention to everything. I often say that our nervous systems + our minds were not designed to know about everything that is happening everywhere. I enjoy getting sucked into a late-night doom scroll as much as the next person, and: I know that too much “news” makes me feel anxious + overwhelmed. In every moment, we are choosing to put our attention somewhere. What do we want to pay attention to? How do I want to feel? can be a helpful way to guide myself. This Ace invites us to remember that attentional liberation* is a continuous possibility.
Something important to practice: 6 OF CUPS
The Minor Sixes in the tarot are about regaining a sense of balance + harmony after the challenge + disruption of the Fives. So in the watery suit of cups, this card is about emotional + relational harmony: a child’s simple act of kindness + connection. It is about casting our mind back to a (real or imagined) place of secure relationship that allows for wonder, exchange, curiosity + vulnerability: love as a practice.
Something to remember: what you pay attention to grows.* And something to practice: love, connecting with others, simple acts of kindness. Having grace for our own + each other’s inner children, who may be freaking out as late-stage capitalism shakes our systems + structures loose.
The chaos + shaking often scare me. I try to remember that in the shaking loose there is also lots of opportunity: for change, to build new things that center our care for each other + the earth, for the uncanny + seeming impossible to break through.
I keep thinking about that garland of roses crowning the Ace’s sword: the sharpness + precision of the mind in service to beauty + life. May it be so.
*these are framings I learned from adrienne maree brown
Find out more about my tarot work
…democratize love. Love the earth, love the people around you. Love everyone. To just apportion love within the confines of romance is not liberatory.
— Alok
