December 2022: What kind of art is this?
The role of the artist is make the revolution irresistible.
— Toni Cade Bambara
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
The Catskills palette has simplified + reminds me of this snippet of Hongzhi: In plainness there's flavor. The bare trees, marcescent leaves + endless shades of brown, beige + gray invite closer looking. I wonder how these weeks leading up to the winter solstice are finding you?
As the light continues to wane, I invite you to check out some of my upcoming offerings:
- Asking Good Questions, on Saturday, December 17 at noon est
- the Study Tarot Series, beginning sometime in the new year. If you’re interested in beginning at the beginning with 5-10 other explorers, let me know. Here’s what people are saying about this experience.
- the Liturgical Book Club: join me + others on zoom to read Tricia Hersey’s new book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto out loud, one hour at a time
I would love to see you at any/all of these!
My books are open for readings in December.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many truly amazing + generous ways. See you in the New Year…
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
— Octavia E. Butler
You Might Be Interested
- In keeping with this month’s theme, check out Episode 12 of The Ritualists podcast on Rituals of Healing, specifically through the creative process
- End-of-Year giving is one of my favorite creative projects—what world do I want to create through the medium of money? Check out Episode 11 of The Ritualists on Money as a Ritual Ingredient! This year, I’m giving to the Phoenicia Library, the Phoenicia Food Pantry, SURJ, the National Network of Abortion Funds + Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition—Water Fund
Art is the highest form of hope.
— Gerhard Richter
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- this conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer + Björk: the two discuss how language connects us to the natural world; the consequences of living apart from nature; and what it means in our transient society to live in right relationship to the land
- Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes. Having written a college paper in the 90s on the women in Homer’s Odyssey, I found Haynes’s book to be a masterpiece I didn’t know I was longing for. She reads the audiobook herself! (This feature on Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey, is one of my favorites of all time…)
- Thank you to everyone who sent me The Visions of Octavia Butler! Lynell George, who wrote this feature, also wrote an amazing book called A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler that I highly recommend
- Season 3 of We’re Here on HBO Max is happening! Grab your tissues! This show lays out a very real choice #inthesetimes that couldn’t be more stark. On the one side: beauty, joy, creativity, care + community. On the other: ugliness, violence, + the fetishization of suffering. And just to put as fine a point on it as possible: there is no middle ground. Staying on the sidelines of the fight for the right of queer + trans people to exist in safety + the fullness of our humanity is choosing a side. This show, along with all the organizing I’ve done the past couple years, is a good reminder to those of us who don’t live there: the South is not a monolith.
- Artist documentaries are my favorite genre; please send me your favorites! I recently watched + LOVED The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography + Master of Light
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.
— Yayoi Kusama
XIV Temperance: what kind of art is this?
In the Thoth deck, this arcana is called Art, which gives us a clue to its function + power. Coming on the heels of Death, Temperance is an invitation into spiritual creativity. How do we go on after losing something precious—a person, a place, a role, a habitable climate, a way of life? This arcana asks us to chew thoroughly, digest + metabolize. To alchemize. This is how we temper a container that can hold the tension of the impossible.
The word “temperance” can evoke a kind of moral moderation. And yet we all know what happens to those who preach moralism the loudest: they end up being found to have committed the exact transgressions they rail against. This is what happens when we leave a part of ourselves outside, when we make something about ourselves impossible. Running between extremes is exhausting. Holding tension—contradiction, mystery, paradox, anxiety, the unknown—is a finesse job. Temperance asks us to be artful with our experience.
Do not mistake this arcana for “our traumas are actually our gifts.” Just because we have the capacity to live with the impossible doesn’t make it a gift. Trauma is the result of living in a death-cult culture of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalist greed + ecocide. Temperance seeks possibilities + opportunities to transform the conditions—in ourselves + in the world—that make harm + trauma happen. What kind of art is this?
What would it be like to be on our own side? To not fight with ourselves? Or run from ourselves? To waste nothing? To trust that every single experience + part of us is necessary to creating the Great Work of our life? To know that we are expressing the fundamental creativity of Life in every moment + to let this comfort, console, transform + surprise us?
When I started the research on shame, I found that 85% of the people I interviewed remembered an event in school that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves for the rest of their lives. For half of that 85%, those shame wounds were around creativity.
— Brene Brown
Find out more about my tarot work
Creativity is our birthright. It is an integral part of being human, as basic as walking, talking and thinking.
— John Daido Loori
