June 2022: Hope is Not a Feeling
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
The mountains are sporting their lush green coats as the tadpoles grow in the creek shallows. Peony season is here—their transient beauty always feels so deliciously extra to me. I hope you’re all finding your joy where you can + reaching out for each other to find connection + solace #inthesetimes.
If the events of the last month have you thinking about the problems with policing: welcome! You can learn more here, here + here.
I’m working on a new program about Asking Good Questions…stay tuned! In the meantime, there’s still space in July’s Study Tarot Series, where we’ll be taking up The Wisdom That Has No Teacher: The Hierophant + Minor 5s on July 10+ 17. Tarot newbies are welcome!
My books are open for readings in June.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.
Hope is not a feeling. It is not optimism. It is a practice.
— Mariame Kaba, from We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
You Might Be Interested
- My dear friend Tess is launching Tangle & Wend—custom wands, fairy houses + protector beings—at Atelier Canal’s June Garden Party Summer Salon in Gowanus, Brooklyn: June 2 - 25 CHECK. IT. OUT.
- I had a super-delicious, regenerative energy work session last month with my friend Peg Conway—yes: remotely! Feels like the best acupuncture sessions I’ve ever had—that beautiful twilight feeling of total-body relaxation.
- Last month’s painting raffle brought in $120—the winner was: Jillian Hanson!—which I decided to use to make a donation here. The primary is June 28th, for those of you in NY’s 103rd. You can donate here, canvass here + please tell your friends!
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- “Paradise” by Sybil Rosen: “I convince myself the logging has been permanently put on hold. Then, last August, small orange dots suddenly erupt like radioactive mold on the loblolly pines along the drive. Something is about to happen.”
- Season 6 of How to Survive the End of the World podcast is adrienne maree brown + Autumn Brown talking all about love + it is DELICIOUS
- From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty: “I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?”
- “A Bleed of Blue” by Amy Key: “I sat there thinking of what I wish I had. Someone to refold my blanket after I’d left my seat. Someone who set up the film for us to watch together. Someone to include me in their ‘we’.”
- SHOT: Patrick Blanchfield isn’t afraid to speak to the complexity of what we face vis-a-vis gun violence: “Gun control discourse is sort of a trap.”
- CHASER: Hope Is Not a Given. We Must Cultivate It Together: “Tanuja Jagernauth conducted a series of interviews and gathered some thoughts on how activists are interacting with the idea of hope and maintaining it in their lives.”
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
Honestly, WTF?
Given the intensity of the last month for me personally, and *gestures broadly at the larger situation,* I decided to pull a spread this month. I really love 3am.tarot’s many tarot spreads, and this particular one seemed perfectly suited.
Position 1: WTF am I feeling?
TWO OF WANDS
This card shows a choice point. Every moment presents choices—how to use our thoughts, speech + action, how to use time, space, money, attention + other resources. It’s a power we always have access to. Small choices add up over time; it’s how practice works. But what about when our choices feel constrained, futile?
In year three of this pandemic, the world seems determined to go back to “normal.” Over 1,000,000 dead in the US, and still: no universal healthcare, no student debt cancellation, no substantive action on climate change. The powers of the overculture have made their choices. I think this card is reflecting the paralysis, confusion, fear + rage that result from feeling like there are no good choices, or having to make choices inside a seemingly impossible context.
Position 2: WTF do I need?
QUEEN OF CUPS
This Queen is a healer, a feeler. She’s not afraid of the dark, of the tidal, chthonic forces; she channels them. Sometimes she is a soft + gentle empathizer. Sometimes she is a hurricane. I was talking to a friend recently about a woman I often pass on Route 28 when I’m going to and from Kingston. She stands at the side of the road, at an intersection. He skin is leathery + red, her hair dirty blonde. Often, she is screaming, the cords of her neck popping under her skin. I often see her kicking the metal signpost with her whole body and mind. “I think she is holding the world together,” I said to my friend. “She is feeling everything that we can’t or won’t.”
It’s easy to say: “you need to feel to heal.” Or: “just feel your feelings.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t find a lot of support in the culture for this. I’m a Cancer rising—a feeler. I have emotional forces moving through me that don’t fit in well inside of conflict-averse, “polite” spaces. It’s hard for me to let feelings arise in isolation; there aren’t a lot of settings + containers for feeling with others, outside of therapeutic dyads. I think this Queen is asking us to consider how we can create spaces to feel things together: grief, rage, fear + despair. And yes: Joy. Gratitude. Wonder.
Position 3: WTF should I do?
PAGE OF CUPS
This Page is in training to their imagination. They are a student of the queer, the liminal, the marginal, the magical. They are a student of beauty + feeling. They are looking out at the world—in all its beauty + horror—and finding themselves in it, and considering how things might be different. This Page comes back to their friends + says, “Look what I found!” and demands commiseration, connection, exchange.
I was talking with another dear friend recently about the power of the imagination—about our ability to create “new” memories in vivid detail, and how these new memories have just as much power + reality as what might have “really happened.” Liberals’ obsession with science + facts is constantly ceding ground to the far-right’s imagination: a place of fear, scapegoating + scarcity—a place that makes people feel things.
I think this Page is asking those of us who cherish connection, who cherish the land we live on, who revere LIFE to imagine a world into being that is beautiful, that we want to live in. That we want our children + grandchildren to live in. Visionary queer + BIPOC communities have been doing this forever, because they have to. The Page calls us to consider our imagination as the indispensable tool for survival that it actually is.
Find out more about my tarot work
Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.
— from the poem “Hope is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat” by Caitlin Seida from her book My Broken Voice
