May 2022: Turning Points
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Happy Beltane! The Catskills are greening + new flowers are opening up every day. Birdsong is my alarm clock + the peepers ancient evening symphony stirs me at the deepest level. I wonder how this new moon + mid-point of spring is finding you?
The Study Tarot Series this month for The Emperor + Minor 4s: Sovereignty + Structure will meet May 15 + 22 at 2pm est. Beginner’s are so very welcome! Tarot 101 will happen May 24th at 5:30pm est. I would love to see you there!
My books are open for readings in May.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.
You Might Be Interested
- The Neighborhood Astrologer. Just had my first reading with Weston + was EDIFIED! Learned so many new things about my natal chart + so much helpful timing info about this year. Highly recommend!
- My friend Bethany Saltman’s book Strange Situation: A Mother’s Journey Into the Science of Attachment turned two a couple weeks ago. Released during the heart of the COVID lockdown, this is a book that reoriented my life—“mutual delight” is something I invoke in my daily liturgy. Bethany is doing many amazing things + I highly recommend her newsletter.
…it was the combination of all those things that made me think, “Oh, aha. What prison is and unfreedom is, is the extraction of time.” That explains a lot, to me, in terms of how time itself becomes monetized, no less than a grape or a ball of cotton or a stand of trees or the cobalt under the ground or anything else that comes from extractive activities.
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition, the Climate Crisis and What Must Be Done via the Movement Memos podcast
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- This. All day long. All the time.
- We’re Here on HBO Max. I feel like I need to spend a week in the woods to process all of my thoughts + feelings about this series. SUPERLATIVE.
- Vaughn Smith, working-class hyper-polyglot who speaks 24 languages: “…for Vaughn, every language is really a story about the people it connected him to.”
- Our Flag Means Death. After crying through We’re Here, it felt good to laugh through this. (Shout-out to my HBO Max connection—how would I be getting through #thesetimes without you?)
- Jerrod Charmichael: Rothaniel. Like Hannah Gadsby, Charmichael’s comedy punctures the illusion of spectatorship + implicates you in feelings of awkwardness + vulnerability. He is a true artist.
- Writing about libraries by Rachael Nevins + antilibraries by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
Six of Swords
Mercury in Aquarius | stories for the greater good
I’ve been looking at the Minor 6s these past months as medicines that help us tap into the power of the Lovers: relationship, mirroring + the force of attraction, who we show our true selves to, how we see + receive ourselves + others, and how + what we learn about ourselves through relationship. To round things out, I’m taking up the Six of Swords.
The airy suit of Swords speaks to the ways that thought, communication + narrative shape our experience. It’s the invisible element that moves things + moves between things. The Six of Swords is a turning point in our narrative orientation—leaving behind thought + belief structures we know are no longer for us, but not yet arrived in the new stories that will sustain us going forward. After the conflict of the Five of Swords, we are trying to find our equilibrium again.
The Six of Swords suggests different ways we might do that: cutting our losses + moving on, abandoning stories that no longer serve, changing the direction of mental habits + patterns, trusting that new stories + meaning await us if we have the courage to make a move. It’s an honest image of what it really takes to reharmonize the mind: a tolerance for liminality, navigating emotional waters, leaving behind the familiar + trusting in new beginnings that have not yet begun.
In that spirit, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on the stories that we re-tell through our thoughts, words + behavior. Some stories come preinstalled in the standard software package of our dominant culture: the gender binary, cisheteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, white supremacy, individualism, scientific materialism, police + prisons keep us safe, borders keep out bad people. You get the idea.
The origin of other stories may feel murkier. Maybe they come from our families of origin, but I think that some of them may come with us through many lifetimes. And while I’m naming these so-called murkier stories as distinct from the cultural stories already mentioned, really they are inseparable from them. As Resmaa Menakem puts it: “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.”
The HBO series We’re Here has me reflecting a lot on the stories of the dominant culture, and what “normal” means. When I think of what is normalized in the culture—having to work for a wage to meet basic survival needs; earth as resource-to-be-liquidated; mass death; homelessness; gun violence; locking people in cages; criminalizing the bodily autonomy of BIPOC, disabled, queer + trans people, migrants, poor + young people—I wonder at all the times I abandon myself in order to appear normal.* Who is this serving?
At this turning point of spring, I am setting out from the land of “normal” + steering my vessel in the direction of weird (to turn) + strange (queer, surprising). Having spent this last month’s planet-pileup in Pisces drifting in my emotional tides, I feel clear about the stories I long to slough off—the work of many lifetimes, to be sure—and the direction I’m moving in, even if I haven’t yet sighted land.
The thing about the Six of Swords is that it asks only that we set off in a new direction, toward what we desire. We don’t have to have all the new stories sorted out. They reveal themselves to us when we live into what generates joy, connection, inspiration, relationship + liberation.
What stories have you been traveling with that are no longer serving you? What stories have you inherited from family + culture that are hindering your capacity to feel resourced, to take risks + move toward what your heart calls you to? What words, feelings, values + desires can serve as a compass as you set off for new lands + new stories?
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*abandoning myself to appear normal: this framing is via Melina Martinez’s Somatics for Social Justice course through Both/And
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Drag is an affront to masculinity.
— Bob the Drag Queen
