01 Nov 2022 6 min read monthly musings

November 2022: Cultural Shadows

Major Arcana 15, the Devil, from Cristy C. Road’s Next World Tarot

golden yellow leaves with bright blue sky peeking through and the black angular lines of tree branches — *autumn’s last flare…*

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

It’s been an autumn for the ages. My room was bathed in the yellow light of a maple tree at the corner of our property for a couple weeks…the leaves are nearly gone now, revealing the beautiful bones of this land. I wonder how autumn is finding you?

Here’s what I’m up to in the next couple months:

A new workshop, Asking Good Questions, on Saturday, December 17 at noon est
A fresh Study Tarot Series cohort starts in January. 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, starting December 9, with two sections to accommodate time zones…join me 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 November.

Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.

Grief and the loss that goes with it is the coin we pay for love.

— Alta Starr

What’s Inspiring Me Now

Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey. One of the finest pieces of spiritual-political writing I have ever encountered—an incantation to break the spell of grind culture, an invitation into a portal of rest, dreaming, resistance + imagination. Check out the Liturgical Book Club, where we’ll be reading this work out loud together via zoom!
What Does It Mean to Be Believed? by Finn Schubert: “Ever since I became a pregnant man, I have ceased to be believed about certain basic facts.”
Time Travel in Britain’s Lost Rainforests: Regenerative forester John Williamson earns his living in the ancient woodlands of the UK’s Teign Valley (Thanks for sending this my way, Mary!)
The Visiting Room Project. Nearly 5,000 people are sentenced to die in Louisiana prisons without any possibility of parole. This is the largest collection of first-person testimonials ever gathered from people serving this sentence. I really recommend watching the beautiful introduction for context.
Off Assignment’s Letter to a Stranger series: In 2013, Off Assignment began asking writers a simple question: “Who haunts you?” They responded in droves. They wrote letters.

Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!

[caption id align="alignnone" width="4032"]

a tarot card and a blue and pink string-wrapped crooked stick against a dark wood background — *Major Arcana 15, the Devil, from Cristy C. Road’s* *Next World Tarot*

Cultural Shadows

In July, I began corresponding with a man who is incarcerated in Illinois. I call him HK. We were connected through the Prison Solidarity Project after I applied to their Pen Pal Program. This was something I’d thought about doing for a long time. My hesitancy + reservations helped illuminate some of the ways I’d been socialized to think about “people in prison.”

HK + I communicate mainly through an electronic messaging system that many prisons use. It costs fifteen cents to send a 2,000-character message, which is shorter than what is allowable in an Instagram caption. The system removes certain kinds of punctuation: quotation marks, colons, apostrophes, dashes, ellipses. It can take over a week to receive a message. I’ve taken to writing the day + date in my subject lines so it’s somewhat easier to keep track. You can’t look at the person’s message when you hit “Reply,” so I take a screenshot of HK’s last message so I can refer to it as I compose my response. Most maddeningly to me, the messages often come out of order. It goes without saying that our messages are not private. I’ve sent him a couple pieces of mail, which can take several weeks to over a month to arrive. Sometimes I complain about this to HK. He takes it in stride. “I am a patient man,” he tells me.

Maybe it’s because I’m experiencing a 7-month-long Mars return in my Gemini 12th House (IYKYK), but for whatever reason, I’ve been doing research lately about mass incarceration, the criminal punishment system + abolition. The United States has the largest prison system in the world, spending at least $759,325,125 per day on police + prisons.*

What else might we do with $760 million dollars a day? What might we create to transform the conditions that cause poverty, homelessness, mental illness, substance use disorders, violence, alienation + isolation, poisoned air + water, mass disability? What would it look + feel like to live in a world where everyone had safe, stable housing, healthcare + access to rest, outdoor space + community?

The things that cause the most harm—militarism, police + prisons, family separation, wage theft + worker exploitation, pollution of air + water, loss of topsoil, organized abandonment leading to normalized mass death, + every other catastrophe you can think of—are not considered “crimes,” but rather “the way things are.” We don’t lock people up for doing them. In fact, a very few people make an incomprehensible amount of money from doing them.

I think one of the greatest harms our systems do is to make it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that the world could be different. As others have said, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Over many months + through the ridiculous messaging system we use, HK + I now know each other well enough to land playful jabs. I regularly laugh out loud when reading his messages. He has asked me questions I’ve never been asked by anyone before. In other words, it’s the beginning of a friendship. Connection is possible under seemingly impossible conditions.

I chose the Devil card for this offering because I believe it surfaces some important questions about our shadow, by which I mean our cultural shadow. Who is disposable? Who is a criminal? What is “crime”? What conditions produce violence + harm? What do we do with the very natural human impulse to want to punish people who harm us? How have we internalized these systems in our relationships with ourself + others? What does it mean to live in a country that not only normalizes locking people in cages—including children + pregnant people—but that spends nearly a billion dollars a day doing it?

As a dear friend recently said to me, “Everything right now feels like an ‘and.’” I can think of no better framing of + medicine for this moment: These are not problems we are going to “fix” or “solve.” And: staying silent + doing nothing is all these death-making systems require to keep going. Voting is important. And: it’s not enough. The world is a mess. And: it is a beautiful, wondrous, mysterious place.

My most sincere wish for all of us as we enter the darkest months of the year is that we find the light of inspiration exactly where we are—in relationship, community, art, dance, organizing, study + research, rest, delicious wormholes, music, communing with the elements, getting cozy + getting out of our comfort zone. Things that remind us that life is a thrumming thing, constantly seeking itself + that we are never separate from it. Part of this wish is that we also invite into our hearts + minds inspiration to take some action—no matter how seemingly small—to disrupt, subvert + interrupt our culture’s death-making systems, + to shape change in the direction of LIFE. May it be so.

Find out more about my tarot work

…fascism is not fought with self-perception. To be anti-fascist, we must be vocal and active in our opposition…there is no ethical silence in the face of fascism.

— Kelly Hayes