October 2022: The Gift of Our Anger
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
The drought has subsided + autumn has arrived here in the Catskills—coloring the mountain, chilling the creek, changing the light + bringing the dark. I’m so here for it. I wonder how you’re feeling as autumn deepens?
My Tarot as Questions series is complete! 78 arcana in 78 days. I’m actually really proud of it. As a gift to myself, I’m off social media for the rest of the year: 1. to see how this new body of work wants to become a physical book, 2. to immerse in my creative + organizing work, + 3. to turn more deeply inward with the waning light. I’m counting on you all to let me know when the Octavia Butler tarot deck becomes available! + to send me the best memes!
I’ll be offering a new workshop called Asking Good Questions on Saturday, December 17 at noon est. And: I’ll be starting a new Study Tarot Series cohort 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.
My books are open for readings in October.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.
You Might Be Interested
- My friend Mary Porter Kerns’s new oracle deck is available for pre-order! Not only has she channeled messages from the flowers, making this a true oracle, but she’s also provided rich + surprising flower history + stellar reflection questions in the guidebook. One of my favorite divination tools!
- This is why I’m investing my time + energy with SURJ for the midterms. SURJ’s culture of radical hospitality is the only culture I’ve experienced that is not white supremacy culture + it feels delicious. And: the new dialer is exponentially easier to use than the one in 2020! We’re taking action to protect abortion access in Kentucky + many other things…CAN YOU JOIN US?
- The Ritualists episode 6 on Desire + Ritual + episode 7 on Rituals at Work, with yours truly + my friend Peg Conway
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- The 10-part podcast series Mother Country Radicals (thanks, Jules!). Riveting storytelling, history I never learned, told by the people who made + survived it. So much complex food for thought #inthesetimes: “I have a thousand regrets, a million regrets. What I don’t regret is throwing my entire life against the machinery of war and racism. I don’t regret that for a minute.”
- Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke: “A female sage grouse’s mercurial mating decisions are, it seems, no more scrutable than my own. After nearly two decades of intense research the one and only thing that experts in the field agree on is that female choice remains ‘essentially mysterious.’”
- Eleanor Hancock’s 9-minute video “5 Tools for Emotional Resilience.” Eleanor was a co-instructor for a class I took in early 2020 called Roots Deeper Than Whiteness, which is being offered again this month. Cannot recommend enough.
- One of my favorite books is back in print: Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand: “…[Rebbe Nachman] seemed to understand two things about human beings that have been true from the very start: To connect with God, we first have to connect with nature, and to connect with nature, we have to awaken to the dark.”
- Intergenerational friendship: “She’s 86. She’s 28. They love their hang time as the Wallpaper Queens of Los Angeles”
- Station Eleven on HBO Max. WOW. Thanks to everyone who kept putting a bee in my bonnet about it.
- This again so much #whateverittakes
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
7 of Wands: The gift of our anger
All the minor 7s relate to Major Arcana 7: the Chariot + present challenges to our will or stated intentions. In the fiery suit of wands, the seven invites us to consider the raw, erotic power of our anger + what we’re doing with it. When we’re not in touch with this power in ourselves, we’re susceptible to its misdirection. This is something I’ve been contending with my whole life.
Corporate media has figured out that our outrage is worth a lot of money. It keeps us clicking + watching. Our human nervous systems were truly not designed to know every wretched thing that is happening in every corner of the world. TV + the internet can turn us into spectators of an endless stream of catastrophe that is designed to demobilize us + keep us anxious, confused, overwhelmed + insecure. In other words: to tie up + hold hostage our vital life-force energy.
Imagine an endless stream of stories + images of people all over the world organizing to improve their conditions, feeding each other, caring for each other’s children + elders, making art together, doing ritual together. That, too, is happening every day. There’s a reason the “news” doesn’t show us those stories.
Who is the rotating villain in our own mind? Is it us? That person at work? That fucking senator? What would happen if we reclaimed that swirling eddy of energy + used it constructively? What hill are we willing to die on? What do we love so ferociously that we’re willing to fight for it? Who do we want to struggle with?
- What is your relationship to rage? To outrage? Are these the same? Or different?
- Who/what are your enemies/rotating villains? What is it about them, specifically?
- What battles are you fighting—in the world and/or in your own mind?
- In what ways do you experience your rage—+ perhaps other emotions—vicariously, i.e. through media: news, movies, social media
- What do you love so much that it’s worth fighting for? What does it feel like to think about doing that?
- Who are the people in your life that you feel ready to throw down with for what you care about? E.g. friends, family, colleagues, comrades, other communities
We’re living in a real both/and moment. The government’s normalization of mass death + abandonment is crystal clear, elections feel pointless AND: abortion is on the ballot in Kentucky. Electing state officials who want to protect + expand voting rights in Georgia is actually really important to blocking the far right.
We can throw up our hands, watch from the sidelines, turn away, or we can join with others to contest power—strategically, collectively. SURJ is an organizing community that makes it feel as supportive + as pleasurable as possible to do uncomfortable things to fight fascism + the far-right. Can you join us?
Find out more about my tarot work
When I tell people about phone-banking with SURJ, whether friends or people I have called, [I tell them] how wonderful the people and processes are—so well-informed, human, supportive, resilient, flexible and kind.
— SURJ Kentucky Voter Contact phone bank participant
