01 Sep 2022 5 min read monthly musings

September 2022: Generative Intersections

The Judgement card from Coleman Stevenson’s The Dark Exact Tarot

a swimming hole ringed by bluestone river rocks and green trees with a clear blue sky in the background — *one place where the Stony Clove is still deep enough to submerge*

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Last week, my little town declared a State of Emergency + burn ban due to prolonged drought conditions. The sun keeps shining, the creek gets lower, the brown patches on the mountain spread. The insects continue to make their layered curtains of sound through the evening + night. I wonder how you are as we approach the equinox?

I’ve written entries on 52 out of the tarot’s 78 arcana so far in my new series Tarot as Questions. If you’re into journal prompts, it’s right up your alley.

My books are open for readings in September.

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

Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.

— Mother Ann Lee

What’s Inspiring Me Now

Suzette Clough’s Art Apothecary. Also her creative mindfulness process, Visual Medicine, which has been keeping me joyfully absorbed for weeks
Vaskange’s Endless Illustration
Ang Roell on BEES: “We're meant to be working together on ritual, we're meant to be grieving together, connecting to each other, and communicating. We're meant to be building together, and when I look inside of a hive, I see a lot of that ritualized and seasonal work.”
Twitter is a hellscape AND I absolutely love this account
The Hustle Behind Bars by Beth Schwartzapfel: “The Marshall Project recently asked several incarcerated people to log the money they made and spent in a month, and to describe how they navigate the unique challenges of prison economics.”
Cecilia Vicuña’s Desire Lines: “This is the time for all of us present in this room to put our hearts, our money, our everything in the service of the healing of this earth. And that is the main art.”

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

a smoky quartz skull, a dead butterfly and a tarot card against a wood floor — *The Judgement card from Coleman Stevenson’s* *The Dark Exact Tarot*

Generative Intersections

I appreciate this image from Coleman Stevenson’s Dark Exact Tarot because it dispenses with the Christian imagery of many decks + suggests that mysterious resonance between our current life + the long story of our soul. The penultimate arcana in the Fool’s Journey, Judgement is a trip into + out of our depths, hence its association with chthonic Pluto.

If major arcana 1 the Magician is our personal power, + 10 the Wheel of Fortune is about larger cycles + seasons of time, 20 Judgement is what happens when those two streams intersect. When the specificity of who we are now touches the long story of our soul, a tremendous force + energy is released. The function of the overculture is to keep that force + energy tied up in an anxious swirl of self-doubt, insecurity, real or anticipated precarity, isolation, conflict, numbness + distraction.

There are two things that I have found conducive to making contact with this intersection: the heart’s desire + working with the dead. I write about the heart’s desire quite a bit + everything I know about it I’ve learned in the Way of the Rose community + by praying 54-day Novenas. Here, I want to say a little bit about working with the dead.

As a zen practitioner + liturgist, I recited the names of the ancestors, made offerings + chanted devoted invocations. This was the beginning of my working with the dead. In January of 2021, I began learning about working with the dead in Perdita Finn’s classes + the community she creates around this work. For me, the communal nature of the work has been key. Here are a few things I have learned about being in relationship with the dead in community with others:

The dead work in kairos, not clock time. The people I am doing this work with, it turns out, hold important pieces of my own long story. Through our storytelling + sharing of our dead, we create connections that seem to speed things up, generate leaps.

The dead don’t need us to heal them. Most other frameworks for ancestral work I’ve come across speak about the work as “healing our ancestral line.” But I’m coming to appreciate that the dead actually long to be in relationship with us, to collaborate with us on our desires + intractable perplexities. To help us remember what we’ve forgotten so that we can better navigate this life + future lives.

There is no one way, or right way, to be in relationship with the dead. The particular form my “work” with the dead takes is devotion, calling in their names for the 49 days after their passing, putting them on my altar + asking them for help. The “work” that others do is as varied + imaginative as each of us are. And our work weaves together seamlessly, beautifully, miraculously—literally.

Humans have been talking to + in deep relationship with the dead for time out of mind. Patriarchy + colonialism made quite the project of separating us from this sacred relationship, because they know how much power it holds. It makes possibility of the impossible, opens cracks in walls we didn’t know were even there + brings us into a more right relationship with all of Life, including death.

If you want to learn more, or, to put it differently, remember the relationship you already have with the dead, I recommend checking out Perdita Finn’s schedule of fall classes. We already know how to talk to the dead + listen to them. But doing this remembering with other people is so much of the magic.

Find out more about my tarot work

To be anti-criminalization in this environment begins with recognizing that no morally complex social issue has ever been solved by criminalization.

— Dayna Tortorici “Your Body, My Choice: The movement to criminalize abortion”