August 2023: Making a life outside the walls of safety + conformity

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Here in the Catskills, late summer is wearing its thick green coat, along with birdsong + drop-of-the-hat thunderstorms + weekend tourist crowding. I’m back on the Stony Clove Creek + getting reacquainted with the crows, eagles, herons, deer, bear, chipmunks, woodchucks, songbirds + coyotes in the neighborhood. I wonder how late-summer is finding you?

Here’s the August scoop:

• I’ll be doing free readings at Blackbird Info Shop & Cafe in Kingston, NY on Friday, August 4, 5:30-8:30pm for Cosmic Dog House Press’s Content Release event
• Come see me Saturday, August 5, 10am-5pm at the Phoenicia Festival of the Arts for a 3-card reading—at a discount for full-time Shandaken residents! I’ll have copies of Tarot as Questions for purchase. Shout out to Christina Varga + her incredible efforts to make this event happen!
• Join my new In-Person Tarot Circle at Cygnet’s Way in Kingston on the last Thursday of every month—this month: August 31, 6-7:30pm est
• Check out the Study Tarot Series cohorts that are starting next month! Here’s what people are saying about this Series.

My books are open for readings in August…

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

In love + solidarity + collective imagining,
shea in the catskills

You Might Be Interested

When I fill in for Cory Nakasue on The Cosmic Dispatch on Radio Kingston this month…

• …I’ll be talking FLOWERS with Mary Kerns, creator of The Flowers Are Speaking oracle deck + a forthcoming book about the million-year love story between humans and flowers on Sunday, August 6
• …I’ll be talking ART PRACTICE with Jody Hojin Kimmel of the Mountains & Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism Sunday, August 13

Tune in live 4-5pm EST, or check out the podcast later…

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• The conversations I’ve been having with folks in Kentucky about re-electing Democratic governor Andy Beshear. This campaign has so much skill + heart behind it.
• Suzette Clough’s paintings: she is channeling earth + mineral communications from deep time
• the artwork of Karla Knight: OBSESSED
• re-reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels for the third time, never gets old
• Local, long-form investigative reporting at its best: The 13th Step podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio
• Katherine May’s latest book, Enchantment: “When we want to escape the surface, we activate our bodies, and they show us a different intelligence, pointing to a mind that resides not just in the head. Our knowing is diffused throughout all of us, distributed through muscle and bone, pulsing through organs and conveyed in the blood. We put out feet on the ground to listen with all of it.”

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

Hope and grief can coexist.

— Let This Radicalize You

Making a life outside the walls of safety + conformity

From Jessa Crispin’s Little White Book for the Spolia Tarot:
The Five of Coins means you are on the outs. There is sanctuary, but the rules are too strict, there is a strict Calvinist denying you the forgiveness of absolution. So you’re out in the weeds, with all of the other lepers and loose women. It’s banishment, it’s excommunication. This card asks you to consider whether you’ve been willing to sacrifice parts of yourself for sanctuary, or whether, now that you’ve been banished, you’re willing to make a life for yourself outside the walls of safety and conformity.

Amidst a burning world + many personal heartbreaks this year, it is the death of Shuhada' Sadaqat, known to the world as Sinéad O'Connor, that has me bursting into crying jags over the last week, trawling the internet for vintage Esprit sweaters, visualizing the posters in my childhood bedroom, listening to old music. In short: remembering my young adolescent self.

I was twelve years old when I saw the music video for O’Connor’s “Mandinka” on MTV. It required an internal expansion to take in: a woman whose beauty was not for the male gaze, whose body was for giving shape to the sound that rushed out of her wide-open mouth—a whisper, a growl, a roar. I ordered The Lion and the Cobra from my Columbia House subscription + wore it out. I was 13—a nuclear reactor of emotional + erotic energy—when I watched her perform it at the Grammys. What would it be like to know no shame, to feel no pain?

I was in love with her; I wanted to be her—to be that strangely beautiful, that powerful + free + feral. She gave me a template that I couldn’t quite fulfill as a young person; the countervailing messages were too strong. But at nearly 50, I am stepping (ecstatically) into my own strange beauty, my own utter divestment from the male gaze, my own creative power. Her death has reawakened + reminded me of those seeds she planted in me at such a tender + volcanic age.

She had rage in her, + so did I. It’s hard to convey how crucial that was for me to see: Me, too, Sinéad! The world, the corporations that fed at her creative trough, could not make her behave. She opened her mouth wide + everything she felt about everything that had ever happened to her came rushing out + it moved us. We loved her for it. When she opened her mouth wide to let larger truths out, however, many who had lapped up her raw vulnerability turned on her: no, do your emotional + creative labor like this, not like that.

In front of a live studio audience, a grown man joked about slapping her + people laughed. The old “She’s crazy” got predictably trotted out to discount her riveting call-out of the Pope—one of the most powerful people in the world—about the ongoing, endemic sexual abuse that was happening to the most vulnerable—in Ireland, in Indigenous communities, here in the US. That same Pope, we may need reminding, was also preaching at that time against the use of condoms amidst the AIDS pandemic. In short: she was right.

Soon after her SNL performance, when the Madison Square Garden crowd booed her at a Bob Dylan tribute, her face showed absolutely everything: attempted poise + stoicism, + the very real, very human devastation breaking thru. Shout out to all my people who have faces that can’t hide what they are feeling.

I watched all this at the time + some part of me took note. Her punishment (like all punishment) was pedagogical: I, too, could expect to receive no better treatment for my own rage + truth-telling, my own insubordination to authority, my own power exercised on my own terms. This is misogyny—not a hatred of women, but rather the ways they are punished when they don’t compliantly perform their role as pleasing helpmeets + emotional caretakers.

Sinéad was tough + powerful + brave, + also unbearably, excruciatingly human + vulnerable. This is precisely what made her art medicine—for her, + for me + for so many others touched by her voice, her lyrics, her whole being. She never stopped being exactly who she was: an artist, a foul-mouthed theologian, a mother, a shapeshifting channel for a force so much bigger than her human body. She never stopped making music, expressing herself, telling the truth as she saw it.

Shuhada' Sadaqat/Sinéad O'Connor, rest easy, rest in eternal peace. Thank you for the music + everything else.

Find out more about my tarot work

I have a universe inside me
Where I can go and spirit guides me
There I can ask oh any question
I get the answers if I listen

I have a healing room inside me
The loving healers there they feed me
They make me happy with their laughter
They kiss and tell me I’m their daughter
I’m their daughter

They say

You have a little voice inside you
It doesn’t matter who you think you may be
You’re not free if you don’t know me
If you don’t know me…

— excerpt from Sinéad O'Connor’s “The Healing Room”

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?