June 2023: Getting Lost

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Here in the Catskills, the mountain is very extra—100 shades of green, peony season, the fragrance of black locust flowers in bloom, birdsong alarm clock + frog-song lullabies. I wonder how this cusp of summer is finding you?

Thank you so much to all of you who have pre-ordered Tarot as Questions. My heart is full! 💚 Today is the last day to pre-order if you haven’t gotten yours yet…

Here’s the June scoop…

• Join me for Using Tarot to Work With the Dead—Tuesday, June 20 at 5:30pm EST
• My class + cohort schedule is up for the rest of 2023. See when Study Tarot Series cohorts are starting (+ what people are saying about them) + when I’ll be teaching Tarot 101 + Asking Good Questions + more…
• The Liturgical Book Club is starting a new book this month! We’ll be reading Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes + Mariame Kaba aloud, together! My books are open for readings in June.

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

You Might Be Interested

• Cory Nakasue + I will be talking Gemini season + questions on The Cosmic Dispatch Sunday, June 11 at 4pm est
• June 16 is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Woodstock + I would love to see you there!
• Finn Schubert interviewed me about Taking Our Desires Seriously + his latest post, Maintenance as a Creative Act blew my mind utterly

For us to be creating formula based on stories already told deepens the systems of oppression that brought us here to fight today. As humanity and consciousness moves forward, our art must reflect that and to go backwards and have ChatGPT, or whatever the fuck, write stories based on John Wayne or something, I’m like, ‘What are we talking about?’ We have to keep moving forward. This is conservatism and it’s really directly related to the global threat of fascism that we’re seeing.

— Ilana Glazer on the Writers Guild of America strike

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• Showing Up for Racial Justice’s—SURJ’s—3-year strategy to organize white people to stop authoritarianism. This whole event was 🔥 (I do a little story sharing at 36:45!)
• Our Ancestors Don’t Need Healing by Perdita Finn: “On top of everything else on my ‘to-do’ list, amid making a living and paying the bills and caring for my family and friends and trying to squeeze in a little self-care, I am also now, apparently, responsible for healing my messed-up ancestors.”
• The new season of the For The Wild Podcast is killing it—check out Bayo Akomalafe’s series The Edges in the Middle with john a. powell, V + Indy Johar, + this episode with Kimberly Ann Johnson on Pleasure as a Pathway
• Karen Turner’s Intuitive Daily Stitching journals
• Having spent the last 2+ months working on getting my video visitation registration approved to have video visits with my friend Hakeem, I appreciated this documentary short that shows the importance of the publicness of public libraries + the predictable diabolical shenanigans of the NYC Department or Corrections

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

It’s easy to see awful things and think they are typical but fighting them requires understanding whether and to what extent this is true.

— David Kaib

Getting Lost with the 5 of Swords

I love Ithell Colquhoun’s image here, because she takes away all of Pamela Colman Smith’s familiar iconography + leaves you instead to wander through an abstract color field. Gone are the swords, the winner + loser + bystander. The wind-swept clouds + choppy water: gone.

What is this moment of the 5 of Swords?

This arcana is associated with Venus in Aquarius—a journey that begins by slipping out of the safe + cozy lap of Venus’s Empress: all of our familiar, comforting stories about who we are + how the world works, everything we’ve been trained by the culture to believe about what’s possible + acceptable, what’s inevitable + unchangeable. Eventually, we’ll end up naked + free under the fixed star of the water-bearer Aquarius, in Major Arcana 17–The Star, with (hopefully) an expansive + visionary perspective. But to arrive at that expansive perspective, we will need to get very, very lost.

The 5 of Swords expresses the moment when our frame gets ruptured + we are compelled to leave the safety of “home.” Our ideas get challenged. Our stories dissolve. Who we thought we were—and weren’t—doesn’t feel so clear anymore. What goes on one side + what goes on the other is no longer self-evident. The source of the problem shimmers between the unthinkable + the obvious.

It’s an important + challenging journey that requires immersion in the other elements. The airy sword of the mind that figures out, sorts + strategizes needs the other elements to allow it to expand, to tolerate complexity + complication—our fiery instincts + appetites, our watery feelings + intuitions, our earthy body’s sensations.

The subtitle of this arcana is the Lord of Defeat. There are some things we can only learn through losing. In all the tarot’s minor 5s, the stability, structure + security of the four gets broken. Whether that results in a breaking open—a way for more of life to flow in—is largely up to how we navigate the lostness. I recommend not doing it alone.

In my experience, my biggest failures, “defeats,” + losses have also been the most tenderizing. Relieved of the burden of trying (+ failing) to be a “good” person, I get the chance to become more human. Whole. Getting lost has helped me to recover unknown + vulnerable pieces of myself, stepping more deeply into relationship + relatedness. Realness. Mystery + aliveness.

We have to be willing to make a mess + be a mess—alone + with others—to find better, more expansive, more complex + more life-giving stories to live with + out of.

• What ideas do you hold about yourself + the world that feel inviolable? Why?
• How have your ideas + ideologies been challenged in a way that’s been ultimately generative + opening?
• When confronted with ideas that conflict with your own, what is your default reactive response?
• What helps you take in + metabolize new ideas?
• What relationships in your life do you feel like you can evolve in?

Find out more about my tarot work

…rather than trying to fill that empty throne with anything, to sit with the ache of that empty space and recognize that all flutes are hollow, and breathe into that empty part, that seat of longing, and just let your breath come from there and see what it goes towards, see what that longing takes your voice towards.

— Abigail Bengson, on how people might tap into the gift of their voice #inthesetimes

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?