March 2023: Playing in the Dark
Being booked and busy is not a flex to me. Being relaxed and aligned and living in leisure with hobbies you don’t monetize is a flex to me.
— Tricia Hersey, author of Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Here in the Catskills, the weather continues to swing between spring + winter—black ice + freezing rain trading places with willow trees turned yellow + crocus heads peeking through the mulch. And back again. I wonder how this wobbly season is finding you?
In tarot news, I’m so excited to offer Asking Good Questions again on Saturday, March 18. Here’s what people who attended last time had to say about it…
In April I’ll offer two new workshops: Reading Tarot Spreads + Using Tarot to Work with the Dead. This latter program is part of Atha Yoga School’s Let’s Talk About It: Death series, which includes a really amazing line-up. I would love to see you there.
I am delighted to report that the March cohort for the Study Tarot Series is full…I am planning on starting another cohort in May as soon as I have enough interest. Let me know if you want in!
The Ritualists podcast is back with Season 2…
My books are open for readings in March.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing + generous ways.
You Might Be Interested
- I hope to see you at the second installment of Atha Yoga’s Let’s Talk About It: Death series, when Robyn Love offers Many Small Deaths: The Art of Living Courageously on Saturday, March 25th 11am est…
- If you’re not subscribed to Perdita Finn’s Substack, you are missing some BIG MAGIC. I’ve been working with her for over two years now, + she is sharing indispensable + accessible teachings on working with the dead—+ a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of her next book, The Body of My Mother: Beyond the Witch Wound to A World Renewed—in this incredible new format.
- Feeling overwhelmed by the accumulation of things? On Saturday, March 11 at 1pm, my friend Peg Conway will offer a new workshop called Making Space: Rituals of Releasing Stuff
TO A CHILD CRYING OVER A BREAKUP TEXT
Trust me, this is living, this
is living.
I promise
there is one word
that you carry,
a sentence that was given in the beginning.
Go in
through the wild doors of your own life—
the heavy thorns, the briars,
child,
the strife.
Lie down
on the far side of the forest.
Trust me, trust
me, trust me,
after all the agonies,
to someone,
you’ll say the one clear thing with all your life.”
— a poem by Joseph Fasano
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- Ann Friedman’s opening essay on Kinkeeping: “There's a word for the strategic nurturing of bonds: Kinkeeping. And while anyone can take on this role, there’s also a word for the people most likely to do it: Women.” (Friedman’s weekly newsletter is reliably amazing)
- Hammer & Hope: A Magazine of Black Politics and Culture: “This magazine is an attempt to create what we desire to see in the world: a radical and evolving vision we can collectively work toward. There is no barrier to entry.” Especially recommend: Chase Strangio’s piece When Cis Women Attack Trans Rights, Fascists Win + Nia T. Evans’s piece about Faith Ringgold, Revolution is a Great Work of Art: “In art and in life, Faith Ringgold sees children’s struggles, imaginations, and dreams as sites of revolution.”
- Hyperallergic’s A View from the Easel series, in which artists reflect on their workspace. Just my favorite thing ever.
- A Love Letter to Libraries, Long Overdue: “We all know that books connect us, that language has quiet power. To see the concentration, curiosity and peace on faces lit by words is to know—beyond a shadow of a doubt, in a time rife with shadows—that libraries are the beating hearts of our communities.”
- More and More, I Talk to the Dead by Margaret Renkl: “I keep searching for the right metaphor to convey what I mean. Is it like a braid? A web? A shroud? Finally the word comes to me: It’s a conversation. Every day, all day long, everyone I’ve ever loved is gathered around the same table, talking.”
- Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday: “The crust shattered and melted with the [asteroid] impact, and hot magma splashed high into the sky. In the cool air, the droplets of rock solidified, raining hot glass spherule bullets over half of North America over the course of three days.” #perspective
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
Imagining a World Without Capitalism #001
Since last month, there’s been an update on the circumstances surrounding the murder of Tortuguita, a 26-year-old climate activist, on January 18 in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest. Recently released body-cam footage that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation insisted didn’t exist revealed a likely “friendly fire” incident, meaning that Tortuguita did not fire on Georgia State Troopers, as authorities initially claimed, but rather the State Trooper was shot by one of his own. #StopCopCity
Speaking of Cop City—a proposed militarized police training facility that would include a mock city to practice urban warfare, dozens of shooting ranges, + a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad—did you know that one of its top funders is…Norfolk Southern? The railway operator that caused the toxic chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio last month?
Norfolk Southern made $12.745 billion dollars in 2022. Executives there made from $3.4 to $13 million. Rail workers, on the other hand, who wanted to strike last year + warned about exactly the kinds of risks that caused this derailment, get zero paid sick days. President Biden personally intervened in 2022 to ensure that rail workers could not go on strike. #capitalismiskillingus
Major Arcana 18 the Moon: Playing in the Dark
After we’ve had a chance to re-create ourselves + reorient in the Star, we land here: in the uncanny realms of the Moon, luminary of change, the body, emotions + circular time. This arcana invites us to travel by night, letting our creaturely selves navigate the shadows, illusions, dreams + silvery magic that live in the generative dark.
In a culture where the lights are on 24/7/365, where people work 40 hours a week or more, it is exceedingly difficult to live according to our own internal rhythms, to feel like there’s enough time to dream, wander, wonder + get lost. Capitalism is a world of scarcity, including time scarcity: it’s running out, there’s not enough, time is money.
The Moon says: time is eternal, moving through cycles of birth, growth, culmination, harvest, compost, decay, death + rebirth. The “line” between the dark moon + the new moon is not a line at all. They sit alongside each other on a circle that has no endpoint. The Moon arcana is mythic time—kairos, not chronos.
When this arcana arrives, it’s time to get comfortable in the dark, looking obliquely, indirectly, around corners, outside the frame + under the surface. The Moon’s light is not its own; it reflects the Sun’s light, its shape + face changing day by day, night by night. What becomes apparent to us when we’re not looking by day, when we trust the messages + mysteries that brush up against us in the darkness?
- What moon phases do you experience as most conducive to work? Creativity? Rest? Divination? Dreaming + imagining?
- How do you work with lunar cycles + your own internal rhythms?
- What is your relationship to your dreams?
- How do you experience your shadows—blind spots—being reflected back to you—by art practice/creative work? Dreams? Conflicts? Synchronicity? Divination?
- What is your relationship to nighttime? The dark?
- How is darkness a source of inspiration, creativity + mystery to you?
Find out more about my tarot work
To be creative means to connect. It’s to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.
— Nawal El Saadawi
