May 2023: The Power of It Hasn’t Happened Yet

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Here in the Catskills, spring is doing it’s special, miraculous thing. Does this really happen every year? The green creeping up the mountain. Dogwoods, cherries, + quinces in bloom. Peepers. And: it’s kinda cold? Not a complaint, really, just an observation.

Here’s what’s happening in my tarot world…

• pre-orders are OPEN for my tarot guidebook / workbook / artbook Tarot as Questions
• I’ll be offering Asking Good Questions on Tuesday, May 16 at 5:30pm EST. See what people are saying about this class!
• there are THREE! spots left in the new Study Tarot Series cohort that begins this month with Operationalizing Desire: the Magician + Aces, meeting May 7 + 21 at 10am EST
• there’s still room to join the cohort underway, meeting May 8 + 15 at 3pm EST to take up Experiencing Pleasure + Abundance: the Empress + 3s

My books are open for readings in May.

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

There is no belonging in being correct.

— Bayo Akomolafe

You Might Be Interested

• sexual, healing, embodied with Melina Martinez—a community-based support + learning space for those exploring embodiment, authentic desire, + growth & healing in their life—sexually, emotionally, + beyond. I worked with Melina last year in a Somatics for Social Justice workshop + I can’t wait to work with them again in this new space!
• Living with Death: Befriending Grief on Saturday, May 20 at 11am EST + Making Space: Rituals for Releasing Stuff on Sunday, May 21 at 1pm EST—both with Peg Conway, both via zoom. Re: Making Space—Whether you’re dealing with childhood treasures, ancestral heirlooms, or ordinary household items, the real dilemma at the heart of the process is: How do I know what to keep and what to move along?
• Oriethyia: She Who Rages on the Mountain. A commemorative tribute website to the poet, seeker, radical lesbian feminist, witch + writer

Late-stage capitalism is also late-stage individualism. So that’s going to be a huge part of the struggle—caring when so many others are acting as though not caring is normal. It’s reciprocal care vs. inevitability, as defined by the ruling class.

— Kelly Hayes

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• The 100th episode of Movement Memos—with host Kelly Hayes + guest Mariame Kaba, talking about their forthcoming book Let This Radicalize You—was one of THE most inspiring, sanity-affirming things I’ve heard in a long time: “If everything was foretold and things were already done, why would they continue to do the things they are doing on the other side? They know it’s contested.”
• COLLAGE: artwork by students at Essex Street Academy, under the superlative tutelage of Chelsea Green + Justine Kurland using an X-Acto knife to re-image the male-dominated canon of photography
• Consummate audio storytelling that weaves deep investigative journalism + personal narrative: You Didn’t See Nothin by Yohance Lacour + The Africas VS. America by Matthew Amha
• End-of-Life Dreams—A hospice doctor makes sense of our final visions by Paul Lauritzen: “The nurse responded skeptically about the need for fluids and antibiotics because, she said, the patient was dying. When Kerr asked her how she knew, she responded that the patient was seeing his deceased mother.”
• The Art Room at My Texas Prison by Brian Hindson: “My workstation is where I do most of my drawing and painting. I usually have a few pieces going at a time, using different materials.”
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a new work for theatre conceived and directed by Simon McBurney based on Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name. Kathryn Hunter is a living treasure.

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

…a lot of people find the inevitability of something bad easier to process than uncertainty. Most of us have an epistemic need to reduce uncertainty. So it’s actually easier for a lot of people to tell themselves that they already know what’s going to happen, and that it’s going to be bad, and to just sort of suppress their feelings about that, instead of challenging the direction that things are taking, or imagining a way to make things better.

— Kelly Hayes

The Power of: It Hasn’t Happened Yet

Our work here is to play with possibility…to upset the established order, the normative ways of speaking and thinking about ourselves just long enough for other intelligences to be noticed.
—Bayo Akomolafe

I don’t know what’s to come. And that to me is actually a source of freedom, not a source of panic and anxiety.
—Mariame Kaba

I was talking to one of my dear friends + spiritual sisters recently about this space between the World + the Fool arcana. The World is the “end” of the Fool’s Journey, where they end up after their adventure through the other twenty Major Arcana. Associated with Saturn, the World is about the possibility of freedom, but grounded in reality, using our particular endowments to navigate this complex, beautiful, terrible world.

The Fool is where it all begins, pure possibility. They are all faith + trust, setting out on a great adventure, unburdened by what might lie ahead. Part naive child, part court jester (the only one who can say shit to the King’s face without getting killed), the Fool is the arcana of no-box. Of unfixedness. Of trickster energy.

I was telling my friend about a recent Action Hour I participated in. We were calling offices with connections to the Atlanta Police Foundation, asking them to drop their contracts + #StopCopCity. We were calling into a Pennsylvania prison to demand charges be dropped against abolitionist author Stevie Wilson. The Action Hour participants were letting us know via the chat when they were being hung up on.

I came off mute to let folks know that this was a good thing, the people on the other end of the line hang up + get irritated because they’re receiving a lot of calls. (One office had created a whole separate phone line for these kinds of calls.) I reminded them that we have every right to call these people + make demands. We can be grounded, even polite, but we are allowed to call. I was reflecting to my friend how much I feel like we’re conditioned by customer-service culture to not upset anyone, conditioned by White Supremacy Culture to be “nice.” But this is not how we get free.

In response, she shared a story that one of the members of the monastery’s New Zealand sangha once told during a talk about the monastery’s founding abbot, Daido Roshi. Daido was in New Zealand to lead a retreat, + one day he + others went to have breakfast in a local restaurant. While they were eating, a “meter maid” (as he told the story) began writing a parking ticket for their car. Daido jumped up to interrupt her, something that was considered a very “American” thing to do: to make a fuss, to argue. “It’s okay, Daido, we’ll just pay the fine. Enjoy your breakfast.” But what was actually happening was: it hadn’t happened yet. The ticket wasn’t written; the moment was still in play.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that space between the clear-eyed, life-tempered perspective of the World + the playful faith of the Fool. When the Fool makes it to the end of their journey at the World arcana, they…begin again. They step right out of the World, traverse that gap—canny with the distilled wisdom of the prior journey tucked away in a small bundle they carry lightly over their shoulder—+ re-enter the journey. Over + over + over.

The Fool is an invitation into the power of play + into the power of things being in play. They know that the story is never finished + are eager to participate in its unfolding. They are the medium of change itself that we have the opportunity to shape with our particular powers + desires.

I recently spoke to one of my organizer comrades, who was also on that Action Hour call. I asked them what it might look + feel like to be diabolical for liberation. The Far Right is diabolical; I don’t even need to go into it here. But what would it mean for us to be diabolical for getting free?

Later, I looked up the etymology of diabolical: “dia-” meaning “across” + the PIE root “gwele-” meaning “to throw, reach” + “to pierce.” This also made me think of that space between the World + the Fool—reaching across that alchemical interstice where things haven’t happened yet, with all of our longing + creativity.

When we do some small thing once, it has its effect. When we repeat that small thing every day, it soon becomes a habit. When we do that small thing day after day for years, it can change the direction of our life. It’s not how wide the angle of the initial reorientation is, but rather the repetition of that small thing over time that has the potential to steer a whole new course.

When one person makes a phone call, it hardly registers. When 50 people make that same phone call in half an hour, the person answering that call can’t ignore it. When 50 people make that phone call day after day after day after day, it becomes something that a lot more people on the other end of the line have to contend with. This is why organizing is so powerful.

What would it mean to get creatively diabolical about our liberation every day—alone + with each other? To reach out across that space between the way things are now—the World—+ the future that hasn’t happened yet—the Fool? To throw our desires across that gap, use our creativity to pierce through the illusion of a future wrapped in inevitability + alchemize a future that is actually always being created now, now, now.

Find out more about my tarot work

That’s all my proposition is: that it’s possible that the thing can be different. My other proposition is what my friend Ashon Crowley teaches me all the time: that we want the practice of hope to produce…what he calls “otherwise possibility.” A break from the known and the knowable world. That’s what a practice of hope helps us to get towards, to move towards.

— Mariame Kaba

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?