Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Here in the Catskills, autumn came thru, along with a second bloom of irises + lilacs, a late-October summer. Fluorescent orange sugar maples stand out on the mountain like Cheetos. The creek is running a slate-muted turquoise, where I see great blue herons, bald eagles, mergansers + crows—always crows—on my morning walks. I wonder how this heartbreaking season is finding you?

Here’s what I’m up to this month:

• I’m now offering two drop-in Online Tarot Circles a month—this month we’ll be talking about the Air element in tarot…I’d love to see you there
• Altho I won’t be starting any new Study Tarot Series cohorts till next spring or so, there is still room to join the Saturday morning or Tuesday evening cohorts-in-progress!
• I’ll be facilitating the final session of Atha Yoga’s Let’s Talk About It: Mistakes on Saturday, November 18 at noon est—Using Tarot to Work With Regret
• Join me at my monthly in-person Tarot Circle at Cygnet’s Way in Kingston—Thursday, November 30 at 6pm
• I’ll be teaching Using Tarot to Work with the Dead early next month—Saturday, December 2 at 11am est

My books are open for readings in November + now it’s super-easy to book with me thru calendly.

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

Whether it’s caused by airborne virus, guns, or war, refuse to normalize mass death.

— Dr. Lucky Tran

ceasefire now

What is happening right now in Gaza + the West Bank can’t be undone. The fights for economic, racial, reproductive, disability + climate justice, for Black + queer + trans + Palestinian liberation, for a fair + just + loving world for everybody—they are all the same fight. Do what you can where you are. Let’s hold each other close + “invite [each other] to imagine what’s possible by modeling + rehearsing the world as it should be in real time” (from Let This Radicalize You).

• resist normalization, inevitability + dehumanization—in your own mind, with those you love, with your communities, colleagues + comrades
• call your reps every day
• watch this webinar that The Rising Majority did on October 30; I made time stamps for it
• join an organization—being organized helps us build power + resist state repression. Unions, SURJ, JVP, your local DSA chapter, community groups: find something that’s for you + get organized with others

You Might Be Interested

• If you haven’t had the experience of organizing with folks against fascism right here in the ol’ US of A, I invite you to join me on Saturday, November 4 from 1-4pm est to call folks in Kentucky with SURJ to re-elect their governor. Gathering with others to move the needle is an antidote to despair + helplessness, + you don’t need any special skills or experience—we will support you the whole way! There are phone + text banks happening nearly every day from now until election day…
• I got to have some more great convos last month with folks doing really interesting shit in the world on my podcast In Conversation With
• Elena Solano’s offering The Grief Room still has a few spaces left in a couple different cohorts. I can’t wait until I have the space open up to do this…can’t recommend enough what Elena is up to + creating!
• We’re still reading Let This Radicalize You in the Liturgical Book Club!

What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.

— Mike Davis

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• The UAW has announced a tentative agreement with Ford Motor Company after 41 days on strike at the Big Three
• 13 Ways of Looking: Jenny Odell: “For me, collection and arrangement were a response, a necessary adaptation: you could give up and live in a senseless world, or you could set about building sense from whatever scraps you could find. But this arrangement could be a pleasure in and of itself, full of devotion to each little piece and to the kind of complexity that needs only finding, not making.”
• Thank you to my Visual Medicine Facilitator Training buddy Jo, who turned me on to the work of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (Klaus Biesenbach slugging wine throughout this convo is 🤌🏻). Videos about the making of her piece A Flor de Piel and Palimpsest are 🤯❤️‍🔥
• How We Show Up with Mia Birdsong on the Upstream podcast: “…the thing I wanted to get to was being able to hear a ‘no’ as information about the person who’s saying no. It has nothing to do with me; it’s not a reflection of me. … I want my love ones to be taking care of themselves. That matters to me.”
• Season Two of Our Flag Means Death—Stede + Ed + Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” in S2E3? My very favorite way to have my emotions played with 😭
• Disturbing the Meaning of Objects—artist Jessica Stockholder on the Louisiana Channel: “I don’t think we can change the world by ignoring our desires. Those desires have to be respected and dealt with.”

Indigenous Catskills 101 with Justin Wexler on the Kaatscast podcast;mfor a glossary of terms and recommendations for further reading, download Justin's handy Lenape Resources PDF

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

Humans are truly a disaster. Humans are truly a miracle.

— Tricia Hersey

20 Judgement: aligning bit by bit

Judgement is the penultimate arcana in the Fool’s journey through the Majors. By the time we get here, we’ve been shaped by our family + culture, been confronted by misalignments between our desires + the things we + others expect of us. We’ve noticed that we’re not calling all the shots + recognized the ways that just living life transforms us utterly, whether we like it or not. We have journeyed underground to poke around in the shadows + had our life ruptured by something we didn’t see coming. We’ve done a bit of healing (hopefully), ventured into the unknown + emerged with a more complex sense of who we are, what life is.

Associated with Pluto, Judgement is about power + big time scales. Some traditional keywords for this arcana are forgiveness, atonement + rebirth. I think of Judgement’s as an invitation into alignment, into the deep + unmistakable pleasure + satisfaction we experience in moments when we are living our life in alignment with our deepest values + desires: there’s no one else we want to be, nowhere else we want to be, there’s not some other life that we want.

I remember feeling this keenly, reliably, during sesshin, silent meditation intensives at the monastery, while I watched cottonwood leaves flicker in the evening light, or marveled at the reflection of a ceiling fan in a cup of tea, or simply breathed on my cushion. These days, this feeling runs like an undercurrent thru my life: sharing an intimacy with a friend, during a walk along the Stony Clove, studying tarot with a group of people willing to be vulnerable + curious, listening to a client explore something challenging or joyful, debriefing with comrades at the end of a phone bank, watching my cat bathe herself with her slip of sandpaper tongue.

And just to be clear: this isn’t a pleasure + satisfaction that’s necessarily about feeling happy. I’ve been doubled over in grief—about things close to home + about things far away—more times in the last month than I have been over the last year. From time to time, I experience brief but exquisite bouts of fear + loneliness. And yet: that deep alignment suggested by the Judgement arcana makes these moments feel like life, rather than a problem, or a mistake.

This isn’t a pleasure + satisfaction that you can purchase; it’s an inside job. As Howard Thurman said:

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

A perfect key for this arcana.

Isabella Rotman’s image from the This Might Hurt Deck shows the Egyptian god Annubis weighing the heart of the dead against the feather of Ma’at, the goddess of Justice. If the heart is heavier than the feather, the myth goes, the soul of the dead is devoured by the goddess Ammit.

What other medicines + invitations does the Judgement arcana have for us about living + dying with a light heart in the midst of a burning world? About living + dying without regret, as the Tibetan yogi Milarepa described his religion? What things done or left undone weigh our hearts down? What can we do about it?

If attuning to + aligning with your desires feels selfish, consider asking yourself a question I learned from adrienne maree brown: who benefits from your thinking that? And if the thought of this aligning brings up the fear: what if I never get it right?, consider turning toward it here, now: what am I longing for in this moment? What is most precious to me in this moment? The more we orient to this call of the heart, the clearer it becomes. Start small.

• What are your values?
• Think of a moment in your life when you felt like there was no other place you wanted to be, no other person you wanted to be. What did that feel like? What values or desires were present in that moment?
• What inexplicable turns has your life taken? Did these turns move you closer to or further away from satisfying alignment? How do you know?
• What gets in the way of your attuning to, aligning with + living from your deepest values + desires—be specific!
• Who + what supports you living a life aligned with your values + desires?

Find out more about my tarot work

I know that revolution begins in the body because rage and fear of harm in response to violence are the two most policed feelings. We police each other right out of embodying the righteous rage and entitlement to thrive required to sustain revolution that leads to liberation.

— Dayna Lynn Nuckolls

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?