September 2023: All together now
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Here in the Catskills, the overlapping curtains of nighttime sound that is the annual symphony of the katydids evokes a poignancy in my heart that seems to contain all the bitter + sweet of the turning season. I wonder how the waning light of late summer is finding you?
Here’s what I’m up to in September:
- New Study Tarot Series cohorts are beginning this month + next month! It’s the perfect time to begin at the beginning with Operationalizing Desire: The Magician + Aces. Here’s what people are saying about this Series.
- I’ll be offering Asking Good Questions on Sunday, September 24 at 10am est. See what people are saying about this workshop.
- I’m excited to be facilitating a session for Atha Yoga School’s next Let’s Talk About It Series—on MISTAKES—in November. But the series starts this month!
My books are open for readings in September; you can now schedule with me thru calendly! + be on the lookout for my new podcast series In Conversation With…new episodes will show up in my shea in the catskills podcast feed.
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
- This Fall, Atha Yoga School is offering Let’s Talk About It: Mistakes. Relateable? While these can be taken individually, the sessions in this particular series build on each other. You also save when you register for all three; Saturdays at noon EST:
What is a mistake? September 16: with Robyn Love
Accountable for harm. October 21: with Nancy Hunter
Using Tarot to work with regret. November 18: with me!
- Suzette Clough is offering a new online section of Painting with the Universe that begins on September 20. I’ve been working with Suzette for the last year, developing my own Visual Medicine practice + I can’t recommend her teachings ENOUGH.
- Virtual Politicized Practice Space for White Organizers, Activists and Community Workers: Thursdays through September 28, noon-12:30 est. This is a drop-in, no-cost practice space offered by the facilitators of Healing Embodied White Supremacy (HEWS). Register for link
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- The Madonna Secret, the debut novel from Sophie Strand. A sensuous page-turner that rivetingly re-tells the central story of our toxic culture from Mary Magdalene’s perspective. I could not put it down. Prepare to feel horny, prepare to feel heartbroken. (Seriously, I was UNDONE.)
- Heat Is Not a Metaphor by Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “What are the words that could reach you and get you to join me in trusting the bravest among us, leaders accountable to multiple generations, who have lived long enough to know what is worth risking and when to risk it?”
- Buried Passion—The Price of Silence by Mary Porter Kerns: “…I sense that my mother, grandmothers, and their grandmothers had long ago learned the only way to be safe was to keep their heart wisdom to themselves. Sharing it with other women was particularly unsafe because the oppression of women was most successful when we were turned against each other.”
- Ayanna Young’s convo with James Bridle on Modes of Intelligence: “…the more you treat other things as intelligent, the more you come to recognize that intelligence isn't something that just happens in the head… It's something that's embodied.”
The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row (gift article): “Over time, their lives in the game world led to the sort of friendships solitary confinement usually prevents.” The human imagination + creativity can thrive under even the most horrendous conditions of state torture.
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
…part of the work is understanding how we heal our own relationships, which is how we heal the world.
— James Bridle on the For the Wild podcast
All together now
In this image of the Three of Pentacles from The Spacious Tarot, we see the entangling roots of three birch trees, reaching for each other + weaving together in the darkness of the earth, eventually making contact with something valuable, magical, golden.
Often called the “collaboration” card, the 3 of Pentacles evokes Mariame Kaba’s quote, Everything worthwhile is done with others. I am thinking about this arcana + all its various significations as my journey making The Ritualists podcast with my friend Peg Conway comes to a close.
We published the last episode this morning—episode 25: Rituals of Conscious Closure—ending two seasons in which we entered the zoom room with very little agenda to process our experience of leaving our respective spiritual communities. Since Peg + I started The Ritualists, I have been a part of several collaborations, + my experience making the podcast with her has become a benchmark for how I want my collaborations to feel.
Peg + I agreed at the beginning that we would only do this as long as it felt fun, + that’s been a good barometer in all my collaborations. Which doesn’t mean that we never need to apply ourselves, or have difficult conversations. It’s just that the basic orientation toward pleasure + ease means that there’s plenty of space for everything to happen. My collaboration with Aurora Brush of Cosmic Doghouse Press on the book Tarot as Questions felt similarly fated + easy. Pleasurably surprising + generative. I had the feeling at several points along the way that: this book really wants to be born!
I am deeply hermetic by nature + I love making things + working solitarily. And: something about having accompaniment, another set of eyes + ears, another heart-mind on a project, generates a trust + confidence that’s made it possible for me to take risks + try things I wouldn’t typically try alone. Feeling “in it” with someone—or someones—imparts courage.
Organizing with SURJ during the 2020 Uprisings + since is a pivotal + life-changing experience of making something happen with others in a way that feels pleasurable + effective at the same time. There is time enough for what we need to do, lots of support, a well-constructed container for orienting, training + debriefing that makes otherwise challenging work—calling strangers about an election, or a county jail, or abortion—feel like a ritual.
I learned so much in my collaboration with Peg on The Ritualists—that the way you do something imparts an energetic flavor to the creation that people can really feel; less prep, more presence is a real thing; being lovingly honest about capacity makes the work better. Perhaps most importantly: that endings can be poignant, meaningful + generative in + of themselves, when done consciously.
Working with others + in groups is a laboratory where I’m learning about what it takes to not only make something function, but to also create opportunities for relational learning, risk-taking, + repair. This is something that I deeply need, + all of us come by this need honestly within a culture dead-set on estranging us from our right relationship with every single thing.
Self-work is important. Therapy has helped me a great deal. Friendship is sacred. And: making things with others is a great way to learn what is possible in the realm of relationship, creativity + world-making. When we make things together, we get to, as Mariame Kaba + Kelly Hayes write, “…invite people to imagine what’s possible by modeling and rehearsing the world as it should be in real time, in the spaces, groups, and relationships that we build.”
Find out more about my tarot work
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
