August 2024: can you join us?
I don't believe that you need to heal grief. Grief itself is the healing. Grief is the medicine.
—Malkia Devich Cyril
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Dear Friends,
Here in the Catskills, the nightly curtain of insect sounds that characterizes the slide into late summer has arrived. Cool nights have made for sound sleeping. I long for a good rain to bolster the creek. ... I wonder how this hinge between the summer solstice + autumn equinox is finding you?
Thank you to everyone who donated to the fundraiser for my friend Kerry, + especially to those who shared the appeal with their own communities. There’s still time to give!
Here’s what I’m up to in the next couple months:
- Artist Elena Solano + I are starting a new workshop series called The Symbolic Lab + we’re kicking it off with Confusion + Casting Spells: Muddying the Water Together this Saturday, August 3 at 1pm est—we’d love to see you there!
- In mid-September astrologer Cory Nakasue + I will begin offering 6-session series called Getting Thru It Together: The Living Language of Divination #inthesetimes. There are only a couple spots left in the Wednesday evening cohort; the Sunday cohort is half-full…we’d love to see you there! Cory talked about it on her most recent episode of The Cosmic Dispatch
- new Study Tarot Series cohort begins in December…what people have said about the experience
Also: new tarot offering alert! It’s a 2:1 consultation that robin herold + I have been test driving in which we read a spread together for your question or request—kind of like a 3-dimensional tarot reading. You can read more about it here…
My books are open for readings in August—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
You Might Be Interested
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs offered an incredible 2-hour reflective writing workshop based on prompts from the lives of Fannie Lou Hamer + Ella Baker. It was amazing, + it was recorded….
- Gerti Schoen is offering her Microdosing Amanita Muscaria online course this month…cannot recommend enough!
- Agonizing? Organize!
Organizing is a craft that challenges us to overcome our alienation and work constructively with others. … Different forms of organizing involve different strategies, traditions, and formations, but any space where we are learning together and acting in concert together in pursuit of a common goal is important right now.
—Kelly Hayes
2024 mood board
- general mood
- In Bad Faith with Mohammed El-Kurd
- cat ASMR
All of the disasters I've seen combined—combined: 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn't equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.
—Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic surgeon
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- Spurred by the arrival of July 20, 2024—the day that Lauren Oya Olamina’s journal begins in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower—I’m re-listening to the Octavia’s Parables podcast with adrienne maree brown + Toshi Reagon: generative conversation 🤌🏻❤️🔥
- A gorgeous zine called Stitching Freedom: Embroidery & Incarceration by Isabella Rosner: “455 years ago, a queen embroidered a picture of her dog…. The dog’s name is Jupiter. The queen’s name is Mary, Queen of Scots…who has given us the earliest surviving example of incarceration embroidery.”
- In June 1971, Jessica Mitford interviewed Black radical George Jackson about his writing while he was imprisoned in California, a couple months before he was shot dead during an escape attempt: “Q. Do you revise much? A. I write strictly off the top of my head. I don't go over it because I haven't time.”
- excellent podcast alert! Immaterial: 5,000 Years of Art, One Material at a Time. I especially loved the episodes on Tarot + Blankets and Quilts
- I’ve been listening to Resistance Revival Chorus’s 2020 album This Joy on repeat, as well as Fannie Lou Hamer’s Songs My Mother Taught Me…everything we expose our senses to is a spell…
Southerners on New Ground (SONG) recently released the results of their strategic planning process, in the form of a Strategic Almanac. It is beautiful, clear-eyed + inspiring: “This moment poses critical questions for organizers: How do we love and protect each other amid collapse? How do we expand the circle of who is protected and cared for in these times? How do we organize, not just in resistance to a bleak future offered to us by the existing systems, but such that the shape of our organizing plants and nurtures seeds that will birth a different future?”
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
It’s not too late to start masking! We are currently experiencing a summer spike of Covid-19 infections, with H5N1 bird flu—also airborne—not far behind
can you join us?
Following Biden dropping out of the US presidential race, there’s been a lot of mobilization + excitement, including a mass call that my political home—Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)—called 24 hours after Biden’s announcement. Nearly 16,000 people registered for the call; 7,000 were on the actual call. SURJ is now in the process of trying to absorb these people into action + becoming part of a long-term, multiracial, working-class movement that can enforce our will at scale.
During a phone bank a few days after that mass meeting, I offered the following story as a “recommit”—a short, shared-interest story that a person gives at the end of an action in which they talk about what brought them to the work + what keeps them coming back. It’s geared toward moving people to recommit to taking action again with us.
I’m making it my offering for the month because it was helpful for me to craft it + speak it out loud, + maybe there’s something here that also speaks to you….
I spent all of my 30s + some of my 40s in full-time residential training at a zen buddhist monastery. In late 2019, I left the monastery + re-entered lay life. Six months later, the pandemic started + never stopped. As the Uprisings following the murder of George Floyd swept the country, I began organizing with SURJ, calling into Georgia, just like you did today.
I left my first phone bank early because calling strangers + getting hung up on made me feel so anxious + dysregulated. Confused + frustrated by my seeming inability to do something as simple as phone banking while others were out in the streets, I longed to develop my capacity to stay grounded while taking action in alignment with my deepest values. So I came to the next phone bank, where I was warmly welcomed back. I came to the next one, + the next one + the next one. What I found in SURJ was something that felt familiar to me from my years at the monastery: a community of practice.
I’ve come to see the kind of interaction phone banking is made of—the very interactions you had on the phones today: with strangers, of limited duration, around shared values—as a beautiful container for relational practice in general. For seeing the potential of any interaction, at any time: to develop curiosity about others; to practice sharing stories; to develop skill in transforming my dysregulation + reactivity into an agile, grounded curiosity; to deepen my listening skills; to ask for what I need + intuit my limits; + perhaps most importantly, to train in persistence.
When my enthusiasm for this work wanes—+ it wanes—my practice of being in collective action with people I deeply care about, to whom I am accountable, sustains me. This is why doing this together is SO. IMPORTANT! We are in a time that calls us to ask more of ourselves + each other, to demand a joyful rigor + discipline of ourselves + each other, to practice an everyday, ordinary kind of excellence. Which is not the same as rigid perfectionism or being the “best.” It is the excellence of showing up, over + over, exactly as we are, + being open to growing + transforming + liberating ourselves, together.
I am not here because I like Kamala Harris, or because I believe any president of this blood-soaked, death-making country is going to do anything for us out of the goodness of their hearts. I’m here because I know that until we have a sufficiently large + organized multiracial, working-class movement, we will not be able to Free Palestine, Stop Cop City, protect the air + water, have healthcare or secure housing.
This is why amidst all the noise + spectacle of this horse-race election season, I am grounding myself in collective action with SURJ—a place where I can bring all of my rage + fear + anxiety + hope + energy + focus it into action, into practice, into getting free. If there’s one thing I learned in my many years of buddhist training, it’s this: when we practice liberation together, the result is liberation.
post script: there are many ways to organize, or to make things with other people that build power + help us care for each other. If organizing with SURJ is not your thing: great! Please find a thing, tho! Unions, mutual aid groups, groups in your local community that are helping meet people’s needs. This is a time to be in an active, intentional practice with others to ideate, make things, try things + fail, try things + succeed, struggle, have + resolve conflict, build skills—all of it. Many years from now, when the ones who are little today ask us What did you do in the mid-2020s? I, for one, want to be able to say: I struggled with people I love for a better world.
Find out more about my tarot work
