February 2024: Freedom is making things
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Here in the Catskills, the sun has been elusive. Gauzy cloud cover, rain + snow have dampened the lengthening days. Winter’s limited palette discloses its own subtle pleasures + delights: the turbid creek occasionally clears into a dull turquoise that reads jewel-like amidst all the grey. I wonder how the heart of winter is finding you?
Here’s what I’m up to this month:
- I’m offering two drop-in Online Tarot Circles a month
- I’d love to see you for Asking Good Questions on Sunday, February 25 at 11am EST…here’s what people have said about the experience
- Altho I won’t be starting any new Study Tarot Series cohorts till May, there is still room to join the Saturday morning or Tuesday evening cohorts-in-progress!
My books are open for readings in February + now it’s 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
“If you love it enough, anything will talk to you.”
— George Washington Carver
You Might Be Interested
- I had a solar return reading on my birthday with artist + esotericist Jonathan Louis Dent. I came across his account on twitter + follow him for his insightful takes on lunations + other salient astro events. The consultation was superlative + I recommend him for natal + solar return readings!
- My friend + Visual Medicine teacher Suzette Clough has new online classes starting, plus her online Visual Medicine Facilitator Training, which I just completed: a life-changing experience
- I recently learned that Joker, one of the co-founders of the Prison Solidarity Project, died in late December. I met my dear friend Hakeem thru the PSP in July 2022 + am so grateful to have found such meaningful friendship thru the efforts of Joker + the others who administer this program. If you are interested in writing to someone who is incarcerated, you can apply here.
“Freedom is not a secret. It’s a practice.”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- Elena Solano + I are collaborating on a playlist that I have just been LOVING during painting + cooking sprees…we thought it would be fun to share it here. We’ll be adding to it each month, aiming to capture the ever-changing vibe of 2024
- The series finale of Downton Abbey: everything works out for everyone + I really needed a moment of that #inthesetimes! 😭🤌🏻
- I’ve been enjoying the zoom study group hosted by Jared Ware of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. We’re starting the Counterinsurgency Field Manual on Thursdays, 7:30-9pm EST, beginning February 8. To join, email Jared + make a donation if you can!
- More amazing artwork, this time from Dana Piazza
- The Feminist on Cellblock Y, a documentary produced by filmmaker Contessa Gayles, follows Richie Reseda and his fellow prison mates as they participate in an inmate rehabilitation program centered around feminist literature
- Astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat’s Astro Poem Generator. I have had a natal chart consultation with them + am a subscriber to their Astro-Kat’s offering—highly recommend!
- via Mariame Kaba’s excellent monthly newsletter, I found out about the People’s Pottery Project…I love finding new places to purchase gifts from!
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
Freedom is making things: 8 of Pentacles
Freedom is not a secret. It’s a practice. —Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Freedom is a place, and we make it, and we make it, and we make it. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Last month I wrote about 2024 as a collective Major Arcana 8: Strength year. Which means this year, the minor 8s become elemental focusing lenses for that big, wild Strength energy. The 8 of Pentacles is one of my favorite arcana. Corresponding to Sun in Virgo, it invites us into material mastery: how are we using our resources—time, money, skills? It asks us what we’re practicing thru our behavior, our commitments, + our work. It calls us to attend to the details of process, means + method, over product, result or goal.
“Work” in our culture is fraught with the imperatives of capitalism. We live in a time when selling our labor to meet our survival needs is the basic activity of human life. The 8 of Pentacles invites us to enlarge that frame by asking the question: what is the fundamental activity of human life? What would it be like to practice work as ritual? To envision success as our capacity to be present to our real-time unfolding, evolution + liberation—alone + with each other—in the course of so-called “ordinary” life?
I’m already hearing lots of anxiety about the 2024 presidential election in the US. (For my esotericists out there: Pluto will slip back into Capricorn one last time for the election IYKYK 🫣) The choices in November look to me like chaos fascism or respectability fascism. I will not be voting for either of them.
And: I will be organizing with SURJ this year. Even as my nervous system sparked + flared during the late-January SURJ leader call, in which SURJ staff laid out the plan for 2024’s electoral work—in particular: hustling for the Squad’s primary races, beginning with Summer Lee in PA-12—I will be organizing with my comrades, as I’ve been doing every year since the 2020 uprisings.
I rage + grieve + despair over the magical people-power of SURJ’s leaders, members + volunteers being used once again to collaborate with a Democratic Party that continues to shit on progressive movements who have again + again ensured their victory in tight races. Who justify genocide at home + abroad in “respectable” tones. Whose every-four-years fear-mongering casts those of us who refuse to vote for them as the enemy. It’s literally an abusive relationship. (Say what you will about the particular horrors of the Christofascist far-right, but they state their goals plainly + have built power over decades to achieve them.)
I decided late last year—as I watched Palestinian doctors hold a press conference with dead bodies at the podium, watched a father carrying pieces of his dead child in plastic bags, woke up to find that poet + professor Refaat Alareer had been assassinated along with 6 members of his family, watched the indiscriminate bombing of Jesus’s birthplace on Christmas Eve—that I would not do electoral work in 2024. I have been a deep loather of the Democratic party for some years now, + scrolling thru a real-time, ongoing genocide has only deepened the root of that loathing + contempt for Biden + everything that the Democratic Party + Liberalism represents.
I knew that SURJ would be doing electoral work in 2024. SURJ sits in a very particular lane among its coalition partners: organizing white people in places the Democratic Party doesn’t bother with. Its strategy for the past couple years now has been to Block the further encroachment of the far-right, to Build a multiracial, working class movement, + to Grow by bringing more people into the work.
I’ve experienced fissures + misalignments in my relationship with SURJ over the years. I was under no illusions about who Biden was when we banked for him in 2020. But he has proven more ghoulish + depraved than even I imagined. The Georgia senators we banked + banked (+ banked!) for to keep Dem control of the Senate have remained silent over the ongoing + violent repression of the Stop Cop City movement, to say nothing of the genocide in Gaza.
The impulse to say, “Fuck this, I’m out of here,” is strong in me. I’ve done it many times. Not all my leaving has been a mistake, but the insistence on perfect alignment + attunement has been a barrier to sticking with complexity. It’s been an excuse to throw things—and people—away. An excuse to do nothing.
I’m gradually coming to understand + claim that my relationships within SURJ, + with SURJ itself are larger than these fissures (at least for now). They are more important than a single campaign, or perhaps even a single year’s worth of campaigns. And: I know in my heart that I cannot get on the phones this year + talk to people about voting. I just can’t. Won’t.
But when I was on the leader call—with over 100 people I’ve known during this impossible time, with whom I’ve made real magic, practiced liberation—I asked myself if I could support them. If I could take up the particular ask that came my way in mid-January to support + coach leaders in story-sharing workshops. To make meaning with people who I know are dreaming of a better world, because we’ve been dreaming it together for years. I felt relieved + grateful that there was a place for me in the work that let me support my comrades + remain in my integrity.
So: 2024 becomes a year for me to take up + practice the mental, emotional + embodied discomfort of a contradiction: participating in a campaign that ultimately reifies the very system I believe lies at the root of the problem. It’s uncomfortable, but not unbearable. + I wonder if I’m being called to deepen my relationships + my skills at a time when it’s very easy to sit back in the comfort of ideological purity + be a critic. Perhaps even lean on it as a reason to not do anything.
It will also be a year to feed what my comrade who called me into the work this year termed an existential need—to be connected to + move with people who are doing something in the face of the impossible. Who are throwing down with each other + committing their time + life force energy to making something in these impossible times. When we recruit people into the work, this is the place where it’s easiest to move people. Feeling isolated, powerless + demobilized amidst a never-ending barrage of horror here + abroad, people are often relieved to know that there is a place where they can gather + practice with people who are dropping their bird’s beak-full of water on the fire.
My work with SURJ will be what it’s always been: a spiritual practice of things that make me feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled, (sometimes enraged), so that I can expand my capacity to move from within those states in other areas of my life. Of learning how to mobilize + make things. Of having a community of people to be accountable to, who would notice if I didn't show up or follow thru. Who see me as something larger than a button to push to get things done. It will be a chance to attend to process, + especially to relational processes, within a context I’m not 100% aligned with. Seems like a really important thing to be practicing #inthesetimes.
My distaste for electoral politics aside, SURJ’s campaign structure + strategy for 2024 is impressive. As has been my experience all along, SURJ has taken the feedback of leaders + volunteers, + created innovative, adaptive + creative formations for their campaigns.
Amidst everything I don’t know, + all the information that I don’t possess, what I do know is that I trust my comrades. I know that the process we engage together—of organizing welcoming spaces where people can show up to make something joyful + magical in a time of chaos + destruction, of bringing people into the work + developing leaders—is true + liberating. As I like to say, when we practice liberation together, the effect is liberation.
My wish for you this year is to find ways to create things with others that allow you to practice joyful rigor + discipline, that allow you to hone your creative, relational + meaning-making skills. + that you can find satisfaction + liberation in the processes you engage with the people you move with.
_____
Keywords for the 8 of Pentacles: practice, discipline, joyful rigor, work as ritual, primacy of process, honing skills, mastery in the material realm
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by @sorbetstar [/caption]
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the importance of self-soothing [/caption]
