June 2024: our thoughts + words are spells
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Dear Friends,
Here in the Catskills, the mountain is showing off her lush green coat, the nights are still cool + the days are warm. The mosquitos are ravenous, the birds + frogs, lawnmowers + leaf blowers are the current soundtrack + the vacationers have arrived in Vacationland. I wonder how this slide into summer is finding you?
Here’s what I’m up to in the next couple months:
- Join me for Tarot 101 on Tuesday, July 23 at 6pm est…here’s what people are saying about the experience
- drop-in Online Tarot Circles
- In-Person Tarot Circle at Cygnet’s Way in Kingston on the last Thursday of the month at 6pm
My books are open for readings in June—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
- I was so excited to join Cory Nakasue, Camille Michelle Gray + Mandee Sheeler on The Cosmic Dispatch last month to talk about all things Gemini season (I joined them ~35 minutes into the convo)
- I got to be In Conversation With Lane Smith on my podcast—it was an epic long-form convo about Palestine, rage + joy, power dynamics in the Tarot, their forthcoming book 78 Acts of Liberation, inviting the body into the conversation, what’s inspiring us now + SO. MUCH. MORE. Their forthcoming book, 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World, is available for pre-order now!
Research is the sacred ritual of excavating your own perspective.
2024 mood board
- Careless Whisper
- Yes, Sigi
- Me every evening at around 7:30pm
- “When propaganda no longer works in a bourgeois democracy to keep people in line it will turn directly to fascist violence to keep control. The same violence that is usually reserved for Black people and other oppressed groups will be unleashed on all. Be prepared.” —Kamau Franklin
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- the Palestinian Resistance—I need to hold this alongside images of the unfathomable carnage of the Israeli Occupation Forces’ US-backed genocide against the Palestinian people: a powerful antidote to hopelessness
- Working Class Love Notes—Beth Howard’s Substack: “My friends, we deserve it all. …We deserve more hours in the day for creativity, rest, and joy, not more work and anxiety. And, maybe most of all, we deserve love.”
- the most wonderful time of the year
- artist Archie Moore’s kith and kin at the Venice Biennale (I recommend the short video): “The work, kith and kin, is about 65,000 years of Aboriginal history and non-linear concepts of time and place. Moore, paraphrasing the anthropologist WE Stanner, calls it ‘the everywhen’.”
- the most anticipated pre-order of the year—Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- working class pianist at the public library: “I’d told my co-workers for years I played piano,” said Archie Gould of Venger Electrostatic Coating, “but never had an opportunity to show them”
How To Survive the End of the World podcast—the sisters’ reunion: “I can't write enough essays that would ever make the point as clearly as just watching power do what it does and saying, do you want to be on that side or do you want to be on the side of the people who are trying to hold peace with each other or the people who believe in freedom?…”
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
If your spiritual practice…doesn’t help you to acknowledge [the rise of fascism in this country] + thus respond in a way to disrupt fascism, then you are practicing spiritual bypassing. And if that is the case, then you are actually supporting the rise of fascism.
—Lama Rod Owens
our thoughts + words are spells
The 7 of Swords is the power of subtlety. The power of playing in complex narrative territory, subversive meaning-making, facility with language + ruthless honesty with ourselves about what is really going on in our mind. It is the power of taking what we need + leaving the rest, narratively speaking. It is the power of being resourceful with our attention.
The power of the 7 of Swords is the mind’s capacity + inclination toward convolution, complication, picking + choosing to make it make sense. It is the power of our culturally programmed perceptions to warp + deceive. + it is also the power of the mind to carve + give intentional shape to our stories + speech + life.
The 7 of Swords is the power of getting away with something—trickery, subterfuge, the power of deception of self +/or other(s). It is the power of using our mind intentionally, which can look like clarity, sneakiness, discernment or betrayal. It is the power of the mind to participate in enacting our desires, getting our needs met one way or another.
The power of the 7 of Swords is messages hidden in plain sight, the power of hackers, wordsmiths + revolutionary poets. It is the power of fucking with the system from within the system, the power of carefully laid plans, intelligence + strategy put into action.
The 7 of Swords is the power of speaking on purpose, knowing that our words—our thoughts, too—are spells that we transmit on the wind, the power of perceived + subtly answered. It is the power of wisdom + strategy in tunnels + tents + behind barricades, the power of chants taken up by a crowd to cast a big fat spell.
The power of the 7 of Swords is the insurgent mindset, narrative warfare + cognitive autonomy. It is the power of thinking, speaking + acting from within the understanding that we are always living inside a story + knowing what that story is + how it is functioning. As such, it is the power of changing the story, of editing + reshaping it to liberatory ends.
The 7 of Swords is the power of realizing that humans are meaning-making machines, storytelling animals, + coming to understand that stories are always about power. As such, it is the power of taking up storytelling + meaning-making with rigorously insurgent intention.
The power of the 7 of Swords is recognizing that speech itself is action, + that action creates the world. It is the power of understanding that there is no such thing as the privacy of our own minds, + instead of being frightened by this, being encouraged + inspired to think thoughts of resistance, joy, eros + liberation. It is the power of knowing that we are casting spells with every single word + being discerning about the spells we most deeply wish to cast + then speaking those spells out loud—to ourselves, to each other—all the time.
The 7 of Swords is the power of having a mind of our own, employing our mind in the service of our heart, our deepest desires. It is the power of attentional liberation* amidst pervasive distraction, extraction, demobilization + pacification. It is the power of taking up our thoughts + speech as instruments of narrative warfare, to liberate ourselves + others from the bad stories of the thanatocracy.
from 78 Faces of Power, a work in progress
Find out more about my tarot work
Annunciation
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as toward a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.
—by Marie Howe
