March 2024: relating with unfathomability
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Here in the Catskills, the season is turning, the light is growing, we’ve had a few warm days. The birds are getting louder, the earth is quickening. I wonder how this time of absurdity + uncertainty 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 Using Tarot to Work With the Dead on Saturday, March 23 at 11am EST
- My In-Person Tarot Circle meets at Cygnet’s Way in Kingston on the last Thursday of the month at 6pm
- There’s a new Study Tarot Series cohort beginning in May with Operationalizing Desire: the Magician + Aces…read what people have said about this unique group study opportunity
My books are open for readings in March + 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
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
— Aaron Bushnell
You Might Be Interested
- Return to the Root Retreat, facilitated by the Treehouse Collective: There is inside all of us an alarm system going off. We gather to heed it. We seek the right questions, trains of thoughts, modalities, and wisdoms that will help us care for ourselves and one another in these destructive times. We have very little certainty except for this: This work must be collective. I’m attending in real time, but the retreat recording is also available for purchase. There are scholarships available, + I encourage people with means to donate toward scholarships (like I did!)
- Elena Solano is accepting applications for spring/summer 2024 cohorts of The Grief Room—a virtual, twice-monthly gathering space where dreaming, imagination + making practices are welcomed in service of collective grief. For more details, visit the website
- I made some zines…printable + digital versions available for you to share!
“When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.”
— Loretta Ross
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- the Stop Cop City movement, always; more of this energy in 2024 (that’s organizer Mary Hooks answering the ever-inane question re: “do you condemn…”)
- Artist Nick Cave on Loss, Yearning, Transcendence via the On Being podcast: “I don’t think the common thread that runs through humanity is greed or power or these sorts of notions. It is this binding agent of loss. That, to me, is the thing that makes me able to look at anybody and feel connected to them, regardless of who they are.”
- Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a new documentary about one of our greatest living poets: “I'm really very fortunate that I just don't care what people think about me.” #forevergoals (Her convo with James Baldwin excerpted in this doc led me here, + to an eventual re-watching of this)
- Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center via Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study substack: “People in the U.S. and Western Europe started internalizing the idea that friendship is a peripheral relationship when two historical trends converged around the turn of the 20th century: same-sex intimacy became suspect, and marriage started to consume people’s emotional lives.”
- Prison Art: Drawing Is an Outlet and Source of Income for Incarcerated People, an op-ed by Juan Hernandez: “I ended up purchasing the 12-set of Reeves pencils and placed the box in my pants pocket so they wouldn’t get damaged. Upon returning to my cell, I opened the box and took all the pencils out, laying them on my rusty table that was screwed into the concrete wall. I looked at each pencil intently and even put them up to my nose to smell the wood and lead, which reminded me of school.”
- Born at the Right Time by Natalie Labriola: “To say ‘she was born’ sounds far more passive than what labor and birth actually felt like: an active struggle for emergence which involved traveling to the land between life and death, a timeless realm that I visited to retrieve my baby. Like the tiny sliver of moon newly visible in the sky, suddenly there was a presence—and an entire new universe of love—where before there was apparent nothingness.”
- feline blessings
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
0 the Fool: relating with unfathomability
The power of the Fool is an empty space, sunyata*, God is change.* It is the power of play + things-in-play, of dancing with impermanence, of trusting that opportunity + liberation are always at hand. It is the power of reinvention, of wiping the slate clean, leaving the past behind, starting over, beginning again. + again.
The Fool is the power of unconventional wisdom, of believing another world is possible. It is the power of seeing the herd move one way + heading in the other direction. It is the power of masking during an ongoing, deadly + disabling pandemic when everyone around you has “moved on.”
The Fool is the power of the open road, a new adventure, going off-map, off-road, off the grid. It is the power of being game for it, up for something utterly new. The power of traveling light, the gods smiling upon you, of not needing to know more than the next step. It is the power of big faith in everything turning out in the end.
It is the power of foolishness, of feeling foolish, to open a portal to something fresh. The Fool is the power of getting out of our comfort zone, of don’t be so serious, of forgoing the practical for the imaginary, the beautiful. The power of the Fool is believing the impossible possible, + then moving in the direction of making it so. The Fool is the power of signaling possibility, other worlds, other ways of being + doing.
The power of the Fool is a jailbreak, resistance, rebellion + revolution—of turning the world on its end. It is the power of sussing out the gaps + weaknesses in what appears utterly totalizing. It is the power of clowning to reveal the ridiculousness of the dominator’s schemes. The Fool is the power of humor + levity in moments of terrifying seriousness, the power of laughter to soothe the underdog + unsettle the powerful.
The Fool is the power of stepping on the field, of getting in the game, of trying + failing, instead of sitting on the sidelines assured of how everything will turn out. It is the power of disrupting violently normalized systems + logics with art, humor, subversion, joy + love.
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from my current work-in-progress 78 Faces of Power
Find out more about my tarot work
Meditations in an Emergency
by Cameron Awkward-Rich (hear him read it here)
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds &
the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I
ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the
institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand
on my stupid heart.
