May 2024: the power of the World
The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. —Octavia E. Butler
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Dear Friends,
Here in the Catskills, spring is fully underway, with everything under its spell—the new-green is leafing its way up the mountain, the birds are making a morning racket + the flowers + flowering trees are too MUCH, in the very best way. I wonder how mid-Spring is finding you?
Here’s what I’m up to this month:
- I made a little tarot something…
- drop-in Online Tarot Circles
- Asking Good Questions on Thursday, May 23 at 6pm EST—here’s what people are saying about the experience
- 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 May—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
- Public service announcement
- Incarcerated writers are looking to connect with people on the outside. Begin or deepen your commitment to building relationships with people in prison + disrupting state-sanctioned alienation through email/letter writing with the Prison Solidarity Project
- I finished Gerti Schoen’s 6-week Amanita Muscaria Microdosing course last month + I cannot recommend enough. It broke my daily weed-smoking habit, helped me make some much-needed space for grieving + softened some hard, anxious edges. I take an SSRI + this was not a barrier! As Gerti says, “Microdosing this mushroom does not provide expanded states of consciousness, but long-lasting healing, physically + emotionally.” Her next microdosing course starts on Sunday, May 19
2024 mood board
- No
- iconic
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs: When you punish students for their love & compassion you teach them how powerful compassion truly is. You admit to them that you govern on a premise that cannot withstand love. Love prevails. We’re witnessing the soul growth of a generation. They deserve our care & respect.
- Shawn Fain: It's not a CEO that's going to save us. It's not a president that's going to save us. It's not me and it's not you. It's us. It's a united working class is how we're going to win!
- Mario Savio’s 1964 speech at UC Berkeley: …you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop…
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.
—James Baldwin
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- creating new worlds + new culture
- Currently OBSESSED with the Sound ID feature in the The Cornell Lab’s Merlin Bird ID app…I’ve been leaping out of bed to have my coffee with the birds + see who’s in the neighborhood—so much better than that other cursed “bird app”!
- Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files: “a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency”
- Need an infusion of joy? A pep talk? Words of encouragement? Call (707) 873-7862
- Sophie Strand on Things to Say Instead of “I Hope You’re Feeling Better” or “But You Look so Good!”: “There are kinder ways to ‘bump’ into friends who are sick rather than relying on these pat phrases.”
- Sam Gregg’s photographs of The Forgotten Naples
- the mesmerizing artwork of Sebastien Preschoux
- Artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir: “I want to understand why everything exists.”
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
RIP Faith Ringgold, who left this life on April 13, 2024
the power of the World
The power of the World is Saturn keeping time, delineating boundaries, serving up hard lessons to shape the possibility of a truer, more durable freedom. It is the power of reclaiming the energy otherwise spent in flights of fancy, castles in the sky, magical thinking + delusion, + investing it in the process of getting free here + now. It is the power of liberation within the real.
The World is the power of a clear-eyed assessment + appreciation of actual conditions that makes possible a deeper ease, facility, nimbleness + beauty. It is the power of dancing inside the constraints of current conditions. It is the power of wisdom enacted within time, place, position + degree.
The power of the World is an insight thoroughly digested, metabolized, integrated + embodied. The power of a software update that changes how we operate based on what we’ve learned thru winning the game, falling down, getting lost + fucking up. It is the grace we grant ourselves + others thru making huge messes, + coming to accept that there is no true living or liberation without making messes.
The World is the power of what the Fool hands off to us after traveling thru the whole catastrophic journey, + what we, in turn, hand off to the Fool: a distillation of their initial idealism + faith concentrated into a protected seed that contains the essential ingredients for what we’re meant to grow into in the next phase of the journey.
The power of the World is coming down to Earth, getting grounded in the joy + freedom we can only experience when we inhabit our life as it is. It is the power gained thru alignment with reality, with our desires + values, the power that becomes ours when we choose the life we actually have + find our pleasure in working with the ingredients we’ve been given.
The World is the power that lives in the seeming paradox that the closer we get to the specific + idiosyncratic conditions of our life + who we are, the freer we become. It is the power of liberation that is rooted, resilient, time-tested, able to grow + flower + flourish in any conditions. It is the power of becoming ever more ourselves, of not wasting a single thing that has happened to us along the way, of assembling all the pieces of our journey into a sublime bricolage that is sturdier for its patched-togetherness.
The power of the World is the potential for the detail + luminosity of our current place + time, the current condition of our body-heart-mind, to be a piece that nestles perfectly into the vast, unfathomable puzzle of things. It is the power of The World is vast + wide, why do you [do what you do]?* It is the power of apocalypse + the world born anew in every moment, for someone, somewhere. It is the power of re-entering the world now. Now. Now…
—
keywords for the World arcana: integration, wholeness, liberation within reality, lessons distilled for the next cycle, dancing with constraint
from 78 Faces of Power, a work in progress
Find out more about my tarot work
An Octopus Has Three Whole Hearts
and sometimes I lie awake thinking
about all that lub-dubbing
on the ocean floor and no one to hear it.
What kind of god gives a cephalopod
three but a human only one?
I want more thumps. I want more time.
I want to waste my love on everything.
Give me a heart for Ohio. Another
for a silk butter moon. Another
for the park bench man who swoons
for doves, his quiet hands full of crumbs.
—Joy Sullivan
