We are living through a remarkable moment of depravity that will mark each and every one of us for the rest of our lives. —Ussama Makdisi

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, the leaf-show was sublime: the mountain’s reds + yellows + oranges against a clear blue sky never fails to fill me with wonder. And: I pray for rain. It is very dry here. The Town has instituted a burn ban + declared a state of emergency because of ongoing drought. I wonder how this deepening autumn is finding you?

Here’s what I’m up to in the next couple months:

• the new Study Tarot Series cohort beginning in December has one spot left…+ there’s also a new cohort starting in January…check out the cohort schedules + what people have said about the experience
• In-person Tarot Circle at Cygnet’s Way (outdoors or masks required) is meeting for the last time this year on Saturday, November 30 at 11:30am…would love to see you there ⭐️
• I’ll be holding an online Post-Election Gathering Thursday, November 7 from 7-9pm et; please be sure to check out the guidelines so that you can discern if this space will be supportive for you.

My books are open for readings this month + it’s also easy to purchase gift readings for the people in your life.

Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing + generous ways 🙏🏻💚

Love + rigor,
shea in the catskills

You Might Be Interested

• Elena Solano is available for psychotherapeutic + coaching services. Doing a 12-session grief accompaniment with Elena helped me see how enlivening my grief is + how it touches every aspect of my life. I've done a lot of therapy, + working with Elena was the first time I've been able to bring my whole self—including structural/cultural/socio-political issues—into deep emotional/relational work.
• HEY LOCALS! On November 8-10 Valatie Community Theater will present the World Premiere of Sam's Point by Sybil Rosen, directed by Marnie Andrews. Sam's Point tells the story of an isolated society of huckleberry pickers on Shawangunk Mountain during the Great Depression. Based on actual history in an actual place just sixty miles southwest of Valatie, theatergoers will recognize familiar landmarks like Fleischmann's + the Catskills.

What is the artist’s job? To make war. The artist’s job is unrelenting war on evil.

—Amiri Baraka

2024 mood board

• Scorpio season mood

• anthem

• Covid Safety 101:

  • Covid (SARS-Cov-2) is neuroinvasive, causes vascular disease + dysregulates immune systems

  • At least one in ten infections leads to Long Covid, a severe disease that has no cure

  • Reinfections are far more dangerous + the damage is cumulative

  • Current vaccines do not prevent transmission, death, or Long Covid

  • Masks—N95s/KN95s—are our only protection from infection

    Learn more >>>

• We can never say we didn’t know; we are all complicit

• cats cats cats cats cats

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• my friends + family
• organizing instead of agonizing
• my comrade Julia’s monthly newsletter Found On The Ground—comes out on the first of the month, too, + is just 🤌🏻🌈
• offerings
• working class heroes
• Kara Walker: Fortuna & the Immortality Garden (Machine)
• Sarah Kendzior’s Hanging by a Thread—the politics of art in an unraveling world: “Folk art is a bulwark against [the colonial assumptions that Indigenous nations do not exist]. It is proof of life, and proof of historical tradition—and therefore deeply threatening to invaders.”
• beauty + love in Palestine
• Dan “Nuge” Nguyen’s art

the Fall 2024 issue of Hammer + Hope

Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!

Getting people used to mass death is a prelude for getting them to accept mass murder.

—Sarah Kendzior

major arcana 13: death

I remember the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the horror of watching the news every night with the latest counts of the dead. By the end of March 2020, nearly as many people had died of Covid-19 in the US as died in the World Trade Center attacks, over which the US waged war in two countries for nearly two decades. Just a couple months later, the death toll was 63,000. A month after that: 125,000. Today, it’s well over 1.2 million dead. Just in the US. And: we’re also not really counting that closely anymore.

Despite Biden ending the Covid public health emergency in April 2023, for the last 9 weeks of this year, 1,000+ people a week in the US are still dying from Covid-19. When I mentioned this to a friend recently, they asked, “I don’t know enough to know: is that a lot?”

Their question exposed a deeply normalized cultural acceptance of mass death + disposability that both shocked + didn’t shock me. Watching everyone + everything around me go “back to normal” these last years while Covid has adapted + mutated to become more transmissible + dangerous, has made me an outlier. Excluded from public life, I listen to people talk about recurrent illness, autoimmune flares, the sudden death of loved ones.

I’ve had people tell me I’m “too anxious” about Covid-19. I’m not anxious, actually. I’m afraid, + I wonder: why aren’t you? What happened to our survival instinct? I would give anything to be utterly wrong about the science + research around the long-term impacts of Covid: mass immunosuppression, cognitive + physical disability, + premature death.

Meanwhile, over the 12+ months, Israel has killed an estimated one out of ten Palestinian people in Gaza, with the killing, displacement, torture + starvation only ramping up + expanding to Lebanon. Our tax dollars provide the financial, logistical + political support for all of it. Mainstream media has been circulating the “40,000 Palestinians dead” figure since June. The Guardian, however, recently put it at over 335,000. The IOF has targeted + killed the people + destroyed the infrastructure in Gaza that kept track of these numbers. As well as over 180 journalists who reported on them.

I’m not even going to get into the numbers of dead due to climate polycrises.

So many numbers, so much death. Who has time to stop + take it in, think about it, feel about it, when there’s so much work to be done, so much needing to happen just to make ends meet, keep the basics together, keep our lives from falling apart. Funny, that: it’s almost as if the frantic urgency of “business-as-usual”—poor health due to repeated Covid infections, mass entertainment designed to pacify + demobilize us, + an economic system that keeps us increasingly insecure—is connected to our collective numbness around mass death.

As my friend + collaborator Martha Crawford wrote in her latest newsletter about her upcoming Living Intentionally With Mortality series (which I’m enrolled in):

No matter the outcome of this election: We have some serious cultural problems that have left almost everyone completely uninitiated when it comes to contending with death, dying, mortality and bereavement. It lives in our racism and oppressions, in our inability to confront climate crises and injustice. I believe that it is everyone’s work to be able to talk about death and dying, and that the general population needs to learn again how to support those who are in close proximity to death through care-taking, bereavement, exposure to natural disasters, scarcity and violence, or potentially terminal illness.

We have been, continue to be + for our foreseeable futures will be, living in a time of mass death—the culmination + ultra-violent last gasps of rapacious, unchecked systems of colonialism, capitalism + domination.

For me, living in denial of this, or making myself numb to it, is not an option. So the question becomes: how do I + my people get in right relationship with this reality? What do we study together? Practice together? What do we hold onto? Let go of? Keep our eyes on? Keep our hearts on? What do we invoke? Evoke? Renounce? Resist?

Patriarchy + colonialism made quite the project of separating us from a sacred, utterly engaged relationship to death, dying + the dead, because these systems know how much power that relationship holds. This is why everything in our culture is designed to ensure that death feels removed, remote, like it’s happening over there, to those other people. Let us not be fooled: it is right here, exactly where each of us is.

• When did you first learn about death? What do you remember about that?
• What is your relationship to death? To being around the dying? Dead bodies? Death rituals like funerals, wakes + viewings? To mass death re: Covid, genocide?
• What are your biggest fears about death?
• What is your relationship to the dead? Consider this question more broadly than biological family.
• What did you learn happens after you die? What do you believe now?
• Is there something in particular that you hope to do in this life that you haven’t yet?
• If you knew that you were going to be reborn right back into this beautiful, terrible world after you died, how would that change the way you’re living now? What would you want to focus on + practice? With whom?

Find out more about my tarot work

We must recognize that our radicalism and our indignation will not carry the day. We must do messy, uncomfortable work. That is the path toward transformation. It is an uncertain path, but the path exists. We will need patience and humility to traverse it.

—Kelly Hayes

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?