When the whole world is running
towards a cliff, —he who is running
in the opposite direction
appears to have lost his mind.

—C.S. Lewis

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, fall seemed to arrive all at once, right after the equinox: windows closed, sweaters on + darkness by 7:30pm. The sugar maples are opening the leaf-turning show…I wonder how this turning point of the year is finding you?

As Samhain + the Day of the Dead approaches, I will take some time to gather together those who’ve passed in the last 12 months—people + animals—printing out their pictures for my ancestor altar, writing their names in a special book that I keep just for the purpose, calling on them for help living #inthesetimes.

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 moving to the last Saturday of the month at 11:30am…would love to see you there ⭐️

My books are open for readings this month—it’s easy to book with me thru calendly. robin herold + I are also offering 2:1 consultations—a tarot reading in stereo!—you can read more about it here.

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

• Martha Crawford’s fall/winter groups—I’m doing her Living Intentionally With Mortality workshop that starts in November…
• The new issue of The Rebis is available for pre-order, shipping mid-October—I can’t wait for this annual tarot-themed print anthology of creative writing and art…there’s even a playlist for the issue!
• Don’t forget to order your 4 free Covid tests!

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

—science fiction writer Ted Chiang

2024 mood board

excerpt from an article by Sean Murphy, for the Associated Press, about the State of Oklahoma’s murder of Emmanuel Littlejohn:

Strapped to a gurney and with an IV line in his right arm, Littlejohn looked toward his mother and daughter, who witnessed the execution.

“Mom, you OK?” Littlejohn asked.

“I'm OK,” his mother, Ceily Mason, responded.

“Everything is going to be OK. I love you,” he said.

Mason sobbed quietly and clutched a cross necklace during the lethal injection, which began shortly after 10 a.m. Littlejohn's breathing became labored before a doctor declared him unconscious at 10:07 a.m. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes later.

Littlejohn's spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, was inside the death chamber and prayed over him.

Steven Harpe, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, said the lethal injection went without any problems.

• “Oh, you’re still worried about Covid?” From Time magazine: “It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above.” YES I AM WORRIED!
• doing the impossible. every day.
• Palestine teaches life: “please come and make us happy, or help us forget”
• “My name is Matt Nelson and I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
• cat videos, always cat videos

our taxes are directly funding a genocide that has murdered 330,000 people, or 8% of the Palestinian population—in the most horrific ways imaginable—in less than a year, + displaced more than a million people, leaving them without shelter, food, medical care or basic supplies to maintain hygiene + sanitary conditions. (listen to one US healthcare worker’s experience in Gaza.) now the same is happening in Lebanon.

despite the vast majority of people in the West + around the world wanting this to stop, nothing has yet been able to stop our “Democratic leaders” from continuing to fund + facilitate this genocide.

fundraisers offer a powerful way to make a real difference in Gaza. our contributions can put food on the table, provide tents + shelter, secure life-saving medicine + support critical evacuation efforts. every donation can bring hope and relief to those in desperate need.Alice Wong et al started Crips for eSims, which needs donations right now. + here are 2 vetted Go Fund Me mutual aid fundraisers that I recently donated to: 3 families + Fidaa + her children. can you join me?

You can also find mutual aid funds providing direct help to those impacted by Hurricane Helene in the southeast U.S.

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• my new painting series—yes! my own art practice inspires me!
• speaking of art practice that inspires me, I watched Kusama: Infinity for the fourth time last month + it made me cry, what an absolute force
• Hamada Shoo cooking for the children in Gaza + the date harvest
• remembering the world is vast + wide + deep, + that there are worlds within worlds (this also made it in just under the wire for some profound perspective!)
• direct action
• this short video about sculptor Beth Cavener’s work: “Primitive animal instincts lurk in our own depths, waiting for the chance to slide past a conscious moment. The sculptures I create focus on human psychology, stripped of context and rationalization, and articulated through animal and human forms.” (the Process section on her website is 🤌🏻)
• Adam Elenbaas’s video about what we’re doing when we’re reading the tarot or delineating astrology or doing depth psychology, mediumship, or any other kind of oracle-reading—it gave me language to understand more deeply what it is I do!

Ann Friedman’s recent newsletters about ways to build community: “The hard truth is that no one gets to be in community without effort.”

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

All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!

—Marcellus Khalifa Williams’s final statement

on being not-okay

On the first of every month, I pull a big tarot spread that I leave out on my desk. I look at + live with it, + by the end of the month, things that were confusing often come clear. On September 1, I pulled the Tower arcana in the strength position. The strength position indicates something to draw on + resource yourself with, something to employ that will work for you. I was puzzled: how could the arcana of falling, crumbling + rupture—the arcana I’m always most afraid of seeing—be a strength?

In the last weeks of September, as my appetite dried up over the latest horrors of state-imposed mass death + disposability, as I felt deep sadness, despair + horror, + as I reached out to friends to let them know how I was really doing, I remembered this Tower-as-strength placement. What does it mean to be “doing okay” in these times?

My investment in being “okay,”—functioning well, showing up for my relationships + commitments, above all: working—runs very deep. So deep, in fact, that it moves alongside a twinned visceral aversion to “not-okay-ness” in myself + others. Seeing someone undone, chaotic, “needy,” mad (as in madness) surfaces a reflexive: not-me. Well, as it turns out: it’s me.

I cried a lot in September. When these waves of emotion ran over me, a voice inside my head wanted to know: what do you have to be so sad about? Welp…

Navigating year five of an ongoing pandemic that continues to kill 1,000+ people in the U.S. every week. Over a million people in the U.S. have died of Covid since 2020 + we have not stopped to take this in, not for one minute. The dropping of all public health mitigation means that public life does not feel safe to me. None of my healthcare workers have worn masks in this last year of visits.

States across the U.S. executed 5 men last week. The money I pay in taxes gets me the occasional 4 free Covid tests + gets foreign governments billions of dollars to murder Palestinians + now Lebanese people—a genocide I can watch unfold in real time. Did you know that nearly 140 journalists in Gaza have been murdered in the last year?

I have seen people’s personal electronic devices explode in grocery stores. I have seen a person carry: a severed human head, a headless child’s body, a child whose skull is completely open + empty. I have seen bulldozers crush human bodies. I now know what shredded, liquified human remains look like, hanging from a building + gathered in plastic bags. I have seen mass graves filled with unidentifiable bodies. I have seen IOF prison guards sexually torturing Palestinian detainees. Seen a precision IOF drone strike killing an injured civilian for seeming sport.

I have seen children with skin diseases due to lack of sanitation, children licking drops of water off the corner of heavy machinery in their thirst, emaciated children starving while miles of aid trucks idle at border crossings. I have listened to the voice of a young girl in Gaza, trapped in a car with her dead relatives, speaking with ambulance dispatchers, heard her voice go silent as the ambulance sent to get her was blown up on its approach. I have seen civil defense workers in Gaza using hand tools to dig out people buried under rubble—some who make it out alive after 10 or 15 hours of backbreaking, dangerous work + some whose voices slowly stop calling out during that unfathomable time. I have seen decomposing infants in ICU beds.

I have seen Portugal on fire + central Europe under water. “Unsurvivable storm surges” in Florida, which refused to evacuate incarcerated people. I have seen militarized German police chasing down + detaining a 10-year-old boy carrying a Palestinian flag. Seen militarized police here in the US attack elders + students, knocking them to the ground + seen them stand idly by while pro-Zionist rioters attacked student encampments. I’ve seen NYPD shoot into a subway car over $2.90. I am watching the Left tear itself apart as the far-right continues to gain power.

Closer to home, I have lost friends to death + to irrevocable rupture. My parents are frail + vulnerable. I know four people who are currently housing insecure. I could go on + on. + on.

In light of all that, I’m not seeing my current not-okay-ness as a problem in need of solving, actually. I see it as an utterly sensitive + accurate response to the current conditions we’re all living thru. + what that Tower arcana in the strength position has been showing me lately is that letting myself be not-okay—+ more importantly: letting myself be seen in my not-okay-ness by the people closest to me; letting my walls come down—is helping me soften some of this rigid, supremacist conditioning that keeps me believing that I have to be okay + that it’s not okay to be not-okay.

Letting my closest friends see what is probably apparent to them already, but is slowly becoming apparent to me—that my reflexive anger masks feelings of profound fear + uncertainty, of vulnerability for myself + everyone I love—feels like a practice of transforming my tendencies to isolate, externalize, overfunction + go it alone.

My resentment at others’ “neediness” has become my dashboard indicator light that I need something: care, attention, co-regulation, nourishment. This feels important, both as a friend + as someone committed to living a new world into being. The relentless, urgent march of normalcy + functioning is literally killing us. I keep waiting for a moment of mass refusal, a day where everyone just stays in bed + says: not another fucking minute of this death-making, a day that turns into a week, a month, 6 months, however long until it stops.

Not-okay-ness as an individual problem that each of us needs to “solve” thru therapy, personal spiritual practice, better habits: how’s that going for us? What I am longing for these days are public wailing walls, mass rituals of despair + grief. Not as an end in themselves, but as places to collectively affirm + access that tremendous stream of energy that is currently being tied up in numbness, urgency, holding it together, being okay, being “normal” in these not-normal times.

• How + when do you experience not-okay-ness?
• Who can you be not-okay with?
• What is it like for you to be with others who are not-okay?
• Do you know what you need when you feel not-okay? If not, how might you go about researching that?
• What relational practices can you + the people you love experiment with in learning how to not be okay, together?

Find out more about my tarot work

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?