You are not a separate being. You belong to the living body of Earth. You are the Earth, looking up at the stars. You are the Earth, becoming conscious of itself.
—Joanna Macy, May 2, 1929 – July 19, 2025

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, we’ve cycled thru hot days + cool nights, wicked heat + humidity, + poor air quality from Canadian wildfires. The insects have begun their evening serenade. Sunlight thru the green leaves is an ongoing miracle amidst the relentlessness of ticks + mosquitos. I wonder how living + working amidst polycrisis is finding you?

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

• I’m offering two of my favorite workshops, by donation/pay-what-you-can:

  • Asking Good Questions on Saturday, August 23 at noon est— check out what people have said about the experience + I’ll be donating 100% of the proceeds from this workshop to The Sameer Project

  • Tarot 101 on Saturday, September 6 at noon est—check out the testimonials

• Elena Solano + I continue our online arts-based research project with Trust in Communication Saturday, August 30 at 2pm est. This series is offered by donation, + you don’t have to have attended previous ones to participate. See what participants had to say about it so far

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

It can be hard to know what to do in the face of our government’s ongoing, active participation in the genocide in Gaza. 85% of people in Gaza are in the fifth stage of malnutrition due to Israel’s intentional starvation of the people, aided by the US. Sometimes I feel helpless (+ sometimes, frighteningly numb) in the face of our collective inability to bring this nearly two years of mass killing + starvation to an end. But as Beatrice Adler-Bolton recently wrote:

I know people are feeling overwhelmed. I know the grief can feel unbearable. I know the images can be too much.

But you cannot afford to freeze or falter. You cannot afford to flinch.

If you feel rage and despair, good. That means you are human. That you know the difference between right and wrong. That means your conscience is intact. That means you yearn for Palestinian life to thrive. Let that rage move you. Let that grief become action.

Because Palestinians don't need our thoughts and prayers. They need us to break the siege. To support the infrastructures of survival that they have built. To move money from the imperial core towards life-making in Gaza. To raise hell. To organize. To act. Your grief is valid. But grief alone won’t save a life. Solidarity might.

Hold that fire close. Let it burn away the numbness, the helplessness, the lie that there is nothing more you can do. There is so much you can do.

Some things you can do:

• give to The Sameer Project or Gaza Funds
• take a class with Workshops 4 Gaza
• use this toolkit to pressure elected officials—ask some friends, neighbors + colleagues to join you
• keep talking about Palestine

What people are saying about Asking Good Questions…

The most important thing I learned is:

• tools that can help us form + ask questions
• Questions have questions before them that need to be answered first!
• the art of asking questions. + that usually the initial question can be further explored to get to an even deeper & more relevant question.
• I learned so much listening to other people's pulls! I also am so grateful to have the tools of these 4 rituals now. They are so helpful.

you might be interested

• Transgender Strategy Center is looking for 10 new monthly donors by the end of August! They'll be starting up their newsletter again this week, consider subscribing for brief and encouraging snippets about building resilience in grassroots trans movement work.
• Tamra Grace sends out an every-so-often newsletter—a blend of zodiac musings, current astrological vibes, tarot insights + other mystical thoughts from the mind of a Gemini-rising astro auntie. I love finding this in my inbox! You can sign up here
• Martha Crawford has started offering a free, one-hour public Open House on the first Friday of the month via zoom at 2pm est, + a new Group-Group begins this month. Martha’s ongoing Community Discussions continues with trans Pastor Wendy Vie Trittin—Christianity: Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It. If the donation is prohibitive, use this 100% off coupon code when checking out through the Sign Up button: 7YV1WYR

resistance + refusal

the US is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand
here’s what you need to know

• shout out to Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck for telling Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to go fuck himself, legally speaking
• Amy Sherald Cancels Her Smithsonian Show, Citing Censorship: the artist said that she made the decision after she said she learned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking President Trump
• these brave souls protesting ICE in Ohio
• nuns + grandmothers protesting the genocide in Gaza
• people getting trained to hold Mass Meetings all over the country to bring new people into the work of organizing for a better world thru local elections + noncompliance/immigrant solidarity—join a Mass Meeting near you +/or join me at the next SURJ Action Hour on Wednesday, August 6 at 8pm est

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I'm sitting here with...my grandma Faye's thimble collection that I inherited when she died. And when she died, I would put these thimbles—like 10 of them—on my fingers and type poems. And we were making art together. I think almost all art is made by the dead and we don't know it.

—Andrea Gibson 8/13/1975 - 7/14/2025

I think the more people who just…passively witness, who feel absolutely nothing, who say, “I just want to not think about this and live my life,” and I think about how when the heart atrophies, there is so much of your actual human self that cannot be retrieved. If you are allowing your heart to become useless so that you can “just live your life,” you are not living.

—Hanif Abdurraqib

what’s inspiring me now

• Talia Lavin’s writing, particularly Notable Sandwich #129: Pan Bagnat: “You don’t need to be perfect to taste a perfect thing” + Writing Into the Wreck: “Being furious all the time is uncomfortable. It feels like wearing a too-small jacket, hot and tight against the skin. Being afraid all the time cramps the stomach. Being both makes legs, brain and heart hurt.”
• Bryan Dunn’s “This Will All End In Tears” #mood
• Dean Spade’s new podcast: Love in a Fucked Up World: “As somebody who a lot of my life put all my eggs in the basket of sex and romance, as a place to feel...parented, loved, seen, to deal with my neglect wounds, to be like: Oh! I am already being held by the most divine lover, parent…
• I truly love when Mandy Patinkin loses control over his emotions #relateable
• Andrea Was Waiting To Give You This Gift: “Andrea has said many times, ‘I write so much about my diagnosis not to remind you that I am mortal, but to remind you that YOU are mortal.’ My hope is that this poem doesn’t make you sad or worried, but invites you—like Andrea invites us—to ‘raise what will end you, with love.’”
• Hanging Onto Hope Amid the Horrors by Kai Cheng Thom: “...we as a collective of human beings living through societal and environmental collapse are called upon to embrace the wisdom of two things at once: The real and true horror of what is happening, and equally important call to keep fighting to save the world we love.”

Carolyn Yoo’s Zine Lab + my Zine Lab cohort—we’re inspiring one another to make amazing zines! Stay tuned for tarot zines from me coming soon…

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?

Correspondence testimonials:
…a unique reading that validated needs and desires within me that I'd always struggled to articulate and own for myself. Throughout the whole reading, I found myself hand on my heart saying "YES, that's me." Not only do I feel more seen and understood, I feel more unapologetic and confident bringing all of myself into the world.
— Beth Howard, author of Song for a Hard-Hit People: A Story of Anti-Racist Solidarity from a Coal Miner's Daughter, forthcoming from Haymarket Books, Spring 2026

I loved the entire offering from start to finish! I felt seen, cared for and full of curiosity while listening to their reflections on my chart. I love having the ability to pause, rewind and rewatch this recorded reading. I would recommend this offering for anyone who is seeking inspiration or new perspectives. I was surprised by the .pdf that accompanies the reading with tarot info and more!
—Elena S.

Listening to this was SUCH a treat and so far and above any other reading I have ever received.
—L.M.

planting seeds for the next world

Where life is precious, life is precious. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore

I was having a moment recently with a comrade + conspirator where I shared how pointless it felt to write anything for this newsletter right now. I toyed with the idea of having this month’s installment in its entirety say: Free Palestine. It’s been nearly two years, + the death-making + cruelty continues relentlessly. + not just in Gaza. ICE is tearing families apart, kidnapping people off the street, all over the US.

This year I signed up with SURJ to coach people who are holding Mass Meetings to bring more people into the work of sustained action in this critical moment. My coachee in northwest Iowa said to me the other day: it’s a tactic they use to get us to not do anything. She was referring to people in her community who are afraid to come to her Mass Meeting, but it applies just as well to my “anything I do feels pointless” feelings.

As it turns out, my coachee had to cancel her Mass Meeting, scheduled for this Saturday at her local public library, because of destructive storms that tore through her neighborhood. Her son’s car was totaled by a fallen tree. The SURJ community is currently raising money to help him replace it. This is how all of us will survive: by having a big community than can help us when we need it.

I used to think + talk about the Judgement arcana as a call to live one’s life in such a way that we might die with a light heart. I don’t believe that’s possible anymore, + probably it was never possible.

Every day I wake up shocked that we’re all still going to work as our government participates—with our money, our tax dollars—in deliberately starving an entire population before our very eyes. + then I remember how Biden announced that Covid was “over” in 2022. Back to normal at all costs, go to work. How long can this continue?

Joanna Macy + Andrea Gibson joined the ancestors last month. Two beautiful souls who planted uncountable seeds for the next world. I am looking at framed photographs of both of them as I write this, so nourished + grateful for the offering they made of their lives.

+ so I’m making my art + teaching my classes + working at the library + learning how to make things with my friends, conspirators + comrades. I’m making offerings morning + evening at my altars + getting on the floor to run my hand over the sleek, vibrating body of my purring cat. I am walking the same state route I walk every morning, noticing the changes in the creek, the color of the mountain, the shimmering leaves of the cottonwood trees, the sounds of the late-summer insects. I am mowing the lawn + repotting plants + leaving emotional voice notes in my group chats + practicing feeling more instead of going numb.

Because at the end of my life—whenever that comes, + none of us ever knows when that will come—I may not die with a light heart, but I aim to have planted as many seeds for the next world as I possibly can.

Find out more about my tarot work

To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

—Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?