Consider that the climate safe haven you may be looking for is "true multi-racial democracy that gets money out of governance and promotes global solidarity and mutual learning and support." —Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, January was cold. The creek froze in places in the most beautiful patterns tinged with turquoise. Giant sheets of ice clinging to boulders. How do the birds survive when it’s this cold!? I wonder how this cross-quarter day, midway between the winter solstice + spring equinox, is finding you?

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

• my Online Workshops are on the calendar thru April…
• I’m thrilled to be embarking on a nearly year-long, online arts-based research project with my dear friend + conspirator Elena Solano—The Symbolic Lab: Trust. Join us each month to explore trust thru a theme…
• Cory Nakasue + I are offering a new duet consultation called The Correspondence that presents key stories + patterns in your life as revealed by your birth chart…read what people have said about the experience! We’re also offering Beyond Love + Strife: A Venus Retrograde Workshop in March
• Elena’s sweet dog Truman crossed the rainbow bridge on January 27 💔 + the bills remain…she + I have cooked up some goodies, the proceeds for which go to her GoFundMe 🌈

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

• Sign SURJ’s Gear Up Pledge!
• if you want a slow-drip version of my monthly newsletter, follow me on bluesky!
• Martha Crawford’s Riding the Rollercoaster: Emotions & Contemplation workshop begins this month (I’m already registered!): “Most of us learn very early to see our emotions as problems, as distractions, as disturbances that need to be banished or fixed, or else as commands to impulsive actions. What if they are something else entirely?”
• Trans-led organizations need funding + trans community leaders need an investment in their leadership. Consider making a recurring donation to the Transgender Strategy Center

resistance + refusal

• acts of public defiance like this + this + this + this + this—it doesn’t look one way!
• I’m getting my news from Kelly Hayes’s Organizing My Thoughts newsletter. She includes links to the most important articles she’s read + also includes context, meaning-making + calls to action. Offered for free, please consider making a recurring monthly donation if you find it useful because the labor she’s doing of literally digesting the “news” + noise out there is ❤️‍🔥
• mutual aid isn’t easy, but…
• always keep our eye on the ball

Knowing who to be mad at is praxis.

—Mariame Kaba

what’s inspiring me now

• perspective
• ART: like Colossal (I subscribe to their newsletter), handmade artist books, the Black Gold Tapestry: Sandra M. Sawatzky has made a 21st century work of art relating the saga of oil, global societal change, + energy transition through the power + beauty of 67 meters of hand embroidery.
• speaking of art, I’ve been bingeing episodes of Portrait Artist of the Year + my friend Elena also made a 20-minute video of her painting watercolor flowers
• Emily Hall’s dreaming of a new world: rituals to grieve together. “We need dreamers to vision new worlds. / We need organizers to fight for our communities. / We need artists to create beauty and joy. / We need witches to cast spells of healing and protection. / We need rituals to grieve together. / Most of all, we need each other.”
• Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, hosted by Margaret “Magpie” Killjoy is one of my favorite podcasts! She recently did a 2-episode series on The Great Dismal Swamp and 200 Years of Revolt in the US South that was 🤌🏻 Ya ever wonder why we didn’t learn this in school?
• A talk by Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which runs the Signal messaging app: Feelings are Facts: Love, Privacy, and the Politics of Intellectual Shame: a debut of new research and analysis, focused on emotions + the affective register—love! shame! intimacy!
• A Glimpse by Martha Crawford: “We are just drops, or maybe smaller still, atoms, particles in drops. We live for a moment, and we dissolve. Anything we think, feel, attempt, or enact is a drop in the bucket always. What if that is liberating, empowering, holy, miraculous, transformative—and not merely terrifying?”

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?

major arcana 15: the devil—entering our villain era

I started joking with my tarot students late last year about “entering our villain era” when I saw the Devil arcana showing up again + again in our pulls. Often read as bondage, oppression + addiction, the medicine of the Devil is liberating these energies so that we’re able to access + wield our deep libidinal powers with intention.

The dominant culture needs us to be steeped in shame + insecurity, treating our bosses, spiritual teachers + other authorities like surrogate parents that we need to please, training us to believe that being a good girl, doing the most + earning the gold star will keep us safe + ultimately satisfied. The powers-that-be need us tied up in these knots in order to do their death-making, resource-hoarding, chaotic + violent work. Which is why de-shaming + liberating together is so crucial right now.

We receive “rewards” for being “good” + playing by the rules: jobs, promotions, the temporary good graces of those who control resources + and access to other things we want + need. The cost, tho, is that everyone who is excluded from these so-called rewards by virtue of their race, gender, citizenship status, zip code, disability + financial precarity is left to fend for themselves. We reassure ourselves of all the ways we are not like “those people,” + go about the business of protecting our little corner of imaginary peace.

While those who hold political + military power continue to sow violence + chaos, it’s time for the rest of us to see how we have been trained by capitalism + individualism to sacrifice each other for some temporary benefits + rewards. It is time for us to see thru their divide-+-conquer tactics + realize that no: it is not immigrants or trans people or our neighbors who voted for Trump who are the threat. It is time to see that we are truly all in the same boat, + we must wake up from the dream of security thru sacrificing others.

What follows is a curation of some of the best articulations I’ve found of what it means to start divesting from seeking fake rewards + instead start investing in each other…

These executive orders on banning federally funded entities from recognizing trans people or disallowing them from using the bathroom are not self-executing or immediately enforceable. They require formal rule making at a minimum. They are a scare tactic. Ignore and do not comply in advance. —Alejandra Caraballo

Many of us get caught up in expressing opinions online, or want to be seen doing good work by others, but are less prepared to do underground work, work that is illegal or rule-breaking, and work that needs to happen covertly. …This is a time for sustained care for one another, careful rule-breaking, and disobedience in the face of illegitimate authority. —Dean Spade

Witnessing and disapproving will not save us. We must be willing to act and refuse to act on the basis of what we know is right. We must build a rebellious culture of care in defiance of a death-making culture of greed. We must reject the disposal of our fellow human beings. Rather than allowing this fascist oligarchy to invisibilize its violence by cloaking its harms in criminalization, we must be willing to become criminals. To be orderly and cooperative in a fascist state is not a virtue. We must be prepared to live and act defiantly, deriving no legitimacy from the illegitimate brutes who would govern us. —Kelly Hayes

We cannot take necessary action in the face of evil without harnessing the wolf and all that it represents. We cannot make such decisions with our simple, young, idealistic humanity. We must know when to allow our response to be directed by a well harnessed, primal, animal instinct. —Martha Crawford

via an anonymous account on bluesky: Hello, a group of us made something heartfelt that we think could help people. It’s an [role player game]-style guide for surviving an authoritarian and oppressive regime: Survive the Tyrant.pdf: “The single most valuable thing you can do to help defeat the regime is to build relationships of trust. The regime tries to separate us and make us fear each other to distract us from how they are looting the nation. A network of mutual trust and mutual aid can be an extremely powerful force. …A small number of strong connections is best. Even just one ally can be all you need. The quality of your relationships matters much more than the quantity.”

from the C.I.A.’s very own Simple Sabotage Field Manual: “Frequently you can ‘get away’ with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, ignorance, over-caution, fear of being suspected of sabotage, or weakness and dullness due to undernourishment.”

Find out more about my tarot work

But there are momennts, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

—excerpt from Marie Howe’s poem “What the Living Do”

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?