Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, we’ve had some snow, our first below-freezing cold snap. The creek is running more fully again, a subtle, icy turquoise jewel that flows amidst the stillness of the season. I’ve begun filling the bird feeders my former housemate Mary tended to for years with such care, + the juncos, jays + cardinals are a reminder of profound aliveness amidst winter’s bare beauty. I wonder how this turning of the year is finding you?

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

• the new Study Tarot Series cohort that begins this month still has a few openings!…check out the cohort schedules + what people have said about the experience
• 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…plus a Venus Retrograde Workshop…

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

• Cory Nakasue + I talked about all things Capricorn season on the most recent episode of The Cosmic Dispatch…watch or listen!
• Writer + teacher Janine de Novais talked about her book Brave Community on Bill Ayer’s Under the Tree podcast last month: “It's asking the question you know you don't want to ask when you're in the class, when you're in the meeting, when you're in the conversation and it's going a particular way and you want to say, but you don't.”
• Dean Spade + Susan Stryker on trans resistance—scroll down to the series of short videos from their convo ❤️‍🔥🤌🏻
• my dear friend Robyn gifted me Kimberly Garland’s Cosmic Flowers Coloring Book + friends, when I tell you it is delicious 🤓

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons. I watched this documentary multiple times: being radical in the mainstream ❤️‍🔥
• Daniel Hunter talked Tactical Disobedience with the Brown sisters on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast: “…I feel like heresy might be a gift to the movement right now, for us to get to stay and experiment with some heretical things...”
• Conclave: high Roman Catholic liturgy! Beautiful vestments! Ralph Fiennes is 50 shades of stressed out! Stanley Tucci is hot! Isabella Rossellini is a witchy nun! Heavy breathing thruout! Twists + turns!
• Frank Duffy’s Queer Crow Death Magic Tarot: a MASTERPIECE + true artist deck. The images are exquisite + the guidebook is pithy, fresh + visionary. The power of restraint in this deck reveals the artist's deep, intimate relationship with the arcana. Don’t forget the guidebook!
• Martha Crawford’s Circling the Drain: Living Intentionally With Mortality 16-week workshop. Martha has been thinking, writing, living thru + experimenting with this topic as deeply + thoroughly as anyone I’ve ever encountered, with a cultural competency + structural analysis that is rare in spiritual circles. Sign up for her newsletter to find out when she’s offering it next!
• it’s a great time of year to watch NPR Tiny Desk concerts…some of my recent faves: Doechii, TV On The Radio, The Magnetic Fields, Audrey Nuna + Hayden Pedigo

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, The New Yorker, May 16, 2005

the hermit’s curriculum for 2025: trusting our experience

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized. This also means being trustworthy—not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you.
—Daniel Hunter, founder of Choose Democracy, coach + trainer of movements around the world

When I realized some months ago that 2025 would be a collective Hermit year—2 + 0 + 2 + 5 = 9; the Hermit is Major Arcana 9—I was puzzled. It seemed like the opposite of what we were going to need in a year poised to be even more precarious + chaotic than 2024. As these winter months have deepened, however, it’s begun to seem like the exact prescription for what lies ahead.

People dear to me are struggling to make ends meet, buried under piles of debt, being terrorized with medical bills + cut off from essential social services. The circus-game-show atmosphere of corporate news, social media + the disinformation landscape makes it increasingly difficult to know what’s really happening, what’s really true + what’s most important. As a friend said to me recently: they want to keep us terrified + busy. Indeed.

Major Arcana 9: the Hermit is a prescription for trusting our experience—what we see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, + perhaps most importantly: what we feel in our own bodies + hearts, + what we feel between ourselves + those we live our lives with. Corresponding to meticulous, detail-oriented Virgo, a mutable earth sign devoted to the real, the Hermit invites us into communion with the source of information that needs no fact-checking: our direct experience.

If we do not yet have a practice of sifting thru the noise to get at the truth, attending closely to our experience, honing our intuition, or developing relationships of deep trust that can help us discern what is real in these times, 2025 is the year to devote ourselves to that curriculum. If we are engaged in these practices already, the call is to deepen, refine, iterate + transmit what we are learning.

The “news” will be feeding us fresh crises day after day for the foreseeable future—the latest spectacle of absurdity, cruelty + mass death—with the narcotizing production values of a reality TV game show. It is essential to recognize this corporate-driven chaos as a form of psychological warfare to which we are subject as long as we consume + emotionally react to a never-ending “news” cycle. The Hermit calls us to tune our dial closer to home—to the information coming from our own bodies, minds, hearts + relationships.

The Hermit moves at the speed of walking. In a culture that is speeding up, asking us to do more + more with less + less, the Hermit is a radical intervention + invitation to slow down, do less + pay more close attention. This can feel impossible, + in many cases, for increasing numbers of people, is impossible. And yet: it is exceedingly difficult to make contact with our ground of being otherwise.

It can feel hard to trust in slowing down, grounding + turning toward the details of our experience during a time of such upheaval + precarity. Shouldn’t we be doing more, right now? All the time? The Hermit invites us to consider if being in a constant state of urgent reaction during a period of great uncertainty is, in fact, the move.

The Hermit confronts us with the premise that the world is not happening out there, but rather is the directly experienced reality that we are co-creating every day—intentionally or habitually—thru our thoughts, words + actions. And the Hermit’s syllabus revolves around an imperative to practice, rehearse, create, experiment with + iterate this here-and-now world—day after day, detail by detail, interaction by interaction—for the rest of our lives. Take note of how this makes you feel.

The Hermit calls us into a rigor + discipline applied to the quotidian, the situational, the “mundane.” Instead of grand gestures, heroic maneuvers, or facile pronouncements of our ideals + values, this year calls us into practice: making it more bite-size, more intentional, more specific, more continuous, more iterative + responsive. It is a time for realizing—for making real—our values + desires thru our everyday behavior. We create a world of connection + care by enacting connection + care, at every opportunity. This starts in our own bodies, hearts + minds + interacts with our relational world.

It’s understandable to hear the words rigor + discipline + feel an internal groan. We are deeply socialized into convenience culture, an expectation that things should come fast + easy, that every problem can be solved. “Rigor” comes from the root meaning “to stretch;” “discipline” from the root meaning “student.” How might we be ardent students of what it requires to stretch ourselves across the gaps between what we believe + profess, + what we actually do? Stretching our practice of + hence our capacity for deep feeling, embodiment, truth-telling + grounded action?

During the course of this year, when up against feelings of isolation, despair, fear, hopelessness, or desperation, ask yourself: how can I make my practice of connection in this moment smaller, more granular? How can I practice sitting + connecting with what is real, + reaching out, calling in + asking for what can soothe + tend? How can I offer this to myself + others?

Across the zodiacal axis from meticulous, earthy Virgo is oceanic Pisces, Major Arcana 18—the Moon. These two arcana are numerologically related: 1 + 8 = 9. In a framework developed by Angeles Arrien + elaborated on by Mary K. Greer, the Moon is said to be the “teacher” of the Hermit. The Moon is an arcana that invokes both fear, delusion + illusion, as well as getting weird + trusting our instincts. The Moon holds out a reminder that we are both human, + just under the surface: feral + creaturely.

This year, the Piscean influence of the Moon can either lead us into switchback, dead-end warrens of disinformation + delusion that leak our vitality + leave us pacified, ineffectual + vulnerable to others’ certainty. Or: it can support the Hermit’s work of sitting in deep trust of our embodied feelings, sensations + intuitions. It can pit us against each other for the sake of the ruling class’s priorities, or it can connect us thru our deep desire to creatively nourish + care for each other.

Both of these arcana, or mysteries, are about moving in the dark. We are living in uncertain times. These arcana hold profound medicine about navigating under the radar, with enough light to see by + signal our radical presence to seeking others, but not so much light that we draw unwanted attention to our disobedience, resistance, refusal + practices of radical care, creativity + magic. This moving-by-night curriculum invites us to consider how we will care for each other outside the broken institutions of a crumbling empire. The deep trust of self + other that the Hermit is calling us into is the beginning of a journey to learn to see with our whole body-heart-mind when things are murky.

In the coming months, I will look at the tarot’s Minor 9s to see how they support + inflect the Hermit’s invitations for 2025…stay tuned.

In the meantime:

• In what daily, specific ways are you developing + deepening your self-trust + your trust in the people you are most closely connected to? What helps you do this? What makes this harder?
• What does your experience of trust feel like? How do you know its specific, idiosyncratic signature in your own body-heart-mind? What small practices support toning your self-trust every day, so that when big stuff arrives, you're already familiar with its flavor + feeling?
• How are you curating + limiting your intake of media in order to support feeling grounded + connected to your own experience + most important relationships?
• What practices are supporting the development + deepening of your intuition? How does your non-rational knowing communicate with you? How do you know what you know?
• What people in your life are reliable sources of processing + discernment? How are you checking your views + perspectives against those of people you trust?
• What practices are you engaged in with people in your life that deepen trust? How are you surfacing the things it’s most important to talk about right now: resources, care, needs, support, plans for emergencies, illness, death + dying?
• How are you sourcing power + wisdom from your feral, undomesticated, creaturely self? What are the animals you live with or in proximity to teaching you about instinctual wisdom?
• How are you attuning to cycles + change—your mental + emotional cycles + changes, + the cycles + changes of the moon, seasons, rivers, rocks + creatures?

Find out more about my tarot work

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?