July 2025: dreaming demands work
Dreaming demands work. —Zohran Mamdani
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
PSA: the latest COVID strain presents more like an allergy attack—sneezing, sinus congestion—than “classic” COVID 😷 The American Medical Association has a YouTube page; they are doing daily updates on bird flu and other outbreaks since the CDC can not
Dear Friends,
Here in the Catskills, everything is lush + green + loud with birdsong. It’s been wet + hot + cool + gorgeous, with lots of bears + ticks + biting insects amidst the green beauty. I wonder how deep summer amidst ongoing collapse is finding you?
Here’s what I’m up to in the next couple months:
- I’ll be offering Using Tarot to Work with the Dead later this month, on Saturday, July 26 at 11:30am est…
- …+ right after that, Elena Solano + I continue our online arts-based research project the very same day, with Trust in Desire Saturday, July 26 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…
- In-Person Tarot Circle at Cygnet’s Way in Kingston: Sunday, July 27 at noon + Tarot 101 will happen—for free!—at the Kingston Library Tuesday, July 15 at 6pm. N95 or KN95 masks required + provided for all in-person events
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
- Arts-Based Research as Collaborative Practice—an online Community Discussion with Martha Crawford + Elena Solano happening on Sunday, July 13 at 3pm est: “Arts Based Research as a community practice allows participants to engage in a process that centers rest, silence, reflection, play, self-regulation, amplification, intuition, meaning making, and imagination and image and to hold these functions up as forms of power and ways of knowing.” I’m already registered!
- When We All Get to Heaven is a documentary audio project that uses archival audio to tell the story of a queer church in San Francisco + how it got through AIDS in the years before treatment. The show is based on an archive of recordings the church made of its worship services from 1987-1999, + they are raising money for the final stretch of the production!
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
- The Struggle is Permanent: Keep Fighting by Mariame Kaba: "Rather than allowing ourselves to be swallowed by fear because the present and future are uncertain, what if we tried to inhabit and embrace possibility?"
- “Nazi fucking cowards!” a neighborhood ousts ICE
- No Kings day: a compilation—are you looking to take more sustained, ongoing action? SURJ has plans in place for 2025 + beyond—start with an Action Hour: it’s one hour!
- Greta Thunberg using every single atom she’s made of to support getting aid to Gaza with the Freedom Flotilla
- storytelling as resistance
- In defiance of President Trump’s announcement that he was firing her, Kim Sajet—the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery—has continued to report for work
…to play into carceral narratives of innocence and guilt and who is worthy or disposable among people resisting and among people who are trying to survive is wholly unacceptable. Above all, let's not do their work for them. Let's not be so psychologically captured that we join them in blaming or disposing of their scapegoats.
—Kelly Hayes
what’s inspiring me now
- MAMDANI!!!!
- The Goodbye Line: “In a time when so much feels fractured, The Goodbye Line aims to create public intimacy.” (h/t Prisons, Prose & Protest)
- An Affront to the Sovereignty of the Earth—make your offerings to the brokenness by Alicia Enciso Litschi, an essay that broke my heart + nourished my soul simultaneously: “This Saturday is her birthday. She wants no party. No singing. It’s like she knows even though we don’t watch or listen in front of her.”
- screen-free bedtime via…reading books! The algorithm has nothing on my beautiful human friend Quinn, who has been nailing it with her recommendations: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner + All Fours by Miranda July
- Ever Deadly: the first 7 minutes of this documentary about Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq was the most intimate thing I’ve ever watched two people do with each other. Feral, gorgeous + heartbreaking.
- Pee-wee as Himself: I was 10 years old when Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiered. I loved that show. This was a fascinating + nuanced look at an extremely creative human + his incredible ambitions.
Raquel Willis on Marsha P. Johnson: “Marsha teaches us that performance can be a form of protest. That caring for others is political. That imagination can be more valuable than wealth. That defiance doesn’t require perfection—only courage. She reminds us that collectives are stronger than individuals. That joy can coexist with rage. That survival is a legacy.”
dreaming demands work
…affect is important, but it's not the end-all and be-all of intersubjectivity. …our shared reality says we have to confront certain struggles in the world. We have to confront physics, gravity. We share a physical world. We share an economic world of growing inequality. …We can't have collectivity or solidarity if all we have is our vibes in effect.”
—Catherine Liu, Doomscroll, June 16, 2025
Every Saturn-Neptune conjunction feels like the night the “unsinkable” Titanic met the unfathomable Atlantic Ocean: man’s towering constructs—be they our bodies, ideologies, or empires—are permeated by mysterious forces indifferent to our ambitions and ideas of control.
—Ang Stoic, June 18, 2025
Feeling and thinking at once can guide our actions, and together with some intangibles…can form a foundation for our intuitive life. Yet it’s hard to tell the difference between thinking and feeling, impulse and intuition when we don’t call on the wisdom of what grounds us. When we don’t call on the wisdom of the land itself.
—Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, “Empire, Fear, and Feelings,” June 22, 2025
…dreaming demands work.
—Zohran Mamdani, June 24, 2025
...something I've been trying to do in my most recent books is to talk about the connection between the material and the emotional, the political and the psychic. In 2023, I put out a book called The Age of Insecurity, which is about…the way that economic insecurity has all of these affective consequences. It makes people…more vulnerable to fascist appeals.
—Astra Taylor, Movement Memos, June 26, 2025
As we cross the threshold into the second half of 2025, this is what I’m attuned to: the interpenetration of earth + water: structural/political reality + emotional/intuitive reality; fact + delusion; rigor + flow. This aligns with our collective Hermit year, the Hermit being the earthy archetype of Virgo: analysis, data, facts, information, + the Hermit’s teacher card, Major Arcana 18: the Moon, watery archetype of Pisces: oceanic feeling, vibes, compassion.
Within 10 days in late June, I had encountered all of these articulations, excerpted above, of this tension between the seen + unseen worlds, between structural reality, + the permeating undercurrent of affect, emotion, intuition + the unseen worlds. How do we find the right mix of earth + water as we live into these unprecedented times?
When I think of finding the right mix, the Temperance arcanum comes to mind: not moderation, exactly, but rather committing our attention to reality as it unfolds + shifts, so that we can participate in shaping change. Alas, who doesn’t wish for that magical attentional light switch: find it, flick it on, + go on automatic pilot? Set it + forget it, amirite? Temperance, however, demands our ongoing participation, our utter engagement with our life, asks us to consciously partner with change + co-creating the future.
With the distraction economy so frighteningly refined, the horrors of what’s happening here + abroad so unceasing + unbearable, the reflex to detach + check out is understandable. This is an excessive, shadow version of the Moon: delusion, dissociation, a cottony detachment from reality. On the other hand, we can bury ourselves so deeply in the details of every horror that’s unfolding, be so wedded to facts, that we find ourselves in the Hermit’s shadow: perfectionism, sinking in endless analysis, thinking we can “know” how things will turn out.
We are living in interesting times, + nothing we do is going to save this world, the one we’ve known our whole lives; it’s dying. + I believe this is something to be deeply felt + grieved. This, to me, is the power of the Moon arcanum: reconnecting to our feral nature, the creaturely part of us that wails + laments at the scale of the losses—the ones that have happened + the ones to come. Connecting with this wild, oceanic part of ourselves that refuses to pretend that this is all normal + not affecting us. There is tremendous energy in that wildness that we need right now.
For me, so much of living right now is knowing what I’m devoted to, what matters most to me, + giving that my time, energy, attention + resource. Which means being in a conscious practice of not engaging with everything: every breaking news alert, every email, every demand for my attention. How do I practice rigor in how I rest + maintain my mental health? How do I bring care + trust + authenticity to my most important relationships? To my organizing work? How do I make time for my art practice—the thing that when I’m doing it makes me feel most alive, most in touch with my purpose—when the need for everything, everywhere, is so great? This, to me, is the power of the Hermit arcanum: trusting my experience, discerning my priorities + aligning my choices with them.
What does it mean for us on a collective level—in our families (chosen + otherwise), in our friend groups, workplaces, neighborhoods + communities? What does it mean for the ways we take action to resist hypernormalization, the disposability of ourselves + our neighbors, + the ongoing march of end-times fascism?
What does it mean for you?
How can the Hermit help you:
- discern your priorities?
- deepen your trust in your own experience?
- put some boundaries + protection in place around your time, energy, attention + resource so that it’s available for what you’re committed to saying YES to?
How can the Moon help you:
- feel more deeply what needs to be felt?
- grieve your losses?
- stoke your imagination to dream into possibility?
What helps you find the right mix of rigor + flow, rest + engagement, earth + water?
Find out more about my tarot work
“We are being exterminated… and we know we are being exterminated,” Amina says. “The world knows it, it sees it. But it continues."
—Mondoweiss, June 19, 2025
For the first time in nearly 560 days, I also received the care and prescription drugs I had sorely needed for months. They were two very basic medications: a multivitamin and an antibiotic. Nothing more.
—Abubaker Abed, May 12, 2025
