01 Mar 2025 7 min read monthly musings

March 2025: feeling secure

9 of Pentacles artwork by me

the rippled surface of a creek with snow and ice along the edges — *thawing*

So much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads. —A Tale of Two Cities

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, February was unbearably cold + the bleakness seemed to extend in all directions, even as the light lengthened + the songbirds grew more raucous. I wonder how this lead-up to the spring equinox is finding you?

Congratulations to the Blanket Raffle Winner: Merrill! Thank you to everyone who donated 💚 If you donated but did not win, please feel invited to send me your address so I can send you a little treat…we raised $660 for Elena’s GoFundMe (+ there’s still plenty to go)!

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

I’ll be offering Asking Good Questions in April, here’s what past participants have said about it
A new Study Tarot Series cohort starts in May ⭐️ read what people have said about the experience
I’m thrilled to be embarking on a nearly year-long, online arts-based research project with my dear friend + conspirator Elena Solano that begins at the end of this month with Trust in Ground
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—starting March 9!
I finished writing about all 78 arcana for my forthcoming book, 78 Faces of Power

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

There’s a coup happening in the USA: Here’s what you need to know

resistance + refusal

Chris Kluwe: “I will now engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.”
Protect and Resist in the First 100 Days with SURJ
what using your platform can look like
Milton, NY dems
this + this + this + this + this

for cis people who are listening, it really is becoming an existential problem for trans people…
—Margaret Killjoy

Talk and organize with a fervent dedication to undoing the myth that trans people should be scapegoated for the suffering of poor and working people. The billionaires and their crony politicians love a scapegoat. But trans liberation and class struggle are the same struggle. And the billionaire and political classes are the real enemy.
—Kai Cheng Thom

Budgets tell us a story. Consider the discrepancy between how much New York City allocates to keep a single person in prison for a year (an average of $115,000) and how much is allocated to support a public school student for a year ($32,284).

—Chloë Bass

what’s inspiring me now

the OFMD Craft Fair (OFMD = Our Flag Means Death, a tv show about queer pirates). these queer crafters opened an auction on February 18 to benefit the Campaign for Southern Equality's Trans Youth Emergency Fund + set a goal to raise $5,000. They hit that goal in eleven minutes. As of my writing this, they’d raised over $55k for queer kids in the South ❤️‍🔥
Leonard Peltier walking out of prison after nearly 50 years of wrongful incarceration
#TeslaTakedown actions all over the country
Choosing the Uncertain Path by Martha Crawford: “The challenge of the era, it seems to me, is to learn to live into the uncertainty of it all, to become more suspicious of facile optimism or certain doom. Fate intrudes on our willful paths, and maybe life in all its fullness only emerges in the uncertain spaces where human will and the Hand of Fate converge.”
Not exactly inspiring, but my broken heart reminds me I’m still alive: 9-yr-old Aya carried a doll with no head: “I used to brush her hair every night. I don’t know where her head went. I carry her body everywhere and I hope someone could fix her. My mom said, ‘She’s gone, Aya.’ But I didn’t want to believe it. I still don’t. I just hold her, even though she’s broken.”
watching art get made
Ema Shin’s Hearts of Absent Women + Devoted Body (h/t Colossal)
these documentaries about natural dyeing—Indigo: A World of Blue + In Search of Lost Colour
these prints by Irish artist Strangford, these quilts by Ann Brauer

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?

meme of a black and white photograph of a crow holding a lit match in its beak, dark, gothic & spooky things, lighting a woman's cigarette, me

paper collage artwork with a text background, flowers and circles and a swimmer wearing a pink swimsuit in the foreground and the words 9 of Pentacles — *9 of Pentacles artwork by me*

feeling secure: 9 of pentacles

As promised, I’m going to share some musings on the tarot’s Minor 9s now + in the coming months, as we live into this Hermit year…

The 9 of Pentacles is the power of joyful rigor in service of a felt sense of security. The power of making the beautiful, of being disciplined about the life we actually want. The power of sticking to the plan for what we long for our life to be + feel like—not being seduced by FOMO, distraction, shiny things on our feeds.

The power of the 9 of Pentacles is satisfaction, of knowing how to be satisfied*, of knowing in our own bodies what that experience feels like. It is the power of making a meticulous + thoroughgoing study of satisfaction, + then dilating our capacity for it. It is the power of maturing into knowing there’s no switch that, once flipped, makes us feel good forever, but rather that being satisfied—satisfiable*—is something we can choose to devote ourselves to every day. It is the power of satiety to make joy + liberation an experience we can cultivate, grow, nourish + touch every day.

The 9 of Pentacles is the power of pleasure in our own hands, not left to chance, not out there, in what someone else has. It is the power of inventing + investing in the place we live—inside the walls + outside. It is the power of a feathered nest, a beautiful space of our own creation where our body can surrender into enjoying the fruits of our efforts.

The power of the 9 of Pentacles is the space we live in being a living altar to beauty, pleasure + satisfaction. The power of everywhere our eye lands it finds something beautiful, meaningful. It is the power of personal curation, of moving our favorites to the front, of rotating the books + art + decor to match our current mood, or perhaps the mood we’re longing for. It is the power of a well-curated space to feed + affect our entire body-mind, to call us back to beauty, wonder, gratitude + our connections with others.

The 9 of Pentacles is the power of alone in our environment + feeling great about it, making a study of + cultivating what makes us feel secure + then giving that to ourselves. Of learning how to nudge + encourage ourselves to do what we most truly long to do. It is the power of re-learning what discipline + rigor are for outside the scarcity-inducing imperatives of disaster capitalism, compulsory education, or any one of the other deadening contexts in which we learned to make ourselves do things we didn’t want to do. It is the power of these systems will never love us + our true security can never be found there.

The power of the 9 of Pentacles is reclaiming rigor as a daily practice of taking our pleasure + security seriously, of knowing that living a new world into being requires that we model + enact it thru our behavior every day, + that resourcing ourselves for it means feeding our senses the most beautiful nourishment possible.

_________

from 78 Faces of Power

Find out more about my tarot work

I don't think the point is: Why are we different? Why have we refused to walk one of two narrow paths, but instead demanded the right to blaze our own? The question is not why we were unwilling to conform even when being beaten to the ground by ridicule and brutality.

The real burning question is: How did we ever find the courage? From what underground spring did we draw our pride? How did each of us make our way in life, without a single familiar star in the night sky to guide us, to this room where we have at last found others like ourselves? And after so much of ourselves has been injured, or left behind as expendable ballast, many of us worry “What do we have left to give each other? Upon what basis will we build something lasting between us?”

I think we have a whole world to give back to each other.

—Leslie Feinberg