May 2025: being self-responsive
I believe that public libraries offer an opportunity to fight FOR what we want to expand at a time when everything is a fight to block things or to stop things from happening. —Mariame Kaba
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
Dear Friends,
Here in the Catskills, spring is working its magic: green-gold new leaves creeping up the base of the mountain, cherry blossoms, magnolias, redbud, birdsong + peepers. I wonder how this season of new life is finding you?
Artwork for sale! (+ some other special goodies!) check it out
Here’s what I’m up to in the next couple months:
- There are 3 spots left in my new Study Tarot Series cohort that starts this month on May 10 ⭐️ read what people have said about the experience…do you have a friend who would enjoy doing this with you? Register with them at half the suggested donation amount!
- Elena Solano + I continue our online arts-based research project with Trust in Patterns Saturday, May 31 at 2pm est—we’d love to see you there! See what participants had to say about it so far…
- In-Person Tarot Circle at Cygnet’s Way in Kingston returns this month! Sunday, May 25 at noon
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
Martha Crawford is offering:
Riding the Roller Coaster: Emotion & Contemplation, starting at the end of this month: “…explores the important neurobiological, psychological & spiritual functions of our emotions” What if we understood the functions of our emotions, + not just how to repress or express or “manage” them? I think about or use something I learned in this workshop every single day.
A Gathered Meeting to Support Helpers—a quiet space to gather, rest, share & recover: “Those who have assumed helping roles in the community are not only attempting to assist others through this poly-crisis, we are also negotiating the same challenges ourselves. ‘Helpers’ of all kinds are in danger of their own psychological injury through over-extension, and through vicarious and direct trauma.”
Mediumship readings with Karin + clairvoyant readings with Monica—I’ve worked with both of these practitioners + 10/10 recommend!
resistance + refusal
There’s a coup happening in the USA:
Here’s what you need to know
- people showed up + showed out for #HandsOff protests last month
- cross-racial, intergenerational solidarity
- Missouri, Chicago, Alaska, LA
- a powerful person doing something: 10/10, no notes
- Urge your rep to fund libraries!
- The facts about the Constitutional Crisis we’re in
- join a May Day action—they’re all across the country
- join a SURJ Action Hour on Wednesday, May 14 +/or Wednesday, May 28, 8-9pm est—get some orientation to the current landscape from an organizing perspective + then take action with hundreds of other people—it’s an hour!
“There’s a button that the President can push that will get everyone to pay attention to him, and he’s going to keep pressing it because it makes him feel important” is as important to understanding what’s going on as “he actually thinks tariff’s work”
—Cooper Lund
what’s inspiring me now
documentaries about bad-ass women artists:
Joan Baez I Am A Noise: at the end of a 60-year career, legendary singer + activist Joan Baez takes an honest look back + a deep look inward as she tries to make sense of her large, history-making life + the personal struggles she's kept private. I’ve been listening to her 1975 live album From Every Stage 🤌🏻 (I remember every word from hearing it non-stop as a little kid!)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: follows the life of artist Nan Goldin + the downfall of the evil Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty who was greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic's unfathomable death toll
Iris: a documentary about fashion icon Iris Apfel, the 93-year-old style maven who has had an out-sized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades, from legendary late 88-year-old filmmaker Albert Maysles
All About Disciple, an artwork by Robyn Love: “…both texts are pointing to a state of spiritual apathy marked by a slowness and heaviness in the body and resulting in a disinterest in our practice(s). Suffering is soon to follow!”
“Save Your Humanity, Don’t Save Your Job” by Janine De Novais: “Buddhism is not anti-rage so much as it is against letting our feelings hijack our minds, and rage is exceedingly good at that hijacking (as are all the other emotions that, incidentally, the Devil’s workshop we call social media runs on: shame, defensiveness, vengefulness, vanity, egotism, etc.). I am sitting—seething?—in so much rage that I feel like all my Buddhist practice is failing me.”
100 Days of Creative Resistance, particularly these pieces by Carvell Wallace + Christina Rivera
a poem by my beloved comrade Monica, “Dear ones, it is time.” …belonging is not a promise, / It is a process of becoming whole.
Mapping Lunar Beauty: “If one can attribute artistic qualities to visuals not created with artistic intent, the compositional logic behind these maps might be understood as an inversion of process art: Pollack’s abstractions were created by pure impulse, these works by immutable pairings of specific hues with geological substances. The results are gorgeous meditations on color…” (h/t Hyperallergic)
cats co-parenting their kittens: for when you need a break from the horrors
being self-responsive: 9 of cups
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 Cups is the power of a solitary good time, of abandoning ourselves to feeling good. It is the power of knowing what pleases us, what makes us feel emotionally secure enough to be fully present to the internal cascade of experience—bodily sensations apprehended, valences of emotion noted: joy, sadness, nostalgia, longing, ecstasy, despair. This emotional life may or may not include “happiness,” but rather a satisfying fullness of feeling, whatever it is. It is the power of being interested in the subtle textures of our emotions + desires—how they manifest, announce themselves, or perhaps sneak up on us.
It is the power of self-as-lover, of pulling out all the stops to romance + seduce ourselves. The power of being a student of + taking seriously the terrain + architecture of our seduction + fulfillment. It is the power of experiencing our aloneness as full of possibility, charged with sensual aliveness. It is the power of our self-seduction + erotic fulfillment as an experiment worthy of liturgical laboratory conditions.
The power of the 9 of Cups is pleasure-as-practice, of understanding self-love as something that requires cultivation, conducive conditions, repetition + iteration, an experiment in getting acquainted with ourselves to the same degree + extent we do with a new lover. It is the power of pleasure research, of taking a joyfully rigorous + playfully disciplined approach to learning what pleases, fulfills + satisfies us in the realm of beauty + emotional experience.
The 9 of Cups is the power of deconditioning from everything we’ve learned about pleasure as frivolous + selfish. It is the power of longing for + living into the truth that pleasure, satisfaction + fulfillment are everybody’s birthright, + enacting that possibility whenever + wherever we can. The power of the 9 of Cups is the power of liberation—our own + everyone’s—to be the greatest, deepest pleasure we can enact + experience, + aligning our solitary pleasure ever more seamlessly with the process of pleasure + liberation for all. It is the power of: making justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.*
It is the power of moving thru the world with a full cup, of transmitting the grounded, regulated joy of pleasure + fulfillment out in a world of increasingly frightened + dysregulated people. The 9 of Cups is the power of prioritizing pleasure in a culture that incessantly broadcasts the priorities of work + consumption.
The power of the 9 of Cups is the power of wishes made + fulfilled, the power of knowing what we wish for, of being in contact with + utterly familiar with our desires + longings.
_________
from 78 Faces of Power
Find out more about my tarot work
As for the inevitable death, if I die, I want aloud death, I don’t want me in a breaking news story, nor in a number with a group, I want a death this is heard by the world, a trace that lasts forever, and immortal images that neither time nor place can bury.
—Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassona, killed along with ten family members in an Israeli air strike on her home in northern Gaza, is featured in a documentary due to be screened at the Cannes film festival this month. 200+ Palestinian journalists have been assassinated by the IDF since October 7, 2023
