28 Oct 2025 7 min read 6 of cups

november 2025: the power of poignancy

6 of Cups from Lettie Jane Rennekamp’s Many Queens Tarot

There’s a thing that worries me sometimes whenever you talk about creativity because it can have this kind of feeling that it’s just “nice.” It’s not: it’s vital. It’s the way we heal each other. —Ethan Hawke (h/t Amelia Hruby)

Dear Friends,

Here in the Catskills, the yellow leaves on the maple tree at the corner of my house bathe my office in a golden light for a few weeks every October, + it is glorious. The air is cooling, the darkness is growing, + the mountain is shaking herself bare.

Today, I find myself thinking of the 40+ million people (myself included!)—10% of the country—who can’t access their SNAP benefits. I wonder how living thru this time of chaos + wonton cruelty is finding you?

May we suss out the possibilities for loving + caring for each other inherent in so much uncertainty.

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

I’ve added a new cohort of the Study Tarot Series beginning in February, meeting on the 2nd + 3rd Wednesday of the month at 6pm est: get in on it! Find out what people are saying about it 🤓 watch me talk about it
Cory Nakasue + I have a new Correspondence offering: a 30-minute recorded Upcoming Transits + Tarot Prescriptions reading!
Elena Solano + I continue our online arts-based research project The Symbolic Lab with Trust in Community Saturday, November 29 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
Elena + I also set our theme + schedule for next year’s Symbolic Lab, beginning in January—Revolution: a Close Reading of Nemik’s Manifesto. We’ll meet the 2nd Friday of the month at 4pm est/1pm pst. Details to come…

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

yellow leaves heaped on the ground — *fallen yellow leaves*

Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast

PSA: did you know that the Covid vaccine doesn’t prevent Covid infections?

It can lessen the severity of an infection + is 100% worth getting, but it won’t protect you from getting Covid…+ mild or asymptomatic infections can result in immunodeficiency + disability due to Long Covid.

I know it’s hard to keep up in the absence of public health infrastructure. Trust me: I never wanted to be so informed about this shit! The only things that can prevent/mitigate the spread of Covid are:

N95 + KN95 masks (check your local library for free masks!)
clean air (DIY version)

An air purifier alone won’t provide much mitigation, but masking—even one-way masking—can really help protect you, your loved ones + your community.

If we all masked at:

grocery stores
in healthcare settings
on public transportation
in airports
on planes

we could go a long way to keeping each other safe this season. Now is always the perfect time to put a mask back on! 😷

study tarot series with an image of a colorful abstract circular artwork, new cohort starts February 11, applications are open, meets online 2nd and 3rd Wednesday at 6pm est, offered by donation/pay-what-you-can — *I recorded* *a new 8-minute video* *about this series…get a sense of what we really get up to in these cohorts!*

you might be interested

I’m participating in an offering by Kening Zhu called Labyrinth Library, + it’s been such a great opportunity for me to do work I typically do alone alongside creative people from all over the world
Martha Crawford’s by-donation/pay-what-you-can community offerings are exactly the kind of “prepping” I recommend #inthesetimes

a white thin man faces the viewer wearing glasses, a green wool jacket, slate colored sweater and tan pants and boots crouches on a pile of peat with the Irish landscape in the background

"Encoded within these [ancient sacred] languages are elements of the belief system of the first humans to develop speech. In the right mouths they can be vessels of revelation. If this is true it should be no surprise that Irish, with all its similarities to Sanskrit, might also be capable of conveying some of these attributes of continuity and communion with distant epochs."

Manchán Magan (pictured above), joined the ancestors on October 2. This passage is from his 2020 book, Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, a book that utterly changed my life. Rest in peace, Manchán.

resistance + refusal

This month, I’m featuring images of clergy on the front lines of the fight against fascist jackboots kidnapping their community members

Images + stories curated by Jack Jenkins, a journalist covering politics + religion

masked fascist jackboots wearing masks and military gear spray chemical weapons in the face of a white man with blonde hair and beard wearing all black and the collar of a clergyperson — *ICE agents spraying chemical weapons at David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, in Chicago; photo by Ashlee Rezin of the Chicago Sun-Times. Writer + organizer Kelly Hayes took* *this video* *of ICE agents on the rooftop of a building shooting Black in the head with pepper rounds; he was cared for by people on-site + is okay. September 19, 2025*

on the left, a masked thug shoots a chemical weapon at a clergyman from 5 feet away, on the right, the clergyman's face is caked with chemical weapons residue and he squints in pain — Jorge Bautista, a clergyman with the United Church of Christ, reacts after CBP agents shot him in the face with a flash-bang grenade in Alameda, CA. Photo on the right, of Rev. Batista’s face caked with chemical weapons residue, by Stephen Lam of the San Francisco Chronicle. October 23, 202

left image: a white woman with long curly hair and glasses speaks into a microphone, on the right, state troopers in tan uniforms and helmets violently arrest this same woman — Reverend Hannah Kardon of the United Methodist Church; photo on left courtesy of the United Church of Rogers Park. Video screen grab on the right is of Illinois State Police pulling Rev. Kardon from a group of demonstrators outside the ICE detention facility in Broadview, IL, before arresting her. October 17, 2025

on the left, a nun wearing a black habit and yellow t-shirt listens to a tall man wearing the hat and uniform of a state trooper, on the right, a white man with white hair and glasses wearing liturgical vestments holds a gold monstrance in front of state troopers — *Outside of the Broadview ICE facility in Chicago, a state trooper tells a delegation attempting to have communion with detainees that ICE has denied their request. Father Larry Dowling, in* *full liturgical garb on the right, is holding a monstrance, used to display a piece of communion bread for worship. October 11, 2025*

a crowd of protesters and clergy wearing bright yellow shirts holds up a large image of Our Lady of Guadalupe against a cloudy blue sky — *Members of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership gather outside the ICE facility in Broadview, IL. Photo credit: Adam Gray/AP. October 11, 2025*

a white person wearing a gold ring and flannel shirt holds a large brown leaf in front of their face against a wall of overlapping gold-colored cat food can lids — *sycamore leaves falling in my neighborhood are bigger than my whole head #findingbeauty* (+ yes, that is a wall of cat food can lids sequining my wall!)

Here’s a statement that might be radical in 2025: ‘bad art’ is still art, not content or slop. “But what about AI?” What about it? It demands that we interrogate the definition of art itself, and therefore here is mine: art is a practice, not a product.

Art is not something we consume. Art is something we do.

Artificially-generated ‘art’ does not fall beyond the purview of our definition of art because it lacks aesthetic merit. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. AI ‘art’ is not art because it is not something that the ‘artist’ has done.

—Bethany Karsten

what’s inspiring me now

Raqib Shaw’s Paradise Lost (thank you, Tamra!): this page describes Shaw’s method: “…applying an acrylic liner on gesso to create a golden line almost like the leading of a stained glass window. He then applies automobile enamel paints with needle-fine syringes and manipulates those with a porcupine quill…” Y’ALL 🤯
i’m not personally on IG anymore, but I do look at the crisis.acting account regularly for what amounts to a unique global vibe-check; CW: it depicts the full range!
When We All Get To Heaven podcast: “…the congregation's refusal to deny their queerness or their religiousness, and the religious things they made out of that very refusal moved me in this way that I could not let go of…”
virtual zine libraries! + this one, too
“A woman stitched together 609 of her state fair award ribbons into a quilt that is now on display in the Smithsonian—and she is headed to Washington, D.C., to see it when she is done at the New Mexico State Fair.”

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?

five quarter-page zines arranged against a brown leather ground with crystals and a feather

here’s what Amanda Yates Garcia recently had to say about my new tarot zines box set, 78 Faces of Power:
“shea fills their zines with collaged color plates, tarot meditations, and quotes from mystic poets like Dogen and Joy Harjo, alongside channeled oracles for each card. Each element comes with its own (delightful!) playlist, weaving music into the magic of tarot. These zines aren’t just art objects. They’re an invitation to create, and a reminder of the joy of participation. You’ll love them!”

6 of Cups tarot card showing 6 black silhouette vases in which flowers and children are peeking out, a sun with a face hovers above — *6 of Cups from Lettie Jane Rennekamp’s* *Many Queens Tarot*

the power of poignancy: 6 of cups

The 6 of Cups is the power of Kindness eases change.* There are no adults, actually. Our trembling heart as the world crumbles before our eyes.

The power of make-believe, play, portals + otherworlds. It’s not too late to have the childhood you always dreamed of. Reclaiming our inner child. Rekindling wonder + amazement, remembering to imagine + invent, leaving offerings to fairies in the woods.

Poignancy: late-autumn afternoon sun cutting thru trees, a few minutes of golden light before the sun sinks behind the mountain. Reverie, laying in grass, watching clouds move. Letting the eviscerating beauty of impermanence pierce our heart.

It’s the power of vulnerability, being with people who see thru our survival strategies + coping mechanisms, our fly-off-the-handle rage + chilly withdrawal, keeping us tender.
___________

this is a distillation from 78 Faces of Power: the Elemental Tarot Zines

Find out more about my tarot work

In tent life, there is an unlivable war—a war that doesn’t begin with bombs, but with the absence of everything that makes life human. It is a war whose weapons are the denial of clean water, the lack of hygiene, the absence of toilets, dignity, and safety. I am not writing this as a distant witness. No—I am writing this from within it. From the ground. From inside the tent. These are not stories I’ve heard; these are the sensations I experience.

—“A Torturous Sanitation Disaster Is Unfolding in Gaza’s Displacement Camps” by Sara Awad, October 25, 2025