2020: It’s here!
Happy New Year,
I hope however you marked this turning of the decade was meaningful, or fun—or both!
New Year’s Eve is my birthday, and I’ve spent the last 14 years marking it and ringing in the New Year in silent retreat at Zen Mountain Monastery—a deeply enriching and meaningful experience.
This year, I made a conscious decision to spend the day alone, looking back on the lessons of 2019 and looking forward to what I want to create in 2020. It was also deeply enriching and meaningful, I’m delighted to report.
Also delighted to report: on the evening of January 31st, I’ll be offering a Tarot for Self-Study workshop at the Phoenicia Library. If you’re local, please come—it’s FREE!
I am excited to share my inspirations with you this month. I spent much of December giving myself over to reflecting and visioning, and I came across some things that really got my creative juices flowing…
Let’s take good care of each other through the rest of this winter.
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- Emily Wilson is the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English. If you’re not sure why that’s a big deal, read this or listen to this. It is beautiful, riveting and incantatory. Iambic pentameter for the common people! Loved getting together with friends to read it aloud.
- Proposals for the Feminine Economy by Jennifer Armbrust of Sister. Highlight: 100 Ways to Make More Money—it’s not what you think.
- Following the trail of references in Armbrusts’s Proposals (above), I found The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth. A taste: “We are all happiest when we are demonstrating in physical reality what we know to be true about ourselves.” Wow. Writing my “money autobiography” was a challenging and enlightening experience!
- Writer, activist and public intellectual Rachel Cargle started a fund to provide financial assistance to Black women and girls seeking therapy as a 30th birthday present to herself in 2018. She ended up raising $250,000! (The Loveland Foundation is now a 501(c)(3), so donations are tax deductible.)
- The Ultimate List of 400 Personal Values—I spent a lot of time with this last month. Such an enriching (and personal!) exercise to cull the list to the essentials.
What’s inspiring you now? I would love to hear about it and include it in my next newsletter…
New in the Shop
Tarot session gift cards. Give the gift of a one-hour tarot session to someone you love.
Starscape Note Cards—now available in sets of five. Printed locally!
Card of the Month: Three of Cups
Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” comes to me when I see this card, and that’s a pretty good place to start, actually. The feeling of that song—uplift, joy, optimism—is what we experience when we’re with people and in environments where we feel safe, secure, loved and like we belong. This is a card about our group relationships—with friends, family, co-workers, communities. Do the groups we move in make us feel good? Safe? Joyful? Curious?
Just as we get caught in our own internal loops and habits, we develop relational habits, too. Gossip, complaining, doomsday-scenario/news-cycle hydraulics, revisiting the past and painful memories, or revisiting some idealized fantasy of the past are a few examples.
It’s possible to practice and grow healthy relational habits, too. Next time one of your people reaches a goal or shares some success—celebrate them. Ask to hear all about it. This is called mudita, or sympathetic joy. It’s happiness at someone else’s good fortune or accomplishment, as if it were our own, and it’s one part of a profound Buddhist teaching called the Four Immeasurables.
When a song you hear or a movie you see or a particular quality of sky makes you think of someone you love, let them know that. Who of us doesn’t want to hear that someone we love was thinking of us? As many a wise one and sage has said: what we pay attention to grows.
My wish for you this month (and this year, and forever onward) is to dig in with your people. If you don’t have people, make it your business to find some. Isolation, especially during this approaching dark heart of winter, can be mentally, emotionally and spiritually unhealthy and hard to interrupt. But you can do it. Reach out, find a recovery meeting, a religious community, a group of people doing activism or political work that you support. Connect with others. Keep reaching out until you find people that you feel safe and good with.
When you get with your people, I invite you to consider taking a relational risk. What does that mean? Try connecting in a way that you haven’t before, but maybe always wanted to: read a book aloud together, make art together, do political work together, study something together. Share some part of yourself that you long to share but haven’t before. Notice what happens when you do that.
Our deepest wounds happen in relationship, and relationships can exacerbate or heal those original wounds; usually it’s some combination of the two. Tarot reader and social worker Jessica Dore says, “So much of healing work is practicing and modeling healthy ways of relating.” Some things heal inside of us, in solitude. But some things only heal when we show up vulnerable and authentic in relationships of love, trust and mutual support.
Find out more about my tarot work, or schedule a tarot session.
WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?
