August 2020: Bringing Summer in for a Landing

Hello friends,

This is such a strange, wondrous and terrible time to be living through. I turn and face the wall of green that is the Catskills in August and watch the creek, the ducks and other birds, the late-summer flowers and the tomatoes ripening in my garden. I wonder how you are holding up? What is sustaining you? What are your fears? What are you angry about? What gives you hope? I’d love to hear from you.

As I’ve spent so much of this summer going inside, I’ve also been looking for ways to get politically involved. I’ve added a new Political Action page to my website, where I share some of the resources I’ve found for taking action for racial justice and collective liberation. If you find yourself with an internet connection and a little time on your hands, you’ll find everything you need to make some phone calls and send some emails.

Make sure you know the latest about what’s happening with voting by mail in the state you live in. It took me 90 seconds to get my absentee ballot request form for New York State.

To all of you who have been supporting my work—thank you! It means so much. To make a one-time donation, you can use my tip jar. You can also purchase original artwork in my online shop.

Wishing you nourishment and inspiration wherever you are.

With love,
Shea (aka Zuiko Ikusei)
she/they [why is this here?]
sheainthecatskills.com

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• Beyond the Visible—a documentary about the visionary artist Hilma af Klint. I just keep watching it
• The Pieces I Am—a documentary about Toni Morrison
• Mysteries of the Dark Moon by Demetra George
• The Overstory by Richard Powers—I’m reading this very slowly…savoring it…WOW
• Phone banking with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). Do this from your home, with 300 other people, no prior experience necessary. They’ll train you and offer support—it’s the best! Find out more here
• This episode of The Tight Rope podcast with Cornel West and (my former NYU professor!) Tricia Rose with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez talking about her moral and spiritual journey. At 49:00, AOC talks about her practice of non-attachment—amazing!
• Tarot for the End of Times—a podcast by Sarah Cargill. If you end up listening and enjoying, please consider making a donation to her!

What’s inspiring you now? I would love to hear about it and include it in my next newsletter…

Card of the Month: XVIII The Moon

I was talking with a friend recently about prison abolition, and they said, “I want to live in a world that doesn’t exist yet.” When talking about prison abolition (and other things), people often ask: “But what will we do about….” Not understanding that already—now, within the current system—there are vast numbers of people who are not safe or protected by the state and its systems of policing and prisons. When we ask questions like this, we’re not critically thinking about why the world is the way it currently is. We’re not letting ourselves imagine how else the world might be.

There are many things to bemoan about the overculture—a term I use to refer to cisheteropatriarchal white supremacy, racial capitalism, ableism, ageism, individualism, and neoliberalism (the delusion that the market can solve social or ecological problems). But the one I’ve been bemoaning lately is the overculture-as-thief—stealing our time, energy, money, safety, security, and our imagination. Keeping us rushing around and fixated on the 0.01 percent of life that can be weighed, measured, evaluated, tested, analyzed, proven, seen with the eye, and monetized.

Writer Claudia Rankine has said about white people: “[Their] whiteness limits [their] imagination. A deep awareness of this knowledge could indeed expand the limits—not transcend them, but expand them, make more room for the imagination. A good thing.” Like Rankine, I don’t believe that white people can transcend the ways that they’ve been conditioned by the overculture. And at the same time, it feels like an important and liberating practice for me to notice, become aware of and name the ways that the overculture limits my body, mind, spirit, perception and imagination.

How do we awaken and feed the imagination? How do we daydream and wonder? It’s hard to go inside and be receptive to our inner world when we’re occupied with basic issues of safety and well-being. The overculture keeps us scrambling just to keep up. And as things unfold, more and more people are not able to do even that.

I’ve been spending this summer exploring the other 99.9 percent of life—intuition, imagination, creativity, dreams, visions, energies, the Shadow, the Void, ancestors, cycles, rest, stillness, silence, the elements. I believe these are essential and powerful ingredients for reclaiming the imagination. And they are the realm of the Moon—our unconscious and subconscious, our uncanny—or “uncanned”—mind.

Tarot reader Jessa Crispin: a “logically disconnected but emotionally true atmosphere dominates” with the Moon card. Reader Carrie Mallon advises: “use the imagination with reverence.” The odds of getting lost and running into demons are high. And so is the potential for encountering and recovering gifts and power that we’ll need to imagine a new world into being.

I’m rooting down into the Moon card in many ways these days. Doing things that the overculture doesn’t want me to do, tells me I shouldn’t do, and makes impossible for so many people to do: exploring, resting, playing, creating, communing, daydreaming, feeling, contemplating, intoxicating, journeying, wondering, being-without-producing. Imagining...a world. Saying it out loud is a spell, a dream to dream together.

Housing, healthcare, and a basic income are human rights. There is enough for everyone—enough safety, time, resources, pleasure, belonging, community and care. Punishment has been replaced by healing, repair and mutual aid. Education centers around respect and reverence for life—human and non-human life; an understanding of trauma, resilience, emotional regulation and coregulation; conflict resolution; communication; creative practice and cooperation. The needs and experiences of the most marginalized occupy the center. Healthcare for everyone encompasses mental, emotional and spiritual well-being, collective healing practices, a connection to the natural world, and a deepening of our embodied, somatic experience. We realize our healing and liberation together.

What’s your dream?

Find out more about my tarot work.

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?