June 2020: Igniting Our Desire for Justice & Liberation

Dear Friends,

I am humbled by how challenging this time is. The isolation of quarantine and social distancing is, as a friend said to me recently, “The Big Squeeze.” It’s showing us what we’ve been practicing, where we’ve been putting our attention, and the choices we’ve been making, individually and collectively.

Spring has been both exquisitely beautiful here in the Catskills, and challenging on many levels—emotionally, mentally and spiritually. I’ve slowed my pace way down and am making time for the things that feed me—tarot, spiritual training, writing, art practice, working my Al-Anon program, gardening, and communing with trees and creeks.

And while I cocoon in my cozy bubble, the world continues to burn. Which brings me to this message for those of you who are white like me (cw for BIPOC: racial violence): COVID-19 is exposing our country’s systemic racism like an x-ray, from every possible angle. The effects of this virus, combined with ongoing state violence, are a kind of genocide by default of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). If you haven’t already, I encourage you to gather with other white folks and do something. Shock and outrage are not sufficient responses to violence that has been ongoing for centuries. This isn’t a matter of being a good person or doing the right thing. The lives of BIPOC, our humanity as white people, and our collective liberation are at stake.

Thank you so much to those of you who continue to support my work and allow me to support my local community. If you find value in my work but don’t wish to purchase a tarot session or artwork, my tip jar is open.

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

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• This recently compiled list of anti-racist resources for white people. Thank you to Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein for compiling it and to Lilly for sharing it.
• Coming out July 14th—Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, the ladies behind my favorite podcast of all time: Call Your Girlfriend.
• Jessie Driscoll’s Crystal Skulls Tarot Deck, with guidebook written by Rachel Pollack—it looks amaze balls!
• This amazing poem by my friend Brett Price
• Not able to get out in nature? Check out this amazing photo/video library at my friend river’s new website (sign up to receive their newsletter!)
• The Heart podcast’s new series Race Traitor

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

New in the Shop

• Ritual Consultations Because ritual makes visible our internal landscape, it can support us in shifting our behavior to align with our deeper values and intentions.
• “Creek,” 2020. 22 x 30” watercolor on paper. See close-ups of this new favorite painting of mine in my online shop. 50% of the proceeds from the sale of this painting—and all of my paintings—will go to the Phoenicia Food Pantry.

Card of the Month: VIII Strength

Note: I am addressing this month’s offering specifically to white people. To my BIPOC friends, of course you are welcome to read, but please be warned that there is mention of racial violence in this post.

In this image, we see a woman who has coaxed a lion into a posture of rest and relaxation, her arm draped over his big lion body. How did she do that? I’m guessing she didn’t yell, or threaten, or push or pull. She didn’t force or control or defend, ignore or deny. The Strength this card refers to—patience, inner stillness and love—is what’s required for coaxing this wild beast out of hiding and bringing them to rest beside us.

On a personal level, I’ve used this card to understand and affirm the challenge of emotional self-regulation, the ability to use my higher functioning to let in and allow and regulate the wild fluctuations of my nervous system. I’m 44 years old, and I’m still learning to do this, to sit peacefully side-by-side with dysregulation, activation, anxiety, fear, rage, numbness, dissociation. In my experience, it is only through patience and self-love that I have been able to begin to do this. Self-hatred does nothing to soothe the wild beast; it only riles him and makes him bigger and scarier in his hiding place.

Another way of looking at the Strength card is as an illustration of our superpower as human beings—the ability to intentionally work with our impulses, strong emotions and desires to live a life deeply rooted in our values. There’s an awful lot of life-force energy in our wildness. Why waste it fighting with ourselves? With others? With life? Better to use it in service of what is most important to us.

Actualizing this superpower requires knowing what our values are. Not abstractly, but actually. Without knowing what is most important to us, we are vulnerable to all manner of outside influences. Not much in the overculture encourages this kind of self-knowledge. Best to just move along with the herd, keep your head down, and take care of your own. Feeling bad? Take this pill, buy this new thing, make it go away.

But there are many good reasons to feel bad. And the extent to which I as a white person am not able to feel that badness is the extent to which white supremacy has estranged me from my ability to feel empathy when others are in pain. I may not be Amy Cooper, calling the police on a Black man minding his business, but a.) I absolutely do know what it’s like to be out of my mind with rage, self-righteousness and entitlement and b.) within my quiet, comfortable life, I can choose to “not think about it” or “take a break” from knowing about the ongoing mass killing of Black, Indigenous and People of Color through public policy and state violence—violence that has been going on without end since European colonial settlers arrived here. This is how I’ve been socialized as a white woman.

But there’s more: my inability to feel my own pain as a white person—around my estrangement from my body, from deep feeling, from Mother Earth, from communal care, from the traditions, wisdom and culture of my ancestors—is yet another way that my socialization as a white person has dehumanized me.

What if, as white people, justice, healing and liberation were what we longed for most? What we yearned for most deeply in our bodies, hearts and minds? What would the world look like if, for white people, uprooting white supremacy and acting for racial justice wasn’t a matter of doing “good” or being “good,” but was instead, as Chris says, reclaiming our full humanity, reclaiming our deeply felt connection with “ALL of life”?

I don’t believe there is any way to begin to touch these places of white racial training and trauma in my body without a deep desire to do so, without trusting that the longer I avoid this work, the more estranged I become from my heart, from life. The more my spirit atrophies. The more incomplete I realize my own healing and liberation to be. It’s important to appreciate that everything in the overculture supports my silence, my inaction, my apathy and complacency. But in my experience, the heart ultimately longs for healing. The spirit longs for true liberation, not numbness and false comfort.

How do we as white people generate the desire to do this difficult work? We cannot only be moved by graphic videos of police murdering Black people. If burning cities are the only thing that move us to act, well, that is not a sustainable model for anti-racist action. One of the most important pieces of my own anti-racist journey has been studying the history of my white European ancestors. For me, learning this history has helped me begin to touch the grief of my own dehumanization under white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. How else but by dehumanization could I continue to live comfortably while Black, Indigenous and People of Color continue to be targets of state violence and land theft?

So if you are interested in practicing anti-racism, I urge you to learn more about your own ancestry and the millennia-long history of violence in Europe that was the training ground for the settlers who came to the so-called "New World." Not so that we can play the victim. But so that we can reclaim something of what it cost for our ancestors to become "white" in the United States. I urge you to get in touch with the feelings associated with what white supremacy does to estrange us from our hearts and our empathy, and from the strength and wisdom of our ancestors before they became "white." This is the best piece I've found so far, by David Dean, who co-taught a course I recently took through White Awake.

Once I began to study that history, I came to understand the absolute necessity of embodied anti-racist work. I’ve been studying structural oppression for nearly 25 years, and while that certainly gives me a lot of context and analysis, the intellect cannot touch the heart of the matter. Only the body can.

When I started to do that kind of embodied anti-racist work, I met the lion: my own white racial trauma. The wild, out-of-control activation that surges up when I am called out for centering whiteness in a mixed-race group, or for engaging in white solidarity by being silent or mealy-mouthed in the face of a racist comment. The shaking, wordless fight-or-flight that blooms inside me when a Black friend tells me how my words hurt them. The silence and paralysis that seeps from my numbed nerve endings, passed down through generations of white people witnessing and perpetrating gruesome violence against Black, Indigenous and People of Color. The freezing of my heart that has been passed down through my ancestral line for centuries.

When I learn to meet that lion with Strength—with patience, inner stillness and love—and with other white people who are also meeting their lions, anti-racist work becomes an imperative. The flame of desire lights up my heart, fuels my actions. It’s not a good deed for someone else. It’s not something I should do. It’s what I long for.

I’ve also found it helpful to think of my antiracist work as wholly integrated with who I am—my gifts, talents, and interests—and not some outside thing I need to fit myself into. Whoever we are, now, whatever our life looks like, now—how do we take those very ingredients and employ them in service to uprooting white supremacy? This is a creative process. To be sustainable and effective, antiracist action must be wholly integrated with our life.

I was taking a walk in my neighborhood recently and came across two white men in their late 20s talking to each other on a corner. One turned to me and said, “It’s an opportunity, isn’t it?” I asked, “What’s an opportunity?” He said, “This whole situation we’re in right now?” And without breaking my stride, I said, “Easy to say if you’re white.”

I tell this story to illustrate that unless antiracism is something that you practice every day, it won’t be there when you need it. My intention wasn’t to shame these men; I said my words with love. I implicated myself in my own statement, throwing my lot in with theirs. I’ve gone through my angry, shaming-other-white-people phase, a phase I believe most white people committed to anti-racism go through. It’s awful and there’s a lot of clean-up to do, but ultimately, it humbled me and helped me build my love-muscle around this work. Now I want to do everything I can to urge, implore, cajole, and encourage white people to get to the work of liberation—their own and the collective’s.

I am here for you as a resource. Do you have questions? Do you want to role-play scenarios around what to say or do when you hear a loved one say something racist? Do you need to offload some thoughts and feelings that you feel guilty or ashamed about to clear your decks for doing the work? Looking for ideas and resources for learning more or talking to your friends? I am here for you. Please reach out!

Here are some ways that I practice antiracism:

• Addressing white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy as a spiritual matter through my daily liturgy
• Writing about tarot through the lens of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and individual and collective healing and liberation
• Reading books, listening to podcasts, and following social media accounts of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC)
• Classes, workshops and anti-racist trainings
• White affinity and cross-racial anti-oppression groups
• Making the subject of white supremacy and its intersections with patriarchy and capitalism a central part of all of my relationships with friends, families, teachers and mentors
• Tithing a dollar amount every month to organizations that center BIPOC
• Raising money for organizations that center BIPOC through my tarot work
• Understanding that uprooting white supremacy is the work of white people and doing everything I can to encourage and educate white people within my sphere of influence

What are your deepest held values? Are you practicing antiracism? If not, why? What stops you? What are you afraid of? What is in the way? What would help? What would you need to start in earnest? If you are practicing antiracism—how do you do it? What gifts, talents and interests do you have that can be employed in the service of anti-racism? How can you generate desire in your heart and body for a just and loving world? What would you need to face the lion? I’d love to hear from you.

Find out more about my tarot work.

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?