Beltane & Spring’s Blessings—Celebrating Life
[caption id align="alignnone" width="2016"]
My home altar, with flowers from my front yard [/caption]
Dear Friends,
Beltane is a Sabbat that starts at sundown today and ends at sundown tomorrow. It marks the midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. It is a celebration of life. May the magic of Spring in all Her glory bring us some measure of grace and relief during this uncertain time.
For me, this time of COVID-19 and physical distancing feels like a karmic accelerator, bringing excruciatingly close many feelings and shadows I’ve been efficiently rushing past my whole life—even as a former monk who sat still more than the average person. I think this karmic acceleration is happening on a collective level as well.
Things I’m practicing now: slowing down, receiving myself fully, resting, spending time by creeks and under the night sky, savoring small, simple pleasures and unplugging from business, busy-ness, productivity and pressure. I’m also practicing accepting the range of my emotional world (harder than it sounds! How about you?)—from numbness and distraction to grief and fear, plus heavy doses of gratitude and humor.
I’d love to hear what you’ve been practicing, and how you and yours are doing.
Aware that we are all in such different settings and situations right now, I extend a heartfelt wish for each of us to find what we need to stay connected to ourselves and each other.
With love,
Shea (aka Zuiko Ikusei)
she/they [why is this here?]
sheainthecatskills.com
[caption id align="alignnone" width="1224"]
My grandmother, Charlotte Settimi, turns 94 today! My grandfather, Caesar Settimi, would have been 98 today. [/caption]
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- My grandmother, Charlotte Settimi, who turns 94 today—Happy Birthday, Grandmom!
- Project Resilience—a community fund and local food distribution effort in Ulster County, NY to support residents impacted by COVID-19—and all the local restaurants that are participating, including Peekamoose in Big Indian (still serving “farm to feast” fare + cocktails to go!), and all the amazing locals who are delivering meals to people who need them. I live in an amazing community, and that is truly inspiring.
- The work and teachings of Sarah Faith Gottesdiener
- Covid Classics Instagram feed
- Weeping trees—willows, cherries, birches and pines
My friend Bethany Saltman and her newly published memoir, Strange Situation: A Mother’s Journey Into the Science of Attachment. This is the book we all need to be reading RIGHT NOW.
What’s inspiring you now? I would love to hear about it and include it in my next newsletter…
PS—I got to participate in a Tarot Roundtable last month with some fellow tarot geeks. Check it out to learn more about my approach to reading. Thanks to Michael Kaup for organizing it and being a superlative host!
[caption id align="alignnone" width="560"]
Visit my online shop to purchase original artwork [/caption] [caption id align="alignnone" width="1280"]
New in the Shop: Water Life II, 2020 . 11 x 14” Watercolor on paper. [/caption]
Card of the Month: Mother of Pentacles
I selected this month’s card, inspired by my friend Bethany Saltman’s new memoir, Strange Situation. This is one of my favorite cards in the Wild Unknown deck. Those stable lines of green, blue and purple provide the soothing backdrop to this image of mother love. A doe at rest, yet completely alert—a teaching that animals expound so effortlessly—while her spotted fawn dozes untroubled against her warm, solid body. It’s an image of a feeling we are all born needing to fulfill.
I’ve been reflecting on the ways that Western psychological thought emphasizes our childhood relationship with our primary caregiver—in most cases, our mother. And there is certainly much material for us to mine here about why we are the way we are, the things we got and didn’t get, and how that’s playing out for us. In hearing Bethany talk about the journey of writing her memoir, it dawned on me that I, too, had been telling a story about my childhood—who I was and who my mom was and what that all meant—that actually isn’t true or useful anymore.
The stories that feel so inherent to our identities can trap us—not least because they are hard to see as stories. And yet, because they are stories, they can change. By shifting our perspective, encountering empowering information, or just by seeming sheer chance, as we get to know ourselves and learn to receive ourselves more fully, our old, limiting stories can crack open. We can begin to tell new stories, better stories, stories of solidarity and liberation.
It’s not incidental that our culture places so much blame on our mothers. How would patriarchy continue to function if we all turned and reached back to reclaim and reconnect with our mothers, grandmothers and matrilineal ancestral lines? If we saw that the problem is not our mother (or our father, or men, or other women, or trans or non-binary folks), but rather the way that white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism sever our connection to the feminine, to the Earth, to each other? To vital and powerful aspects of our own nature?
I’m speaking as a 44-year-old queer white cis woman, and I invite you, whatever your social identities, to consider how these systems of domination and oppression have estranged you from your own sources of power, and from solidarity with others.
I recently learned from feminist scholar Silvia Federici that the etymology of the word “gossip” is: “a person related to one in god.” How did we go from “being siblings in God” to “spreading rumors”? An important project of proto-capitalism and the Church was to break women’s solidarity, in any and every way, including through language. The power and strength of women derived largely from their communal bonds, their work and connection with each other.
This shift in the meaning of the word gossip is just one minute blip in a centuries-long project that has estranged women not just from each other, but from their own bodies and wisdom. The same brutal techniques of violence and oppression used against women, “weak” men, and those outside the socially sanctioned norm were exported from Europe and further refined for use in the “New World” against Indigenous people and enslaved people from Africa.
Patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism are always at play—in our public spheres and in our private moments. They are soaked into our bones and marrow, our cells and genes over countless generations. That being said, this programming is not inherent to our nature. But to exorcise this programming takes active measures—study, solidarity, self-love, contemplative practice, communal care, mutual aid, regenerative healing, art-making, activism, awakening our pleasure and excavating our desires, (re-)connecting with Mother Earth and her rhythms and cycles, seeing our bodies as Mother Earth Herself.
We won’t find any of this in the stories we’re going to be fed about “back to normal.” It can’t be bought through capitalist consumer culture. It won’t come through sacrificing each other. These are resources that are already inside of us, longing to re-awaken, and to re-awaken together.
How are you divesting from the stories and systems that have kept you small and separate from the great power that is your birthright—the power to imagine and create a world centered on healing, justice and care? How are you fulfilling the longing to feel safe, seen and felt in a profoundly uncertain time of physical distancing from others? What are the ways you’re finding to turn inward, to seek and find that warm body of “home” inside yourself? How are you turning what you find there toward the collective, trusting that your unique gifts are valuable to others and to our collective liberation?
Find out more about my tarot work.
Want to hear more? I pull a Card of the Day and write about it on Instagram and facebook.
Card of the Month pulled from the Wild Unknown Tarot Deck.
[caption id align="alignnone" width="560"]
Zoom link to join Online Tarot Circle on Wednesdays at 6:30pm [/caption]
WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?