Negative capability
Offering for June 24, 2026
I have a few one-on-one tarot sessions still open this summer. To read more about what they entail click here, and to book, click here.
Dear Reader,
For the last several years, I’ve sent Offerings out on weekend mornings and this week I decided I want to do something different. I’ll still send newsletters out weekly-ish, but they’ll come when they’re ready as opposed to the self-imposed deadline of Sunday mornings. My process around Offerings has been shifting as well, and I want to share more about that for those who might be interested.
I started writing Offerings ten years ago, based on advice from my sister, who was in digital marketing then, that I should start building an email list. At that time, Offerings was a newsletter “about” tarot which is to say it was about whatever I was reading or thinking about, and could reasonably tie in with one or more of the seventy-eight ambiguous images I’ve now spent fifteen years looking at.
I moved to Substack in 2021, and in 2023 announced that the newsletter would focus more specifically on grief, loss and mourning. The experience of narrowing has been so good for me. It affirmed something I’ve sensed a lot these last years, which is that slowing down and reading or listening more closely than you think you need to or should is one of the most generative things you can do. Not in in the sense of solutions or answers, but more interesting and enriching questions.
So for the last three years, I’ve read as much as I could about grief. Open access philosophy papers, textbooks when I could access and/or afford them, grief memoirs, and publicly available testimonies like those in the Grief Survey database by philosophers at University of York. I wanted to interview lots of people about their work on grief and related topics, and managed to interview three: philosophers Ami Harbin and Matthew Ratcliffe, and psychotherapist Francis Weller.
I also facilitated two, eight-week philosophies of grief reading groups in which we—a group of artists, therapists, grievers, writers, teachers, and more—read philosophy papers together and discussed them in light of our lives, work, and losses. I hosted four rounds of the major arcana meetings series, where many people spontaneously spoke about grief as we moved through the cards one by one. And I did a good bit of one-on-one tarot work, where I found people’s queries increasingly oriented toward the sorts of questions that swirl as one re-learns the world after loss.
At some point I made the decision to de-center tarot in my writing and work. But the weekly meetings, especially—which were born from my own necessity to be with others during a grief-induced struggle for meaning—yielded an unexpected and deeper appreciation for the cards as a kind of modular school for what John Keats called “negative capability,” or the ability for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.1” (And I trust Keats on this, as he spent his short life “dogged by illness and poverty,” lost both of his parents at a young age, and succumbed to tuberculosis at twenty-five.)
As someone who’s been “reading” tarot for more than a decade, and has never used cards to predict the future, I guess it’s not that surprising I’ve become fascinated with experiences that remind us how little we know and can know about what will happen.2 And I’ve gotten more and more curious about the creative activities we tend to do in such times; pulling cards, reading, writing, talking with others if we are lucky to have others to talk to, trying to discern what’s become and what might-yet-become as we transit the dark.
This week, I’ve been thinking about tarot in terms of theologian Catherine Keller’s “dream reading,” a kind of prophecy that is not prediction, by rather a mode of attending “to what might yet be” through “the patterns of what has already become…”
This is no simple knowing and telling, but a reading so meticulously close it reveals openings for what you did not see coming. And maybe that’s what I’m trying to do here: drafting and revising this letter to you, tracing my steps, looking at what’s become, describing and discerning a way forward that I don’t yet know. As I can imagine Keller might argue (and as I, a non-future-predicting-tarot-card-reader would surely agree) there are more ways to relate with “what might yet be” beyond the binary of knowing / not-knowing.
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