Offering: Equinox 2023
📯 Updates! Announcements! 📯
Image description: A hand is holding a tiny Tarot card, Judgment by Sam Spetner. The card pictures one of those curly trumpets with a red flag on it with sound flying out. The number 20 is written up top. In many decks, this card heralds the dawning of a big change.
Hi Everyone,
I arrived home from Mexico City to autumn in full swing here in Eastern PA. Sweet relief from a pretty harsh summer. Today’s Offering is mostly a check-in with a couple announcements. I’ve got some new offerings that I’ve been fleshing out for a minute and am finally feeling ready to set free.
Mexico City was so beautiful! It was my second time there and I joined a couple friends who are as serious about good food as I am, so we didn’t waste a single meal. Highlights were the menuless, just-eat-as-many-courses-as-you-can breakfast experience at Expendio de Maiz Sin Nombre, tlacoyos from a stand at a street fair, and my friend’s birthday dinner at Masala y Maiz.
The night of Rosh Hashanah it was raining and I wanted to give my friend Sam Spetner a Tarot reading as I do every year for his birthday. Since for some reason I hadn’t brought my cards, we decided to make our own using ink and his fancy watercolors. We only did the major arcana, but we loved them so much that we’re planning to finish the rest back here in Philly. It was really fun and I enjoyed experiencing myself as an artiste.
Image description: A set of hand drawn and water color painted tarot cards are strewn over a blonde wood table. There is an open paint palette and a plate for mixing.
Fall is my favorite season but for secret reasons I expected to be sad this year. By some miracle—I think sometime around the new year’s blasting of the ram’s horn on the 16th—the heaviness of summer took an abrupt turn.
A few days ago this Mark Nepo poem called “Yes, We Can Talk” came across my Twitter feed. These verses in particular say well what I’m thinking of:
Having loved enough and lost enough,
I am no longer searching,
just opening.
No longer trying to make sense of pain,
but trying to be a soft and sturdy home
in which real things can land.
These are the irritations that turn into a pearl
So we can talk awhile,
but then we must listen,
the way rocks listen to the sea
And we can churn at all that goes wrong
but then we must lay all distractions down,
and water every living seed.
All summer long I worked on exactly this: "Trying to be a soft and sturdy home in which real things can land.”
The hardest part has been the terror that if I make myself a soft home for “real things” of the painful sort, they’ll get a little too comfy and won’t leave.
There are only a few people in this world who have ever lived very closely with me and each of them know that I am at times oppressively specific about my routines and living space. I can be a bit Kafka-esque: “My mode of life is devised solely for my writing, and if there are any changes, then only for the sake of perhaps fitting in better with my writing; for time is short, my strength is limited…”
I can be good with a guest for a night or two before I start feeling like my energy is being sucked up and away from all the non-writing tasks that go into being able to write everyday. Listen, I’m not bragging. It’s not cute. No one (so far) likes it. At the same time, I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world for someone like me to have a thing I’m okay with being disliked about.
(I am being reminded of so many things this morning and currently it is this: One of my all-time favorite and most relatable George Costanza moments.)
Anyway, the “real things” I had as houseguests this summer were thorny and heavy and I’m glad to report they’ve gone elsewhere, for now. They stayed longer than I’d have liked and I saw some things I’d rather not have seen but I think I’ll be better for it, in the long run.
I am also big-time loving the poem’s instruction to “water every living seed.”
Behold, this white zinnia—the first I’ve had in three years of Zinnias, I think?—that bloomed in my garden this week right behind my Virgin statue:
Image description: A close up of a white zinnia being held steady by a hand.
Okay. So, on to the announcements!
DAILY CARDS
As some of you know, I got my start writing about Tarot on Twitter through daily card pulls. First in 140 characters or less and then later in 280, I’d write a little caption and pair it with one of Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. After a few years I got really sick of doing them for a host of reasons.
I felt boxed in by the character limit and weirded out by the way people were relating to me. I wanted to write longer-form stuff with more room for complexity. Perhaps most significantly at the start of 2021 I’d grown so disillusioned with my own understanding of the world that it felt impossible to say anything to tens of thousands of people every day with integrity.
Two and a half years later I’m feeling a lot more grounded. I still love working with the images and symbols. They are fruitful for me, and—as always—a useful way to catalog ideas, quotes, ways of thinking, metaphors, and so on. And so, I’m going to start the daily cards again here on Substack!
Don’t worry, it won’t be a daily email. It’ll be a weekly email that’ll go out to everyone with partial access for monthly subscribers and full access for paying weekly subscribers. If you want to upgrade, hit the subscribe button below.
As always this is an experiment. I’ll see how it goes, and how it feels. Do let me know how you like them! And if you don’t like them, simply hit unsubscribe. :)
EXPOSING SECRET TEXTS TO THE FUTURE: A WORKSHOP FOR JOURNALERS
Image description: A flier with an image of a mint green journal and a white bic pen on a pastel plaid fabric. The flyer reads, “EXPOSING SECRET TEXTS TO THE FUTURE a workshop for journalers.”
EXPOSING SECRET TEXTS TO THE FUTURE is a workshop for those interested in the idea that private writings are landscapes, ripe with openings toward un-storied worlds & unusual knowledges. It is a workshop for those who see personal narrative not as a portrait of a fixed true self but a site of selfing & of potentiality, that can be worked & re-worked toward “becoming other than what we have been.”
Participants will receive once weekly prompts over the course of four weeks to write about an area of life they’d like to spend the month documenting. Then, during our live time together, participants will be invited to deconstruct their secret writings.
This workshop is inspired by the literary and philosophical theory and practice of deconstruction, the legacy of philosopher Jacques Derrida, and the applications of these ideas in narrative practice.
During the live session—in the spirit of what philosopher John Caputo calls "exposing a text to its future"—participants will be offered a set of concepts adapted from deconstruction, and then invited to unpack their private writings in ways that will put their most precious and closely held stories at risk.
The cost of this workshop is $125. The fee includes four weeks of once-weekly journaling prompts leading up to the workshop and three hours of live, virtual time in a small group of eight.
Prompts will begin on Sunday October 22 and the live event will be held virtually on Zoom on Saturday November 18 from 3-6 pm Eastern. Since we will be digging into secret texts, live sessions will not be recorded.
Spots will be available to paying subscribers first.* If you’re a paying subscriber, scroll down for the link to register.
*I really would not encourage you to become a paying subscriber just for this. However, if you think you’d enjoy daily cards, a once weekly essay from me, and first dibs on Divinational Interviews (my one-on-one sessions), go ahead and sign up! It’s only $5 a month and you can cancel at any time.