Offering: May 2025

Winter review, updates on home, & a tarot class!

Egret at Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Plum Island, Massachusetts.

I’m teaching a tarot class on zoom next month! And have openings for one-on-one sessions. Scroll all the way down for details. <3

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here, so I thought I’d offer some personal context this week. I spent the winter in Maine, and for the last many weeks have been trying to flesh out next steps. It was my first stretch of time on the New England coast in two decades, and though I’ve been known to weave big dreams just to find I can’t endure my own choices, this one really lived up to my hopes.

In January, I announced that Offerings would shift toward a full-time focus on grief, loss, and mourning. Despite the fact that I lose more paying subscribers than I gain every week, this strange shapeshifting newsletter has somehow managed to be #12 in Substack’s philosophy category! I feel proud of and grateful for this, because the process of making Offerings is one of the most enjoyable things that I do in my life. Your reading and contributions are what make it sustainable, so thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As a reminder, hitting the like button is a big help. :)

Anyway, I had a great winter. I found a beach that I loved, and walked on it every day twice a day with my dog. You’d be surprised how many things on a beach stay the same day after day in the winter. I took tons of pictures (should I make an oracle deck?), found so many treasures, and saw a full moon rise next to a lighthouse.

I also fell in love, took western-style horse riding lessons, and developed a new obsession with field recording. After uploading one of my frozen tide recordings to this interactive map of sounds from all over the world, I even got an email from a listener in Taiwan who said it was one of the coldest sounds they’d ever heard. I saw the message during one the winter’s many unwanted, too-early-even-for-me wake-ups, and I beamed at my phone in the dark.

The day I made the icy tide recording, I’d rushed home to grab my recorder after Mango and my afternoon walk. As I pulled out of the driveway, a giant owl was perched on the mailbox. The winter was full of moments like that. One of the big hopes I had about coming to Maine was that my second book would start to cohere, and it has. Much more to come about that.

While in Maine, I also had and published this conversation with philosopher Ami Harbin on her book Disorientation and Moral Life, which continues to influence my thinking on experiences of profound uncertainty, and another with philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe on his book Grief Worlds about phenomenology and grief. I’m proud of both these recordings—and am absolutely loving audio work—and hope you’ll have a listen, if you haven’t already.

Mailbox owl, another normal magical coastal Maine winter event.

Within a week of beach walks everyday I felt like my nerves were uncoiling. Being so close to where I grew up, there were so many small things I just got. Ways of speaking, being, dressing, decorating for holidays, eating, greeting. It was a very cold, snowy winter, but the days went by fast. As my seasonal lease edged closer to ending, I still didn’t know much but I knew I did not want to leave.

After a (relatively speaking, of course) arduous process, I arranged to stay longer. I found a new spot a bit further north but am in-between places this week. I’ve been revisiting the parks I grew up by, including the Parker River Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island where I made this recording of reeds creaking in the breeze. It’s one of the best I’ve made yet, I think!

On my beach walks these last months I would often think (as I do, anyway) about Tuan Mac Cairill’s life as a salmon. He’s finally come back to the rivers and lakes of Ireland after spending time far out at sea. He loves it and tells how “delight and strength came to me again…What a joy…¹”

After reading novelist Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative a few weeks ago, I started to think more about moments of recognition in stories like Tuan’s, and also my own. Hammad describes such re-cognitions as involving some sort of remembrance; something dawns on a character, something they may not actually wish to recall, but are now tasked with learning to live with.

In Tuan’s case, it’s the realization he has when he’s as far from home as a being can be. As James Stephens tells it, “far away in the sea, I remembered Ulster, and there came on me an instant, uncontrollable anguish to be there. I turned, and through days and nights I swam tirelessly, jubilantly; with terror wakening in me, too, and a whisper through my being that I must reach Ireland or die.²”

The journey back is incredibly hard, but it’s worth it. Tuan gets home and it’s all that he knew it would be. And it’s far from the end of his story. Hammad, who is British-Palestinian, is writing about recognition within the knowledge and context of forced displacement, apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. And, while it goes without saying that my experience of coming home by choice after decades away also by choice is not comparable to the Palestinian situation, when I think about home it’s hard not to think about Palestine.

It’s hard not to think about how the Irish poet James Stephens, who published the version of Tuan Mac Cairill I work with, put out his collection Irish Fairy Tales just one year into Irish independence after centuries of brutal British colonization and genocide. It’s hard not to think how revolting it is that an American billionaire is emboldened to say “We’re gonna have Gaza…There’s nothing to buy” on national television.

Referring to Irish novelist and poet James Joyce’s use of epiphany in stories, Hammad notes that epiphanic experiences are often less moments of clarity than they are markers of a shift in perspective, “a kind of partial turn…more often a disclosure that knowledge itself is precarious. Some meaning may arise, precipitating the ending, but it does not mean closure.”

My own recognition toward home, and of needing to be home, and of things home may come to mean has not yielded a sturdy perspective. It’s given me many feelings and the desire to listen and re-listen to very specific, placed bits of sound—common reeds, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Eastern Towhees, frozen tides—and a longing to stay. It’s given me a sense of what it means to be cunning in the way poet Robert Bly describes cunning, as the instinct to re-arrange one’s whole life around something one’s touched that is true. It’s given me sorrow and fury.

So there’s my update I guess. I’m home and unsettled, in Maine for the foreseeable future. I’m listening as much and as close as I can. I’m discerning ways forward when ways forward feel less clear than ever.

And, I’m going to teach a little next month! About tarot, which I always love doing. I’ve also got some spots open for one-on-one sessions later this month. More below.

Tarot for Change: An Introduction to Tarot for Spiritual Practice will be held on zoom on June 7, for those curious about how I’m thinking about tarot these days. This class is a combination of practical instruction and promiscuous theorizing, including nuts and bolts of a 78-card deck, plus things I’ve come up with about what the cards may have to do with, what we might think of ourselves as being up to when we pull them, and how we make meaning. For more details and to register, click here.

One-on-one sessions have been a real joy, these last months. For more about what these sessions entail, click here, and to book a session, click here.

Thank you as always for being here, and we’ll see you next time.

Onward,

Jessica

As a reminder, hitting the like button is a big help, so please do it if you feel inclined.

You’re reading the Offering for May 2025. Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including Sunday Meetings and workshops. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

1. From James Stephens’ telling in Irish Fairy Tales.

2. From James Stephens’ telling in Irish Fairy Tales.