All the Things I'm Dreaming Up For You!

Hey all,

Well we are a week into 2019 and this is my first blog post. I spent New Year’s Day being admitted into the hospital overnight because of ongoing health issues. We still don’t know what’s wrong but we’re going to figure it out. I’m home, I’m with my cats and my extremely beloved roommate, and I’m slowly easing my way into work for the year. Which means I’m off to a slow start but I’m determined to have a fantastic year in all areas of my life no matter what. So as I’m dreaming and scheming and writing I thought you might want to know what to look forward to throughout the year!

For starters, I am working on several pieces about tarot and/or witchcraft aimed at artists, as well as a similar set aimed at multipassionates. I will eventually teach classes on those things this year too but I have quite a year up until the end of March, and my book comes out in May so it will be after that.

I’m also really nervous but excited to bring some original content about chronic illness and mental illness and tarot & spiritual practice. I’m nervous because I don’t ever want you to think that you shouldn’t seek medical care when that’s what you need. I don’t ever want you to think that you can wish, hope, or essential oil your way out of a serious and debilitating illness. What I DO have to offer are tips, tricks, spreads and spells for aiding the rest of your care regimen and boosting your confidence to heal and make those illnesses manageable. I’m taking my time with this and I want it to be right. It may even be ambitious for this year, but certainly I’m in the planning stages.

I am literally always prepping pieces and content about using tarot as a form of healing and empowerment, collectively and individually especially for marginalized people.

In addition to a new workbook or e-zine about one of the topics listed above, I’ll also have a Tarot Keyword List for Creatives, Radicals and Other New Age Misfits coming out in the next several weeks.

Finally, I have been promising the world an essay about my journey out of restrictive (though self-imposed) Christianity and into occultism and alternative spirituality for a long time. This is just a one of essay, and may have follow up pieces with tips and tricks along your own journey. It is coming sometime this year. This journey was so rooted in seemingly unrelated trauma and my own queerness though, and untangling it all in my own brain to make it accessible and readable to you all is something else entirely.

In the meantime, I will also be continuing the work I’m already doing. Queering the Tarot articles are getting released monthly on Patreon along with scores of other goodies. The book comes out in May. My #dailytarot series runs almost daily on Instagram, alongside other tarot content and personal posts.

Thanks for following, and thanks for continuing to support my work.

Blessed be y’all,

Cassandra

A Year of Heart: My Hopes, Not Goals For the Upcoming Year

Tonight is the night, y’all. Midnight is going to strike and 2018 is DONE. I am elated, really I am. Mostly what I feel though, is tired. I am so, so tired.

For me 2018 was a year of a mild traumatic brain injury that it took me the bulk of the year to heal from, and heal is a weird word because I still get symptoms if I get sleepy or overwhelmed. My memory is not what it used to be. I am so, so, so much better than I was throughout spring and summer. I am so lucky that my brain injury was only what it was. I am still someone coping with a brain injury.

2018 was a year where I had my heart broken platonically, where some of the people closest to me were traumatized and went through really trying life experiences and transitions. This is a year that is even ending in injury and illness for some of the people closest to me.

This only scratches the surface. One of my business lives almost fell apart. There are stories that are awful that I am deeply embedded in but are not mine to tell. It is a year that I took a step backward financially (thanks to said brain injury) for the first time since I started full-time self-employment. I am ending the year back under the poverty line and that hurts given how hard I’ve worked through it all.

I am sure that I have learned lessons. I am sure that there are things I have gained. I am so grateful for the things and relationships I do have and that is always true. Normally though, at the end of the year, I do this great program and I revel in my success and reframe my failures. I think about what I learned and where I want to go. I write it all down, and I blog a lot of it. This year though, every time I’ve looked at that great journaling program and written down more goals beyond “produce plays, sell books” I have panicked. I’m not ready. I still need to take things slow. I still need to recalibrate. I am not done healing.

I am not done resting. Not even close. This is the hardest part for me. My last two years of college I slept maybe four hours a night. I had a full load of classes, directed and stage managed plays, celebrated Sabbats with the few other Pagans on campus, and pulled a struggling GPA from my previous school into a 3.7 GPA. I had two jobs and an additional one in the summer too. While sick. I graduated a decade ago and until my brain injury I kept that schedule except added in extra hours of sleep and doctor’s appointments instead of classes. Basically the only thing that changed was I slept more and I called that rest, and a reasonable schedule, and healthy. Maybe it was then. It’s not now. Some people thrive on being busy. I don’t. I write better, read better, create better when I am not running from place to place to place. It took a brain injury to teach me that. I’m sure that’s the lesson. I don’t care. I’m still bitter when I should be grateful.

This is not a normal mindset for me, and it’s been really hard to deal with myself in this process. In my life I have dealt with multiple sexual assaults, Lifetime movie worthy toxic friendships, and the trauma I endured in my upbringing with nothing but hope and love and gratitude in my heart for the things I did have. I have been oppressed because of my gender, my weight, my sexual identity, my health, and poverty and that only made me more determined to create safer spaces and try to make change for others going through the same thing. These things, for all of the horrors that they were (and I would not wish any of them on anyone) did not crush my spirit. My heart remained at the center of everything I did for my entire life. Until now.

My heart is not in anything I have done this year. I don’t know why. I’m not really even interested in finding out why, except to say that I want it back. In spite of my aversion to Unraveling My Year, I did still pull some tarot cards for next year. When I asked what my Word of the Year should be, I pulled the Ace of Vessels. Then, I started sobbing. For the first time in months I let myself mourn. The cards were promising my Double Pisces, Cancer rising butt that I would find me again in 2019, and that made it safe to cry and feel now. I am so sad that I worked so hard and this year made me feel like all of it was for nothing. I am so sad, and I am so tired.

Yet even as I type that I am preparing for a rehearsal process for a dream show and a book release in 2019. Obviously there were gains. I want to be there for them, not only in body but in mind, spirit, and HEART too. 33 is a coming of age year for a lot of people as they settle into what being in their 30’s means. I wasn’t here, wasn’t in myself and yet I can feel that I have changed in positive ways too. I hope to be present and accounted for for any changes or growth that 34 brings. I hope to love again and laugh again and mean it this time. I hope that that Ace of Vessels comes true. I hope that not only do I find myself again, but I find my heart along the way.

The Million Dollar Questions: Where Have I Been and Where Am I Now?

Photo By Janet Nguyen Photography

Hello Dear Readers,

I promise this is not yet another blog post where I just rehash the trauma of my brain injury, because where I’ve been in 2018 is so much deeper and more nuanced than one injury (even if that injury did suck literally over half a year out of my life).

When I was blogging before, my monthly posts about everything I accomplished/did/learned (and because I believe in accountability and strength in vulnerability, everything I failed at, struggled with, and didn’t accomplish) where some of my most popular and shared pieces. As I start back up, I want to keep the same personal voice with higher quality material so here we are back at the beginning of the month and ready to roll with some updates.

As a reminder OR as information for new readers, the reasons why I do these “month in review posts” are basically because:

1. Even if people didn’t enjoy them, holding myself accountable for my health, my productivity, and my community is really important to me. Posting publicly what works and what doesn’t keeps me going strong.

2. I get really overwhelmed and excited about all of the great things that exist in the world and I want to share the ones I’ve experienced with everyone and promote some great things.

3. I absolutely love reading personal posts, listicles, and other writer’s monthly round-ups, and I figured if I love those things that much, maybe you do too. My numbers consistently showed that that was true too!

Since it’s been almost a year since I wrote last, I obviously won’t recap EVERYTHING. That would take forever, and without an intense look through my photos and social media and journal from the year I’m not sure I’d even remember them all. (Thanks, brain injury! #stillbitter)

Instead, here are some snippets from my year:

• The biggest news of all: I finished my book! It’s coming out May 1st, 2019 and it is so queer and so personal and still (I hope!) such a great educational tool as you start or continue on your own tarot journey.

• Little Red Tarot decided to archive, cutting short the series that led to the above book. I’ll be doing a Queering the Tarot article a month on my Patreon, which is open for wide release on Monday. I am at peace with this decision and the beauty of the site archiving on Samhain was not missed. I decided to take this as an opportunity to get back into doing things my own way for awhile, and see what exciting new opportunities that leads to this time. The archived Little Red site is here.

• The Column has also decided to archive. I’m still struggling with that, in part because I fell absolutely in love with doing regular arts journalism and haven’t found a new outlet yet in spite of pitching and applying for a few spots. I trust my writing skills and my ability to manifest, and I have so, so much respect for my editor. The struggle is completely in “how to move on” and not any anger or frustration AT ALL. Andy Birkey worked so hard for so long and made this beautiful thing that I’ll never forget being a part of. My past arts journalism can still be found here as the website looks for their best archival options.

• I’ve taught several tarot classes this year. Many Queering the Tarot, Tarot 101 for Creatives and Sex and Tarot as well as a Tarot for Spiritual Use and a handful of others. As a response to those classes, I’ve also got some unique workbooks and an E-Zine in my tarot shop on this website that you can check out.

• Theatre mostly went on hold while I healed, and that’s legitimately okay. I still performed improv a few times, put together a Drunk Queer History or two, and put together an amazing Board of Directors for Gadfly. I also got a very generous grant for my dream show: [Working Title]: 60 Queer Plays in 90 Queer Minutes. That goes up in March and trust me when I say it is a freaking dream team of writers, cast, and crew so far.

• I fulfilled a lifelong dream of performing stand-up comedy and I apparently was good at it? I was VERY bitten by that bug and while I haven’t done it since, one of my upcoming projects is to scope out other opportunities that feel safe and daring at the same time to perform at.
  
  

Same adorable cat.

In some ways, things haven’t changed that dramatically. This was a hard year in both my personal and my medical life, and the past two months have been very trying professionally. Yet I still wake up in the bed I love so much every morning, next to my cats who I adore, in the same apartment I fell in love with two years ago. My queerplatonic partner is still my person, and some of the same people who have ALWAYS held it down for me still do. I am still doing the things I love for a living, by some God’s grace. This was a year of good-bye and of death. It was a year of huge change and very dramatic scenes. It was also a year of rest and recuperation though. Most importantly, it was still a year of love, laughter, and at times, out and out silliness. I am grateful to my core, to the deepest part of myself for these things. I feel gratitude into my bones and oozing out of my pores. I haven’t felt this in a long time, and I hate what it took to get me here. I’m here now though.

My book cover! So great!

As I look forward:

I see my first book being released. I see my dream show going up. I see more time in this wonderful apartment with more of the people who make it and Minneapolis a home for me. I see a successful Patreon and while I don’t know where or what they will be, I do see more really great writing gigs in my future. I see some other more ambiguous ideas right now too: a podcast, more theatre, some vague ideas for adventures. I see such lovely clients and collaborators, especially at my steady gigs like the Eye of Horus, The Future, and Gadfly Theatre Productions. I’m eager to add to that roster too, but I can wait.

I’m also facing something really hard and scary in this Pagan year.

I don’t know when or if I’ll be ready to talk about it, but I will say that I have decided to seek treatment for vaginismus as well as any underlying causes for it. It’s really hard and scary and I have cried every day for the past two weeks as I wait for the right doctors to call me back. I’m keeping things close to the chest regarding writing or talking about it, at least currently. I live most of my life VERY out loud so that others will know they are not alone. I am not in a place to be of service regarding vaginismus right now though. I am not equipped practically or emotionally to answer questions or shoulder other people’s confessions. I don’t know if I could have admitted that before my brain injury. That injury has taught me so much about rest and focus on self. Maybe I’ll just need an outlet and it’ll be this blog after all. Maybe not.

In any case, that is another very important answer to the question of “Where Am I Now?” Because where I am IS hopeful, excited, and well-rested. I am also facing the realities of what happens when you have Avoidant Personality Disorder and a really painful, terrifying problem like vaginismus. Where I am is also petrified, wanting to run and hide, and kicking myself for letting my AvPD convince me to wait this long. I am so emotional about this. There’s not another way to put it. That is where I am though, and that is what I’ve been carrying as I work to build this blog and it’s readership back up.

I obviously don’t want to end on that note!

SO here’s some happier stuff that I’m super into at the moment:

Current Fave Tarot Deck: The Numinous Tarot

Currently Reading (and Loving): Calypso by David Sedaris

Currently Watching: The Good Place, Charmed, and How to Get Away With Murder most vehemently.

Current Fave Movies: The new Halloween which I LOVED and Colette which I can not and will not ever shut up about. To think I used to not like Kiera Knightley?! Honestly what was wrong with me?

Current Favorite Websites: Them is what I read most often. I also like this article about traveling while arthritic.

Current Favorite Recipe: This really easy cucumber salad: Chopped cucumbers, feta cheese (I dump like half of a crumbled brick in there but most people probably use about half of that), and Garlic Expressions salad dressing. Plus whatever else I have on hand. Handful of onions or a couple croutons or whatever is there that meshes. SO good, easy, and relatively cheap once you have a bottle of dressing on hand.

Current Music: Sparrow by Jump, Little Children (the whole dang album), and I still can’t stop with Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer or Brandi Carlile’s By The Way, I Forgive You.

Most Recent Adventure I’m Still Raving About: This place is so much better and weirder and creepier than I ever could have imagined. I promise.

Thank you all so much for being here and sharing this time and space with me. I’ve missed you all! Please feel free to comment below with what you are up to or what you’re most excited about post-Samhain/Halloween!

Blessed be, y’all!

An Abbreviated Post-August Check In

Hello friends, witches & tarot lovers!

Mercury Retrograde has not been friendly to my apartment's electronic devices today so here's a quick update on where I've been AND an important September announcement!

Also, here's an arbitrary picture of Sir Didymus and Sebastian. Just because. 

Tarot life brought me TWO amazing classes, one on "Queering the Tarot" at The Future and a BRAND NEW course on "Sex & Tarot" at none other than The Smitten Kitten. My big announcement? DO NOT DESPAIR if you missed the first "Sex & Tarot"--it's happening again THIS month on September 16th at The Future. Sign up here--my queering class filled up quite nicely and I don't want you to miss this one too. PLUS if that date DOES NOT work for you, I'll be teaching not one, not two, but THREE classes at my beloved Eye of Horus this fall & winter. One for 101 newbies, a Queering the Tarot, and a Sex & Tarot. Check it out! 

Theatre life was a lot of prep for this month & my December show. Nothing thrilling to report about the work I've already done, but uh, you're not gonna wanna miss Drunk Queer HIstory on the 26th. Grab your tickets NOW! 

Writer life was my safe space this month. I got to review and feature a lot of cool events here, and I'm still going strong over here. I'm sitting on some potential big news, and getting a lot of storytelling pieces done in my free time (so if you like stories about illegal boat hopping or lizard rectums, hit me up). 

From Two Harbors, MN. Over Iona's Beach. 

Non-work life took a hit for most of the month as a re-designed my Queering syllabus, created a Sex & Tarot syllabus, and stayed super, blissfully busy with tarot clients & behind the scenes theatre work. However, I insisted on taking my queerplatonic partner up to Duluth & Two Harbors MN last week and I am so unbelievably relieved to have ended such a busy month this way. We spent 2.5 days eating at some of our favorite restaurants, sitting on beaches, climbing up to cliffs and (literally) crying on said cliffs about how beautiful it all was. We also sipped tea until 3 AM with a darling college friend and got see Northern Lights Witch who gifted us a trip to Vikre Distillery for fancy cocktails.

I also spent a day earlier in August watching bad horror movies, eating Chinese food, and gifted one of my favorite people a fake llama head to decorate her wall with because birthdays are my favorite. 

That's it for me this month! Follow my multipassionate adventures in real time on my Instagram, or "like" my tarot page on Facebook for up to date info on where I'll be.

Blessed be, y'all!

Multi-Passion Diary: Well, I RAN An Art Gallery

Hello all!

I'm still working and hammering out what I want this column to be, but I think for now it's both a good place to find out about other solo entrepreneurs and the balls they're juggling while exploring some personal blogging too. Today felt like a more personal day for one big reason: I just closed an art gallery.

Now, for those just tuning into my blog perhaps for the first time, in addition to doing tarot and writing I run a theatre company called Gadfly Theatre Productions that does queer and feminist work. Sometime last year we started aching for our own space, and it turns out, a good friend of mine decided to buy a restaurant, which means she needed someone to take over her lease at a popular small art gallery. The space was ideal for rehearsals, staged readings, and open mics. It was a wonderful creative found space for our mainstage shows. We got to rent out the space for low cost to other marginalized artist and I always felt so good and aligned handing out the door code to renters. Gadfly made four really stellar events of our own in the space, and we partnered with other creators to make their dreams come true too. Longtime Gadfly fans had an amazing time knowing where to find our provocative work.  Gadfly is meant to be a theatre company that has four walls. (I tried to make a pun here about the fourth wall. It didn't work.) My business partner and I are meant to run a space. 

My cutie pie business partner and favorite human goofing off as we cleaned up the space one day.

So no one was more surprised than us when we decided to shutter it suddenly in late June, with a move out date only two weeks later. The "what happened" isn't important for the purposes of this blog, but the whole sudden move out process moved around a bunch of stuff in my soul, and these are the reminders and lessons I felt fit to share. 

• Holy wow, stop and take stock of your growth once in awhile. Manny (my business partner) and I just kind of decided to get a space, and then one fell into our laps. There's a whole bunch of spiritual sentiment wrapped up in that too (manifesting works y'all), but the main takeaway was this: For eight years Manny and I have worked almost every day creating work for this company. We have worked hard, and we have rarely complained about how hard we work at this for as little money as we do. We don't even really get that exhausted doing it. We love this company. We love theatre itself. We love the love and community our work creates, and we loved moving that into a space. So it never occurred to us that paying bills in the space might be hard (we had one hiccup but it was otherwise totally fine.) It never occurred to us that scheduling snafus, managing events we didn't produce, and a whole list of other things might drag us down (it didn't). We worked hard and steadily, and when it felt right we moved into a space. As I was moving physical objects out of the gallery I realized how silly it was that we never took a moment to be proud of ourselves for such a huge step forward.
  
  It's a big deal to successfully run a space and create the relationships we did. I don't think I ever would have realized that without such a sudden move out, and it's an incredible reminder to look at how I've grown in the other areas of my life. I have two steady writing gigs, a steady tarot gig, and my writing and readings get better every day. I'm teaching tarot now. I mostly buy food I have to cook at the grocery store. I listen when my chronically ill body is screaming for a break. I have open, painful but real conversations with friends and family when they hurt me or I hurt them. There are so, so many ways I have grown exponentially in the past couple of years. Yet I have never fully stopped, looked around, and said "Wow, good job me" until after the gallery move out. Everyone reading--once you're done, think through where you were a year ago and where you are now. I promise you've moved forward. Congratulate yourself on growing. 
   
• Know when an experiment is over. A year ago I was SURE I wanted a space for Gadfly to call their own in. I didn't. What I wanted was to find out if we were capable of running an arts space. I wanted to know what that would look like artistically and fiscally. I wanted an experiment. I figured that out pretty quickly upon moving in after a couple of fiascos with keys and doors being unlocked. Now? I am 1,000% positive that I want a space for Gadfly to call their own--but it took realizing it was time to step away from THIS space at THIS moment in time to realize that A) this experiment was successful, but it's over, and B) I was absolutely right about us needing a space to run. There are lots of reasons to do big, audacious things with your life. Do not convince yourself that each bold step is THE step or is meant to last forever. Sometimes an experiment is just an experiment. Your job is to know when it's done. 
   
• Know when something is and is not for you. I can not stress this enough. While it seems like Manny and I act fast sometimes, we never do anything without at least three in depth conversations and a night or two of sleep between each one. We think through every detail, every pro and con, every possible outcome to our so-called hasty decisions. The biggest thing we weigh is "what about this are we meant to work with, and what are we meant to let go of?" A lot of letting go of the gallery came down to this example (which was one of many factors in the decision): we are a wildly inclusive company, but the bathroom in this building was down a flight of stairs. There were days my arthritis was so bad I would buy a $6 coffee next door so that I could use their bathroom and avoid stairs. If the artistic director of a company can not use it's restroom, that is not acceptible, accessibility-wise. This means people in wheelchairs, with mobility issues, or have to use a restroom urgently and suddenly could not comfortably come to our shows. This was a huge problem, and my guilt over the situation increased as our popularity in the space grew. So running a space is definitely for us. Running a space without easy restroom access is not. 
  
  This lesson can and has been applied over other areas of my life even since shutting down the space. Certain kind of client questions are not for me, and I can refer them to someone else when they come up. That doesn't mean I'm not a superb reader, it just means I know I'm not best suited to some questions. As much as we hate to admit it, a lot of our happiness does come down to the choices we are making. I am in no way shutting down how hard mental and physical illness, societal oppression, or actually toxic situations make our life. Please note I said A LOT of our happiness comes from our decisions, not all of it. My advice for ANY choice is to get super clear on what works for you and what doesn't first.
   
• I would also add to the above note, especially since I did mention external pressures and pain: know when you're making a choice. Full disclosure? We did have some expected funding fall through, and that was a factor in making the decision to close the gallery. It was not, however, THE decision making factor.  Shutting down the space was 100% our choice. We had enough resources and renters to keep going, and it was an incredibly hard decision to reach. One message that keeps coming to me spiritually is one to own my choices, and acknowledge when I am able to make one. In all of my careers it is sometimes easy to feel like things have been thrust upon me, but that isn't the reality nearly as often as I would like it to be. Usually I am given a choice. Figure out what the choice or decision is, and be aware you are making it.
   
• Be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful. This gallery, started by a dear, dear friend of mine was incredibly special. I met my current group of friends that I see the most and consider the closest there, long before it was mine. I fell desperately in love, and then harshly, quickly, angrily out of love in this space. It has been an unendingly vocal space about shaping my art and my life. I created really magical artwork there, and so did so many other fabulous people. I am sentimental to a fault and I had a three day sadness spiral about the space dissipating. But now I'm just so ecstaticly happy that I got to be a part of it and a curator for it, even for the small space in time that it was. There is a not an area of my life where I can slack off on gratitude right now--and that alone, is more than enough reason for the gratitude itself.
   
• Look ahead. There is so much New Age philosophy about staying present, and it's not wrong. Until you can look around and enjoy where you are, you probably aren't going to move forward in leaps and bounds. However, the way you close an experiment is by looking into your actual future. Gadfly is building a proper, working board of directors and otherwise taking it easy for the year outside of producing events. In approximately one year we'll start looking for a semi-permanent space. If those plans weren't in place before we made this decision, who knows how long we would have waffled or if we would even have made the right decision. There is no use staring into the future and hoping for better without enjoying the work you're doing to get there. There's also no use in pretending the future doesn't exist. 

That's it for me and the Multi-Passion Diary today y'all! Sending so much love and light until next time.

Blessed be.