tarot community — Blog — Cassandra Snow

Happy July, friends!

This June we saw Litha, a summer Sabbat best used for thanks and resets. My closest friends and I did a simple spell with roses, the lake, and our deepest wishes. The lake was as wonderful as she should be and the city's reflection reminded us we were home. That is my place to reset: a large body of water, still night air, and lots of thanks to give. Before we made our wishes we thanked our dieties and spiritual energies for the gifts we already had that would enable this next phase of our lives. I am so grateful for my friends and loved ones, my own love of love, my work ethic, my careers, and my magick and gods themselves. I needed room and time for thanks as much as I needed the clarity or the energetic reset. One of my friends bought the most beautiful light purple roses to make our wishes on, and we watched them float away in the water as we breathed in hope and renewal. It was perfect for anytime, but the best Litha I think I've ever had.

So...what else was I up to this June? Uh...kind of a lot.

Tarot Stuffs!

As mentioned in my last end-of-month post, I have not one, but THREE classes lined up for August and September at various venues! I can officially reveal that on August 17th, I will be revamping my Queering the Tarot class at The Future, a really quirky, unique, very Minneapolis witch store and event center. You can reserve your seat here. I'm pumped. The OTHER two classes will both be...Sex & Tarot! I'm so excited to take my joyfully slutty view of the tarot and teach others to read that way. I'm premiering this one at The Smitten Kitten on August 20th (and then moving it to the Future). It's FREE at the Kitten, so definitely save the date!!!
I'm still at the Eye of Horus from 11:30-6 on Sundays and 3-9 on Wednesdays. I've been so happy (and busy) the past couple of months, so I'm strongly suggesting appointments if that's where you prefer to read for me.
If you prefer coming through just my business, that's great too! I'm reading Thurs-Sunday 1-6 P.M. And Monday 1-6 P.M. Or, and the reason I'm writing this when it's clearly visible elsewhere on my site, is that I've been working hard to promote my e-mail reading service and I've been doing some really wonderful readings that way. E-mail snow.cassandra@gmail.com if you're interested.

Things I Wrote

My review of the radical Urban Tarot by Robin Scott is up at Little Red Tarot. I got some great feedback from the deck creator herself and am so tickled with this deck. If you go back a little deeper on the site, you can also get some Queering the Tarot action.
Over at Thecolu.mn I'm still covering Queer Arts Must Sees in Minneapolis, giving a needed spotlight to worthy artists, and advancing the Queering the Tarot series.
Right here on my own blog I wrote another handy, easy tip for learning tarot and let my friend Abbie from Northern Lights Witch take over my Multi-Passion Diaries for the month.

Theatre Life

Photo courtesy of Jessi Hiemer/ @gluestickgeek on Instagram

Okay, so this is where most of my life got away from me this month. In fact, it doesn't even deserve separate bullet points because it was a wild ride where Gadfly was concerned and it's all connected. First, we DID very successfully open and close our annual one-act festival. My play was HILARIOUS, and I'm so proud of everyone's work. The tech week process though? Kinda rough tbh. Our air conditioner broke, we had an actor just straight up not show up for tech rehearsals, and we were tech-ing six shows, some of them fairly artsy, with only a week to do it. You know, with no A.C. And a missing actor. Yet the festival was marvelous, all actors were accounted for during performance, and we closed on a very full, happy audience. Then...as a company, we made a tough, sudden decision. We had applied for several major grants for placemaking, and when they all failed to come through, we decided to let the lease on our art gallery run out instead of battling with another rent increase while still having a non-accessible restroom. This decision also meant a very, very fast turnaround to get out, and basically I've spent the last week cleaning an art gallery. This has been a really emotional turn and change in my life. A very good friend used to run the space, and we took over her lease. It's been queer run for six years. It's been magic this whole time. I met my current closest group of friends there. I fell in and out of love incredibly hard each way in this gallery. I created some of the best work of my life. I made some of the most important, notable connections of my personal and professional life in this gallery. It was a heartbreaking decision that we didn't take lightly. I am hopeful for these next steps. We ended on an incredibly high note. The support as we close up the gallery has been almost overwhelming. My business partner and I are more platonically in love than ever before. We will find a new space--the right space, in the right time. In the meantime? Well, season announcements are coming soon and it's going to be a breathtaking season of queer, feminist art. It's going to be one of our most rad seasons to date, and I'm antsy to reveal info soon...not immediately, but soon.

Recommendations

Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times is the first book in a long time that took me a long time to finish because I wanted to ruminate and absorb it in a way that was as unique as the book is. I can not recommend it enough to activists who love good prose.
J. Selby's in St. Paul has some of the best vegan food I have ever had in my life. I do eat mostly vegan, but this was truly special. Half comfort food, half gourmet, all delicious.
Manny and I dealt with our moving day blues for the Gallery by heading to Daddy: A Queer Variety Show and Dance Night, expecting friends and fun. We got those things, but it was also one of the most affirming, queer, warm spaces we've been in in a long time. Normally one of us likes an event more than the other, but we both felt totally at home and totally enthralled. They're doing it again on Thursday, August 10th at the Icehouse. It's so good. Don't miss it if you're a Twin Cities queer!

Other Shenanigans

My queerplatonic partner and I reached total queerplatonic partner peak this month as we spent our weekly date night on a beach eating pizza and laughing about all the bad sex we've each had with romantic and sexual partners. After a sad day of starting the gallery exit, it was the best thing we could've done for ourselves. Whoever you love or need the most right now, grab a pizza and a beach and hunker down for the night. You'll be transformed.
Northern Spark, Stone Arch Festival, and in spite of my issues with it this year, Pride all provided what I needed at the time: bonding with friends I already love, some quality solo time, and connecting with people from my community I hadn't seen in awhile, in respective order.
My darling friend Kate who runs the 318 Cafe did a really sweet gig for charity where she sang with her husband, and then several of our friends joined in for a few songs, and eventually her youngest child took the stage and blew us away with her voice and ukulele skills. It was music and love and giggles all around.
Goose teenagers at the park. Goose. Teenagers. At. The. Park. I was in love. Until they all started heading towards me at once and then I was kind of scared. But still in love.

That's a wrap for me on a wild, somewhat unpredictable but ultimately beautiful month. This July I'm dog-sitting for a week, then my AMAZING sister is coming down for a week, and in the meantime I've got pieces to write, cards to read, and art to get set on dates and locations. I'm ending the month like I started it: bursting with love and gratitude.

Blessed be, y'all!

Hello all! Welcome back to my ongoing Multi-Passion Diaries where I explore what it's like to be a theatre making, tarot card-slinging, freelance writing entrepreneur and general adventurous but introverted human in today's world. I also host guest blogs, which is what today is! E-mail snow.cassandra@gmail.com if you're interested in contributing.

I'm so, so excited about our guest blogger today. Abbie from Northern Lights Witch is a close friend of mine (she even crashed in my spare bedroom for awhile when her job life got weird) who runs a really great witch business while managing a career in Public Policy. Read all about how she juggles the two and what she's learning along the way.

I have always, always been a multipassionate. When I was a child, I wanted to be both a journalist, and an artist, and also I wanted to be a biologist. All at the same time. In high school, I spent my early mornings with the jazz band, worked hard to keep my grades up and my writing top-notch, and spent the evenings in rehearsal as an actress. I almost went to school to become a jazz musician, but decided during my senior year that I would rather be a writer. By the end of my senior year, I had decided that the best way I could make a difference in the world was to become a human rights lawyer.

Spoiler alert: I am none of those things now.

I don’t play in a band, I don’t work for a newspaper, and I don’t have a law degree.

What I DO have is a Master’s in Public Policy, with a part-time job working on water policy and mining in Northern Minnesota, and a tarot business.

I miss the arts. I miss playing music – when I listen to music, I yearn to play, and when I try to play I’m frustrated that it’s not as easy as it once was. I miss performing. But I am able to write in all of my careers. Writing is the constant that holds together all the pieces of me.

Recently, I wrote on my own blog (link to my multipassionate post) about the cycles that you go through as a multipassionate professional. It’s important to recognize that sometimes, when you’re balancing two (or more!) careers, you need to put more energy into one of them than the other. That doesn’t mean that you don’t still have those multiple careers – it just means that the balance has shifted somewhere different for a while.

For the last ten years, I have put almost all of my energy into my career in public policy. To an extent, it’s important to be creative in the field of public policy. It takes a deep level of analysis to take in all the information that you need, and to find new solutions to difficult social and environmental problems. But there isn’t that sense of freedom I crave.

I started Northern Lights Witch while I was still seeking my Master’s degree, in large part because tarot was (is?) having a Moment and it’s been a part of my personal spiritual practice for over 12 years. But really: I needed an outlet where it was ok to talk about my understanding of the world in terms of intuition, rather than logic. I needed a space where I could deeply explore my identity as a witch, as well as write creatively about witchcraft and the Unseen parts of the world.

It was a rebellion against the strict career positioning necessary in a graduate program.

But as I’ve moved through both careers, I find that they really do inform one another in interesting ways. They are very different, and use different parts of my brain, but there are lessons to be learned that carry through both places.

Trust your goddamn intuition. As much as public policy is about logic, it is also about intuition. This is especially critical when communicating with decision makers and those who hold power. It’s more important to read between the lines, to read the body language rather than the words. Now, I am not a mind-reader and it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it is possible to pick up a lot from nonverbal communication. Those gut instincts? Critical.
Do. The. Work. When you’re working on legislative campaigns and issues, things move quickly. Sometimes, you’ll be asked to produce a policy memo in two days that needs to be researched in depth. I once wrote a policy brief that was 10 pages with 160+ individual citations in a week. I need to do a better job of translating this work ethic to my own tarot business, but I know that I have a capacity to produce top-notch work on a short timeline and with few resources.
Know when something is outside of your control. Reading tarot has made me keenly aware of forces that are greater than myself. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency, and the subsequent radical alt-right takeover at many other levels of governance, has taught me important lessons about playing defense. And a lot of the time, things are outside of my control – and so I need to know when to use my power and how to use my power to the greatest advantage. Witchcraft and tarot are both ways of exploring the unknown, ways of exploring your own power. It is far easier to influence policy for the better when you know what is and isn’t within your sphere of influence. It’s important to concentrate your energy where you will actually have power, instead of needlessly running into walls. Tarot helps me accept that which is not within my control, and can remind me when I’m not focusing well.

Tarot and public policy hone crossover skills – writing, intuition, communication, analysis – but they also hold particular tensions.

When I accepted my current job, I decided to have my birth chart read for the first time. I knew that I would be moving to a more rural community, and I had concerns about being “out” as a witch. She advised me that it’s important to first establish credibility as a kickass environmentalist, and then to mention that I’m “tarot-interested.” I still haven’t told my boss that I do tarot readings. I’m terrified that I will lose his respect – or fail to gain it.

And so I need to be careful about how open I am. My last name isn’t listed anywhere on my website, nor is my address. This has made it hard for me to fully throw my energy behind marketing, getting myself out there, and pitching podcasts and blogs. Not all positions within the field of public policy come with these politics – but navigating the field as a young person means I need to think critically about this. I need to establish credibility above anything right now.

Soon, I hope to have a position that will allow me to bring my full self to all aspects of my work. Until then, I must keep my witchcraft in shadow. But the lessons I learn from the tarot resonate through all aspects of my life, and make me a stronger advocate. No matter how open I am about them.

More About Abbie here, including bio and tarot info.

That's A Wrap on June!