A Tarot Ancestor Garden of Verses: A Reading

We spent a beautiful 2022 using the tarot court cards to connect with the family tree through writing and art. We made personal tarot card art to honor the connections we discovered. 

Please join us as at our reading during which we will share the harvest of our reflections in poetry, prose, and art. Work was created in Antioch University's Continuing Education series, Using Tarot Court Cards to Explore Ancestry. 

This event is free and open to the public. Please pre-register here for the zoom link: A Tarot Garden of Ancestor Verses.

Sunday, January 26, 1 pm PST / 4 pm EST

Our presenters:

Valerie Coleman-Palansky: I am a 5 number and my archetype is The Hierophant: I am inspired by teaching and learning situations, honoring and valuing the sacred within as well as the unlimited source and resource provided by that inner faith and intuition. I am a psychotherapist, NYU adjunct professor, and and a registered Jin Shin Do acupressurist living in the Bronx, New York. I am married and have two almost adult daughters. I engage in many creative arts including writing. I have been specifically involved with tarot and metaphysical doings from my teen years. I synchronistically found Tania and her Heart's Compass Tarot Journaling group and was hooked via the Aces immersion. My first deck was The Golden Dawn Tarot and my most recent is Daughters of the Moon.

 

Alley Greymond: I am driven to learn and at various times have studied Accounting, Psychology, Systems Design, Real Estate Management, Poetry and Non-Fiction. While my current position is administrative support, I find value at work serving with different Employee Resource Groups towards perspective shifts and workplace equity. I’m not used to using my intuition to a robust capacity and when I first joined Tania’s class I felt as though I’d have nothing to offer. What a welcoming group of women and Tania creates an environment for one to think, feel and share. I appreciate having had an opportunity to explore Tarot with these women.  

 

Pratishta Natarajan: I have been fascinated with spirituality and meditation since I was five years old. My father was incredibly passionate about Indian mysticism, and I grew up surrounded by books on Eastern spiritual traditions. I found Tarot when I was a young teen. I loved receiving Tarot readings for years before I attempted doing my own reading. I was amazed by the connection I instantly felt with the cards. Tarot cards have been a powerful guide in my journey of personal healing and transformation. Currently, my favorite tarot deck is the Light Seers. 

 

Deborah Smith: My name is Debby and I live in New Paltz, New York on Lenape land. My pronouns are she/her. I have worked for 40 years practicing and teaching bodywork based in Chinese Medicine. My work with clients includes assisting them in tapping into their inner wisdom through the bodymind connection and supporting their intuitive relationship to their own health and happiness. I have revived my connection to Tarot as a doorway to my own intuition in the last two years and Tania's workshops have been a wonderful part of that. I've done a fair amount of writing related to my profession, but these writing experiences have been very rich and stimulating, both because of my own connections and being privileged to hear from the others in the group. Pulling tarot cards has become like having conversations with a dear and trusted friend: always relevant and always fascinating.

Additional Links of interest:

If you are unable to attend, but interested in using tarot cards to explore ancestry, the book Ancestral Tarot by Nancy Hendrickson is a beautiful place to start.

If you are interested in beginning or deepening your understanding of the tarot, I'll be teaching a new linked series of six-week courses through Antioch University's Continuing Education program that explore how the Major Arcana are connected to the Minors. 

For more information and to register for the first course (starts Sunday, February 26), visit: Tarot Journaling Courses 2023 & 2024

SDWI Unheard Voices Reading and Writing Workshop: Resist, Rebuild, Perform

Crisis! Today’s troubling headlines, articles, and Tweets can be overwhelming! What to do? Come listen, rebuild, write, perform, and share with us. At tonight’s Unheard Voices Reading (Friday October 26), the fabulous Sandra Hunter reads from Trip Wires (Leapfrog Press, 2018), a collection that personalizes global-scale catastrophe by taking brief looks into the everyday lives of young people around the world from Columbia to Afghanistan to Glasgow and beyond. 

A teacher and avid supporter of women's causes, Meliza Bañales celebrates her new non-fiction book, Adventure Awaits You in Hell: A Survivor's Manifesto (Ladybox Books). 

Tania Pryputniewicz celebrates the anthology, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2018). Audience participation encouraged for a lively discussion

Link to more information:  Unheard Voices Reading

Saturday’s Unheard Voices Writing Workshop with the same three writers has a triple focus: generate, revise, perform! Roll up your sleeves and come join us, again at San Diego Writers, Ink.

Link to more information: Unheard Voices Writing Workshop: Resistance, Resilience, and Rebuilding

*Fee: $30 member, $36  nonmember. Course feel includes a copy of Sandra Hunter's story collection, Trip Wires.

Related Link:


Sandra Hunter on the San Diego Writers, Ink blog:  Sandra Hunter on Trip Wires, Trippings, and Assumptions

Instructor Bios:

Sandra Hunter will read from Against the Stranger, one of the stories in her new collection TRIP WIRES (Leapfrog Press, June 2018). The collection personalizes global-scale catastrophe by taking brief looks into the everyday lives of young people around the world, from Columbia to Afghanistan to Glasgow and beyond. TRIP WIRES earned praise as “a beautifully written collection, both poetic and melancholic. Deeply moving, and often grim and uncomfortable in their confrontations of unimaginable tragedies, each story evokes a bold, emotional response,” according to Katie Asher (Foreward Reviews, May/June 2018).

Meliza Bañales will read from her new non-fiction book ADVENTURE AWAITS YOU IN HELL: A SURVIVOR’S MANIFESTO. From her teaching to her activism, all of her work in speaking up — shouting out — has been in support of women’s causes. Meliza says, "Just remember… someone is [always] going to dislike you for being too honest — or not honest enough. But better to be too honest, because the people that really appreciate it will find you.” This is Meliza’s honesty without mercy.

SDWI Poetry Instructor and contributor Tania Pryputniewicz will read from the newly released anthology, AMERICA, WE CALL YOUR NAME: POEMS OF RESISTANCE AND RESILIENCE (Sixteen Rivers Press, September 2018). Born in response to the 2016 Presidential election, the anthology combines voices of poets from across America–from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns–with the voices of poets from other countries and other times. From Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Po-Chiu to Robin Coste Lewis, these voices, now raucous, not muted, now lyric, now plain–join together in dissent and in praise, in grief and alarm, in vision and hope.

Love and Spirituality: Trusting Your Inner Compass

Unmasked: Women Write About Sex and Intimacy After Fifty

What does a love life look like for women after fifty? Lover or no? Online dating or no? Love of friends eclipsing lover love? You’ll find fifty-three views in a new anthology, "Unmasked: Women Write About Sex and Intimacy After Fifty." I’m honored to be included, writing that I first posted here on Feral Mom, “Sex, Hammers and Self-Care in a House with Three Children.” 

Editor Marcia Meier will give a brief introduction, followed by those of us reading from the book: readers Lisa Rizzo, Barbara Rockman, Renate Golden, and yours truly. 

Editor Marcia Meier answers a few questions about Unmasked over on the SDWI blog.

Come out if you can tomorrow night (Saturday, October 7th) to San Diego Writers, Ink over at Liberty Station 5-7 p.m. for the reading and signing and refreshments.

Trusting your Healer’s Compass: Amazon Wisdom Keeper Van Tuyl

As I keep working slow and steady on writing prose about an Illinois commune I lived on as a child, I’m reading memoirs voraciously—for inspiration, for strength, for joy. I met Loraine Van Tuyl on-line last year and fell in love with her forthcoming memoir, “Amazon Wisdom Keeper: A Psychologist’s Memoir of Spiritual Awakening,” which comes out at the end of this month with She Writes Press.

In “Amazon Wisdom Keeper,” Loraine anchors us in the physical landscape of her native Suriname, the fertile green and heat a backdrop for her childhood experiences and family lineage of teachings (a quality of light and heat that prepares Loraine for later trials when her deepest visions are questioned). To escape the turmoil of the changing political power-scape in Suriname, Loraine’s family moves to the United States where adolescence’s lessons arrive through Western belief systems. Intuition’s early lessons came through love, and later, through college psychology classes with their fixed ways of approaching healing as well as spiritual groups with rigid understandings of the ways to access healing power.

The gift of Amazon Wisdom Keeper is the intimate look at the very push and pull of different ways of believing and healing and what it takes to undergo rejection and somehow find the strength to trust one’s internal compass to navigate life, to know when to stay, when to let go, when to change mentors or groups. Van Tuyl reminds us that in our deepest moments of personal and spiritual rejection lie the seeds for self–love. We learn that by confronting our obstacles and trusting the process, we have the potential to awaken beautiful parts of ourselves otherwise left untested and dormant. Thank you so much Loraine, for your beautiful book. For more information, here is a link to a short video about Amazon Wisdom Keeper and a link to Loraine's page on Goodreads.

Keep your eye out for an interview with Loraine later this month--I will post the link here when it is live. 

**October 19 update: Here is the link to the interview: Amazon Wisdom Keeper and Spiritual Awakening.