January Grief Studio this Thursday: Welcoming the Hermit Year, A Guide for Disorienting Times
What to bring & zoom link inside!
Our January Grief Studio is this upcoming Thursday, January 16th, from 6-8pm eastern time.
We’ll be exploring the medicine and wisdom of the Hermit card as the collective card for 2025, and how they might be a guide for staying with the trouble in disorienting times, and making art about it. ❤️🔥
The card of the year is calculated by adding up that years’ digits (2+0+2+5=9) and then seeing what card from the Major Arcana that number corresponds with - in our case, 9 is the number of the Hermit card.
The Hermit holds up a lantern before us as they lead us down the starlit path through the deep woods of 2025, and invites us to consider how we move in the dark.
In A Grief Spell for the Winter Solstice, I shared:
The hermit is a being who lingers between worlds… a wise, strange, unsettling grandmother who lives at the edge of the woods, beckoning us towards the unfamiliar… The Hermit is the potential elder in each of us (and out in the real world), who knows that we will sustain ourselves by both tethering ourselves to community, as well as finding and building our own spiritual reserves and magical practices. What would your inner-badass-grandmother-witch-who-lives-on-the-edge-of-the-woods do?
Rather than avoid the world, the hermit invites us to find the inner quiet we need to be present in the world, to stay with the trouble. The Hermit is the center of each of us that we can return to. Simultaneously, the Hermit is the seeker, returning again and again to the mysteries of the cosmos. A center that lays beyond us.
Some of the questions we’ll be sitting with:
What messages might the Hermit card have for the collective in 2025?
How might the energy of the Hermit support us in staying with the trouble (turning towards one another and the world)? How might they be a powerful guide in disorienting times?
What does it feel like to embody the Hermit? How does the Hermit move through the world?
What connections do you see between the Hermit and grief?
What inspiration are you drawing from the Hermit for this year? What are the spiritual/magical practices that ground and sustain you through grief filled times?
These studios are for paid subscribers and are spaces to dialogue with, make, and share your own art and writing alongside other grievers. For $16-20 per month, you both support this publication and your creative practice too! You’ll also access monthly creative prompts and other paid posts!
What to bring:
🕯️🧙♀️Bring the Hermit card from your own tarot deck, or an image or item that reminds you of the Hermit in some way.
🕯️💐Set the space: Please find a comfortable, quiet place for our meeting. Set this space for yourself in any way that feels most supportive for you, whether bringing in pillows, candles, flowers, photos of any of your beloved dead, drawing a tarot card, creating an altar of some kind, bringing in scents and textures you enjoy, or simply making sure you have a spacious and comfortable space.
🍉🫖Bring nourishment: Please bring water, tea, any beverages, fruits, or snacks you'd like to bring for our time together.
🎨📒Bring art supplies, a pen and paper or something to write with, or if there is a more pleasurable or accessible form of reflection you like to do, bring materials for that…Markers, colored pencils, paints, collaging supplies, your phone to record voice memos... There will be time set aside to free-write/create/reflect using whichever mediums work best for you.
🧚♀️🌊Disrupt perfectionism and come as you are. You do not need to be "on" in order to show up to this space. Let however you're arriving be enough.
Structure for Grief Studios*:
Welcome & Grounding
Small group discussion around a particular theme, tarot card, plant, or text related to grief
Intention Setting for your creative practice
Creative Exploration/Studio time: Undirected, parallel play/creative exploration using whatever mediums/materials you feel called to, with the understanding that all of life can be lived as art, and that our artmaking gets to be a practice of attunement to ourselves and the world around us. Studio time can include anything from painting, collaging, dusting off your apothecary shelves, making tea, making music, rearranging your room, casting a spell, cooking a meal, or simply laying down and allowing yourself to rest as a creative practice…
Reflection: Set aside time to free-write/reflect on your creative process, and witness and dialogue with your own art/creative process as if it were animate and speaking to you.
Witnessing one another: Time to share our art and reflections with one another, without the intentions to critique or comment. Here we are simply in the magic of witness - hearing ourselves speak aloud that which arose in witness writing, feeling ourselves be heard and received by one another.
Sessions (not including break out rooms!) will be recorded for those unable to make them live ✨
*This structure is adapted from the lineage of the Jewish Studio Process, whose two year Creative Facilitator Training Fellowship I am currently in and deeply grateful for!