Dear reader,

So many turn to divination searching for an oasis in an existential desert, lost amidst disillusioned dreams, and the hope that heart will ever find fulfillment, sanctuary and belonging becomes bone-dry.

Lost without family, we are in search, suffering mirages of intimacy. Insidious is artifical intelligence, as it is addictive. Virtue has no artifice, it either is achieved in fleshy resonance or it’s deception, deceptive as it dangerous. How many miles till the migrant is arrested by a burning bush that dispels the predatory promises of a future fixed by the compulsions of capitalism, perpetually contorted into a disembodied abstraction?

The diviner, the neighborhood card reader, the down-south star-gazing sooth-sayer rather develops a craft that proliferates fates, generates futures and makes these futures filled with sensation, suspectible to the poignancy of the present.

No future is worth being abandoned in the present.

As I am called to teach as a prophetic vocation, I aim to ensure it is established upon an ethic of acompañar. Daily, those I work with cross social, linguistic, instituitional borders. So to be in right relationship with the work as a human in service of others is to instrinsically understand that the self is a relational constitution. To be in relationship is to be kindred, and to be among kin is to be accompanied. To be is to be together, to feel together, to do together.

Latino theologian Goizueta, says that “to accompany another person is to walk with him or her. It is above all, by walking with others that we relate to them and love them.”¹

Anyone who walks through the valley of the shadow of death knows prayer is a physical disposition, a path in which we pray for a Holy Spirit to protect us, guide us, preserve us from predators. Even if we are physically alone, we can invoke and sense the subtle spirit of grace that bears vital witness to our sorrows and our persistence.

Then of course, you walk with women, wives, sisters, daughers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, friends to their car, to their frontdoors because rapists, racists, transphobic pedophiles would make any woman, girl or femme their prey.

When you walk with the most marginalized amongst us, so as to not linger in any dangerous cross-hairs any longer than you must, you establish a relationship of reciprocity and dignity and critical dialogue between equal subjects. With such acompañamiento we struggle together to survive, adapt and bridge our ruptured world with the regard of a healing, dignified love. Acompañamiento is the practice of affirming relationships, valuing life as an absolute value in itself, regardless of productivity, ability, gender, age, class, ethnicity or sexuality. Its aim is fellowship and mutual engagenment in each other’s life worlds.

I am reflecting again on this pedagogical imperative, as an alternative, independent educator of any institution, because I have just concluded faciliating year 1 of my decan-walk, Tenz, with my students.

This 2-year course is signified by its distinct length and border-crossing of the bounds of tarot and astrology. Our last class was about 5 hours, which is typical of the live meetings. My students have stamina, and their embodied presence (even via zoom) is a testament to our mutual committment to show up for each other.

We use critical literacy, poetry, and storytelling together to read the minor and major arcana cards assigned to the Zodiac, turning tarot into an astrological calendar and a means to read each other’s charts throughout our time together.

It is thrilling to see all the varied engagment of practitioners who facilitate or walk their own decan walk, and I hope that even without their explicit articulation of the practice as a method of acompañamiento, that it is as affirming nonetheless.

Within Tenz, we work out a diasporic syncretic practice of divination extended into an expanded critical literacy informed by the indigenous, feminist, and decolonial texts and teachings curated for the study. By walking the decans together, we walk through each others charts, the cosmogram of the soul, as we process the horrors of humanity with a sharp shared tongue that talks back.

Within so much spent talking to each other, I am able to provide dialogic and responsive feedback to my students to attune their craft as card / chart readers, so that when they offer a reading as way of being with another, an other who comes to them for guidance at the crossroads, their technical skill will match their critically conscious inquiry into our shared liberation.

With our charts and cards, hand in hand, we lay hands on the future by finding each other in the present, using the tarot as mirror for starlight to guide us out of the desert of modernity into a social otherwise.

Tenz, is built on and oriented on the creative, insurgent acts of a people making space, creating place, and building community in an increasingly fragmented global world. To study the psychic-social-celestial map offered in the decans is to be the poet articulating the unfolding revelation of time.

I am ecstatic that they have all decided to continue walking with me for another year, where they will assume more authority in sabotaging empire with their fate-work, reading and writing many fates for the signs, for the cards, within our time together such that our fate becomes clearly figured as co-determinate, each sustaining the act of reading, as card readers do, reading again and again so as to offer the love that births us into the future, by looting the colonial present.

Due to my limited human capacity, I can only faciliate one decan walk at a time, so I won’t be opening enrollment for year 1 of Tenz, till the beginning of 2027. But if you might see Tenz in your future, and would like an early invite to enroll and limited registration discounts, join the waitlist below.

I offered my students a white fire limpia to both close out our first year, and honor Mars as the planetary bookend of the decans. I’d be curious to hear your rituals for the turn of the astrological year and of course if you have any questions, I’m just an email away.

May we continue walking towards, with, and for each other.

x,

Christopher