The Romance of a Politics of Liberation
Author Lane Smith on lazy queerness, authentic spirituality, the sexiness of devotion, and tarot for change-making in their new book, 78 Acts of Liberation
“For a long time, many activists believed that if only more people knew the truth, then they would never stand for the abuses of power that cost so many lives. In support of this belief, we devoted ourselves to consciousness-raising and truth-telling. We have been seeing that, as it turns out, the truth alone will not set us free. We have to act on it.” —Lane Smith, 78 Acts of Liberation
Welcome to the second installment of the Queerly Devoted interview series! Here, we get to know magical and radical folks working at the intersections of queerness, transness, spirituality, and devotion. We’ll hear inspiring perspectives and learn how real people are living spiritual lives devoted to queerness, transness, community, love, and liberation.
I’m so excited to bring you this wonderfully generous interview with Lane Smith, author of the brand-new and eagerly anticipated 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World, which just came out last week! I’ve been following Lane’s work ever since they started their Tarot & Politics zine and began connecting Major Arcana cards to activism and liberation movements on their Instagram in 2021. Lane’s work has been hugely influential in my thinking around tarot, so much so that I thank them in the acknowledgments of Radical Tarot! But Lane has also been instrumental in the evolution of my political thinking, too. Like many former liberals, my radicalization ignited in 2016, accelerated in 2020, and reached lightspeed in the past 10 months due to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. But I also owe my radicalization in large part to Lane. Through their writing, their social shares, and their example, Lane consistently challenges me, emboldens me, and pushes me to learn more and do more for liberation struggles globally and in my own backyard.
So you’ll understand when I say that I had high expectations for their book, and I am not exaggerating even a little bit when I say that 78 Acts met and exceeded those high expectations. 78 Acts of Liberation is an activist education and a tarot revelation with liberation at its heart. It’s not your typical tarot guide that repeats standard interpretations of the cards; instead, Lane introduces the cards in number groupings (the twos, the threes, the fours) in the tradition of Mary K. Greer, considers them through the lenses of numerology and astrology, and then connects each card to a social movement to demonstrate a real-life application of its action.
78 Acts of Liberation is an activist education and a tarot revelation with liberation at its heart.
Since 2024 is an eight year, let’s look at the chapter on the eights for example. Lane calls the eights “Acts of Endurance” and connects Strength to contemporary struggles for body autonomy for trans people, women and people with uteruses, and sex workers; the Star with the Free Chol Soo Lee movement; and the Eights of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles with radial slogans from history that affirm our power, affirm our dreams, affirm our truth, and affirm our demands, respectively. On top of this, as I mention in our Q&A below, Lane furnishes the hands-down best tarot history chapter I have ever read, and they offer a new way of conceiving of the shape and sequence of the Major Arcana that is, quite frankly, revolutionary.
The radical thing about Lane’s approach to tarot isn’t just that they connect the cards to radical historical movements. It’s that in doing so, Lane provides material reasons for hope in every card. In times like ours, it can feel like everything’s moving backwards, or spiraling out of control, and that real change for liberation will never happen. But history—the history not usually taught in school books, the history of activist and social and labor movements that Lane writes about in this book—reminds us that meaningful change does happen, civil rights are won, wars can be ended. And it reminds us of the only way that happens: together, and through action.
If you believe, as I do, that tarot can be a tool for creating the future, 78 Acts of Liberation is an essential read. By framing the cards in a non-individualistic, action-oriented historical context, Lane Smith provides a vital and inspirational framework for using tarot for real-world change-making and collective liberation. “This book is for people who aren’t satisfied with injustice in any world,” Lane writes, “and who want to know how to create change beyond their own inner world. Tarot is a world where we can practice creating such change, and reading Tarot can guide us through personal transformations that lead to world-changing actions.” Lane also reminds us that “the truth alone will not set us free. We have to act on it.”
So, as they signed in a copy of the book shared on Instagram, Do something!
You can order Lane’s 78 Acts of Liberation now through my Bookshop.org affiliate link using the button above, or pick it up at your favorite local bookseller. But make sure to come back here for Lane’s generous and thoughtful responses to my questions, where they talk about the process behind the book, the role of the tarot’s Knights in their queer self-discovery, the romance of quantum physics, the sexiness of devotion, and so much more.
“I would say that my spirituality is fluid, is a process of discovery of both wonders outside of myself and of my internal being; it’s a way of seeking and shifting within the context of everyday life and larger forces (from planetary movements to politics); it’s how I relate to the world around me.” —Lane Smith
Charlie: What does the word “queer” mean to you?
Lane: I have a similar relationship to the word “queer” that I do with the word “witch,” in that I feel like it’s important to be careful and take your time with words that are reclaimed slurs. I’ve had to look at how much of my history of gatekeeping myself out of “queer” (and of “witch”) is due to internalized phobias/bigotry and how much of it is respect for those I perceive as being more deserving of reclaiming those words because they’ve experienced more oppression than I have. To be honest, even just a year ago I didn’t really “get” statements like: “Queer as in fuck the police.” I thought, it makes no sense to consider anyone who is against the police to be queer, that’s not what queer means, queer has a specific history and meaning tied to gender and sexuality! But now I understand that it’s not saying that queer is a catchall term for anyone who is against the norms of society regardless of their gender and sexuality. I understand that a statement like “queer as in fuck the police” or “queer as in Free Palestine” is taking for granted that the person is already outside of cis-heteronormativity in terms of their identity (in other words, they would be the recipient of “queer” as a slur regardless, and they choose to reclaim it) and additionally on top of that, they are expressing a non-assimilationist politic. What I mean is, someone can be gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or any one of the identity categories that tends to get lumped under the umbrella of “queer” colloquially, and still recreate binary gender norms and roles, still buy into cisheteronormative values like marriage and the nuclear family, and still uphold the systems of white supremacy and capitalism that create oppression for all people who don’t fit into a cis or heterosexual identity category (but affects them differently based on other intersections of their identity). And for me, to be queer on top of also being gay and trans is to always be against that assimilation, and against those systems. And part of that is also a resistance to being neatly categorized as a particular gender label or sexuality label in the first place.
My queerness is a big “no thanks” to what the larger dominant culture dictates, but also to what the predominant “queer culture” dictates, too. And likewise, my spiritual practices are pretty pared-down, relaxed, not monetized, not on display, and don’t follow little-p pagan or big-P Pagan norms any more than they follow any of the big mainstream religious institutional norms. It might seem like I’m defining everything by what I’m against instead of what I’m for, but really what it comes down to is authenticity, integrity, and autonomy…
Charlie: How would you describe your spirituality, and how does queerness show up in it (if it does)?
Lane: I would say that my spirituality is fluid, is a process of discovery of both wonders outside of myself and of my internal being; it’s a way of seeking and shifting within the context of everyday life and larger forces (from planetary movements to politics); it’s how I relate to the world around me. I would say the same things about my gender and sexuality (which really are inextricable from one another since sexuality is defined by attraction to genders, so when genders shift and change and blur then sexuality must also). My queerness is not very goal-oriented or aesthetic, it’s very much about how I process and relate, so it makes sense that my spirituality would reflect that too. There’s a laziness to my queerness in that I don’t really want to be bothered about my appearance or fashion or participating in these very high-energy activities that tend to be associated with queerness (like knowing what’s going on with celebrities or going to clubs and what have you). My queerness is a big “no thanks” to what the larger dominant culture dictates, but also to what the predominant “queer culture” dictates, too. And likewise, my spiritual practices are pretty pared-down, relaxed, not monetized, not on display, and don’t follow little-p pagan or big-P Pagan norms any more than they follow any of the big mainstream religious institutional norms. It might seem like I’m defining everything by what I’m against instead of what I’m for, but really what it comes down to is authenticity, integrity, and autonomy (which isn’t the same thing as independence and is really only possible in supportive community). That’s what I’m for. Black feminist theorist Melissa Harris-Perry’s analogy of “the crooked room” is one that I think many queer people can relate to; and when society is aligned against who we are, just being ourselves is to go against the grain, not because we’re oppositional and defiant by nature but because we would have to contort ourselves to conform to a false reality. My spirituality feels the same way, because even among spiritualist who aren’t Christian or who reject “organized religion,” my nonhierarchical animist view that there is no God, there are no gods or goddesses, no “higher” power, no “leveling up” or spiritual “evolution” in the sense of constant improvement (as opposed to the scientific concept of evolution as constant adaptation to the given circumstances), that there are spiritual ecosystems and spiritual politics (shifting groupings, alliances, loyalties, and balances of power in the spirit world), is a perspective that goes against the grain even in witchy spaces.
Charlie: Tarot helped me come out to myself as queer, non-binary, and trans, and particular cards have shown up to talk to me about my gender and/or sexuality repeatedly along my journey. Have any particular cards shown up in this way for you?
Lane: Knights show up for me a lot in this way! And it’s funny, during the period of time when I was starting to realize I was both transgender and gay and I came out was the same period of time when I was very engaged in a collective/community conversation about not assuming the gender of cards, so it wasn’t easy for me to get the hint that Knights could be asking me, “Have you considered that you might NOT be a woman?” because I was going hard on deprogramming Knights as always having to be men. I have a tendency to forcefully go hard against the status quo (as a Knight would) and so while I was dead set on not seeing Knights as masculine, I was also deprogramming myself from assuming that I must be a woman who likes men and is therefore straight (mostly through continually coming across and hearing trans men’s stories).
Knights are often seen as having an adolescent, intense single focus and stubbornness. They each have a big “no” which makes way for a passionate, enthusiastic “yes.” The Knight of Wands says “you can’t tell me what not to do,” The Knight of Pentacles says, “you can’t rush me,” The Knight of Swords says, “you can’t silence my truth,” and the Knight of Cups says, “you can’t pin me down.” For a long time, I experienced my gender and sexuality just in terms of the “no – that’s not me, that’s not what I want” and so there was a period when I identified as asexual and considered possibly being agender. I think that period of rejection of expectations was necessary for me to discover what I actually DO feel and want. In my book, I relate the Knights to the Chariot (which happens to be my birth card) and I think the Knights going hard in one direction is what leads eventually to the ability to discover what is personally self-regulating and in alignment with The Chariot.
[The Knights] each have a big “no” which makes way for a passionate, enthusiastic “yes.” The Knight of Wands says “you can’t tell me what not to do,” The Knight of Pentacles says, “you can’t rush me,” The Knight of Swords says, “you can’t silence my truth,” and the Knight of Cups says, “you can’t pin me down.”
I never felt straight, and everyone around me always assumed I was bisexual which I thought was pretty plausible, and there was a lot of pressure on me to “go all the way” and be a lesbian. But I knew I was not a lesbian. I only ever felt comfortable around men, and I only wanted to date people I felt comfortable around. In fact, the most straight I’ve ever felt was when I was being pressured to try dating women and the only way I could imagine relating to women at all was to copy cishet men, and I acted like a complete asshole to the women I tried to date. Most often I’d fall for a guy who treated me like “one of the guys” and then once I was his “girlfriend” he’d treat me totally differently and I’d feel so confused and depressed, wanting to regain the dynamic we’d had when we were bros. In my twenties when I was single, I’d sometimes get in a mood where I’d feel furiously angry “for no reason” and to blow off steam, I’d just decide to go to a bar, pick out a guy, and make it my mission to fuck him that night and then never speak to him again, and you know, as someone perceived to be a fairly conventionally attractive white cis woman, that was ridiculously easy to do. Looking back, if I’d known I was transmasc and I was gay, I could have had a lot of fun cruising, which is I guess what I was doing. That’s not really something that appeals to me as much any more now that I’m in a stage of my life where I’m more interested in stability and less afraid of real intimacy, but I do mourn the wild gay youth as a Knight of Wands/Knight of Cups fuckboy that I might have had.
Charlie: I’ve been eagerly awaiting your book, 78 Acts of Liberation, since you first announced it, and now that I’ve had the pleasure to absolutely devour an advance copy, I can confidently say that it’s everything I hoped it would be and more. It’s more than a tarot book—it’s an education in activist history and a manual for liberation. What inspired you to write a book that brings activism and liberation movements together with tarot?
Lane: It really started out as just play for me. During lockdown in 2020, I played with the idea of what I would create if I made a deck, and I called it “The Tarot of We,” imagining what each Major Arcana would be if it were a group of people instead of an individual. I kept my ideas in a notes app and left them there; I’m not an artist and I wasn’t actually interested in making a deck, it was just a thought exercise for fun. Then in 2021, when I started the Tarot & Politics zine in order to uplift and preserve the ideas of Tarot folks who didn’t have huge audiences or access to traditional publishing at that time, I played with some political interpretations of the cards just to create filler content on my Instagram page, to draw an audience for the zine. I really didn’t overthink it, I didn’t have a whole plan, I just looked back at my note from 2020 for the Majors and played with whatever came to mind for the Minors – I really didn’t take it very seriously at all, it was all in service to getting people to read the zine and see the work of Tarot thinkers and writers who are BIPOC, queer, neurodivergent and/or disabled. But people really liked what I was posting, I had people with much larger platforms following me and observing how I was grouping the cards together by number (inspired by Mary K. Greer’s work but not commonly taught or talked about in that way at the time outside of her method of calculating birth cards for individuals) and how I was using the cards to discuss social issues directly.
Truthfully, I never would have chosen a Tarot book as my first book even though I’ve wanted nothing else but to be a writer since I was in second grade… But there was something very powerful about feeling like 78 Acts of Liberation was happening in spite of what I might want. It felt beyond my control, and it also felt like being of service to what others needed and wanted from me.
Within two months of posting these card groupings with sociopolitical associations (the Majors as movements paired with a historical image, and the Minors as specific activist skills and concepts), a literary agent contacted me about making it into a book. (I thought it was a scam and did a lot of digging on that person before I responded!) I’ll be honest, I just thought, it’s practically already written, I might as well, it would be so easy. I cut and pasted all my Instagram captions into a Word document it was somewhere around 50,000 words. I think if it hadn’t felt mostly done already, I probably would have talked myself out of taking it on, but since it appeared to be so easily within reach, I agreed to it.
Truthfully, I never would have chosen a Tarot book as my first book even though I’ve wanted nothing else but to be a writer since I was in second grade. I had a book idea in 2018 that I have still never let go of and which I still want to write. But there was something very powerful about feeling like 78 Acts of Liberation was happening in spite of what I might want. It felt beyond my control, and it also felt like being of service to what others needed and wanted from me. And I think that experience of not controlling, and being of service, really was the impetus for a lot of deeper spiritual development for me over the last few years, a lot of learning about myself and letting go of some old habits and patterns – and that all of that was really necessary for the book idea I had in mind in 2018 not to be a total disaster. I have real sense of “fatedness” and “destiny” about the whole thing, which are words that I associate with Jupiter, and my spiritual practices over that period of time were perhaps not coincidentally tied directly to Jupiter. Jupiter is my dominant planet (not my chart ruler, but the planet ruling over the signs where I have the most placements - almost all of my personal planets are in Sagittarius). And my natal Jupiter is in the 8th house, which is a house I think of as other people’s stuff, and the stuff you can’t control, as opposed to the 2nd house which is your own stuff (resources and talents and so forth). So, I think that probably also contributed to my sense of it feeling like this book is not mine, it belongs to the people who asked for it, and it was more a process of me letting it happen than of putting in great effort to create and build something based on my own desires, if that makes sense.
Charlie: I love that you organize the book by number grouping (the ones, twos, threes, etc) and that you introduce an entirely new way of conceiving of the Major Arcana as a sphere instead of a line. There are lots of mind-blowing things about this model, but I think my favorite is that you position the last three cards (The Sun, Judgment, and The World) as the “horizon” of the sphere, which you say “distinguishes them from being an achievement or goal to reach” because “the Horizon is always before us; we never reach it.” Rather than being a destination, these cards then “outline the contours of possibility,” and they’re also relational, changing as our position and conditions change. It reminds me of what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia about queerness as “a horizon imbued with potentiality,” an ideality that can never be reached but must be aspired to and acted toward nonetheless. This resonates with what you write later (about The Star): “A more liberated world doesn’t have to be a utopia to be worth moving toward.” I guess my question is less of a question and more of an expression of awe! How did the idea of the sphere come to you, and how can conceiving of the tarot in this way shift the way we relate to it and use it?
Lane: It’s always been my experience that information finds its way to me with magical timing. Just recently a friend asked for something to do while bedridden as they recover from top surgery, and as soon as they asked, I immediately found It Wasn’t a Phase: The Ultimate Emo Activity Book by Yasmine Summan and the release date for the book was the very next day! I’d probably never have even heard about it if I wasn’t shopping for a gift for my friend at that particular moment, and it was perfect for them (and something I’d love to get for myself!).
I’ve noticed that I’ll buy a book that interests me but I never open it and it sits on my shelf for ten or fifteen years and then suddenly I’ll think of picking it up, and it’ll be a book that’s now out of print and would have been hard to put my hands on if I hadn’t bought it years ago, and I’ll read something in it that connects with a new interest in a profound way – things like that. In my 20s, I was really interested in quantum physics, but honestly it was the more romanticized, science fictional descriptions of quantum physics than the actual science and math that I was drawn to. The concept of quantum entanglement is just so romantic to me.
Back then, I really felt like I wanted to tie together postmodernism and Buddhism, AI and spirituality. It was a spark of an idea which of course many, many other people have had too; it was one that I didn’t end up exploring very deeply. But that interest came back to me again while I was thinking about Tarot structure, and the numerological pairings that Mary K. Greer identifies as Tarot constellations struck me as mirroring both the axes of signs in astrology and the sympathetic vibrations between tiny particles in quantum entanglement. And at the same time, I was also reading material about fatphobia and I was having a lot of thoughts about the preference for lines over spheres as body shapes and as stories that we tell (linear versus cyclical).
I don’t know, I have what I call “the cauldron” inside me, which isn’t just my mind but it’s a container for a lot of different inputs and experiences, and I always feel like stuff bubbles up in the cauldron from who-knows-where and when, and I can purposely throw some things into the cauldron too, and then it all mixes together on its own – it all wants to find where connections can be formed, and then something usually comes out that connects them. It happens without me thinking about or focusing on it too hard (just like with quantum particles, looking too directly at them pins them down in a way that belies their nonbinary, nonlinear reality). That process of mixing stuff up in the cauldron is something I think of as being particularly Sagittarian, and that alchemical process is my strongest association with the Temperance card. So, I guess the short answer to your question is – it came to me by magic.
Charlie: 78 Acts has one of the hands-down best history chapters I’ve ever read in a tarot book because you focus on the history that isn’t told by white, European academic elites, including cartomancy’s Romani roots, the appropriation of Jewish mysticism by non-Jewish tarot occultists, and card reading as a survival trade. I think that sometimes, when tarot readers (white readers in particular) are confronted with the problematic past of white European occult tarot, they feel like they have two options: either deny that past as false, or acknowledge it and throw their tarot decks out the window. With the acknowledgement that you and I both are white tarot readers, what advice would you give to white readers who feel confronted by this knowledge?
Lane: Yes, exactly! That binary choice between completely canceling something or propping something up through denial and erasure is the exact question I’ve been grappling with most – in fact, the book idea I had in 2018 addresses the same exact thing, but for something else, not Tarot. I think we see that mindset play out on a larger and more horrific scale with settler colonialism, where it’s like, “it’s mine to do what I want with or I will burn it to the ground.” And of course, the Land Back answer to that is to ask if you can imagine yourself being in actual relationship with Indigenous people. Can you Indigenize your own life? (Which doesn’t just mean romanticizing your relationship to the land, but understanding that Indigenous people are part of the land and your relationship to those very people matters, and it can’t be one of coercion or control.) What would Israeli settlers have had to do to be able to live among Indigenous Palestinians as equals and as co-stewards of the land there, before genocide made that an impossibility? What would European settlers have had to do to be able to live among the Indigenous people of Turtle Island to be able to live here as equals, learning to be co-stewards of the land? What do white Tarot professionals have to do to be in relationship to the still-existing Romani readers, and Black cartomancers?
Hope, for me, is an inner fire that stays lit when I’m actively engaged in changemaking with others.
I would never tell survivors of genocide or slavery (and Romani people are descended from people who experienced both) that they need to forgive and forget and move on. All I can really do is attempt to be in right relationship with them as best I can in the current context. That doesn’t mean every Romani person will be pleased with me – they are not a monolith. But I think white people in particular tend to project onto others a demand for perfection that just isn’t there, and they/we use that as an excuse to not even do the bare minimum. I have listened to Roma people who believe Tarot should be a closed practice. I have listened to Roma people who don’t believe it should be a closed practice but that non-Roma should be doing repair work for the damage that has been done in disparaging them through racist stereotypes, and uplifting them and supporting them more. What I’ve determined for myself is that, unfortunately, white people abandoning Tarot will negatively impact Romani people and their businesses, marginalizing them even further. So, I’ve decided to continue to use and write about Tarot, but not to be in the marketplace competing to sell readings, because Tarot is not a survival trade for me; I can make money in other ways. And I know there are queer and disabled people, including some white people, for whom Tarot is a survival trade and I personally wouldn’t tell them to make the same decision that I’ve made for myself in choosing not to sell readings. I do think we are all obligated to tell the truth about Tarot history and rectify Eurocentric tellings of that history which marginalize Roma people, and that we should be uplifting and supporting Roma readers at least as much as we uplift and support and give our money to our favorite readers who aren’t Roma.
Charlie: I’ve had The Star on the brain a lot recently because of guest editing The Star issue of
, which is going to contain a wonderfully strange, sensory, mind-opening piece of fiction and essay by you! (Available fall 2024—preorders opening soon!) One of the popular interpretations of The Star is hope, and the action you list for The Star in your book is “Have faith in the future.” For a lot of us, hope and faith are difficult things to come by right now. What’s giving you hope or bolstering your faith in the future right now?Lane: Honestly, the last year has really made me dig deep to explore where I locate hope more, and the prompt for The Rebis also made me think more deeply about my relationship to The Star than I had done when I wrote that section for the book. I’m always growing and learning and changing, thankfully! So that makes it weird to be an author of a published work which will stand alone unchanged. But yeah, I was really thinking a lot about how responsibility and change are both aspects of Aquarius/The Star through Aquarius’ dual rulership of Saturn and Uranus. I’m not sure I necessarily find faith and hope in that duality of responsibility and change, but I do find that faith and hope are prerequisites for it. For me, hope is located more with Jupiter (Sagittarius/Temperance and The Wheel which both come before The Star). I believe the future depends on those dynamics of responsibility and change that are essential to shaping the horizon of possibility. The Star points to our responsibility to make change and cause disruption and go against the grain in order to prevent Empires and monoliths and total destruction, as well as to know what to imagine and do when destruction has already happened, as in the Tower. Hope, for me, is an inner fire that stays lit when I’m actively engaged in changemaking with others. I’ll leave it at that, and hope people read my piece in The Rebis for more!
Charlie: I feel like every book I write changes me. I might be writing it, but it’s writing me, too. Do you feel like writing this book changed you? If so, how?
Lane: Most of what’s written in the book was written in 2021, and the writing part didn’t really change me, but the publishing process did. What I wrote is very much situated in my past experiences, what I’ve learned and experiences as an activist and Tarot reader over the last 25 years. It feels really significant to me that it sums up where I’ve been and where I was situated just before October 2023, since the content editing was completed that summer. I’ve been changed much more over the last ten months because of the movement for a Free Palestine, not because that movement was new to me – I’d been involved since 2002, but because I became so disillusioned by the political processes and protest movements that I imagined would make a Free Palestine possible, and as a result, I radicalized further than where I was when I wrote the book.
The advice I always give to writers is to do more living than writing, to spend more time having experiences with other people and in society than solitary moments at your writing desk; otherwise, all you really have to write about are the contents of your own mind… To have something new and worthwhile to say, you have to actually live out your particular life in this particular time and place; that’s what’s never happened before.
78 Acts of Liberation really feels like a bookend on a chapter of my life – one that was transformative, and I’m grateful for all of it even though a lot of it was very hard: from being a chronically depressed and suicidal young adult to a committed revolutionary socialist to breaking from the socialist organization I belonged to for 15 years, to marrying and having children, to coming out as transgender and gay. The book feels like an integrated capsule of that period, and going through the process of actually seeing something through to completion was probably the most challenging part for me. Having to face all the self-sabotage that comes up around completion and around being seen publicly when both my writing and Tarot practice have always been very private was what changed me the most; I had to face a lot of fears and maladaptive habits. Now I feel that I’m stepping into a new, exploratory chapter of my life where I feel more like a wobbly newborn than a seasoned elder in a lot of ways, while at the same time being fortified by the challenges I met and the breakthroughs I experienced in the last chapter.
I would say most of that change did not happen in the process of writing, but of living. The advice I always give to writers is to do more living than writing, to spend more time having experiences with other people and in society than solitary moments at your writing desk; otherwise, all you really have to write about are the contents of your own mind, and that’s the kind of thing that leads to the feeling that everything has been said already. To have something new and worthwhile to say, you have to actually live out your particular life in this particular time and place; that’s what’s never happened before. So, I’ve certainly changed, and my writing reflects that and helps me process it, and is part of the alchemy of digesting my experiences so that they can change me, but I wouldn’t say that writing all by itself is the main ingredient in that transformation process. For myself, I experience writing like breathing. Could I grow and change or even survive without it? Of course not. Is it the thing that drives my experiences and steers the direction that I go in? Not really. It supports whatever I’m doing with my life.
Charlie: Describe something beautiful.
Lane: Sitting in the basement classroom of my local radical bookstore in a Tarot group started by Black queer folks, reading Tarot collaboratively, so that everyone is the reader and querent at the same time, negotiating the answer to the question we formulated together. Everyone should try something like this, and it’s the one first thing I hope people will do when they read my book, because it’s never too early to start building networks of trust and mutual support with like-minded and like-spirited people. Having established trusting relationships is the only way we will ever be able to take the bravest kinds of actions required of us to confront fascism, genocide, and the police state.
Charlie: Lastly, the final question I ask everyone: What does the word “devotion” mean to you, and what are you devoted to?
Lane: To me, devotion is the intimate expression of commitment. I think of commitment as very Saturnian, involving long-term effort in spite of emotional fluctuations; there’s distance in both feeling and in time. But devotion is commitment that is concentrated into the present moment and involves emotional intimacy; I would connect it with a near planet, like Venus or Mercury. Devotion is often associated with Virgo, ruled by Mercury, and I do think devotion can be expressed in both everyday routine ways, and also in romantic and sensuous ways, and both of those ways are intimate in a way that, say, Capricornian long-term commitment to building a legacy isn’t. I think you can express passionate devotion to a complete stranger, in one chance encounter – that would be devotion without commitment, and I think that kind of devotion is usually viewed as sinful and is sort of a hallmark of cruising culture. You can also be committed without devotion, which I think many people are, to their jobs and families for example, out of necessity. For me, imagining relationships that have both commitment and devotion at the same time is extraordinarily romantic. I view my friendships and my community relationships and my politics of liberation as romantic, primarily because I’m both committed and devoted to them. And at the same time, I also find beauty (and sexiness) in devotion that is not committed, fully immersive in a one-time experience. I’m a devoted (and committed) parent, revolutionary, and friend, all because the long-term commitment gives me enough support to soften into repeated acts of tender devotion. It’s been a while for me, but I can also be a devoted lover, with or without commitment - but with commitment, there’s more romance and tenderness along with the passionate intensity of undivided attention, because there’s more safety and security, and more room to make mistakes and make repairs over a longer term, rather than having just one shot at giving all of yourself.
About Lane Smith
Lane Smith is the author of 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World, published by Sounds True (August 2024). Lane is a transmasculine nonbinary writer with over 20 years of experience as an activist, organizer, and Tarot reader. They have been involved in struggles against war, the death penalty, attacks on 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and body autonomy for marginalized genders and birthing people, police violence, apartheid, and genocide. They have worked as a social worker in prisons, and in the field of harm reduction with people who are at risk for HIV/AIDS. With a professional Master’s degree in Social Work and an academic Master’s degree in Humanities and Social Thought, Lane expresses their ideas in clear, nonacademic language in the interest of putting social justice values into practice. Lane is the editor of the Tarot & Politics zine, and a member of Solidarity Tarot where they live in Baltimore City, Maryland.