vote – Jen Fries Arts

Magic Time: Let’s clean house

November 2, 2026 JenLeave a comment

Happy Halloween!

My witchy treat for my friends today is a tarot reading! (Have I mentioned that I read cards? I think I may have.) This is just for general vibes and, of course, entertainment purposes. Take or leave it as you will, and make of it what you please.

Halloween heralds the transition from end of fall to beginning of winter with several days of cultural, religious, and secular celebrations. Here in the USA, this transition includes the end of Daylight Savings, knocking us into the dark season way too quickly, and Election Day, an even darker season this year.

So considering what we’re all doing and thinking about this week, I sat down and asked the universe how we might expect things to go, socially and personally.

Overall and surprisingly, not too bad.

This reading brings the energy of a major housecleaning. It’s about taking direct action to correct a disordered condition. It’s about breaking inertia and making that first progress step towards fixing something that’s been bothering you for a long time.

Is your house a persistent wreck (like mine)? Are you stuck in a dead-end job? Have you been struggling or hesitating to begin a near-and-dear project? Are you ready to vote the bastards out once and for all?

Now is a good opportunity to crack that wall, kick aside that obstacle, and get started.

8 of Wands x 10 of Cups (reversed) confronts the problem head-on. This is about recognizing that you are not happy. Maybe you feel you’re not living your values, your joy, your love, your self, and you’re choosing to do something about it as of right now. This far and no farther. You are determined to turn this shit around.

Motivation comes from being fed up to the gills with the status quo, per the 4 of Cups at the foundation. You’ve had enough of worthless, garbage options. You are hungry for something new, and you’re done waiting passively for someone else to deliver it.

So you step up and get to work. The Queen of Wands is you coming into your competence, skills, and leadership, applying them to practical matters. Balancing your accounts, paying the bills. Getting your ballot delivered on time, or getting yourself down to your polling place to cast your vote. Cleaning your garden, bringing in the harvest, getting it all mulched and bedded down for winter. Organizing, cooperating, planning, helping, doing the things, on your own or with friends, whatever suits your situation. You get what’s needed to do what you want to do, and you build your relationships and support system as you go.

The Queen is in the position of the recent past and present, indicating you’ve already begun this process. You have had it with this mess. You’ve burned through all the bullshit, and you are clear in your head about what you want and what is blocking you from having it.

The 3 of Pentacles tells us this is an institutional, foundational issue. This is about the institution of your home, your work, your community, your finances, your health, your politics, whatever you have going on, all of it. It’s both the what and the how.

Make no mistake, there are obstacles and opposition. You are fixing things that have been broken a long time. That in itself is difficult. You may come up against people who don’t want the situation to change. And you may have to confront old habits to stop sabotaging your own progress. None of that is easy or quick, even though the 8 of Wands says that, right now, you take quick action that brings quick results.

Those results, in the near future with the 4 of Wands, will be successful, but not the end of the matter. It’s a short-term win. Take it, enjoy it, celebrate it, and accept the benefit of it.

But understand, you are celebrating the opening of a road. Then you have to start your journey down that road, doing whatever you just cleared the way for.

This will be your chance to make sure that what you build and where you go next will support the life you want to live, the world you want to create. Now is your chance to actively express your values and your true self, rather than letting others dictate your reality, others who do not have your wellbeing in mind.

So, for example, if you’re doing fall cleaning this week (like me), don’t just dust and polish the existing junk. Think about what you want your space to be, how you want it to work and feel, and once you’ve decluttered and cleared out the closets, then be ready to start making it better.

Or if you’re voting in an election this week (early voting, yay!), do it with 2027, 2028, and the next decade in mind. As soon as that ballot is cast, start planning what you want to do with a new Congress once we’ve swept out the old one.

We’re reaching the end of many things. In almost every aspect of life, including big, public stuff, we have to do a lot of heavy lifting with no guaranteed outcome.

But this is a great time of year for that sort of thing, because Halloween is a gateway from one time cycle to another. Things end this week, and other things begin.

I invite you to consider Halloween week the first step towards the season of new years, the great winter reset of our seasonal, planetary, and celestial cycles. This is the demo phase of recreating ourselves and our world.

So c’mon, Queen of Wands, let’s identify the things we want to be rid of, and what we want to have instead. Let’s make a list, and let’s start scratching items off, one by frikking one.

-Jen

Notes

This essay contains 973 words. According to western numerology, 973 reduces to 19, then 10, then 1. In tarot, 19 is The Sun, signifying light, liberation, and self realization. 10 is The Wheel of Fortune, signifying the working of fate, universal cycles, and luck. Opportunity is knocking. And 1 is The Magician who channels universal energy through skill and intelligence to make things happen in the real world. We are all Magicians here.

You really couldn’t ask for better omens, so get out there and vote!

I used the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot for two reasons. First, it’s my heart deck. I learned on this deck, and as an artist, the RWS system is natural for me. Second, Pamela Coleman Smith’s card art is in the public domain, so I can post these images with happy ethics. Expect to see more of my tarot work in future.

Additional illustrations are my original works, seasonally appropriate, a page from a pen and ink sketchbook and a detail from a crown of bats and moths.

A new day comes: choosing hope at the crossroads

November 5, 2024March 17, 2025 Jen

Hi, all.

It’s been almost half a year since I posted last, and the reason this time is that I’ve been pretty deep in the weeds, personally. There have been some developments in my work, some chronic health issues popping up, and some practical things that had to be addressed. But mostly it’s been the same worry and stress that everyone has been feeling lately – politics.

Tomorrow is Election Day in the US, the last day for casting ballots and the first day of counting. It’s tomorrow as of the time of writing this blog post. By the time you read it, we’ll be well into the process. I don’t expect it to be quick, clean, or easy. It will likely be some time before we know for sure what path my country is going to take.

I won’t lie, I’m sick to my stomach about it, but in keeping with my personality, I’m more angry than scared. There are people I will never forgive for what they’ve taken from me and my world these recent years. I’ve lost friends and family connections to an ideological cult. My cynicism is a hot, inflamed mess. My capacity for trust is totaled, uncertain if it can ever be fixed. I’ve felt stuck, paralyzed, unable to commit to plans because I have no idea what conditions to plan for. The most fantastical and outlandish worst-case scenarios seem all too plausible now.

Everything I’ve been doing, all the ways I’ve been presenting myself, the public image I project, it’s all being second-guessed. Can I, like this, really operate in a new reality? Is this version of me even functional, let alone relevant, to any of the roads opening before me? And if not, how should I adapt? Which Jen should take over and where should she appear?

By 1:00AM, Tuesday, November 5, 2024 (though I guess it’ll really be Wednesday morning), the last polls in the USA, in Alaska, will be closed and concepts will start transforming into things. Only then will we start to get a clear idea of what we’re dealing with.

It matters tremendously, of course, but however it works out, Election Day is only the beginning. It’s just the day of making a choice. Doing things to realize that choice comes after.

Whether we end up regrouping to relaunch our opposition to ascendant fascism, or we celebrate democracy’s win with sweeping actions to clean our house at last, we will need to dedicate the rest of our lives to curing the critical rot in our society. I’m coming around to the belief that this struggle will never end. It will return again and again, as outlined in an inspiring historical analysis by Heather Cox Richardson. And I kind of don’t mind that. I think this is what it means to “fight the good fight” and to “keep the faith” — to be willing to embrace that never-ending work as one’s self expression and the definition of one’s community. That’s how “American” should be defined, as a people who fight for freedom and stand against the forces of autocracy.

I’ve decided to get a bit of a jump on all the work, so to speak, with a series of blog articles on the topic of principles. I’ll get down to the granular texture on specific topics in later articles, but in this inaugural statement I want to make one thing clear.

I am a left-leaning, liberal progressive, and proud of it. I support progressive policies in the US, I give my vote to Kamala Harris for US President, and I want to state in as strong terms as possible that I provide no safe space – zero safe space – to haters and manipulators.

If you are a racist, a sexist, misogynist, transphobe, homophobe. any kind of genderist, a corporatist of any kind, a fascist, an elitist, a denier of science, history, or simple facts, a warmonger or profiteer, or an extremist of any kind, you are not and will never be welcome here, because I’m done with all that crap. That’s Point 1 in the post-election 2024 reality, whatever else it might be. It has always been what I’m about as a person, and it always will be. Simple as, end of.

I have only a tiny community right now, but it might grow – it could happen – and this statement will always be on this website, applicable to all people and situations. So if someday, someone has a problem coping with getting their bullshit called out, they were warned.

I’m going to wrap this up with words from the most famous American President ever to win a civil war, because I feel he captured that moment, this moment, and every similar moment more perfectly than I ever could.

And I’ll close my own words with one of my recent watercolors. It’s a very small painting of something very large. It is the sunrise.

It’s our turn now, all of us. Choose hope, people.

– Jen

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Books, Bees, & Sunflowers

August 21, 2020 Jen

This month, I finally finished one of my projects, the re-binding of my Pictorial Key to the Tarot. You saw it in progress in my last posting. Below are some photos of the finished book.

The new cover uses the boards of the original cover wrapped in a one-of-a-kind decorative paste paper I made recently. I salvaged the torn, beat-up, original spine label, fading it a bit more with a lick of paint. The lines of fine black ribbon on either side of the spine are the exposed stitching attaching the cover to the book. I went with my preferred adhesive-free, sewn binding. The inside covers, front and back, have double pockets for notes, and I included five permanent ribbon bookmarks. As you can see, the book lies open very easily. Closed, it looks quite fetching on my bookshelf as well.

What else is going on? Flowers! Bees! The garden is a satisfying riot of gorgeousness and buzzing. We’ve suffered through some heavy heat and rain, but all is well on the flora and fauna front.

I learned today that the sunflower is associated with the women’s suffrage movement. It was used on a button of the National American Woman Suffrage Association for their 1867 Kansas campaign, and was Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pen-name in the women’s newspaper, The Lily. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton Hometown Association) As 2020 marks the 100^th anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment, guaranteeing women the vote in the US, I’m feeling a little extra pride in my lovely, tall, nodding, giant flowers.

Also, exciting announcement, a shop-like arrangement is in the works. Watch this space for updates on when works will become available to buy. I’m a little terrified by the prospect, but it’s really happening. The paperwork is mostly in hand.

And if you haven’t yet subscribed to my monthly newsletter, do give it a try. It offers exclusive glimpses into my art practice and study, as well as things to do outside the studio. You can sign up here and receive three printable bookmarks as my thank-you gift.