The Radiance of Pain
“We’re all just walking each other home.” It’s a phrase that’s been ringing in my ears lately. I don’t remember who said it. I could Google the answer, but I like not knowing, as if the phrase were as common as “sly as a fox” or “out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
I wish it were.
What’s made me remember these words is the pain I’ve witnessed this year. I don’t normally discuss my clientele because I would not be a very trustworthy intuitive if I did. Some colleagues do, of course–usually when they count celebrities among them–but while I understand the impulse and hope everyone is being discussed with their consent, I feel I must adhere to very clear ethics because intuitive work is not regulated though it entails such fragile, precious material–namely, souls. Continue Reading →
Divine Extradition
A friend once told me she walked in the woods every day because the woods were her church, and why wouldn’t you pray every day when your church was so beautiful? Today I spent Yom Kippur in such a church–a temple, really–and really did find prayer and fasting and atonement so much easier. Guided by lower and upper case grace, I walked the paths of my friend’s beautiful land–pink, amber, ochre, grey. I prayed to my ancestors for forgiveness for how I failed their line, asked G-d to help me be a better vessel in the second half of my life, talked aloud to the highest spirits of those with whom I am blocked. Light-headed and clear-hearted, that’s how I felt when the sun disappeared again. Good. G’mar Tov, beautiful people. You are my temple.
Amber Atonement
Grace and I are in nature again, and my heart is already glad. This is the right place for true atonement this year, I can feel it in the gratitude and lower-case grace suffusing my limbs, abdomen, cheeks. Wriggling my toes. The drive here was full of the colors that only fill museums and graffiti when I’m in the city; the air like nothing when I fling open my apartment window. I know the divine is everywhere but sometimes it’s so much easier to greet it when you walk unfettered by blocks, squired by swanning trees. Grace feels it too. She barely complained as we drove upstate and when we arrived–the sun sinking golden and amber below the horizon; other fireplaces sharing their smoke so tantalizingly–she raced gleefully from room to room, screeching to a halt on the screened-in porch with her tail trembling, tiny nose twitching. It was like she was saying, “This!” I blinked many times at her: “Yes, this.” She crept into my lap, sweetly shy kitty. I’ve been trying for weeks to teach her to say yes–oddly, she has mastered the “n” sound, so like an angry 2-year-old she bleats “no” whenever I squeeze too tightly or nudge her off a surface. Here, as we forgive and ask for forgiveness, as we tune into the heavens visible only in squares and patches back home, I think my overfamiliar will finally trumpet that yes. G’mar Hatima Tova, which is to say: May you be sealed in the Book of Life. Let’s say the Book of Love while we’re at it. Yes.