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Summer Solstice Magic for Ameriker

June 21, 2020 in Astro Matters, Church Matters, Country Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

Today is Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year and the lightest moment in the earth’s orbit around the sun. It is also a new moon and a solar eclipse while five other planets are in retrograde (six by tomorrow). All else has stilled as we celebrate Litha, the Celtic goddess of abundance, and the first day of Cancer, the sign most associated with family, nurturing, our homes. It is also the sign under which this country was birthed.

Today linear time has collapsed to make way for soul time. Past is future is present. The ancestors are here. History has reanimated so we may assess its impact in real time and release all that does not serve.

On most midsummers, I recommend cleaning your house, decorating with flowers, burning sage, and lighting candles. Any rituals celebrating abundance, creativity, and prosperity. All this still applies. But today, I also recommend praying for America. For we are midway through this year of profound turmoil and transformation, and we must pray to continue healing.

So let us honor the Earth as well as the Sun. Let us honor the beautiful spirit of everyone and everything on this soil and in these seas. Let us honor the children we carry, the children we eternally are, children everywhere. Let us honor the sacrifices we must make to protect each body as if it were our own.

May the voltage of this midsummer magic help heal this dysfunctional American family. May it eclipse the greed and cruelty that has for too long seized this land. May it recharge us so we better serve love and light.

Thank you, Mother Sun for loving us as we fail to love each other.

art (top to bottom): Javaka Steptoe, Kerry James Marshall

How Venus and Mercury Retrograde Raise Us

June 18, 2020 in Astro Matters, Country Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

As readers of this blog are well-aware, I’ve been felled by a UTI that bloomed into my kidneys and retriggered intergenerational trauma. While I’ve been trying to heal, I’ve been laying low in terms of my “business.”

Until recently most of us used social media to promote our businesses or a version of our selves–so much so that I’ve been privately advised I should keep discussions of my illness to a minimum.

It all boiled down to the same thing: our brand, even if we didn’t admit it.

But somewhere between Covid-19 and our country’s substandard response to it, between the righteous rising of the Black Lives Movement and an institutionalized white supremacist rebellion, “brands” stopped being an appropriate presentation. Because this moment is not about ego, the “I.” It is about the “superego”—the collective conscience.

So what’s the connection between my inflamed urinary tract and the greater unrest in our country? The shared reality that we can only filter so many toxins before we break down. Just consider how health and justice has been disrupted by generations of institutionalized harm. If you are, as I am, the descendent of Polish Jewish immigrants, that impact is powerful. If you are a BIPOC person in America, it is legion. And it’s no coincidence that this massive dis-ease has been happening during Venus Retrograde.

This period demands we examine how love and care is disrupted. The good news? We needed the recalibration. And I’ve come to believe that healing is not about getting “better” so much as positive transformation. Consider the dual definitions of “utopia”—“no place” and “perfect place.” The point is to continue striving.

We may never achieve perfectly equitable, institutionalized care in our economy, courts, streets, schools, and whole selves. But we must always perfectly try.

Today Mercury Retrograde begins in caretaker Cancer, and it will help us continue to express our support for each other. So let your words be love spells and shape-shifters—assents and ascents. Because healing is not linear. It is a spiral staircase on which we revisit blocks from an ever-higher frequency.

In the 1960s, great upheaval ushered great changes. Now we may rise again by re-raising ourselves and each other.

(To those who’ve kindly inquired, Ruby Intuition sessions can be booked again starting in July.)

The Church of Prince and the Revolution

June 7, 2020 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Church Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Music Matters, Spirit Matters

Today is the 62nd birthday of Prince Roger Nelson. Anyone who reads this blog knows that he’s part of a holy trinity for me, the other two members being Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. But not everyone realizes that our astrological charts continue to affect others long after we die. This is important because our Lord in Purple hailed from Minneapolis, the heart of America’s broken heartland, where George Floyd was so flagrantly and unrepentantly executed by law enforcement officials that his murder launched a worldwide revolution. Had he been alive Prince surely would have been the first to raise holy hell. He loved his hometown fiercely–never really left–and was so down for revolution that he named his band after it. If the depth of his social justice commitment was not fully recognized during his lifetime, that’s only because he kept many of his good works behind the scenes. Which only makes me love him more.

His genius was recognized, though, and it continues to offer a collective intimacy necessary to fight the good fight, because it continues to remind us how unique and desirable we all are–how worth fighting for. Trust that he would be on the forefront of today’s protest lines today were he alive. And trust that he is moving just as powerfully behind the scenes today— composing the perfect lyric, backbeat, howl to raise us from the ashes of institutionalized white supremacy.

So I believe that on his 62nd solar return—when a person’s energy is most felt— we may still call on Prince for support, practical magic, and inspiration. Indeed, may this poly-everything, third-eye-winking, putting-the-Gem-in-Gemini reign as the sign of our times. Purple love to all on this turbulent Sunday in America.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy