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Camel Toes the Line

July 8, 2019 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Book Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Spirit Matters

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This is a dream; feel free to read no further. But I was so intrigued by its details that I’m sharing what I can remember. It contains new imagery for me. Gone are the communal spaces where in past dreams I’ve been forced to camp; gone too are the panic dreams in which I don’t graduate from high school because I failed math. (Yes, my father has a PhD in higher mathematics.) In the last of that ilk, I barreled through a forest of literal red tape and nabbed a diploma anyway.

This dream confronts new fears and offers new hope.

I inherit a camel as a pet. I’m not sure how the camel comes my way and certainly do not receive instruction in responsible camel-caretaking. Totally over my head, I feed it leftover steak with spinach and ask it politely to join me on the subway. With rheumy eyes and a resigned but kindly manner, Camel obliges and as the train emerges onto an elevated line slinking through Midtown, it turns into a Snowpiercer-style disaster. We pass a tundra that used to be 57th street with about 50 frozen human corpses hanging from a cable strung between two skyscrapers. Snow and ice shimmer in the air, fatally beautiful, though we passengers are still wearing summer gear. Camel and I can’t exit the subway, none of us can. It’s making no stops–just hurtling forward–and we’re in danger of losing electricity and dying on the tracks, suspended above the polar tundra of the city. Off the train we’ll die, too.

I hold onto Camel’s matted amber fur for comfort and he–I think he’s a he, I’m not attached to him being a he–receives my touch. He is impassive but also comforting. There’s a solidarity and trust beaming between us, and when I scavenge food from a shrieking woman’s purse (vintage Gucci, even in that context I admire it) I duck under a bench to share the booty with now-friend and family member Camel. The end is nigh–maybe. Maybe not.

We munch on Swedish meatballs encased in a proper silver tin.

I have never given camels serious consideration before, but believe they refer to conservation–a theme that also emerges when we fear the train will lose juice. Now that I am soundly middle-aged, I think about conservation a lot. Also since my income drastically plummeted. Also since the environment started more rapidly declining.

With a transportation disaster at its core, this is a Mercury Retrograde nightmare if ever there were one–especially since conservation is a major theme of Cancer, where the Sun and Mercury live this month. And of course this is a real American Horror Story, since there’s not a thinking American alive who doesn’t fret that the end is nigh. Such extreme, apocalyptic weather is right around the corner.

But there’s something beautiful in this dream’s ambiguous ending, something hopeful. For camels also are symbols of endurance, of surviving unyielding, harsh circumstances.

All year I’ve been stuck in a desert that I fear I won’t survive–creatively, financially, romantically, geopolitically. Yet in this dream I am fumbling through, unsure of how to take care of myself and Camel but doing it anyway. With his mute, trusting presence, Camel is supporting me too. I think of the Strength card in Tarot–of the artist taming the lion (untapped raw creativity) while the lion also tames her.

But camels are more practical, less dramatic creatures. The know how to brighten up and also hunker down. They have strong personalities, proclivities, passions, but express them only when they can afford the resources.

Camel and I aren’t trying to tame each other. We’ve weathered a lot already–more than we’ll ever understand or know about the other. We may not have much time together, and we may never offer each other more than creature comfort and an innate sense of shared goals. But from here til the better end, we’re in on it together.

Grown-up love is coming.

Mercury retrograde is all about missives from the divine unconscious so expect powerful dreams of your own this month. Feel free to share them.

Mercury Retrogrades, So Do We

July 7, 2019 in Astro Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Food Matters, Spirit Matters

Mercury went retrograde today, and immediately I went off-plan. All set for a quiet night with a fillet of trout and a certain permakitten, I was invited last-minute to the sumptuous Lilia Ristorante and–well, mama didn’t raise no fool.

As we were mawing mint artichokes, my companion said, “Isn’t Mercury always in retrograde?” and I replied that though technically the planet of modernity (communication, travel, multitasking) only goes retrograde every three months, it happens a lot to force us to unplug. In other words, when it starts moving backward, it’s kairos, or soul time, rather than chronos, or linear time.

The usual caveats apply–namely, back everything up and don’t stay attached to business as usual. Also keep cold hard cash around; banks and digital resources may get especially funked up . Since this retrograde is happening mostly in the sign of Cancer during an eclipse season that’s bopping between Cancer and Capricorn (the mom and dad of the zodiac, respectively), the big issue on the table is protection and nurturing–how do we take care of ourselves and others, how can we do better? I’m not talking “radical self-care,” an eye-roller of a term if ever there were one. I’m talking about investing in the crucial collaborations of our lives–releasing past traumas that block us from being fully present with others, embracing present alliances that can transform us into future champions. No one is pretending this month will be status quo, but so long as you take it slow, its long-term effect should be fabulous. Just remember to–wait for it!–go with the flow.

Mercury retrogrades are brilliant for tuning into the cosmos; schedule a Ruby Intuition session this month!

Sox and the City, Baseball Caps and the Shitty

June 9, 2019 in Astro Matters, City Matters, Feminist Matters, Queer Matters, Ruby Intuition, Weather Matters

Kristen Schiele, 2019

As soon I finished my block of intuition readings yesterday, my immune system 100 percent hit the wall. My clients were lovely, but with Mercury in Cancer during Gemini season, people are projecting their big emotions rather rather than filtering them. You can’t walk down the street without tripping over a weepy, explosive confrontation. The effect is toxic.

Word to the wise: All projection but astral projection is ill-advised. Eh, film projection is all right, too.

Being sick this time of year is miserable. It’s also discombobulating, because these should be halcyon days. NYC has so few blocks of decent weather that when they arrive you want to call in happy to every obligation hanging over your head. Instead all I’ve been able to do on this sunny, clear Sunday is writhe on my bed, feverish and clogged up. Oy vey, I moan.

Question: When a writer’s whining in her apartment and no one’s there to hear it, is she really whining? Answer: Oy vey, yes.

And sola dwellers must fend for themselves, no matter how they’re ailing. So this morning I put on a schmata–no point in combing my hair–and hobbled down to Whole Foods for the sort of provisions that might miraculously restore my health, or at least not worsen it. Usually I stave off my Whole Paycheck crabbiness with good deals on free-range chicken (and Fairway). But the number of white guys in baseball caps and expensive footgear who bumped into me because they were fiddling with their phones while wandering up the aisle– not looking up, not soldiering bags, JUST LETTING THE LITTLE WOMEN BY THEIR SIDES DO THE ACTUAL FORAGING–was simply mind-boggling. Okay, the number was three but, oy vey, that’s a lot given that it was only 8 am and it’s 2019. Here they were, taking up space but in no way interacting with it, let alone improving it.

The metaphor loomed.

Here’s the thing. I’ve lived in Williamsburg off and on since the 1990s, and while that may mean “entitled hipster” to you, for long-time residents it means community and hustle. Certainly the one thing it’s never meant in all its generations of immigration and creative gentrification is dumb dickocracy.

Until now.

So did any of these forever frat boys excuse themselves when they bumped into me? No, they looked up annoyed, as in WHO DIDN’T GET OUT OF MY WAY? Maybe if I’d been feeling stronger I would given them the ole Rosmaniac pushback but today their ugly arrogance just made me sad– as did the plastic-encased cut flowers and the prohibitively expensive organic food and the older woman I spotted in the dairy aisle carefully counting the change in her purse.

Part of me thought, why is she shopping here if she’s so strapped? Then I remembered you could say the same of me and maybe she also needed healthy food without venturing out of the neighborhood. So I tuned into her, and was immediately stuck between her rock and hard place, walls closing in on all sides like I was in the Star Wars garbage compactor.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m feeling everything and everybody–an occupational hazard when my defenses are down–and the truth is few of us are having a very good time even though it’s the prettiest spring I can remember. Our world isn’t just changing. t’s crashing down, and the saddest part is the rude white dudes unapologetically running everyone down in their lane.

I write all this and then remember the ten episodes of The L Word I watched in the last 24 hours. (What can I say? It’s Sox and the City for this sickie.) Though the series only ended 10 years ago, the queer community has come a long way, baby. I pray someday soon those lane-crashers will be forced to catch up.

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