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Second Chakra Ladies and Germs

July 18, 2017 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

I had a piece to write for money today and I wrote it. This is newsworthy only because I threw out my back on Friday and even a few years ago this would have incapacitated me for at least a week. These days, I know the drill, though not well enough to stop me from throwing out my back in the first place. The morning I’d done so, I’d been too busy to go to the gym or the dance studio so I’d gone running instead.

I called Beztie upon returning from the track. “I went running,” I said triumphantly.

“Dummy,” she said. “It always throws out your back.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette, and I smiled.

Then I went into spasm, and lay flat on the floor. After I stopped crying and permakitten Grace stopped licking my paws sympathetically, I took four Advil and did the stretches my old trainer Leslie taught me. My regular acupunk–the brilliant, elfin Tim–is abroad for the rest of the year, so I looked up C., his replacement. That’s when things got hairy.

C., as it turns out, was working out of a communal space, which was perfectly fine in theory but precarious for a radioactive witch like me. Continue Reading →

Our Lunar Tides, Our Selves

June 8, 2017 in Astro Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

I know menstruation is one of the few taboo topics on social media (cockocracy!) but today I cried over the Comey hearing, a late-’90s Julia Roberts film that will go unnamed (ok, Stepmom), a certain permakitten when she rested her chin on my toe, and the fact that my dress wasn’t ready at the tailors. Tonight’s potent full moon is not helping, nor is our massive Constitutional crisis. Overall, though, I just need to (insert verb, Mad Libs-style) already. Our periods are a blessing for which I am all the more grateful since I realized mine was an endangered species. But the period before our periods blows as hard as our alleged president–very, very hard.

Zoo York Is Not Enough

May 21, 2017 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Quoth the Raving, Snapshot, Spirit Matters

I had such a lovely break from the city–sunrises by the sea, swanning on tree-laced hammocks, cartwheeling in big fields–and such a bumpy reentry. On the drive back a glass-encased candle–an uncrossing candle, no less–exploded in my car, my phone abruptly went dead and still is not fixed as I type this, and so many serious accidents took place on the highways that the normally 3.5-hour trip took 7 hours. It’s not just that my nerves were shot; it’s that I could feel everyone else’s were shot, too. Finally somewhere in Connecticut I broke down in tears–the messy kind, not the pretty kind– and had to pull to the side of the road. Aloud I said: “Okay, higher spirit. You’ve secured my attention. What do you want me to know?” In response I could not just hear but see the Rilke quote: You must change your life. And here I’d thought I already had, though I guess thus far said change has been inflicted rather than invited.

I know some of what I need to do but if the rest were obvious or easy, I’d have done it long ago. This is, after all, the human experience: We learn by expanding our horizons, by stepping out of our comfort zones, in this case literally. Living so isolated from nature drains me to a degree I only acknowledge on the rare occasions I’m by the ocean or beneath a tree by myself. Yet the craving for unadulterated fields, for the noisiness of birds and wind and crickets, pulses beneath all the decoration of my New York life no matter how I try to drown it out. It grows even stronger in the shadow of dystopia. As I zoomed back to the city I no longer love monogamously I still could the heartsong I breathed in that big air; how to return to All That now looms as my biggest question though others should take precedence. Being middle-aged, it turns out, teaches us to heed older rhythms and wiser notes than what our tiny brains can measure.

Grace is glad I’m back, anyway. My friend takes my absence so seriously that I could hear her weeping as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. Witches and their familiars should never be parted.

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