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The Fourth Day of This Month Called July

July 4, 2021 in Art Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

For many of us, July 4th doesn’t feel like cause for celebration so much as cause for revolution. The “independence” this holiday commemorates was originally intended only for the appallingly small percentage of us deemed fully human by the Founding Fathers. More and more, we’re dealing with the fallout of this rotten foundation. 2021’s Uranus Square Saturn —AKA that conflict between progress and calcified regimes—is forcing the hand of white supremacist patriarchy. I like this disruptive energy only for the beautiful change it can invoke—if we do the necessary shadow work. So today I’m not BBQing nor flag-waving. I’m tuning into the heavens on behalf of progress and anyone serving it.

Image: “Free America,” Kerry James Marshall

Summer Solstice Rites, Rituals, Reveals

June 19, 2021 in Astro Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

Tomorrow is Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year and the lightest moment in the earth’s orbit around the sun. It makes sense that it falls upon Father’s Day this year, because Sun is the ultimate good daddy, shining upon us no matter how we founder.

Summer Solistice is always the day of Litha, the Celtic goddess of abundance, and the first day of Cancer, the sign most associated with nurturing and the home. It is also the sign under which this fraught country was birthed.

Tomorrow is when linear time makes way for soul time. Past is future is present. The ancestors arrive. Higher spirits make themselves known.

It is a day to heal shadows and celebrate light. A day of seed and flower—of closing the gap between desire and manifestation. Of releasing all binaries.

Above all, tomorrow is a day to unplug and rejoice. Prepare for it by cleaning your hearth and heart. Scrub, atone, sage. Then tomorrow, festoon yourself and your home with flowers. Wear bright colors. Dance. Make a bonfire. Make an altar by decorating a surface with summer flowers and fruit and lit candles. Make a solstice tea by placing a jar of water and herbs in the sun. Make a mandala by arranging flower petals in a circle outside.

Do whatever feels best, but make sure to inform the Sun of your desires. Thank it for your blessings and for its steady strength and magic. Pray for it to shine upon your shadows.

Tomorrow Sun reveals who we truly are, not what we seem. Let that light the way.

I will be giving solstice readings tomorrow morning before I unplug myself. Book an intuitive reading or guidance session for yourself or a loved one.

I Do Not Dervish Well (Morning Regrets)

June 13, 2021 in Age Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Spirit Matters

last night

It is an absolutely lovely Sunday morning and I am find myself reflective in a way that would be better suited to a real essay but I have a kitchen to clean and a greenmarket to visit before the best spinach sells out. So I’ll just write this out in a few messy overlong paragraphs, perhaps most fitting for my fugue.

It’s just that never before have I been so aware that human joy and connection is fleeting. More than that: fragile. And never before have I felt so stricken by this fact. This last week has been more social than the 15 months before it, and I have been constantly overstimulated, giddy, and anxious. How to find a center in this whirling dervish of everyone and everything after the cozy claustrophobia of covid incubation tanks. This morning my cuticles are bleeding, my guts are a mess, and I am obsessively running over the dumb things I said and did in every social event I attended–the myriad ways I failed to listen well, hold space for others, breath before opening my big trap. Not to mention the small and big hurts I glossed over in everyone around me, including how they were clocking me (how embarrassing). I of course am an extroverted introvert; I naturally replenish energy reserves alone rather than around others, who drain me even when I adore them (especially then) because I always clock everything they’re thinking and feeling even as I am prattling on a topic of my own (especially then). Worse, it means I am someone who dominates and performs when nervous–so much so that you can tell I actually trust you when I got silent.

this morning

After 15 months of nearly zero socialization I have lost my mechanisms of self-regulation, meaning that I get so overstimulated by the energy of people around me that I keep turning into That Lady–the oxygen-sucker with mentionitus, which is what I call the pathology of using everything someone says as an opportunity to jump in with a comment of your own. AKA the worst. There’s not much to add to this and in fact it’s the kind of post that I normally leave up for 15 minutes and then delete. But for now I’m pressing send just in case anyone else is feeling this particular overwhelm. A sense of being so grateful to be back in this world. To still be alive. To love so much. But also a sense of not living up to any of it when trying to live within it.

My dreams–well, my dreams have been a mess.

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