Archive | Essays

Behind the Veil: On Fate and Free Will

Since I resumed my Ruby Intuition practice last week, I have been reminded of “the Future as Santa Claus” phenomenon. This is what I call a tendency to regard the future as both inevitable and preferable—an un-moveable entity that rescues us from our less than optimal realities. It’s an understandable tendency, especially during a time as inhospitable as the last 12 months. Everyone wants to know when and if something is definitely going to happen: Am I going to leave my apartment or job? Am I going to get married? Am I going to proper? Will I and my loved ones be healthy? These are wonderfully human questions. But the real answer, always, is: Maybe. As in: Nothing is 100 percent fated. As in: There’s no underestimating the shaggy, unpredictable, beautiful power of human free will.

You may ask: So why bother getting a reading? And that too is a wonderful question. My answer is that I can offer a Whether Report—the spiritual equivalent of whether you need an umbrella or extra sunblock on a given day. I can perceive what past, present, and future factors are entering and departing your life—-and offer tools to facilitate your best response. What I cannot tell for sure is how fully you will choose to meet these moments. That pesky “human free will” part is actually the most exquisite part of being alive.

I like to think of our experiences on this earth as spiritual GPS. Each of us is on a karmic highway (the Aretha Franklin song never written) and always has a choice about how to navigate it. Yes, there are certain lessons and blessings our souls sign on to encounter. But how we respond to them builds out our actual paths. If we resist these experiences–this flow, if you will–the Universe is just going to guide us into another version of them until we grow accordingly. Annoying, sure. But also: loving. It’s like a parent who plays ball with us every day until we finally learn to catch.

This is why we keep having versions of the same trauma until we heal the initial trauma (often in childhood). It’s also why we have the initial trauma, although I would never suggest that such pain is your fault or your doing. Instead, I’ve come to believe that everything that happens to us is an opportunity to feel the support and love of the Universe even when it is not giving us everything we want or like. Especially then, actually.

Yes, I have been gifted with a longer glimpse of the human timeline than most people. Most times I perceive key figures and facts of your past, present and immediate future even when I don’t wish to. I also have a strong sense of your physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges and strengths before I meet you. And, yes, if pushed, I can usually predict how things are going to go–but that’s because I am good at assessing how ready you and your loved ones are to self-reckon and self-actualize. Rest assured there’s no judgment either way. And that’s not what you really need.

The true joy and satisfaction of your life is contingent upon your meeting the Universe halfway–and the only person who can write that piece of the story is You. How I can serve is by holding a mirror to your best self so you may connect to that person through every curve life throws you.

I am honored to hold your hand when your youngest self is running the show and needs to be soothed by the long-term perspective that your daily self cannot provide. I am honored to tell you everything I see in the past, present, and future that I believe will serve your growth and happiness. But the greatest way I can serve you as an intuitive is by highlighting your highest, most heavenly form and the tools that help you embody that person in your daily life. That’s not just being supported by a divine energy. That’s living as part of a divine energy—and what is more beautiful that that?

Book here for an intuitive reading.

Gratitude Profusion & Readings Update

It’s a sleety Sunday in Month 11,202,112,394,493 in the Pandemic, and I am feeling wildly grateful. I wanted to share this because I’ve been plenty open about my struggles over the last few months. So I’ll start with this image of me, noteworthy not only for the big cheesy grin but because I am—wait for it—sitting. You may ask: What’s the big deal about sitting? Indeed, it’s a valid question since all anyone has done for a year is sit. But in fact as readers of this blog may know, my lower back went out so badly last November that I lost my ability to sit. I could write a whole book on the back now, especially about the psychic information locked in its psoas muscle, which I tore and which has supported us long before we relied upon our brains to protect us.

But today I’d just like to thank you.

I am grateful for your patience while I have been unable to do readings. I am grateful for the massive support that you showed me while my own back could not. I am grateful for your herbal tinctures and Chinese medicine and amazing teas and coffees and lipsticks (which, yes, I consider essential) and Tilda Swinton tee shirts (also essential) and Seamless meals and referrals and chore porn and sympathetic ears and advice and referrals and books and gelt and good wishes and vibes. I am grateful for the pod-friends who have cleaned my house and fed Grace and done my laundry and brought me groceries and even changed Gracie’s litter and my sheets.

Your care has healed more than my back.

I am not 100 percent yet but well enough to re-open my schedule and so excited to tune in again on your behalf. Expect some changes as I’ve learned a lot about how better to support your intuition and healing as I’ve expanded my own. More than that, expect a new level of solidarity. It’s finally a new year and I’m so grateful to be able to walk into its light with you.

Beginning of End Times

“The Night Was Quite Dark,” Helen Sewell

It’s 740pm and I’m calling it. The electricity went out in the early hours of this morning after the big storm, and it never got fixed so my apartment is unheated unlit un-networked. A part of me–the part that obsessively reread Little House in the Big Woods (and not just as a child)–appreciates the challenge of being stripped of power. Of laying blankets over everything and setting up candles and heating water over my stove, which still works with a match. But as night has fallen, an unaccustomed darkness has blanketed my neighborhood and it is eerily silent. The outage stems from a manhole fire four blocks over and so my entire region of East Williamsburg is un-juiced. It’s like the 2003 blackout or the 2012 hurricane–only for my tiny little corner of Brooklyn. There’s no coffee shop noise, no infuriating neighbor music or loud Zoom calls hurtling through the walls. No blather on the street. No streetlights. Not even any running cars since they’ve blocked off the streets (and there are no traffic lights). There’s just the drills of Con Ed guys outside my window, grinding grinding like gritted teeth.

I know these guys are trying their best–have been since before dawn–and that so far they simply can’t locate the electrical short to fix. I know because I brought them mugs of my Laura Ingalls Wilder coffee earlier and peppered them with questions. So it’s like camping—only in a subfreezing night in which Covid keeps us from cowering together.

“Woman in the Dark,” Anonymous


I keep thinking about what this corner of land was like 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago. I keep thinking about that last chapter of Cloud Atlas, when the grid and governments crashed and everyone in the future was living prehistorically and no one had record of prior generations because they had been uploaded to the cloud which disappeared with the electrical grid. And I keep thinking: Is this how dystopias really happen? Step by step, so that we adjust so incrementally to the degeneration that one day it seems perfectly natural that we can’t leave our houses without masks lest we infect each other with a deadly plague that has already killed 500,000 of us, perfectly natural that we’re stumbling around in the unheated unlit un-networked dark, perfectly natural that hot regions are freezing and polar caps are melting, perfectly natural that there’s mass shootings every month, perfectly natural that we have elected officials who casually uphold white patriarchal supremacy and insist Jews use space lasers to fuck up a coastal state and . Don’t answer that. Really, don’t. I know I’m being catastrophic but it’s been that kind of day week (retrograde). The point is: There’s a fur hat on my head, a fur blanket on my bed, a fur permakitten in my arms. And I’m going to bed. Scarlet O’Hara always said I”ll worry about it tomorrow. Tonight I’m taking a page from her book.

Note: My power was out for 48 hours. When it came back on, I posted what I’d written to comfort myself.

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