Archive | Essays

The Long Way Home

Maybe because my love life is in the crapper again, all day I’ve been thinking about a moment I shared with a woman I dated briefly. I’d gone upstate to see her, and she was running the visit because being in charge was clearly the only way she felt comfortable.

It’s an aspect of queer life I don’t dig—the gender roles that can become more bald than in heterocontexts, though younger generations are loosening up those binaries. With my lipstick, big blond coiffure, and tight skirts, I present as femme, but only in that world. On the rare occasions I date cis-men, they often see me as more masculine than them. In terms of temperance, they are absolutely right.

Really, I’m only me in every context: someone who prizes freedom over security, who can change a tire and style anybody, who drives a stickshift, who is more than a little vain, who cries at the drop of a hat, who shies away from processing but says what needs to be said.

Anyway, this woman I was dating was butch but barely and that was fine with me. I liked her lush breasts beneath her suits and country-boy gear; her curly, silver-streaked bob. Maybe not so much the silver chain she wore at her neck but only because it was ugly, not because it was a feminine flourish. I have a very expansive and flexible definition of beauty, but find a lack of integrity in construction or presentation to be jarring. Continue Reading →

The Sorry, Charlie School of Intuitive Guidance

It is spring, the world is blooming, and instinctually we wish to bloom as well. While this can feel inspiring, it also can be triggering. Because one of the hardest lessons of life is that we can’t always push our way through. No matter how smart, gifted, and well-intended we are—no matter how much we charm, chant, meditate, pray, make affirmations, visualize, flow-chart, invest, work,nand white-knuckle it—sometimes things just don’t go our way.

In my intuition practice I have observed that the Universe will put obstacle after obstacle in our path until we not only learn a new lesson but a new way to learn. Central to this learning is the acceptance that we are creating our lives with something else. When we learn how to be present and open to each moment even when we wish it were different, then we align with this divine consciousness. It is in this alignment that we are always supported and always grow.

Flowers don’t bloom from their will alone and neither do we. That’s what makes it all so hard–and so rhapsodically mud-luscious.

To chart optimal paths, release roadblocks, and activate your own intuition, book a reading for yourself or a loved one. Image: Shara Hughes.

American Love Story

art: kerry james marshall

This is not a post about astrology or tarot or the moon. But it is about spiritual ritual—because rituals mean nothing if they are not ultimately for the higher and thus common good. Activism can be just as enlightening a ritual as meditating all day on a mountain. In fact, when the humanity of everyone is not honored equally in the country where you live, activism can be the most enlightened thing you do. And make no mistake: we live in a country where 20 percent of its denizens make 86 percent of the money and are barely taxed. Where it’s harder to vote than buy a gun. And where the people paid to protect the peace may very well kill you if you are black or brown, even if you’re a child, because racism is core to American policing.

I send love to anyone in pain today or any other day because of the inequities built upon this land by European settlers. I send love to everyone actively fighting for the first truly multiracial democracy to flourish under the American flag. Cornel West said it and it is true: Justice is what love looks like in public.

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