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The Sorry, Charlie School of Intuitive Guidance

April 19, 2021 in Art Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

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

April 16, 2021 in Country Matters, Essays, Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

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.

Painting at Audre’s: Part I

April 14, 2021 in Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Past Matters, Ruby Intuition, Style Matters

Once when I was 9, a mother and her two kids disappeared from our neighborhood. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was just that for years they lived down the street from our house, then one day they were gone.

The husband was still there, but when my mom took my sister and I around to visit his wife and kids, he said they were out. His normally polished appearance was unruly—clothes rumpled, face unshaven—but he offered no further explanations and shut the door before my mother could ask any more questions. When we went back the next day, he didn’t answer the door, though his orange Volvo was parked in the driveway. Nor did he answer it the day after that.

For a full week my mom kept finding reasons to drop by. A cutting from her favorite fern, an invitation to take all the kids to the park, cookies she’d just baked, a mug that seemed up the wife’s alley. My mother liked to collect things for people, like a mother bird dragging treasures back to her chicks safe in their nest.

But no matter what time of day we stopped over, no one ever answered the door. The orange Volvo was always there, each day covered with more leaves, but the mother’s car never reappeared.

The real reason my mother kept looking for this woman is she was one of the few people in our neighborhood whom my mother liked. Having spent her young adulthood in downtown Boston, she’d never cottoned to the suburban town to which my parents moved after I was born. She never said it directly—my mother said almost nothing directly—but even as a kid I could tell she found the other mothers in our neighborhood grating or phony or both. She relaxed around this woman–told jokes, pulled faces, lingered over coffee.

I liked this woman too. Let’s call her Audre, because it’s close to her real name and she possessed the practical, large-hearted lyricism of Audre Lorde, whom she liked a lot.

Back home we spent a lot of time wondering where Audre might have gone. Was she sick, I wondered. Does she not like me anymore, wondered my mother. It was my father, surprisingly, who came up with the right answer.

Maybe she left her husband, he said. Continue Reading →

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