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How Venus and Mercury Retrograde Raise Us

As readers of this blog are well-aware, I’ve been felled by a UTI that bloomed into my kidneys and retriggered intergenerational trauma. While I’ve been trying to heal, I’ve been laying low in terms of my “business.”

Until recently most of us used social media to promote our businesses or a version of our selves–so much so that I’ve been privately advised I should keep discussions of my illness to a minimum.

It all boiled down to the same thing: our brand, even if we didn’t admit it.

But somewhere between Covid-19 and our country’s substandard response to it, between the righteous rising of the Black Lives Movement and an institutionalized white supremacist rebellion, “brands” stopped being an appropriate presentation. Because this moment is not about ego, the “I.” It is about the “superego”—the collective conscience.

So what’s the connection between my inflamed urinary tract and the greater unrest in our country? The shared reality that we can only filter so many toxins before we break down. Just consider how health and justice has been disrupted by generations of institutionalized harm. If you are, as I am, the descendent of Polish Jewish immigrants, that impact is powerful. If you are a BIPOC person in America, it is legion. And it’s no coincidence that this massive dis-ease has been happening during Venus Retrograde.

This period demands we examine how love and care is disrupted. The good news? We needed the recalibration. And I’ve come to believe that healing is not about getting “better” so much as positive transformation. Consider the dual definitions of “utopia”—“no place” and “perfect place.” The point is to continue striving.

We may never achieve perfectly equitable, institutionalized care in our economy, courts, streets, schools, and whole selves. But we must always perfectly try.

Today Mercury Retrograde begins in caretaker Cancer, and it will help us continue to express our support for each other. So let your words be love spells and shape-shifters—assents and ascents. Because healing is not linear. It is a spiral staircase on which we revisit blocks from an ever-higher frequency.

In the 1960s, great upheaval ushered great changes. Now we may rise again by re-raising ourselves and each other.

(To those who’ve kindly inquired, Ruby Intuition sessions can be booked again starting in July.)

The Artist’s Way

As businesses and beaches slowly (and not so slowly) re-open, I’ve been thinking about artists as essential workers.

We’d have lost our minds this spring were it not for movies, TV, books, DJ sets, Zoom dance parties, all sorts of creativity. This tracks, because artists always have been the ones to lead us out of chaos by dancing on the precipice between order and disorder, and combining holy patience with holy impatience. It’s a vital model, for to rise wholly (and holy) from this viral dis-ease–to effect conscious, constructive change–we must reject the 21st century, post-industrial concept of linear time in which every hour, minute, second (and nanosecond) has been scheduled and over scheduled. Instead, we must embrace the lessons of our Covid-19 tesseracts, and continue to rest, to look and listen mindfully, to practice gratitude and economy, and above all: to create.

For art was never meant to be consumed and collected the way capitalism has taught us. Instead, we are each meant to process our unique joy and pain through creative expression—be that baking, sewing, sowing, singing, spreadsheeting, painting, witching, writing, whatever suits us sustainably and beautifully.

To be an artist is to be a spirit worker, social changer, chaos wrangler, and time traveler—and we all must be artists now. This is a key lesson of Venus Retrograde in Gemini. And this is a key lesson of this Wrinkle in Time.

For a reading or ritual to activate your own creativity, book here. Art: High as Fuck, an open-air quarantine creation by Josh Smith, courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

Venus in a Wading Pool

Last night I had such an endearing dream that I wanted to download it here–likely for the same reason that it occurred it all.

In it, I bought a small wading pool for my office. (I’m not sure why, though bringing mermaid energy into my intuitive practice is always well-advised.) Before filling the pool up, something made me bend down and peel off one of the decals plastered across its bottom surface. The decal was a kind of sea creature–royal blue, with a spiky spine, four legs and very long tail. Absent-mindedly, I began petting the bit of plastic–cradling it in my palm, really–and without any conscious invocation, it swelled into the third-dimension and then animated entirely. At which point it leapt out of my hand and began scrambling all over the room–nervously, wildly, not unlike a wild bird trapped in an indoor space.

I felt equal parts fascinated and terrified. It was adorable, yes, but also dangerous? A dybbuk of some sort? Finally the blue creature began squirming under my front door, and after a great deal of squeezing and squeaking, managed its escape. I watched with no small relief. But by then Grace had rushed into the room and was clocking the goings-on like they were Game 7 of the Permakitten NBA finals.

“Ma!” she shouted. (In my dreams she can speak, though she rarely deigns to do so.) “I can’t believe you weren’t nicer. I’ve been asking for a decal buddy forever.” At which point decal buddy scrambled back in, and he and Grace began cavorting all over the apartment–the tails of one tiny seasprite and one tiny permakitten joyfully entwined in a barely visible blur.

My big takeaway: The residents of Gracie Rosmansion may be lonelier than I’ve allowed. No doubt there is a tertiary revelation–that my unacknowledged (and thus dangerous) desire for connection can will anything into existence. But there’s something else that has stayed with me all the way through my morning coffee and snuggles with Grace: The unexpected is not always unwelcome. That’s a challenging lesson to absorb. But if I’m to truly find love again–and a love unburdened by the defalcations of yore–I must leave room for what I can’t yet imagine.

A Venus Retrograde dream if ever there were one. Who said the goddess doesn’t have a sense of humor?

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