Archive | Ruby Intuition

Now We Must Listen

Here in the last stretch of Mercury Retrograde, which officially ends March 10, we are mere weeks from Ostara (March 19)–the astrological new year as well as the beginning of spring, glorious spring. During this quiet nascent time, the line between death and life is as blurred as the line between winter and spring. Notice it in the stirring of the air, suddenly fresher, suddenly sweeter; in the quality and length of daylight; and at dusk–magic hour, my favorite hour, when we are held by everything to come as well as what’s come before.

It is as Alexander McCall Smith writes: The voices of the dead—you can hear them still, if you listen hard enough. Late people talking, like children after lights-out: the faint, distant voices of our ancestors.Now is not the time to act. It is the time to listen–to the earth, to the ancestors, to each other. For any true-soul guidance in these dark times.

March into the Future, Bird by Bird

I’ve learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won’t stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown.—Madeleine L’Engle

Hello March! Sometimes, especially in the dreary last days of winter, my clients want to hear about a future that is magically better than their present. It’s human nature to crave a “Santa Clause.” But the truth is that our lives are a mixture of fate and free will—-the culmination of our choices in the face of factors beyond our control.

And entropy is change, too. To avoid it we must work our problems as we sow seeds and till fields. Sun rises, sun sets, but only when we consciously channel its light do we grow something from our shit. This is practical magic at its core–change we manifest rather than passively await and observe. This is love as a verb. This is the self-reckoning that is the foundation of radical self-care.

How I can help is to divine a path on which you thrive—-marching bravely forward (bird by bird step by step) into a future conjured with the good wind of the universe on your back.

To find a path of your own, get in touch. Art (left-right); Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippen.

All Around These Troubled Waters

I am sitting in the dining area at Fairway—a sort of greenhouse overlooking the Red Hook harbor—and I am trying not to cry. Correction: I am crying, but quietly, the way grown New Yorkers process very private emotions in the very public spaces where we spend most of our days.

I am feeling like yesterday’s lunch, which is ironic because I just polished off an enormous breakfast.

All around me waves are rising like Joni’s cold blue steel. It makes me feel held, these busy waters mirroring Joni. It also makes me feel lonely because only the world at large, strangers to whom I feel close, hold me right now.

This is Pisces season at its hardest.

Which is true, but also a cop-out, because this is just a hard time all around. This is Democrats-feasting-on-each-other-while-evil-oligarch-runs-us-into-the-ground time. This is virus time, frighteningly warm-winter time.

February’s last gasp is brutal. So is that of patriarchy.

And, yeah, I’m talking about the white supremacist capitalistic cockocratic dinosaurs poisoning our government, environment, media, fun. This is the longest dying gasp in history, and it’s killing us all.

All around my sorrow swims fury in these gloriously choppy waters. A fury on behalf of menopausal, perimenopausal, reproductive-age–damn it, all people who identify in any way as women. Also a fury toward the women who’ve swallowed so much shit they now feed it to others.

The fury I feel every time Warren’s “electability” is debated by the same couchside demographers who look the other way as her white male contenders scowl, browbeat, lie, fumigate, generally behave unlikeably. Just the body language of the debates makes me apoplectic. (It also rings more than a few bells in my professional life.)

The fury I felt last month when the architect next door fixed my armoire for a pound of flesh– swigging my wine for two hours while complaining about the wife he’d just left, bragging about the blue pills he takes to fuck women half our age. (It goes without saying his very decent ex is our age.)

Waggling his eyebrows as he said, “You must have been hot when you were young.” Continue Reading →

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