Archive | Ruby Intuition

Captain’s Log

I’m writing so well today that I almost don’t mind what a total nightmare of unhappy blankness the weekend was. Almost. We use social media to connect and to trumpet our pretty times and political views. But what about when the turmoil lands so hard it’s impossible to leave the house or say even a word? These are heavy times—mercury retrograde eclipse season heavens raining vengeance upon us times (literally) and it doesn’t help at all that I’m channeling harder and deeper than I ever have but for my own work. Sometimes writing this book is like taking dictation from an Old Testament-style Cassandra. Other times it’s like listening to a noseybody neighbor run amok. Either way, it’s heavy pizza, man.

Yesterday was awfully nice in New York, or so I hear. I got dressed to go out and then found I simply couldn’t. Couldn’t cook, couldn’t talk, really couldn’t face all the brunchers and flaneuzies still writing the story they’re dying to tell their someday grandkids. In a sane society–and what a utopian concept that is just about now-there’d not only be a fully blown National Endowment for the Arts but a sort of coast guard for those of us drowning in the heaviness of our creative projects.

Blood in His Tracks (Indigo Grownups)

I have come to accept my sadness as holy. I don’t mean to fetishize depression. I don’t even think the great grief I experience is depression–it’s situationally appropriate and does not rise up to wall me from my day, duties, you.

But I think of my sadness—this heavy, grave stillness—as holy because it is true and because, after all these years, I am grateful to feel even when it is very, very hard.

As a young empath my daily prayer was to not stop feeling. I worried that I’d grow as numb as most adults, that I’d stop registering the sorrows and struggles and triumphs of bugs, birds, plants, people–of every soul quietly hurtling on its forcefulm fateful path. I felt everything so deeply that it made me cry in fast food restaurants and plastic playgrounds paved over meadows, at birthday parties where the parents didn’t seem happy their kids had been born. Oh, Lisa, she’s so sensitive. That’s what they always say, isn’t it, when we can’t block out the miracles and savagery of everyday life.  Continue Reading →

You Write It for the Child

I did Ruby Intuition sessions all weekend, wrote essays Monday and Tuesday, and wrote and delivered a film lecture for the delightful Huntington cinema club out on Long Island last night. Today is my Saturday morning, and I woke feeling a little decadence was in order. So I put on platforms and a skinny black sheath, arranged my newly blue-blond hair in a big upsweep, and ducked downstairs to the cafe next door—-only to repair back to bed with a silver tray bearing an Americano, freshly peeled figs, and a prosciutto-arugula sandwich. Here I will read and read and read, stopping only to doze or admire a certain permakitten or watch the doves outside my window. I will read until I feel like writing again. This is the midlife, midsummer glamour I promised myself as an unhappy child, and I never forget to be grateful. Gratitude is the ultimate glamour, don’t you know.

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