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All-Purple, All-Purpose, All-Soul Kittens

November 1, 2015 in Cat Lady Matters, Snapshot, Spirit Matters, Theater Matters

It’s 5:00 am, I’m drinking really gorgeous French-press coffee with a splash of heated cream, my permakitten is mawing her breakfast, and we’re both impatiently awaiting the sun, who’s not planning to grace us with her presence for another 90 minutes.

It’s that time of year. Today is All Saint’s Day. Yesterday was Hallow’s Eve or Samhain, the festival of the dead and the end of harvest. And with the clocks turning back, this evening has lasted an extra hour.

It’s safe to say the veil is lifted.

My overfamiliar and I have really felt it. At 3 am yesterday we were gently tugged awake by guides who normally let us rest. At first I was cross—it had been a terrifically taxing week and I needed the sleep—but as I floated up to full consciousness I could feel the magic pulsing all around us. Gracie’s head swiveled everywhere: she saw plainly what I only sensed. From my kitchen window the cityscape twinkled brighter than usual.

I needed that fairy dust. Change is still afoot, and I welcome any wind on my back to ensure it’s beautiful, not just brazen. So I piled autumn fruits and gourds upon my altar, lit some sage, and threw on the purple and gold mumu that has been my uniform this fall. I visualized purple light all around me, just as a clever witch suggested, and lit a small fire in my impromptu cauldron (a purple bowl. Lately all I crave is purple). Then I created some space. I chanted and wept, and honored all the deaths I’d experienced this year—good situations that had soured, the departure of my dear auto Sadie, lovely friends who’d left the Earth. I meditated on some energies that had outlived their utility—sexual jealousies, internalized glass ceilings, the traumas of the ancestors—and gave them to my cauldron. I drank wine and ate apples and basked in the most hallowed voices in my record collection: Nina, Ella, Aretha, Stevie. I invited the dead to join me. Then I burned more sage, and bathed in salt and oils, and said goodbye to everyone.

After that, I floated through my day. I put on long layers of tweed and wool and fur—purple sneakers and lipstick, even—and tried for the fifth time to score Hamilton tickets at the Richard Rogers theater on Broadway. I cheered for the winners without regrets; ate a bowl of hot beans and pork and rice at a Mexican diner; and walked home over the bridge. I felt lighter, I really did. When I got back the house was wonderfully empty.

And now we’re ready for a new day.

The Plot of History

October 19, 2015 in Book Matters, Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, too, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.—David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

The Church of Color

October 11, 2015 in Church Matters, Essays, Past Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, Style Matters

For a while in my twenties, I only could wear beige, white, and black. I was very sick at the time, and in my long recovery, I couldn’t handle the strain of real color. This, in retrospect, is how I know that I was gravely ill, for color is and always has been very important to me.

My abstinence from color had happened once before. That time, I lost my ability to perceive color all together, and it was that loss, coupled with a harbinger of the symptoms that later capsized me, that forced me to accept that I had to separate from my family of origin. The metaphorical and literal often blur dangerously on the blueprint of my body. I suspect this stems from the lifted veil that I take for granted.

By nature I am highly selective about the colors with which I surround myself. The off-tones of the early 1990s hurt my eyes, for example. Those mustards and greyish purples always seemed so joyless–sanctimonious, even, as if it were not PC to shine. (I never viewed a friend who got married in a brown dress the same way again.) In my mid-teens, I was known as “the green girl,” for I liked to wear as many shades of green as possible. It wasn’t an affectation. The green made me feel hopeful and connected to something bigger than myself. Alice May, my mother’s mother, was the only one who understood. She adored green, which she said was the color of life and love. She had a winter green couch that was my favorite place to read. Continue Reading →

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