Archive | Spirit Matters

What Stands Between Us

In the days following the death of my dear friend Adam, many people have said something to the effect of: “You of all people know he’s still in your life.”

I understand such comments come as a bid of faith in my skills as an intuitive, but I’m nonetheless surprised. Because even for me, contact with the embodied—aka conscious, living people— is very different from contact with the “disembodied.” Yes, as a life-long empath, I often receive “downloads”— flashes of emotions or information from departed ancestors, energetic guides, sometimes even the souls of people caught between life and death. But I would never pretend I understand everything about this other realm, and I don’t trust those who claim they do.

We living, breathing people are limited to the third dimension not only in terms of physical limitations but in terms of our capacity to fully comprehend energy and matter. Thus when a loved one dies, our faith that we are supported by something we can’t intellectually grasp is sorely tested. We wonder if our departed person is safe or scared. We worry they might not know what we were unable to tell them. And we fear we’ll never connect with them again.

The truth: These concerns are for us still on this plane, not for those who have moved on to a realm we cannot yet understand. In my work as an intuitive, I often can help others find peace and meaning in these losses, and I am glad to do so. But while moving forward my recently deceased friend may message me through dreams and small coincidences, this will be so very different from the easy luxury of a quick text exchange, a shared joke or meal, and, ah me, a warm hug. We who are embodied crave the creature comfort of other bodies, and must embrace the companions of our heart who share our plane. Which is to say: Regardless of my intuitive abilities, I will deeply miss my friend, and that’s okay.

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Adam Ford, 1970-2020

My friend Adam Ford died unexpectedly this week.

Beautiful, big-hearted, and steadfastly evolving, Adam had been a fixture in my life since age 16 and it is fucking impossible to imagine not receiving another text or impromptu visit or white-knight gesture from my cherry-haired guardian. Somehow it didn’t dawn on me that there might come a day when I would never again hear him say: “Ros, ya need anything?”–even if it meant him dropping everything in Boston to help me move a table in Brooklyn.

I keep flashing on moments of our shared youth and his steady love, and breaking down again. A brilliant athlete and thinker and cock(tail)sman, he saw everyone clearly, which is why he could be so shockingly intimate and also so shockingly blunt. He was a fierce protector, fierce truth-teller, fierce champion, and if I’m being honest I don’t feel I ever lived up to that love. It’s the worst thing ever, scanning through our texts exchange and seeing that he was writing to my best self when I wasn’t behaving as her. But that’s the truth and he deserves my owning up to it.

At left is an image of my stunning friend in Moscow; at right is the last page of a letter he wrote me in 1991 upon hearing I’d been in hospital. His passionate concern was even more beautiful that his physical presence, which is saying quite a lot. As I write this, I can’t help thinking that what hurts most is that of everyone I know, it would have been Adam himself who would have most fully appreciated what I’m writing now. Not because it’s about him but because he so appreciated any expression of genuine emotion. He read everything I wrote, and messaged me immediately afterward to tell me how it had reached him. It’s odd to send this now into an Adam-less world.

If you are reading this, please join me in upholding the rightly named Adam–first place in everything, especially when on a bike. Behave today with as much care and kindness as possible in order to honor his legacy. Above all, please make sure each of your dear friends knows they are appreciated. We are so lucky when we find allies of our heart to travel with through this life. I wish I could tell my sweet friend that now.

The Bread Crumbs of Beautiful Change

Today, with a big old sigh, I pulled my gym card, MTA card, and library card out of my wallet. It was an acknowledgment that there’s no way I’ll be comfortable working out in an indoor public space or riding a subway or checking out physical books anytime soon. That these cards I used daily only months before have become obsolete artifacts in the tesseract that is virus time.

Without unifying municipal or national leadership, there’s no obvious end in sight to the COVID madness, the chaos and cruelty that has become American life. Thus in my clients and community I observe a rising existential despair—an overwhelming sense that life in its current incarnation is unlivable, pleasure is mostly toxic, and meaning elusive at best.

One thing I never do in my practice as an intuitive is bullshit. So I won’t sugarcoat this grief. I won’t meme or om-shanthi or psychobabble it away. Our old way of life was very very flawed–untenable for many–but knowing it is gone is fucking hard, especially since our present existence feels confined and loveless.

Change is invariably and powerfully painful. It strips us of hope, because it suggests we don’t know enough about our future to attach dreams to it.

But hope is a fool’s errand—the imposition of ego–because it stems from the belief that we can and should will our projections into being. Limited to what humans can imagine, it is the clumsiest sort of spellcraft, the fumbling of the faithless.

Most of us live without faith since it was the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater of religion, or because it was disrupted by trauma and injustice. But faith is what we need. Because faith is the knowledge that that so long as we are honest, engaged, and loving—so long as we actively honor the spirit living in everyone and everything— we can find our way to a divine flow that guides us, sees us, supports us. The flow that does not coddle us but always holds us.

Faith is a marriage of fate and free will, reception and inception, personal intent and the good wind of the universe. it is working with rather than against the rhythms of the seasons, the laws of the land (not the government), the call of our true heart. When we lose this faith, we experience increasingly jarring course corrections until we recalibrate or life is recalibrated for us. When we find this faith, we can dare and dive freely because it is as simple as stepping into water–sometimes delightful, sometimes bracing, always liberating.

With faith, we can rise from this collective horror rather than trudge blindly forward.

But to find faith now, we must first mourn. For only when we experience our rawest feelings can we experience anything else, just like infections can’t heal until we lance them. Emotions are not our true selves, but they are the breadcrumbs that lead us to them. So light a candle, put on the saddest music you can find, and surrender to your sorrow.

Somewhere in this shit lives the fertilizer for beautiful growth.

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