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How Venus and Mercury Retrograde Raise Us

June 18, 2020 in Astro Matters, Country Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

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.)

Split at the Root, Part II

June 16, 2020 in Age Matters, Art Matters, Blast From the Past Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Spirit Matters

This is the second installment of my tale about Ute. You can find the first here.

By 1998, I was finally on my own after a decade of living off men after leaving my parents’ house—frying pan, meet fire. I was living alone in a ridiculously affordable Prospect Heights floor-through with a backyard, rotating through a series of lovers, free-lancing as a copy editor, working out at least once a day, and writing the occasional magazine article about holistic health. Back then you could make grownup money as a journalist but working full-time in a magazine would’ve cramped my yoga girl lifestyle so I resigned myself to pitching articles that would earn me coin while I learned about something that already interested me. Getting paid a buck a word to take a vacation where anorexic me could manage the food always felt like a good call.

The magazines I wrote for were mostly the kind of rich-people vanity projects that were long dead by the time everything crashed in 2008, and their editors were usually inexpert enough that they were desperate for my “boho girl” ideas. So when I pitched a raw foods spa I’d read about, they bit though back then nobody ate raw; my friends thought it meant I’d be eating steak tartare by a pool.

I don’t exactly know what I was expecting—spa treatments and beautifully arranged greens and fruit, probably–but it wasn’t what I encountered. The Hippocrates Health Institute was located in West Palm Beach, which is a lot grittier than Palm Beach. Think gravel and gutted strip malls instead of white sand and perfect vistas. Founded in the 1950s by raw foods advocate Ann Wigmore, it was in definitive decline by the time I showed up—all peeling pink stucco, diseased palm trees, unfilled pools, moldy wall-to-wall carpeting; pale people with insipid smiles and desperate eyes.

Shit was bleak.

At the orientation meeting, laminated folders were passed around and my heart sank. Our diet was to consist solely of raw cabbage, spinach, pea shoots, watercress, wheatgrass and cucumber juice, and sprouted grains. In between meals we would be learning about the diseases we’d apparently already incurred from eating cooked food, and submitting to regular fasts, enemas, rigorous tests of our organ function, and electromagnetic and infrared therapy to draw out the many toxins impeding our body’s “natural processes.”

There wasn’t so much as a massage table on the premises.

As our guide—40ish and clad in 70s cult whites—droned on about the benefits of eating raw I gazed around the circle sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor. These were the people with whom I’d be spending the next month of my life, and everyone looked lumpy and wan. The only other person under 40 was a blond woman with angry eyes wearing a long-sleeved floor-length dress though it was 90 degrees in the meeting room, air conditioning apparently counter-indicated for cleanses.

This woman of course was Ute, and though I could usually take people in without them noticing, she looked up and met my gaze hawkishly before I got a chance to register more than a general dislike for her. Continue Reading →

Our Insides on the Outside

June 10, 2020 in Country Matters, Spirit Matters

I am going to write this out and chances are I’ll delete it. But today I had to do a really thorough intake with a psychiatrist I was assigned by my shitty Medicaid insurance. He (of course he) was evaluating my personal and familial history of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse because it’s become apparent that part of my raging and malingering UTI/kidney infection stems from past sexual and emotional trauma being retriggered during this intense period of turmoil and isolation. My point is this: by the time I was 10 minutes into this inventory I was crying so hard I could not breathe. Yet to obtain the medication I need to regulate my emotions enough to give my body a chance to heal–I had to relive all of this calcified rotten familial shit–essentially perform it—for this detached stranger, going back to the wartime rapes in Poland, the great grandmother forced into prostitution when she got here, not to mention my own sexual, emotional, and physical trauma starting in childhood. People who know me in any context know I never talk about these details with anyone but my therapist (who thank god is not a psychiatrist). I learned long ago that managing other people’s feelings about my trauma only compounds my trauma. So I honestly felt like I needed therapy to get through what was passing for a therapeutic intake.

And here is my larger point: This experience put into perspective how it may feel for black people and many other people of color to be so actively reliving the legacy of racism in America during this moment of profound upheaval. Yes, powerful long overdue changes are being achieved but the horror to which some are just waking up is is not new information. In fact, it’s the opposite. And witnessing people not know about it because they didn’t have to know about it–in fact were benefitting from these systems of oppression– likely feels about a billion times worse than me having to tell this snotty shrink my deepest horrors just to get the medication I need. Not to mention in any way being asked to educate or explain and even console white people regarding these “revelations.”

Forgive me if this is whitesplaining–it likely is–but I’m working through this in real time with the particular desperation that accompanies feeling ill over an extended period of time. All I can register right now is brutal, brutal triggers everywhere in this land.

These are the hardest times I can remember in my lifetime. Capitalism is out of control, Covid is (still) out of control, institutionalized white supremacy is downright showing off. All in all, America’s larcenous blueprint is coming up to be rewritten.

And this means that traumatic blueprints of emotional physical legal and ancestral oppression are also coming up to be healed. My experience today reminded me that the process of healing is often as painful as the wound itself. So–and I say this with deep respect for the righteous anger so many are feeling–for the love of anything you love, try to be kind and gentle with yourselves and if possible each other as you pursue intense reckoning and self-reckoning. Because love and care is going to collectively re-raise us best. It’s not always possible, and it’s not always easy. But love and care is what got disrupted for me as a child and what I learn again and again and again as an adult is the only thing that truly can transform my life and the world I wish to inhabit.

It’s been my tagline forever though of course it came first from Tolstoy: All I know, I know because I love.

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