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Archive | Spirit Matters

The Church of Scorpio New Moon

October 27, 2019 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Church Matters, City Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, Style Matters

Dowager avenger

I was standing on the corner of Third Avenue and 21st Street yesterday when a woman came up to me wearing a floorlength cocktail dress, a sparkly headband, rubber galoshes, and a ratty mink coat, and told me—didn’t ask but told me–to open her bottle of Coke. After I did, I asked if I could take a photo of her since I so admired her outfit, and she said “fuck you” and sauntered off.

Obviously I took the pic. And obviously I loved her ultimate dowager chic. The exchange wasn’t just classic New York. It also was classic Scorpio Season.

I don’t know about you, but all I’ve wanted to do lately is burrow under the covers with a flashlight and a book. It’s not just the weather. It’s that the sun and, as of tonight, the moon are lurking in Scorpio, the sign of birth, death, and regeneration, with Mercury about to go retrograde in this sign as well. Continue Reading →

The Coldest Home Is Memory

October 20, 2019 in Age Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

I woke on a whole river of sadness–an ocean, even. My apartment cold, my permakitten anxious, my heart heavy. Still not cast ashore.

In October we are capsized by abruptly cold weather no matter how much we long for it. The veil between this world and the next lifts just as abruptly.

I’d been dreaming of all the couches where I perched in my childhood–all the family homes where I briefly ingratiated myself, not because I craved the companionship of peers or the comfort of uncomplicated adults, but because I’d craved order and cleanliness. Coziness.

Even now, though my mother and I rarely speak, I hesitate to write about the disorder of my family home. It is sexist that the blame landed so resoundingly on her shoulders but the truth is it was mostly her fault. She and my father had one of those fucked-up divisions of labors that a creative person like her should never have attempted–he made money, she kept house. I knew she was bored, I knew she was unhappy, I knew she was profoundly ill-suited to this suburban pathology masquerading as mythology. I also knew she couldn’t think of anything else to do so she sat at the kitchen table day in and day out, drinking cold coffee, slowly reading the paper, looking out the window.

And, you know, not keeping house.

Keep in mind it wasn’t the 1940s but the 1970s. Women’s liberation was happening all around her. It just came too late for her purposes. Continue Reading →

Every Day Is Coming Out Day in Middle Age

October 11, 2019 in Age Matters, Queer Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

There are no pictures online of Adrienne Rich (above) with partner Michelle Cliff, which says a lot about how recent LGBTQ visibility really is.

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
Did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listened here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
–Adrienne Rich, from 21 Love Poems

It‘s been almost a year since the Legend and I left each other, and we were right to do so. We were doing each other no favors and much harm. But this poem fell out of a notebook today, and it made me cry in the middle of a busy morning. Continue Reading →

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