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I’m Not Easy, I’m Green

September 5, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Spirit Matters, TV Matters, Weather Matters

Magic hour in green.

I cannot pretend returning to NYC after my upstate tenure has been easy. Not because of the weather, which, for the most part, has been ridiculously lovely–the sort of halcyon temperatures we New Yorkers associate with mid-September. With September 11, not to put too fine a point on it.

Certainly the existential dread connected to the events of that day is not helping. Like so many long-time New Yorkers, my personal relationship to September 11 only deepens the horror of how it irrevocably changed this city and country forever. Every year, just as the weather gets gloriously crisp and clear, sadness creeps in before I remember why.

But I think this dread is about something more.
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It took a good four days of being in the country for me to lose the bad bruja vibes that had been short-circuiting my car and relationships all summer. (Both Daisy and Grace registered the bad vibes, the former landing in the vet hospital.) Only on the fifth day did Columbia County’s big, big green smooth me out.

Green, not coincidentally, being the color of my grandmother’s heart.

I’ve been thinking about Alice May a lot lately. My mother’s mother, her birthday was last month. She crowns my book–the whole last section is about her, about how the regret she expressed in her last days catapulted me into my true life.

Green was Alice’s absolute favorite color. She said that it was the color of life and love. Only when I began taking my work as an intuitive seriously did I learn that green was considered the color of the fourth chakra–the heart chakra.

As was so often the case, my grandmother’s leonine instincts were spot-on. It was she who, in the 1950s, determined that her sons were not dumb but dyslexic, a disorder that was far less recognized than it is today. It was she who understood that I had to get the hell out of dodge if I were to live the life I was meant to live. The life she’d once wanted for herself.

So I left home upon high school graduation, and with the exception of a few months after my first year of college, never spent another night under my parent’s roof. Never felt like I was anyone’s child again.

But then again, I’ve never felt safe. Never have, possibly never will. Continue Reading →

‘Homecoming’: Venus in Virgo

April 29, 2019 in Astro Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Music Matters, Spirit Matters, Style Matters, TV Matters

I’ve watched the brilliant Netflix concert film Homecoming three times now and all I can say is that Beyoncé is such a Virgo goddess that she makes the late James Brown look like a slacker. Also please note that Virgos don’t get credit for being the healer of the zodiac, but my o my does Lady B heal hearts ancestral lines cultural wounds with her gorgeous tapestries of music and dance and storytelling and costuming. She makes me cry with her womanly curves and womanly courage and womanly creativity, and she makes me hopeful too. For her triple-entendre love of labor and labor of love reminds us that we can change everything so long as we roll up our sleeves and open our hearts. Like I said: a Virgo goddess.

American PTSD

March 20, 2019 in Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, TV Matters

I’ve been thinking a lot about the cultural phenomena issuing from the trauma of a Trump presidency. In the first year, we had #metoo, in which powerful men who’d sexually assaulted and manipulated women (and sometimes men) actually faced consequences. It was such an obvious and constructive displacement of the rage we felt about not being able to unseat a well-known sex offender elected to the highest office in the land. Enter the 2018 elections, in which voter turnout hit a 50-year high, the Democrats finally took back the House of Representatives, and a record 117 women won office. More recently, have you noticed all the takedowns of liars and fraud schemes? Just today, my social media timelines include discussions of the admissions scandal; The Act, a Hulu series about the Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome queen DeeDee Blancharde; the Netflix and Hulu documentaries about the Fyre Festival fraud; and The Inventor, Alex Gibney’s doc about Elizabeth Holmes, the long-con CEO who even lied about her real voice. If only we could take down our Liar-in-Chief, too.

Then last night K and I saw Us, Jordan Peele’s brilliant followup to his game-changing Get Out. In the years leading to this Very White House, dystopia was the name of the Hollywood game. But now that a real-life dystopia has taken root, horror is the most logical cinematic response, and Peele’s American Horror Stories comprise an uprising unto themselves. Though his genius is fully his own, I believe the record-breaking public receptiveness to it partly can be attributed to the revelation that we’re in a real-Life American Horror Story. Exactly like that, actually. The demons of this country have been released like the spirits of a displaced Native American burial ground, and Peele’s reigning metaphor, the Sunken Place, reflects the ramifications of DT’s real gospel: Hate and Fear Thy Other.

We’ve all got PTSD–President Trump Stress Syndrome, also known as the DTs. And you know what? Some of our “symptoms” have been powerfully productive.

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