Recently, my fourteen-year-old goddaughter, Delia, asked for a reading list. I knew she was serious because she sent the request by snail mail – the millennial equivalent of engraving a message in stone. “I didn’t even vote for this president and he’s ruining my future,” she wrote. “I need books to get woke.” Obviously, an equally serious response was in order – one that acknowledged the gravity of our national turmoil without exacerbating her fears. So with the help of far smarter friends, I assembled a primer of essential “consciousness-raisers” that are neither condescending nor obtusely phrased, and I organized them into three categories I thought might appeal to her. I think this list will support resisters of all ages, for one of literature’s greatest services is to re-rear the scared, angry kids we each carry inside us. But in the spirit of James Baldwin’s epistolary essay, “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” the “you” to whom I refer is my goddaughter in the wake of the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. Continue Reading →
Archive | Music Matters
Hip to the Constellation
Typically those of us in the healing and magic communities make a point of sticking to the positive. In this capacity I am no exception, for I ardently believe that even the most challenging aspects of life pose an opportunity for spiritual growth. That said, when we have as many planets in Aries as we currently do—Uranus, Mercury, Eries, Sun, Venus and, as of today, Moon—I feel more than a little weary. All that unreflective go-go-go and me-me-me energy! Such pressure! Such bother! Such blather! Today, though, I am facing a profound crossroads in my creative and professional life, so I am trying to practice what I preach. Let us all welcome this new moon as a fire point, a power surge, an ignition like no other. Standing in the afternoon’s light at the river’s edge of my neighborhood, here is my cry: Please, mommy goddesses, give us the faith and temerity to push ourselves where we need to go. As the Aries goddess pictured here sings: “Get hip to the consultation!” It goes without saying that I pretend she’s singing “constellation” instead.
I’ve been a fan of female jazz singers since I’ve had my own apartment to fill. My first grownup love affair would have paled without Ella and I would not have survived the last without Nina. Yet only now have I succumbed to the charms and chimera of Carmen McRae. Something about her grown-lady yowl—her oldest soul take on that youngest of topics (love love and more love)—opens me up and strips me down as this brave new world keeps shifting beneath our feet. She croons”Miss Otis regrets,” and I marvel at how many colors course through that Cole Porter shade; “I’m okay how you come and go” and I make peace with my romantic limbo. Of all her albums, it’s “At the Great American Music Hall” that’s holding me closest. Listen and