The Beautiful Change of Ostara
Today is Ostara, the vernal equinox, the first day of spring. It is the year’s most powerful burst of energy, a bright new bloom, a stupendously roaring fire. In the pagan and astrological calendars, it is also the first day of the new year—when Mother Earth officially bounds back to life. We embrace this hallowed event with revelry and pageantry—flowers, feasts, costuming, wine, orgiastic writhing (ahem!). But let us also embrace this reboot as a softening—of the soil, the air, our hearts.
Take a moment today to go outside, place your hands on the heart chakra, and inhale this change. How will you serve your highest self and the highest good? Better yet, how will you celebrate it? Breathe in this new space, then gently request your highest spirit to build it out.
Pay close attention to your dreams tonight and to anything out of the ordinary over the next 24 hours. The veil between this world and the next is unusually thin during these transitions, and blueprints and tools are more easily delivered from guides, ancestors, and the divine intelligence of the universe.
Then tomorrow, if you have the means, start something new. Even one plant on your fire escape will help. Even one seed. We all need the wonder of something new and sustaining. We all need a systemic and seismic healing. We all need practical magic. Happy spring, sweet and salty friends. I bid you beautiful change.
This next month is an extraordinary time to divine new paths and release roadblocks. Schedule an intuitive reading here.
The Horror of the Schnorrer
I’ve been thinking a lot about schnorrers. For those who didn’t grow up with a shrewd Jewish grandmother, a “schnorrer” is a Yiddish term for a freeloader–a layabout who, no matter how charming, simply doesn’t earn their keep.
Most of us have been schnorrers at some point, have drained others of their resources and good will (emotionally or conversationally, if no other way). Goddess knows I have been. I was raised by someone who wasn’t especially interested in parenting so I learned early to extract from others what I should have been getting at home. It was a habit that lasted far too long. Into my 40s, even. And when I finally began to address these habits, I turned around and started attracting schnorrers to me like flies, perhaps to understand the pain I’d caused.
The evolution from transactional behavior to open-hearted exchange is a really challenging one, especially in a country that espouses a dog-eat-dog individualism that conflates self-possession with selfishness. But I’ve been working with this concept a lot, especially in my intuition practice, where I bent so far backwards to prove I wasn’t a con artist that I did myself great harm in the first year of the pandemic.
This last year has been one of learning better boundaries, no matter how tough it can seem, to build infrastructure that supports everyone. Not offering free guidance because ultimately it’s not free to me and my health. And not expecting loved ones to provide more care than they have to give. 
It’s about the transition from survival to thrival (yes, I know that’s not really a word) and I’m still learning how networks based on compassion rather than credit can exist, let alone flourish.
All to say that today I drew a new line. In the past I would have felt so defensive that it would’ve translated into anger at the other person. Today I did it lovingly, even if they didn’t experience it that way. I felt compassion for their unconsciousness, compassion for the part of myself that so anxiously needs others to be in agreement with me. All in all I still feel shaky. Isn’t that always the case the first time we exert a muscle?
The Dream That Was Not a Dream
Last night’s dream wasn’t even a dream.
It was a download. A dispatch.
I was told now things in my life were real. Not bad, not good. Just that I’d evolved past clinging to unsubstantial, unsustainable solutions like they were life rafts. Unavailable lovers; disordered habits; disposable things.
I was reminded that I still had a book I’d written. A child’s testimony I was ready to rewrite from the perspective of the loving parent—
The parent she never had.
The parent I never had.
The parent my parents never had.
I was shown transforming this book into essays, sifting through its materials with the concentrated care you’d show a child.
That I still had a purpose. That in fact I still had a child.
Me.
I am crying as I write this.
Getting older isn’t necessarily harder. It’s not necessarily sadder.
