The Beautiful Answer

Idio-Syncrasies

As we near the inevitable astrological pairing of Uranus and Pluto, along with the direct movement of Saturn, I and many of my more sensitive clients have noticed a few things. People seem to already be in panic mode of one sort or another, taking everything on and becoming pretty damn reactive. This aspect is once in a lifetime, and serves to literally force us to choose between that which pleases us and that which serves the greater good of humanity, the planet, and our respective relationships. 

Not to sound dire or anything like that, but it’s some pretty serious shit. Channeling to come tomorrow night. 

I have been drawn to this word idiosyncrasy when trying to describe to people how the energy feels to me. It’s unique, that’s for sure, and very no nonsense — very strong at the core, acting a battering ram and a funnel all in one. But when I looked it up, I found out that the word derives from Ancient Greek meaning “one’s own” with “mixture.” 

That sounds like something that would be ready and able to meld a bit, to let some personal things go in order for the whole to thrive. But so far, and we’re not even to the meat of the aspect yet, my experience has been that most are still looking out for themselves, feeling sorry for their inability to get what they want every second of every hour, and giving very little thought to the idea of the collective. 

With aspects this strong, we don’t really have a choice. Planets are always going to be bigger and stronger than we are. So it’s always best to cooperate with them as best we can. This blog was started nearly a year ago with the thought of looking for what’s beautiful in the world on a daily basis, what’s hidden behind all the stress and inability to see beyond our own issues. It’s somehow fitting that the blog will end as this aspect applies which, if we’re not aware and intentional, could rob us of that ability to see beyond, to the very truth of our being. 

We do not need to be idiots (derived from that same root of “one’s own”). This was a huge diss in their culture, because not taking part in the communal aspects of life was considered a detriment for the entire society. We need to melt a little, to give up something in order to take part of what we need. To not do so is to love ourselves and the next guy less, and that ends up serving no one. 

A Whole Lotta Love

Lately, I’ve been able to contact the feeling of love almost effortlessly. It comes, sometimes overwhelms me and when I’m crying a little, or wanting to reach out and write silly little emails or texts to people I’m thinking about but don’t usually have the time to stay in touch with the way I want to. I call them, leave messages that probably have them thinking I’m out of my damn mind, or plan what I’m going to get them at holiday time. This is what my mind wants to do. 

Writing this blog every day has been directly responsible for that. 

I would say that, generally speaking, I’m a loving person. I care about people, even if I don’t always say so out loud, and think of them often. I try to err on the side of being encouraging, even if I don’t yet understand what someone is doing, or why they want to go that way. Most of the time, I even succeed. 

I’m not looking for a medal. In fact, I think this is what we should all do, all the time. What surprises me is that after almost 12 months of making a daily search for beauty a practice, it’s effortless. I don’t have to set a reminder of my phone to hey, remember to see something beautiful. I don’t have to make it an item to be crossed off my to-do list. 

That would be ridiculous and boring anyway. 

What I love about this little experiment is that it’s taught me, even more than before, that just like the Beatles said, love is all you need. Money comes and goes. Friendships may change, drop away or become something toxic. Even family members can disappointment, depending on where you come from. But love and beauty are for always. They make our lives worth living, and if we make the time to establish it a practice, may become as second nature to us as breathing. Hell to the yeah. 

For All the Mothers

“We’re sitting on our blessed Mother Earth from which we get our strength and determination, love and humility - all the beautiful attributes that we’ve been given. So turn to one another; love one another; respect one another; respect Mother Earth; respect the waters - because that’s life itself!”

                          — Phil Lane (Yankton Sioux)

So Beautiful

These are the moments that sneak up on you, when you look over at someone you’ve been with for a long time and could very well be taking for granted, if you were a different person, and he were a different person, and you feel this simultaneous condensing and endless expanding of time and space, until you’re woozy and dropping and feeling the ground get ripped right out from under your feet.

And the only words on your lips are I love you and I can’t believe I found you, with all these other people in the world.

But maybe it’s not that way at all. Maybe there was no other way but to find one another, exuding pheromones and strange invisible perfumes the way we do. Maybe the tocsin beating out from your heart exactly matches the tocsin beating out from mine every few seconds, that expansion and relaxation, the muscular holography of our being. 

And when I can’t imagine what one minute of my life would be like without you in it, nor ten, fifty or a million, not out of fear of anxiety or the inevitable loneliness of passing along into another state, when my molecules will no doubt merge with yours, but a welling state of oh my God, and holy yes and how could I, of all people, get so lucky to be one of the ones closest to you in this lifetime? 

And when I drop to my knees in that place of supplication, I know all the other stuff, the moments we thought only got in the way, were that many more moments I got to spend with you. 

Rock On

Add this to the million reasons to be grateful: I am safe. I am healthy and alive. I am happy, most of the time. I learn. I love to learn, and I get to do this on an ongoing basis. I can read, which is rare in this whole wide world of ours, and I am comparatively rich. 

I have had the gift of music and theater, my parents and grandparents taking me into New York City to see orchestras play classical music, ballets, Shakespeare Festivals and Broadway shows. Some of my earliest and happiest memories involve these incredible gifts. I have had the gift of renewal, meeting new groups of friends, co-workers, colleagues and mentors, who have helped me along my path at various stages. 

I have had challenges, certainly my share of them, and lived to tell the tale. People have helped me through these as well. People I may never even meet have helped me stay alive, by planting fruits and vegetables, raising animals that will become my sustenance and trucking these things around the country. They have helped me by listening, and even not listening at times. 

Recently I read an article about how the idea that we’re all connected isn’t just woo-woo crap made up by someone trying to sell you a self-help book. It’s true on a very scientific, molecular level. Your atoms crash into mine all the time at the grocery store, in line at the DMV, picking out a new book at the local bookstore. Every once in a while, usually out doing mundane things like errands, I will remember this and fall to my knees a little in my mind. My brain will do a little somersault of joy in the knowledge that I am not alone. I’m never alone, in fact. And if I should see your atoms shooting past me at the dry cleaner, I’ll give a little wave and say, rock on you crazy molecule, and godspeed to you. 

Some New Love

As a psychic and reader of over twenty years, I’ve learned that there is one main question that unites us all. Does someone love me?  Will I find someone to spend my life with, or end up alone?  Am I lovable, and will someone connect with me on that level? 

There are, of course, many variations on this theme. Does he/she love me? Will he/she love me? Will I end up with this or that person? Everyone wants to know, and yet many people are apologetic about it. No worries. We all want the same things, after all. 

Today, I looked for some new love in my life. No, not that kind. I’m a happily married woman who found the right person at exactly the right time in my life. If we’d met any sooner, I would have been too wild, and if we’d met any later, I might have been with someone else. I like to think that person would have been far worse than my husband, who’s pretty all-around cool. 

The new love I sought was from the universe. I decided to try something new today, and just open a new channel. I saw the top of my head, or crown chakra, open up to just see what the universe would do. I sat there not expecting anything, but being open to whatever would happen next. Then I saw a powerful burst of golden light move downward through the top of my head, and extending all the way throughout my body. It felt like an electrical shock radiating all the ways to my fingers and toes. But there were particles inside this light, too, like little bubbles, or flecks of glitter. All of a sudden, I felt lit up from inside, and I heard my guides saying, “You asked to become light when you were sent here and we have lived up to our end of the bargain. Now it’s your turn to see where you can shine.” 

Shit … really? You mean I have to do something about it now?  Kidding, of course.  But that’s what you get when you ask for love from the universe. It shows up in the very next second, if your eyes are open to recognizing it.

Balancing Monsters of Love

Found this quote today, which seems to pretty much sum up every single moment of my life these days: 

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”

                                                          — Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

Sharing the Day

Don’t have much to post today. I’ve been thinking a lot, in the midst of my pretty heavy work load, about love. As I posted yesterday, in light of Valentine’s Day, it can be fleeting. I suppose someone could take that as being dire or defeatist, but that’s not how I mean it at all. We say we want to cherish things, but let them slip away. We focus on ourselves, sometimes failing to see how one moment of disengagement could have momentous effects in our lives and relationships.

So I vowed to be more loving. Today, I vowed to be friendlier and more open, as much as possible. I vowed to be more aware, and then even more aware, as the moments passed. Then I thought I would share these photos of my husband and I sharing the day yesterday.

The beauty makes my breath catch in my throat. 

Yes, that is the Planet of the Apes beach. But no, we didn’t see any damn, dirty apes. 

Champions

“Love is like quicksilver in the sand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.” 

— Dorothy Parker 

I’m reminded of this quote today, and the beautiful impermanence of our lives. Let us love deeply and fiercely, and become champions at this human emotion than makes our existences so worth continuing. 

Let it be. 

Let it be. 

Let it be. 

Love Ray Gun

I know. When you type it out like that, it sounds a little porny. But I have a pretty vivid imagination, and am always on the lookout for new ways to be playful with energy, to not buy into the tired old ways that many of us express our emotions. I mean, does everyone scream when they’re mad?  No. Some people steam, other people drink, while still others hug it out. 

It came to me when I was driving, as we so often do here in L.A. Some guy was riding my buper, even though I was in the slow lane, about to get off at the next exit. This type of behavior irritates me for the obvious reasons (which is that it just sucks), but also because it’s the epitome of greed. I mean, seriously? You’re so concerned with getting what you want right freaking now that you can’t, I don’t know, ease up a bit? After all, we were in bumper to bumper traffic. Not exactly the Indy 500. 

Luckily, I caught myself in the next moment. OK, so it was very little skin off my back, and who cares anyway, right? But I wanted to try something a little deeper. And for some reason, the image of a ray gun came into my mind, the ones you see all the time in cartoons blasting someone’s face off and leaving them in a cloud of ash. Then I loaded that baby up with some love pellets, planning to fire them behind me into the guy’s car. Hey, it could work, right? 

I’m sitting there giggling to myself, imagining firing away with these imaginary love pellets, and probably anyone who looked inside my mind at that moment might have thought that I was batshit crazy, but it made me laugh. I can’t be sure if this is what made him ease off my bumper in the next few minutes, but it made my commute a little easier, and a lot more fun.