Out of the Fire …

As a fierce and fluffy youth (Aries stellium + Leo Moon), I spent the time I wasn’t dancing in leopard print leotards or running around my neighborhood shirtless, speaking about all things mystical into my tape recorder for my closet cosmic radio show, and writing what I called “lipstick horoscopes” for an imaginary trapper keeper-bound mag called Teen Talk.

I’d first discovered the language of archetypes at age 10, in the glossy, full-color pages of DK’s classic Parkers’ Astrology volume. These pages detailed not only each zodiac sign’s energetic and psychological components, but where you could find these energies in the material world. I reveled in my Aries Sun sign and its associations with everything from the pungency of cayenne pepper to the rough and ready streets of Marseilles, France.

The world became an ongoing cosmic treasure hunt, and I found my irrepressible fire energy in the scent of diesel fuel and the saturated magenta of Revlon’s “Cherries in the Snow” lipstick. I fell hard in love with the language of an unseen world that brought me ever closer to this one, and to the proprietary passions of the people who surrounded me. I touched, tasted, and sweated it out to the astral archetypes through everything from 90s house music to my mother’s spice rack, and covered my floor in the Aquarian deck like the cards were pinups from Tiger Beat.

After nearly signing on for a life with the Italian airlines (Sicilian father + pasta obsession), I found my way into the field of urban geography, working in city government and then academia. It was yet another collision between the mystical and material, as I studied how people infused emotions into landscapes and how the landscapes loved them back. I lived full throttle through my early adulthood, fueled by an endless lust for the intensity of experience and an insatiable search for endlessness.

As I completed a PhD and finished up the final throes of my Saturn Return, everything came undone. In the words of my beloved tarot mentor, Lindsay Mack, it was a “sub-basement Tower moment.” Broken down and bottomed out, I nearly left the planet. And in that pitch black, the stars were my headlamp. I returned to the mystical world and its cavernous capacity to beckon us closer to our complete carnality, as I reckoned with what lived inside of me. I learned to look it in the eye, to lick its skin, and to love it, no matter the cost.

The day I entered this breakdown/breakthrough, November 1, 2013, I gave my first professional reading. Beginning as “street signs” astro walking tours, which connected clients’ cosmic worlds with NYC neighborhoods, my work soon bloomed into everything from tarot dance classes to birth chart fragrance making. I slowly crawled back up to the surface of my own existence and built a career out of my belief that star-kissed synesthesia can bring us back to the selves we already are and are always becoming, as close and vital as a makeup case or dinner plate.

A decade later, in the mad magic of midlife, I’ve started to serve the spirits from even more sides. Through the portal of a flooded basement that summoned my dearly departed and catapulted me into the role of my mother’s end-of-life escort as she soaks up her last sunbeams, I’ve been embracing the art of mediumship. Born from a line of card dealers who stuffed poker chips into the sarcophagi at our family’s living-room wakes, I can still see little me spreading her tarot deck before the open caskets. Death has long been becoming me. And I am staying warm for the conversation.

I love high heat and humidity. I love Las Vegas and the Olympic Games. I love saturation and salt, pop music and pinkness. I love with ferocity and tenderness and I can’t stop, won’t stop. I cry easily and hard. I’m scared of flying and don’t ever want to die. But I know that there is nothing here that is not forever-and-always some kind of alive.

I truly believe that heaven is a place on earth.
I’m glad I’m here. And that you are, too.

Special Thanks …

to my mystical mentors + Cosmic Covenettes:

Lanie Kagan, Lindsay Mack, Miles Richardson, Elaine Peña, Maria Soledad, Sue Hunt, Ruby Warrington, Sandy Sitron, The Witches Without Kids, Brandon Alter, Emily Synder, Zach Fredman, Zivar Amrami, Maggie Langrick, and Cara George. And the art works of Liz Greene, Dane Rudhyar, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alana Fairchild, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Lisa Frank.

And to the beats that bring my body upright and the poetry that helps power my pen.