This is a story of chosen family on both sides of the veil. It also is a story of my interactions with Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), an artist and medium who continues to work as a medium now that she is dead. You could argue she’s merely a ghost, but her impact is more holistic than that. She’s like a well-intended poltergeist who’s a zeitgeist unto herself. (What’s the portmanteau here? Zeitergeist?)
None of this is a surprise if you’re already familiar with Hilma. If you aren’t, you’re lucky. Now you get to discover her.
Even for me, this is a long essay, but each section is essential, and I’ve tried to make it entertaining enough to merit the word count. I’m putting this into the world now because Hilma died and was born this time of year, and because some readers might need solace over this complicated holiday.
I know I do.
“Life is a farce if a person does not serve the truth.”—the journals of Hilma af Klint
Mel and I have been friends since first grade. We were in different classes, but her reputation preceded her. There’s a girl who looks like you but is taller, someone said, checking to see if it would make me mad. It did, since I’d been enjoying my illusion of being the tallest girl in our grade.
When I met Mel, I liked her anyway. With her dopey grin, dirty blond hair, and long limbs, she looked like she could be my sister. Also she was always up for an adventure, which back then was still possible for elementary school kids.
All of us in our Greater Boston neighborhood ran unsupervised from the minute we got out of school until we got called in for dinner, and Mel and I used that time to explore every riverbed, tree, and abandoned house within biking distance of our houses.
Once we scraped together our allowances and took the commuter rail 30 miles north to the Gloucester shore. No adults noticed because we got home in time for dinner, which to this day I remember was meatloaf with too much catchup.
The 1970s were a very different time.
Born 10 days apart, both of us had tiny Jewish engineer fathers and very tall blond gentile Cancer mothers who did not work outside the home. To get to each other’s digs we only had to cross one street and hop two fences, but it felt as if we were crossing centuries and continents.
Before having kids, my parents had been real ‘60s swingers. That everything-goes ethos still prevailed in our household, which was messy and loud and overall the Wild West for better and for worse. M’s stoic mother had survived World War II Germany and father was at least a decade older, so their elegantly appointed home boasted a quiet order that verged on oppressive. We both dug the reprieve the other’s household granted us.
As the years passed. we remained close in a way that felt more like family than friends. We even dated the same guy once; our shared love of Prince and Diane Arbus and long Nico bangs made that romantic overlap inevitable, if unfortunate. Only during our college years—when I went on a deep dive into therapy, grunge, and activism, and she put her nose to the grindstone and emerged a commercial photographer—did we not stay close.
We always assumed I’d be the one to become a wife and mother, but life is nothing if not surprising, even to a psychic. In 1993 I moved to NYC to become the child-free flaneuzy I remain today. Mel stayed in the Boston area, birthing two girls with husband K, whom she met at age 19.
I became her daughters’ godmama, not to mention their Auntie Mame. Long after I stopped visiting my biological kin, I still came to Boston for Mel’s clan.
It was last April, a month after an excruciating breakup. Long ago I’d convinced myself that my intuitive abilities and chaotic family rendered me unfit for partnership, but this most recent beau and I had shared more time, space, and sensibilities than I’d shared with anyone in decades. Though our romance had undeniably run its course, I felt his absence keenly.
I was lonely in a way that was new to me.
When Mel said she’d be in town Saturday night, I felt great relief. I longed for the uncomplicated presence of family and a steady supply of hugs.
She explained she’d be driving back from Philadelphia, where she was dropping off my goddaughter Luci at a college she was considering. I was crestfallen to hear I’d miss sweet L—the only teenager who lets me snuggle them—but I understood.
Though I rarely go out on days I give readings, M likes to paint the town red, so I scanned my invites for something to do the night of her visit.
Wanna hit a screening of Hilma w Lena Freaking Olin? I texted.
Her answer was immediate: This wknd is a lot of driving so let’s keep it cozy.
Normally that would have been that, but after a beat I decided to attend the Friday event for the same movie. I wasn’t especially enthused by the prospect of a Hilma af Klint biopic by Lasse Hallström. But Isabella Rossellini would be moderating this post-screening Q&A, and who in their right mind would pass up a chance to see her?
As it turns out, Rosellini was the least interesting part of that night, though she was as authentically glamorous as anyone I’ve met in real life.
One of the most impactful artists and mediums of the 20th century, Hilma af Klint was barely recognized until the 21st century. Born into Swedish nobility, she grew up as obsessed with science as she was with painting, which she studied at Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts to as much acclaim as anyone was willing to grant women back then.
Eschewing marriage (and men, at least sexually), she modeled values of gender equality, queerness, and anti-materialism that would not be culturally embraced for decades to come. She made her living selling veterinary drawings, and creatively and spiritually collaborated with a group of women known as the Five.
Through seances, meditation, prayer, automatic writing, and other psychic tools, this circle channeled messages from spirits, including images and plans for Hilma’s now-legendary series, Paintings for the Temple. Some believe these 193 pieces are the first examples of abstract expressionism, though Wassily Kandinsky is generally credited with originating the genre more than a decade after this project was begun.
Certainly Paintings for the Temple’s subject matter departs wildly from the figurative work then ruling schools of art. Loop-de-loop calligraphy, punctuation, numerals, curlicues, snails, rainbows, Buddhist and Hindi symbols, graphs, hearts, and overlapping circles, swans, and corkscrews climb in different directions, cast in such sly pastels as lilac, primrose, buttercup, and cobalt blue. The 10 Largest—as Hilma referred to the series’ crown jewels—run as tall as 11 feet.
These paintings also draw on then-new scientific discoveries demystifying life—microscopes, the theory of evolution, electromagnetic waves, X-rays, subatomic particles, double helixes, and radioactive decay.
In notebooks and letters, Hilma described Paintings for the Temple as nothing short of a new platform. Let’s call it a medium—one permitting glimpses of everything hidden beneath the surfaces of the material and Western world.
The effect, even now, is not just ravishing. It is revelatory.
In person, viewers don’t merely appreciate the Paintings for the Temple. They read them, and that process is delightfully, wholly absorbing. Especially when perceived en masse, the Paintings transport beholders beyond intellectual or aesthetic judgment into a state of concentrated awe—a receptivity induced, as Hilma once wrote, “by a responsive vibration.”
Cue wide smiles, slowed heartbeats, surer gaits. A shared, rapt calm.
I know this because I saw Paintings for the Temple at NYC’s Guggenheim Museum along with a record-breaking 600,000 other people between October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019.
That this happened is nothing short of a miracle.
While alive, Hilma tried in vain to find an alabaster, spiraling building she was told in visions was the only proper place to display Paintings for the Temple. Unilaterally rejected by intellectual and artistic institutions, she left more than 1,200 paintings, 134 notebooks, and 26,000 manuscript pages to her nephew, a vice-admiral in the Swedish navy, with the explicit instructions that her work not be exhumed until 20 years after her death.
By then, her spiritual guides told her, the world might be ready for her work.
Of course denizens of the progressive 1960s were more receptive to her heady fusion of science and spirituality; her rejection of binaries; her numinous, non-figurative sensibilities. A groundswell began—slowly, slowly (the world was still wildly sexist)—and by 2018, more than 165 of the Paintings for the Temple were displayed together in New York’s Guggenheim museum.
The Guggenheim is an alabaster spiral of a building.
My eldest goddaughter Kira and I saw this show in 2019, and I’ll never forget the collective transcendence Hilma curated from the other side. Drifting through the galleries with suddenly familiar strangers, I realized we all were godchildren of her future.
My limbs and neck tingled as they do during intuitive readings, when time expands so I can view a client’s path from numerous angles at once. Not coincidentally, this effect is akin to viewing an object while climbing a spiral staircase.
Even if you dig Lasse Hallström films—among them, Chocolat and My Life as A Dog, the latter I unabashedly adore—you might comprehend why I wasn’t confident that the Swedish director’s carefully crafted sentimentalism would be a good match for Hilma’s magic. Hurrying to NYC’s Quad Cinema, I prayed he hadn’t reduced her to a sadsack spinster.
Color me pleasantly surprised.
Oh, for sure the film lingers too long on all the predictable period-film beats—the sun-dappled meadows and muddied pinafores of Hilma’s bucolic childhood; the stern, loving Poppa and parochial, fussy Mama; sister Hermina’s pretty little cough that might as well be a rattle of doom for all its heavy-handed foreshadowing.
But all those conventions fall away when Hermina dies at age 10, for Hilma does more than grieve. She becomes profoundly curious about her sister’s posthumous existence. And that ardor for the unseen—that need to grok life and death—eclipses Lasse’s sensibilities.
A quintessential Scorpio, Klint’s desire to understand everything lived side-by-side with her steely-eyed conviction she could achieve anything. Played in the film first by Lasse’s daughter Tora Hallström, then by his wife Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), the painter gazes intensely upon what she wants to know—and what she simply wants.
Cue her love affair with heiress Anna Cassel (played by Catherine Chalk), a member of the Five. In real life, after decades of subjugating her creative and financial resources to Hilma, Cassel became an esteemed painter in her own right. Depictions of the couple’s sexual ecstasy illuminate why it took her so long to move on.
Transcending mere montage, their fucking is a painterly, nonlinear kaleidoscope more in keeping with Hilma’s esthetic than Hallström’s. Spirals on her canvas extend onto the women’s bodies, local botany, a flayed horse’s veins—the future itself, as envisioned by the Five in their seances.
The effect is discombobulating and heightened, perfect. Because in Hilma’s lived experience, the present as well as the future was female— cryptic, womblike, tunneled. Downright gynocratic, really, with a contexture that would pass the Bechdel test with flying colors.
Though this film would not receive its due—only male-centered historical sagas are culturally embraced—I recognized it as the most innovative of Hallström’s career. It also seemed as close to channeling as any film I’d seen. It was as if the writer-director had surrendered to Hilma’s indomitable will, exerted from the other side.
“I'm aware, living as I do in the world, that I am an atom in the universe, possessing infinite possibilities of development. I want to explore all these possibilities.”—the journals of Hilma af Klint
As the credits ran, I moved to the front of the theater for the Q&A.
Amid audience applause, Isabella Rossellini strode out, followed by Lasse, Lena, and Tora. Clad in jewel pastels, stiff layers of silk, and perfectly applied red lipstick, the women glowed as movie stars invariably do in person. I was so close I could smell a spicy, layered perfume, which I imagined emanated from all three of them.
As unconventional as her project choices are, Isabella was a classic film actress when it came to running the Q&A.
The daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, she talked about toiling in the shadow of a movie star mama and a director dad and partners. (She was married to Martin Scorsese and has been linked romantically to David Lynch and Guy Maddin.) It took nearly 10 minutes for her to ask if Lena and Tora’s experiences reflected her own.
They demurred—who in their right mind would answer that question honestly on a press tour?—and an ominous silence overtook the room. Without any forethought, I stood up. “Did you consult any mediums as you made this film?”
The Hallström family looked at each other and grinned. “Well,” Lasse said. “We weren’t sure if we were going to talk about this publicly, but we actually did consult a medium. I didn’t believe in that sort of thing before making this, but Tora was keen on it.”
Tora nodded, eyes bright as she looked at me.
“I very quickly came to believe Hilma herself was communicating with us,” he continued. “Through the medium she told us details about her life that were not yet publicly known.”
“Like her affair with Anna!” Tora supplied.
“Yes, and a few other affairs with women,” her father said. “All of which we later confirmed when her full journals were released.”
“Do you feel Hilma influenced your aesthetic choices?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said. “This film was all me.” He shook his head vehemently, and Tora regarded me with a frank amusement.
After another awkward silence, the discussion moved onto more standard Q&A fare (compliments endearingly masquerading as questions). I sank back into my seat.
As the audience filled out, Tora grabbed my arm. “Do I know you?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I just really love Hilma.”
“She was an amazing person to play,” she said fervently.
“Did you feel you were channeling her? Like, more than your usual process as an actor?”
She nodded, eyes even brighter. “I talked to her many times through the medium. By the time we were filming, I almost felt like a medium myself. I felt her in me.”
I knew that sensation, like you were co-working with something or someone that no on one else could see.
I had a ton of other questions for Tora. What had Hilma felt like? Was she kind to you? Bossy? How much control had she wielded? But others were waiting to speak with her, so I slid past them into the New York night.
It had been an unusually cold spring, but over the last few hours temperatures had climbed into the 70s. Unbuttoning my coat, I began walking in the opposite direction of the subway, sidestepping couples making bedroom eyes at each other and groups cackling wildly like teens on the last day of school.
Suddenly my loneliness boiled over, as acute as the week my beau and I had split. The solitude felt physical, like a wave of nausea or someone digging sharp nails into my skin.
“Ok, Hilma,” I said aloud. “Tell me what to do.”
This is a good time to talk about my understanding of disembodied spirits—the dead and the never-incarnated.
Our third-dimensional brains aren’t built to grasp that other plane, so I would never pretend to be a true authority on the subject. But 20 years of readings have given me a sense of something before and after life, in an “energy into matter into energy” capacity. A quantum consciousness, call it gravity or love or both, that subsumes the individual ego, that human “I.”
When clients worry their dearly departed are upset with them, I shake my head. I don’t believe the disembodied have emotions or thoughts. But experience has taught me they undoubtedly connect with us anyway, by means and for reasons we can’t fully fathom.
You could describe what I do as picking up a phone and reporting on what’s on the other end. Sometimes I see spirits’ images or receive their messages; mostly I just know things about them, as if I’m reading a database.
What I don’t do is let their field invade my own. Strong boundaries are vital to this work.
The rare spirit who craves control in this plane is exactly the sort that shouldn’t be granted it.
I mention all this to establish how unusual it was for me to hand Hilma the reins. I wasn’t letting her jump into my body or speak as me. But I was allowing her input, which I only have done with my father’s grandmother and my mother’s mother.
As I said, I was terribly lonely. I also had a growing sense that Hilma was an unusual being who transcended all binaries—male/female, spirituality/science, time/space, life/death—in the name of holistic love and communion.
While alive, she’d consulted the disembodied and accurately predicted the future with groundbreaking results. Tonight had taught me she could practice her powers from the other side to equally positive effect.
“Where should I go?” I said aloud, plugging in my airpods so I wouldn’t look like a crazy person on the street.
Suddenly I felt compelled to walk downtown and westerly.
“Play me something on my music shuffle,” I said. Bruce Springsteen’s “Spirit in the Night” came on.
The lady had a sense of humor.
"The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke."—The journals of Hilma af Klint
The city seemed lighter now—the air, the mood, even the throngs of people spilling onto the streets. She pressed me to walk faster, and I was happy to oblige, like a child galloping through a field of wildflowers, ogling every petal at once.
But I shook my head when she nudged me to turn a corner. On that block perched the French bistro where my ex and I had our first real date. I couldn’t bear running into that memory of myself, smeared with hope and gorgeous kisses.
She nudged me instead toward the Hudson River, always a good call.
I could feel her prodding me to talk directly to Oshun, the river goddess. To express whatever gratitude and hope and pain I was harboring in my heart and head.
So I did. I talked about my vision for this Ruby platform and my dream of a cottage in the mermaid woods, my love for my friends and clients and cat and city, and my heartbreak about the state of the world and the end of my relationship. “I’ve never minded being on my own before,” I said. “But I can’t take this isolation much longer.”
As I spoke, my whole system eased. There’s no other word for it: I felt received.
It was nearly 12pm when I finished, hours after I usually go to bed on readings days. You were so right to bring me here, I thought. But is it ok if I go home?
In response she pulled me north—not northeast to the subway, but straight up the river path. “Oy,” I said aloud. But in for a penny, in for a pound.
As I approached 15th street, the recently completed Little Island park sprang into view. Cement ramps and staircases festooned with fairy lights, ferns, grasses, and flowers spiraled above the water, framing the dazzling NYC skyline.
I hadn’t seen it before, and stopped in my tracks. The structure was an outdoor edition of Hilma’s alabaster spiraling temple.
The woman really was a witch.
I felt a yank then—the most intense one yet—toward one of the staircases. Mounting its steps, I stopped after three flights to catch my breath admire the Empire State Building. “Enough?” I said.
Her response was a caress on my cheek. Almost, dear one. Head up that ramp on your left. I groaned, but began climbing again.
At the top, a voice rang out that I couldn’t quite place: “I don’t fucking believe it.”
I looked up to see Mel and Luci staring at me, jaws dropped like cartoon characters.
“What in the holy hell?” I said, as Luci rushed into my arms. “Liser!”
We began chattering all at once. I told them I was coming from the movie I’d invited Mel to see, and that Hilma had led me here. They told me traffic had been so bad en route to Philadelphia that they’d pulled off the West Side Highway, then found a space immediately—a miracle, for those unfamiliar with NYC parking.
“So we went to that cute French bistro,” Mel said.
I nodded. That explained that.
“We were going to start driving again, but all of a sudden I really wanted to see the new Little Island park,” she continued.
“And now here you are,” I said.
“And now here we are,” Luci said, smiling. My enchanting goddaughter.
Running into each other was so statistically improbable that the three of us fell silent for a minute. Then we flung our arms around each other and squeezed three times for our patented Godfamily Hug.
I swear Hilma hugged us too.
I won’t pretend life has entirely been rosy since then. Integrating my newfound need for companionship into the lone-wolf setup of my life isn’t smooth. This week is an especially challenging reminder of the kinship structures I lack.
But beautiful synchronicities abound, and they usually entail Hilma. Maybe in another post I’ll share more stories.
For now I’ll say she has showed me that I always am held on both sides of the veil.
We all are.
“You have mystery service ahead, and will soon enough realize what is expected of you.”—Hilma af Klint, last journal entry.
The Ruby Report is conjured with a lot of love and hard work. If you are so inspired, share this post or purchase a subscription for yourself or another. You also are welcome to book an intuitive reading for yourself or a loved one. I have office hours this weekend for all who need a reprieve from this complicated holiday.
Your support allows me to serve, and I’m very grateful. I send so much light.
With waggling eyebrows and slow kitty blinks,
I love it when you drop words and phrases that are especially meaningful to me in the Ruby Report. It seems as though you are droping me a note to pay close attention in the form you know will best land when we cant talk face to face. I appreciate you and your place in my life.
Perfect timing - thank you. <3