Hi, doll.
Today I turn 53, and though this may seem like an inauspicious birthday, I feel super lucky—not only because solar returns impart magnificent magic but because I have lived and lost enough to be grateful for every new turn around the sun.
As I type, I’m sitting next to a roaring fire I just learned to build myself at the Catskills inn where I am staying. Last night I slept in a gorgeous, well-appointed room crowned by one of those glamorously giant clawfoot tubs you see in the movies. Later today I’ll celebrate with pals and explore the snow beginning to fall.
For now I’m layered in fur as Aretha fills the room with her track Tree of Life.
I asked the shuffle gods to send a birthday song and did they ever deliver. Aretha has been my queen, my goddess, my other mother for as long as I can remember. Tree of Life, indeed! When I was 3, I named our family cat after her.
If I’m being honest, today I’m also writing to that 3-year-old girl—hypervigilant and under siege yet already certain she was supported, if not by the humans who were supposed to have her back.
As it turns out, that kid with bruises and braids was supported.
She was supported by the divine that lives in everything and everyone, and she was supported by me—this blond and grey lipstick writer-witch launched into existence 50 years in the future by her beautiful, unflagging faith.
This is another reason I adore birthdays. They perch outside linear time, in a sparkly portal of kairos, or soul time. On our solar returns it’s so much easier to connect with every self we’ve ever been.
So many of my younger selves were lonely, frightened, and pissed-off— cold, broken, and scheming. I’m well-acquainted with survivor mode. With warrior mode, too.
But I love the bejesus out of each of the girls I was—the worst wag, the wiliest waif, even the wickedest witch—because they never gave up on themselves nor this world. Over this last half-century, they transformed hyper-vigilance into intuition and suffering into radical empathy.
Any kindness, wisdom, and compassion I possess now is hard-won.
I’m not sharing this to engender sympathy nor to humble-brag. I’m sharing this to assure that scared, furious 1974 child that she’s not alone so she can keep writing and working and walking toward me.
And I’m sharing this to say you’re not alone, either. Not in your struggles nor in your shine. Telling you this is why I launched the Ruby Report.
To be sure, age 52 brought loads of global and personal dis-ease. It began with the demise of a romance grounded in so much joy that I overlooked my partner’s unwillingness to hold my heart over the long haul.
In the ashes of that love I accepted that my lone-wolf ways—the precise traits that had equipped me to rise from my childhood—had outlived their welcome. That I’d been on my own for so long that I hadn’t known how much I craved cooking and walking and sleeping with a kindred spirit.
Unrecognized loneliness can drive you into inhospitable, even dangerous situations.
It seems like such an obvious insight, so simple it borders on the banal, but until that moment I’d never really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose, that adulthood might be less a chronological state than an emotional one which you decide, through painful acts, to both enter and maintain.—Caroline Knapp
In the wake of my heartbreak, I realized everyone’s greatest challenge is loneliness—the loneliness we feel when we are disconnected from our community, our surroundings, our calling, our health, our selves.
Sating desire is why we get up in the morning, whether that desire is as basic as the need to pee or as complex as the desire to make art. And while registering desire is inherently lonely because it reveals a separation of some sort, deeply connecting to anything outside your ego is what eases that suffering.
It only took me 53 years to figure this out. What can I say? Cappies can be slow bloomers.
As much as I dig sharing a birthday with Dolly Parton (the one person all Americans like), being born in the third week of January can be challenging. The weather is invariably too bleak to enjoy going out on the town, and everyone is broke and dry after the decadence of the holidays.
Sometime in my 40s I realized the best way to celebrate was simply to do only what I wanted. Solar returns set the tone for the year to come, so they pose a brilliant opportunity to close the gap between desire and manifestation.
But until a few days ago I was paralyzed about what to do on this birthday because I was plagued by conflicting wishes. I wanted to thrive in nature on my own terms, but I didn’t want to be alone. Then something made me google the Catskills, though normally I travel to the ocean.
Randomly I messaged an inn that jumped out at me, and heard back almost immediately from a long-lost pal who, it turned out, had recently taken a job there. Come! She wrote, sending a healthy discount as enticement. I’ll leave you alone as much as you want, but we can toast your birthday at our fireplace!
I booked immediately and then ducked out to Trader Joe’s to fetch supplies for the adventure. Making conversation with the twentysomething cashier I said: “Well, at least it’s not grey today.”
“It’s your birthday??” he said, mishearing me. “AMAZING.”
While everyone around us joined in wishing me happy birthday, I collapsed in gratified, surprised laughter.
For sure change is all we can fully count on, and no one person can fully be there for another all the time. But I appreciate the multiverse’s reminder that, so long as we heed our desires without inflicting harm or being too attached to outcome, magic can find us wherever we are.
“We are all prophets of this new age, and for those of us who would be safer in the sensibilities of racial separatism and martyrdom, well, if you can’t help us toward building this living church then step out of the way. Our fight will not end in terrorism and violence and it will begin in a celebration of the rights of alchemy: the transformation of shit into gold.” —Born in Flames, dir. Lizzy Borden
Monday marked the beginning of my yearly sabbatical, in which I conjure new offerings and recharge my intuitive batteries. I will be building out a new website (gravely overdue, I know) and investigating other hosting platforms since Substack has proven far too hospitable to Nazis. Suggestions/support for this venture are gratefully received, as is your patience.
My intuitive readings schedule opens back up on Valentines Day. You are welcome to book a love-day reading now—I’ve already devised new Venus tarot spreads—and purchase a package of discounted readings to support your optimal 2024 path. If you are so inspired, you also may support my Ruby endeavors directly as I prepare for this migration and another turn around the sun.
I am so very glad to share my hygge birthday with you.
With waggling eyebrows and slow kitty blinks,
P.S. Please excuse any errors in this post. I did my proofing best, but I’m always a little addled by birthday magic!