The Journal
mullings on magic, flashes of stories, & the occasional poem
And there are times I think
On poems written between karaoke songs.
February 5, 2023And there are times I think
I don’t need to write another word
It’s all been said
It’s all been read
It’s all held right here
In the palm of eternal beauty
And I think I’ll just stay
Basking
And being
And remembering
How beautiful it all was
And is
And when you call to me in the morning
Tell me that the coffee’s ready
I will smile
And thank you
And sip the beans
Brewed
Like the sun rising now
Through the mist—
A bright orange light spreads across the land
And I look at you
And I know
I’ve said enough.
From Atheist to Mystic
On accepting spiritual experience.
January 31, 2023Save for a Christmas tree, I was not raised with any religion, and from a young age, I renounced any and all spiritual beliefs.
There’s no science to support it, and there are ample reasons to dismiss it. This was my argument for most of my life.
Then, from 2014 to 2022, I had countless dreams that came true. I received regular visions and intuitive messages that consistently proved to be accurate. I lived my days awash in synchronicity, experienced the complete remission of three chronic illnesses (fibromyalgia, Sjögren's Syndrome, and temporal lobe epilepsy), and even had visions of a halo around my body (that then appeared on camera). Still, I struggled to believe.
I’d studied analytic philosophy and human evolution at Vassar College. I’d conducted research with one of the world’s foremost primatologists. I’d bowed at the altar of intellectualism, and my scientifically-trained mind could always deliver plenty of reasons other than the spiritual to explain my experiences.
I clung tightly to the cliffs of linear logic and feared swimming in the sea of faith, but ultimately, for me, this position became untenable. Something more pressed on my being with such force that eventually, I had to let go. I had to accept and believe: I wasn’t just a person having mysterious, magical experiences. I was a person living a deeply spiritual experience that many other people are living and many others have lived, and for me to continue to hold my experiences at a distance — like a scientist with a microscope — was ultimately preventing me from fully embodying who I am.
So now, I accept. I trust. I approach faith and spirituality with curiosity and conviction — simultaneously honoring all that I know while acknowledging all that I am still learning.
Thank you for being here.
The week before my wedding, I received intuitive messages telling me that my photographer would capture something extra special on my wedding day. I saw this in a vision like some otherworldly light around my body — the invisible made seen — and I heard (through subtle, intuitive hearing) that this was my “true self.” The following images were taken on June 8, 2019.
The God I Know
On redefining the word God.
January 31, 2023The God I know is not a man in the sky
casting judgment.
No, he is a loving unified expression of reality
speaking through all things, all the time.
He is not even a he or a she or anything as measured as that.
He is just everywhere and everything, all at once.
Each person’s ability to hear and experience God is based on a number of things,
mostly
the evolution of their own heart.
All religions past and present are an expression of God.
They all work in harmony within a cosmic web of belief.
Most are saying the same thing again and again.
The scientific method? It’s just another way to get to know God.
All of us have a direct connection to God.
There is no end to God speaking.
There is no final prophet or messiah.
You can find God in flowers and music and stories and each other and yourself.
Our connection to God is unyielding.
All things are connected.
You do not have to believe in God to live according to God and in oneness with God.
You could be the most devoted servant of God and not even know it.
What matters most is allegiance to your own heart.
Do not betray your heart, for God speaks through your heart.
Light triumphs over dark not by attacking darkness but by opening itself to more and more light.
Sometimes this looks like an attack.
Nothing is as simple as it seems.
Everything is quite simple though.
What is above shapes what’s below and what’s below shapes what’s above.
Through living life on the bridge between heaven and earth, the earth becomes a glorious garden, and paradise is restored for all.
This is a metaphor.
All language is a metaphor.
You’ll understand these words best by dismissing them completely and feeling instead.
Get to know your heart, and your mind will follow.
Godspeed.
The words above spontaneously entered my mind on January 30, 2023, and were edited months later. I hesitated to ever share them. I’m often wary to explicitly speak of God, yet the words keep coming. I am, personally, not a proponent of organized religion. But I am a lover of God. When I use that word, the above is what I mean. The above is what I’ve come to know. All the other uses of the name “God”? They are, in my opinion, simply a facet of God. A piece of its face. As if the speaker is looking at a broken mirror and simply seeing what’s reflected in a single shard. We keep looking. We keep looking. We keep looking.
To Walk in Clear Skies
On the Salem Witch Trials and ancestral heritage.
November 21, 2022I sat in the rental car with my soon-to-be husband as we drove into Salem. We drove past lines of cars waiting to enter overpriced parking lots—their rates tripled and quadrupled for the month of Halloween—and as we drove, I started feeling pins and needles on my tongue and at the back of my mouth and down my throat—like it was all going numb—and I wondered if this is what it felt like to be hanged.
We gave up trying to park and just kept driving. We drove north for three miles until we arrived at 39 Hale Street in Beverly, Massachusetts. We parked the car on the street outside a yellow clapboard house. The uncomfortable tingling sensation in my mouth and throat were gone. They’d disappeared as soon as we’d left Salem’s town center, and now, standing outside this yellow house, I felt comfortable and safe—like this home was my home. Like here, in the radiating warmth of the autumn sun, beneath the towering, green tulip tree, I was completely welcome.
The house belonged to my eighth-great-grandfather, John Hale, who was the reverend in this town for thirty-three years. He moved to the house just after 1692, after two young girls in the neighboring village of Salem began exhibiting strange behavior. When he saw the girls, he immediately suspected witchcraft was to blame and encouraged the creation of the trials. Fifteen months and twenty-five dead bodies later, the Salem witch trials ended.
Throughout the trials, Hale was intimately involved. He was present during examinations of the accused, testified against two women, and counseled the judges and other trial participants, but in November of 1692, when his wife, Sarah Noyes Hale, was accused, he started doubting everything.
It was in this yellow house, in the years following the trials, that he wrote A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft—the book in which he formally denounced the trials and expressed remorse for the innocent lives that, undoubtedly, were taken. He didn’t believe they were innocent because witchcraft wasn’t real. No, he firmly believed in the invisible forces—good and evil. He simply challenged our ability to judge them clearly.
“We walked in the clouds and could not see our way,” Hale wrote. The clouds, he explained, were fear. A fear he knew well, for he’d feared witchcraft most of his life.
In 1648, just twelve days after his twelfth birthday, he watched a woman hanged for witchcraft. She was the first of fifteen people killed over fifteen years during New England’s first witch hunt, which lasted the entirety of John Hale’s adolescence.
She was accused—amongst other things—of being psychic, of accurately predicting the future and knowing people’s secrets. Of course, most people today will tell you that she wasn’t really psychic or a witch. None of them were. Because these things are not real.
At least, that’s what I was taught. Unlike my eighth-great-grandfather, I was raised with no religion and no spirituality. I never believed in invisible forces—save for gravity—and because I didn’t believe in magic, I never feared it, and I never looked for it. So, you can imagine my surprise when I started meditating, when I got really still and listened to myself, and I discovered that magic was the most natural expression of my being.
By magic, I mean that when I cleared my mind of all my thoughts—the ones I created and the ones that were created for me—other experiences entered that open space. Visions came through. Knowings. Feelings. Predictions. A connection to something I’d never felt before that was so big and powerful it felt like it was both me and outside of me, and it seemed to have no name, and it only ever felt like peace and love and truth.
Over the last seven years of my life, I—like my eighth-great-grandfather— have become a person of faith, of believing in invisible forces. I receive messages in my dreams that come true. On hundreds of occasions, strangers have sat down in front of me, and I’ve closed my eyes and accurately received information about their lives through visions and sounds and feelings. I regularly wish for things, and they come true. And often, I’ll be going about my day—folding my laundry, doing the dishes, the most mundane of tasks—when suddenly, it’s like I can hear the ocean in my ears, and if I close my eyes and listen carefully, the waves become words— messages, songs, instructions—all full of what I felt in those early days of meditation: peace, love, truth.
John Hale and the other powerful men in Salem thought that experiences like these were an aspect of witchcraft. This, in their minds, was Satan’s work. Because that’s what they’d been taught. And that’s what they feared.
I don’t consider myself a witch in the Christian sense of the word, but I am a woman, having an experience, trusting and following her own inner knowing, and in today’s society—just like in 1692—this is an act of rebellion. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that my experiences couldn’t possibly be real, that in short, I—in my entirety, as the person I truly am—do not exist.
Disbelief, I think, was maybe the natural evolution of our fear. Because you can’t fear something you don’t believe in. And I think that for many of us, the clouds we walk in now, the ones that stop us from seeing clearly, are no longer fear but disbelief. I know because I walked in them too, and I’m actually grateful for this because it meant that when magic showed up, I wasn’t afraid, and I could just experience it—without judgment.
As my fiancé and I drove away from John Hale’s yellow house, he was visibly upset. Upset that I’d been so happy there, walking around the yard, taking photos, smiling by the tree. “This is a man who killed many people!” He exclaimed.
I knew it was true. I hadn’t forgotten, and I wondered if maybe I was able to be so happy because I was rewriting Hale’s story in my mind. Maybe I was focusing too much on the part where he eventually spoke against the trials rather than the part where he instigated them and twenty-five people died, and now, the energy still feels so heavy in Salem that my throat hurts driving through, and as I thought about all of this, I could feel inside me the blood of the persecutor and the spirit of the persecuted, but then I took a deep breath, and I cleared my mind, and there in the white rental car, I could still feel what I felt beneath the tulip tree: the warmth of the sun on my skin and the truth that John Hale is not judging me. He just loves me.
And despite all of the fear and disbelief we walk in that makes us judge each other and kill each other and do all sorts of unspeakable, unloving things, I choose to trust my instincts and the inner knowing that we are all connected, that love moves through us, that despite what happens when we are here, we return to the earth, and we return to that love, and after enough time, that is all that’s left.
A version of this essay was first published in the 77th issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review. The above is Virginia’s original edit, written in February 2020.
The False Idol of Knowledge
On universal ignorance and the beauty of being.
October 10, 2022Growing up, I would often say: We are all ignorant.
Whoever was in earshot immediately appeared offended, jumped in to defend their own knowledge and all the knowledge we can and indeed should gain so we are not so ignorant.
While I love learning and value education (both because I enjoy it and because it can create desirable changes in how we live and how we treat each other), none of this changes the fact that we are all ignorant.
And this is an idea that makes most of us horribly uncomfortable. We don’t like not knowing, and the possibility that this is our natural state and that there is a base futility to knowledge is something we are constantly trying to fix. We are searching again and again for answers, understanding, and certitude.
But as we do, we fall deeper and deeper into a state of illusion about our acquired knowledge. We convince ourselves that the more we know, the more we know.
We believe that knowledge is real and true, and many of us pursue it with a vigorous devotion akin to kneeling at the altar of God (or we simply stop at the altar and accept the knowledge it claims to offer).
Then, we take our “knowledge,” and we use it as both a weapon and a shield. We turn that which we know to be true into judgments that we use against others while simultaneously protecting ourselves from fear of the unknown or even worse—fear of being wrong—with our sense of righteous certainty.
Knowledge often assumes righteousness—a belief that the information you have gained is indeed objectively true—but this assumes that we are living in a world where objective truth (a) exists and (b) is accessible via human perception.
These two foundational assumptions can neither be denied nor verified, and knowledge itself cannot be proven to exist beyond the realm of human experience.
Imagine—if you will—that there is a large circle and in this circle is whatever is actually real and true.
Imagine that you are living inside the circle, and now, imagine that all other people are living inside the circle with you.
Each individual person has a circle above their heads that is full of “what they know.” And now imagine that all of these individual circles are connected like a tunnel running across the head of every person on Earth. Information is flowing through this tunnel like a river of “knowledge,” but there’s no way to prove that the river is actually the same as the large circle in which we all live or that such a circle even exists.
Knowledge—at its best—is a hypothetical reflection of objective truth, and at its worst, is purely a creation of human consciousness (and its interaction with what is experienced as an external reality).
I have often thought that experiences of psychic awareness are evidence of the fact that people are (or can be) connected to all knowledge, that we can access every piece of information that exists in the world—not just through the internet—but by tuning into this interconnected river of flowing information. And my many, many years of experiencing this makes me believe that this is true, but at the same time, I don’t know what this river is, and I recognize that the river itself and what it holds may be an illusion.
We both can access all knowledge, and we have no way of knowing if knowledge itself is anything more than a construction of our own making. We can know everything and nothing at all.
We are all ignorant.
So rather than strive fruitlessly towards attaining knowledge and truth, let us rest in the beauty of uncertainty, the mystery of all we do not know and cannot explain, and let us know that this actually applies to everything.
And that, that is beautiful and magical and mysterious and most importantly, it is enough.
It must be.
Because it is all we will ever have.
A Reason to Believe
On psychic messages and what it all may mean.
September 26, 2022The other night, I dreamt about the International Criminal Court (ICC). During the dream, I thought about how I used to work for Northwestern University’s Center for International Human Rights. There—as part of my job—I was in regular contact with the ICC and other UN initiatives.
Two nights later, I dreamt about my old boss from when I worked at Northwestern. I woke from the dream thinking about him, and later that same day, I was reminded of him yet again when my husband excitedly told me that he’d just bought an original recording of the musical Evita on record. I didn’t know he cared about having that record or that he was searching for it, but when he told me, I immediately thought again about my old boss because when I left the Northwestern for New York, he got me a going away present: tickets to Evita on Broadway.
In the ten years since leaving Northwestern, my former boss and I haven’t stayed in touch, and I haven’t had any dreams about him, my old job, or the ICC. But for whatever reason, during the week of September 19th, they all kept coming up, floating into my mind while awake and asleep.
And then, on the morning of September 22nd—the very day after I dreamt about my former boss and my husband bought the Evita album—I woke to see the following announcement on the NPR homepage: “After 16 years and 3 convictions, an international tribunal closes down in Cambodia.”
My eyes widened. The timing felt uncanny because, you see, my old boss had helped create that tribunal. He ran a digital publication called the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor, and during my time at Northwestern, I was involved with updating the monitor and regularly booking travel to and from Cambodia to help support the trials. I hadn’t thought about any of this in many years, but here I was, dreaming about it and thinking about it, just as—unbeknownst to me—it was finally reaching its conclusion.
Before seeing the NPR article on the morning of the 22nd, I hadn’t heard anything in passing about the trial coming to a close. I don’t believe that the news had seeped into my subconscious from words crawling on a TV screen or anything like that. In other words, the timing of the dreams and the Evita purchase appeared to be complete coincidences coinciding with the timing of the tribunal’s conclusion, but really, I think they were the result of a very real phenomenon that exists in the world and that I often experience.
Like the time I dreamt that an old friend was preparing to propose to his girlfriend. He and I hadn’t spoken in seven months, but after the dream, I had to reach out. I texted something along the lines of “you were in my dream last night with some exciting news 🎉.” He laughed as if my text was totally normal, not at all a surprise—he’s known me a long time—and then he told me that the very night of my dream, he was on a plane, returning home from visiting his mom in California. There, he’d picked up the family ring, and he was indeed preparing to propose.
How could I have known?
To me, it seems as though certain information is just out in the world, invisibly moving through time and space, and somehow, I’m subconsciously tuning into it.
When I told my husband about the ICC dream, the dream about my old boss, the Evita synchronicity, and the Cambodia news, he said: Okay, so say you are seeing into the fabric of the universe or something. To what end?
And that’s when I confessed, I wonder the same thing!
With the tribunal experience in particular, I was like, Okay, why?
Why am I tapping into this? Is there a reason or is it just some residual thread from my work ten years ago, something that still binds me to these events whether I realize it or not?
Of course, I’ve also learned that the why doesn’t necessarily matter all that much. Sometimes the why isn’t clear in the moment, but later becomes clear, and sometimes, it’s never clear, and maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the One Big Point to all of this is as simple as this: Everything is connected. Connected in ways we don’t totally understand and often don’t appreciate or even recognize. Connected in ways that are affecting our lives despite our lack of awareness, and there is beauty in the connection. There is magic and awe. There is so much more to this world than we could ever possibly totally understand so don’t start thinking you’ve got it all figured out and you know what’s coming, because you don’t.
Maybe the point is simply humility.
To remember how little we know and also how much more we can access and experience (and often subconsciously do).
And maybe, as I told my husband when he asked—To what end?—the reason is to help us believe.
For in the great invisible fabric of our interconnected world, I’m able to become conscious of real things happening in the world that no one has told me about, things I would have no way of knowing about given our current scientific understanding of what’s possible, and in the fabric of all the things I see happening—things like news from the ICC and friends preparing to propose—I also see events related to something called God and something called Heaven. Again and again. I see them.
I see them despite never having been raised to believe them.
I see them despite being an atheist for most of my life.
I only started to believe—as much as I can believe in anything—because I see them.
And if all of the other mysterious knowings in dreams and beyond are pointing to real events—if we are to accept this—then logic follows that there is at least a very real possibility that these other events I’m seeing—the events in the invisible, ethereal layers of reality—are also real. They too are happening. They too exist.
Maybe there really is something called God.
And there really is something called Heaven.
And all of this is part of our beautiful, mysterious, interconnected reality.
And there is reason to believe.
Your Skepticism is Key
On unlocking your intuition.
June 6, 2022
Intuitive knowledge is the foundational knowledge upon which all other knowledge depends. Skepticism is the key that unlocks it.
❖
I was sitting on a piano bench, waiting my turn to throw some darts when my eyes wandered to the shelves against the wall. My eyes landed immediately upon a half inch thick, black paperback spine on the second shelf from the bottom. The author’s name LOCKE lit up and beckoned me towards it.
I walked over, pulled out the book, and looked briefly at its title: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
In a nearly imperceptible, wordless flash, I processed the knowledge that I’d never read it, never even seen it, and I decided it must have been my husband’s.
Then, I closed my eyes and opened the book to a random page. When my eyes opened, they landed here: “But because the memory is not always so clear…” And then a word jumped out at me, italicized a few lines below: “Intuitive.”
Your turn, my husband said as he marked the scoreboard. I picked up a stray piece of paper from the table and tucked it into the book, marking the page for later.
Of the 475 pages in the book, I just happened to open to that page—page 325—a page on memory and intuition, and I was curious to know what it said.
But first, I threw some darts, I ate some dinner, I watched some TV, I brushed my teeth, I slept for seven hours, I ate breakfast, I meditated, and then, I opened the book again.
“But because the memory is not always so clear as actual perception, and does in all men more or less decay in length of time, this, amongst other differences, is one which shows that demonstrative knowledge is much more imperfect than intuitive.”
He goes on to explain that intuitive knowledge is essentially the knowledge that comes through immediate perception without any need to examine or prove it. Like when you see two colors—black and white—and you immediately discern that the colors are different. That base knowledge is intuitive knowledge.
Before we—as thinking minds—can even get into demonstrative knowledge (a.k.a., knowledge rooted in reasoning)—we first have to accept our intuition.
We have to accept the rapid-fire, foundational discernment of the world around us that forms our basic perception.
But what happens if we don’t?
My parents can attest to the fact that I’ve been challenging and struggling to accept that base intuitive perception my entire life.
I’m prone to question the reliability of basic sensory experiences and the implicit agreements and assumptions that underly most human thought.
We assume so much in order to maintain a sense of certainty, a sense of normalcy, a sense of control, and we often think that our base assumptions are our intuition and that they are reliable.
I however do not.
According to Locke, this means that I’m basically a skeptic (yes, I know), but what maybe Locke didn’t realize is that skepticism supports the intuitive mode of perception.
We all have the basic ability to process information intuitively, but because our minds are so cluttered by demonstrative chatter, our intuition becomes a polluted, clouded mess of a thing, leading people to believe all sorts of hogwash based on “intuition.”
This is how intuition becomes weaponized. This is how it’s used and exploited in service of conspiracy and cults and plenty of organized religions and other institutions. It’s how your inner superpower stops empowering you and starts enslaving you.
Skepticism, on the other hand, can free you.
I’m not talking about the kind of skepticism that leads people to deny intuitive gifts (which isn’t really skepticism so much as following the idealogical status quo), and I’m not talking about the kind of skepticism that leads someone to be a conspiracy theory spouting contrarian (which isn’t really skepticism so much as paranoia). The kind of skepticism I’m talking about simply refuses to let the mind get stuck on any one idea. It releases all rigid belief and takes you into the unknown where uncertainty reigns and intuition rises to the top.
When you intuit something, it goes through the filter of your mind before becoming words and often even before being turned into actions. If your mind is a messy filter, then your intuition will struggle to serve you.
Skepticism helps clear your mind of ideas, so there’s space for intuitive knowledge to move freely and clearly, so there’s space for something (hopefully) most closely resembling TRUTH to guide your life.
❖
After reading from the book, I picked up the piece of paper I’d used as a bookmark. I noticed for the first time that it was a USPS receipt, and it was old. Browned in spots with faded ink.
Its address read Long Island City, and it was dated November 9, 2020.
Somehow it had traveled all the way from my old neighborhood in New York City, moved with us into an an apartment in Ohio, and moved with us yet again into a house. It moved and moved and moved, eventually landing on top of the table in the basement, and that’s where it was at the exact moment that I reached for something to tuck into the book Concerning Human Understanding.
I had just cleaned off the table and organized it a few days earlier, and I don’t recall the receipt being there then. Did my husband recently find it in the pocket of some pants he hadn’t worn in a long time and leave it there? Perhaps. Probably. Whatever it was, somehow, all events coalesced to deliver the receipt to that particular location at that particular time, allowing me to reach for it, and tuck it into the book.
I held the receipt in my hands. My eyes zoomed in on the date: November 9, 2020.
That’s odd, because while it was now 2022, I’d just been writing all about 2020 in The Magic Guide. Specifically, I’d been writing about a pattern connecting November 2020 to this exact moment now—in 2022. I’d written that our experiences now are likely to echo aspects of our experiences then, and here I was, holding a random though highly specific receipt from the very time period in question, and I was holding it just as I was about to launch an entirely-new-to-me direct mail campaign via USPS.
Now, you can chalk all this up to coincidence. It’s just an old receipt! But my intuition tells me it’s more. Yes, it tells me this through the filter of my mind, which has come to believe in signs and patterns based on years of demonstrable evidence, but still, the bias to believe is there. I recognize this, and so…I don’t.
I don’t just immediately believe that this receipt is meaningful. Instead, I observe my intuition telling me it is. I feel the excitement in my heart. I observe my mind putting all of the pieces together—the points in time and patterns and strange circumstances—and then, I return to my life, and I stay curious about what will happen.
I receive the information. I let it move through me, but I don’t hold too tightly to any of it.
I balance my intuition with skepticism, knowing that there’s alway more to know.
And this is, I suspect, is the only way that any person has ever gotten close to any idea that’s true.
What is God?
On questions answered in dreams.
May 19, 2022What I have is this: A wonder that arises from such deep intimacy with the world that the only sane reaction is to admit both how much and how little I know.
I know the English language and facts about neutrinos.
I know how to cook an egg.
I know what colors look like to me, and I know I’ll never really know what they look like to you.
I know that knowing is just a plaything and being is what counts.
And if I could offer the world one thing, it would be this: hope.
A reminder of all the beauty and wonder and things we cannot explain.
A reminder that through acknowledging all that we don’t know, it’s easier to love and harder to hate.
So while you’re out doing whatever it is you’re doing, I’ll be here, being intimate and wondering and seeing beauty and magic and something called God in everything.
What is God? I wondered in a dream.
And the man sitting across from me said: God is greatness.
God is greatness.
And all that connection you see? That’s God’s greatness in you.
Everything Takes Faith
On the limits of human perception.
April 30, 2022Sometimes, I feel like you hate all religion. I confessed to my husband, who was quick to point out my own lifelong rejection of organized religion, and of course, he’s not wrong. I have one issue or another with just about every organized institution of spirituality, but I don’t hate any of it.
I clarified: If someone is religious, I immediately feel a kinship with them. I feel like our spirituality is something we share.
He said, Sure, because you both have faith. It takes faith to believe in the invisible.
I paused.
No, it’s not because of faith. We all have faith. Everything takes faith.
There’s this great misnomer that faith is what separates the spiritual from the secular, but really, I think maybe it’s just the recognition and acceptance of faith that spiritual people have in common.
The reality is that there is no way to know a single thing in this world with absolute certainty. To believe that you know anything requires faith.
It takes faith to believe that I’m sitting here in bed, in a house in Ohio, typing on a computer.
It takes faith to believe that you are reading these words right now on whatever device you’re reading them, wherever you are.
The mere act of trusting and believing in your daily existence—moment to moment—takes faith.
We could all be living in the matrix or existing as brains in vats. We really just don’t know.
But most of us accept that we aren’t living in the matrix. We believe that we are real, living, biological animals on this planet earth in a solar system of the Milky Way. We believe the many things that science has demonstrated to be true, and I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t believe these things. I am simply saying that believing in those facts—believing that they are facts—requires faith.
It requires faith in the information you’re receiving. It requires faith in your perception of reality. It requires faith in the scientific method. There is a foundational leap of faith in the unknowable that life asks all of us to take if we are to believe in anything. We are all creatures of faith.
On any given day, you are flexing your faith nearly constantly. You are making assumptions. You are choosing to believe various things, and you are enjoying the freedom you have to place your faith in whatever you choose.
Personally, I decided a long time ago that the only thing I can really place my faith in is my direct personal experience because ultimately, it’s all I have. Everything I’ve ever read, learned, done, talked about, thought, seen, felt—every single aspect of my life—has been filtered through my senses, my perspective, my mind. I don’t have any “thing.” I only have my experience of “things.” We are all limited by our individual perception. My experience is all I have—just as your experience is all you have.
So for the sake of not falling into the deep dark hole of total skepticism, I have chosen to have faith in my experience. That doesn’t mean that I know everything about what my experience means or that I think my perception is infallible. It simply means that I have faith that I am here, living this life and having this very real experience, and by placing my faith in this simple foundational fact, I have come to perceive so much more than I ever thought was possible.
As I went deeper and deeper into my own experience, my hyper-rational godless reality was turned on its head.
I started to feel God, to hear God, to see God.
Something called God became tangible.
Now, I believe in God—as much as I can believe in anything—not because someone told me God was real, but because I perceive God, because in my personal daily experience, the so-called spiritual layers are not invisible. They are ever present.
My gripe with organized religion is that so often it encourages people to follow blindly. Many religions have the nasty habit of disempowering people’s individual perception and asking them to place their faith instead in what they are being taught, but in my experience, God appears most clearly when you fall into the wild of your own being, not the dogma of others.
Every time I have a dream that comes true or know things before they happen or have a vision with imagery and words that I later learn exist in texts I’ve never read, I am filled not with faith but with knowledge. Faith is simply the thing that allows me to accept that any of this life is happening at all, and once I accept that and I look at my experience, I then see all the knowledge I’ve gained through my experience of science and history and other people’s stories and also through the information that I receive intuitively and magically, which in my case has proven itself to be consistently reliable and trustworthy.
I don’t feel a kinship with other spiritual people because they have faith. I feel a kinship with them because maybe we have some shared information, some shared knowledge, and maybe in their company, I won’t feel like my experience is invalidated.
So much of the secular world asks me to not have faith in my experience, to instead trust its determination that God is not real. I find that the secular world—in its absence of awareness around its own faith—is just as guilty as many religions of asking people to follow blindly the teachings of its books.
And so actually, no. No, it’s not faith that makes me feel a kinship with other spiritual people. Faith is the thing that makes me feel a kinship with everyone.
We are all here in this crazy, mysterious world, taking one leap of faith after the next. We are all asked every day—whether we know it or not—to live on faith. Everything takes faith.
Faith is not what separates us. Faith is what unites us.
The Green Side of Town
On the connection between joy and grief.
April 20, 20222021 was a year of jubilation and heartbreak, and I’ve found that these often go together. Great heartbreak leads to great expansion, and in my experience, these opposing yet collaborative forces seem to work with such swiftness that cries of joy often come within days of cries of sorrow. However, for those of you who’ve experienced heartbreak, which is—I imagine—all of you, then maybe you too have learned that joy does not eliminate pain, that grief finds its way to linger, and that while there is a magic in heartbreak that seems to make way for the bestowal of great gifts, the gifts themselves merely bring perspective on the pain and the awareness that life goes on.
Joy is always available, and pain it seems is simply sometimes its culprit.
This summer, within a span of ten days, I fired my PR person, my literary agent, and released the final issue of The Magic Guide. I wiped the slate clean. The reasons for this were clear and unquestioning, but the grief was real. And to my former employer who once told me “you can’t be upset if you’re the one who ends it,” I say bullshit. I’d made all the right decisions for myself, and I was sad about it. I felt the loss of everything I’d built and the sharp pain of having had my trust broken by people I’d chosen to trust. But I also felt the sweet sense of relief. The freedom that comes with open space and nothing on your calendar. The freedom to just be.
What would I do with all this freedom?
On my very first day of freedom, I drove myself to my favorite restaurant and sat outside on a covered balcony, overlooking a waterfall. Dragonflies danced in twos on the railing while I ate honey covered biscuits, sipped my cappuccino, and wrote without obligation and simply for joy.
This is where I’ll stay. I’ll stay right here.
But eventually, I had to get in the car and drive the twenty minutes back to the apartment where my husband and I were living.
The apartment was on what I had dubbed “the grey side of town,” which opposed where I was now—on “the green side of town.” I felt the passage between the two sides every time we crossed the same street. As we’d drive from grey to green, I’d quickly pronounce, Things are so nice over here! And my husband would laugh about how I said the exact same thing at the exact same point in the drive every time. But it was different over here. I felt it every time, and eventually I looked at a map and saw that there really is a very clear vertical line running through town. On one side of the line, the map is grey, and on the other, it’s green. It wasn’t just in my mind. It really was greener, more lush, which for me equaled “nicer, better, where I wanted to be.”
And on my first day of self-selected freedom, I drove to the green side of town, and I decided to stay.
An hour later, a house was listed on the green side of town that checked all our boxes, and over the next four days, all things came together for us in the place that CNBC had just declared the fastest real estate market in the country. My husband and I raised glasses in celebration. We couldn’t believe we had just bought a home. We didn’t think this was remotely a possibility for 2021. Yet here we were, flooded with joy and excitement.
This all happened in ten days - the firing of my team, the release of the final monthly Magic Guide, and the purchase of our first house. It all wove together in a tapestry of emotion that was less of a pendulum swing from grief to joy and more of a sweet surrender to everything as it truly was—not separate, but working together, hand-in-hand.
…
As I processed the events of those ten days, I couldn’t help but think of a vision I had in June.
I was lying on a massage table, receiving physical touch from a stranger for the first time since Covid, and it was like every subtle stress point, every locked feeling, everything I hadn’t quite admitted to myself about how hard the last fifteen months had been was released from my body, and I saw clearly there on the table how I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want public attention. I didn’t want to be on Instagram. I didn’t want to be typing up a bunch of interviews for people. And I didn’t want to be producing a 50+ page, fully illustrated, publication every month for the rest of my life. I was exhausted.
All I wanted was to live in peace with the messages that flood my being, to create all the things I’m inspired to create, to live in a nice little house with my husband and cat, surrounded by friends and family, and I saw us in my mind — in a house on the green side of town. I saw myself there, writing and creating. I saw myself sharing my work through new channels that didn’t put me as a person on display but simply shared my work. And here I was, just two months later, and it was like everything had been reset in my life according to the vision that rose from my heart that day in June.
I’d closed the doors I needed to close.
And the one I really wanted was opened for me.
The Mystic & the Witch
On the yin and yang of magic.
April 12, 2022
I first sketched this in October 2020, but back then, it was just in black and white. The color hadn’t been added. The story wasn’t complete.
The box was inspired by this box, which belonged to my ancestor. Her name was Remember, so I wrote the word on the box: REMEMBER.
Remember visited me in a vision three months earlier—in July 2020— whispering about witches and mystics. She told me about the ways they were similar, the ways they were separate, and how I mustn’t leave one behind for the other.
The mystic sits in quiet contemplation and lets themself receive information. Lets the knowing return. Simply lets the magic flow through.
The witch takes the magic and bends and weaves it, playing an active role in shaping reality.
These two archetypes are the yin and yang of working magic.
And by October 2020, I’d really started integrating Remember’s lesson - the merging of two halves—and I found myself asking to be shown the stars, the planets, the asteroids—trusting that they would just come to me.
Then, a few hours later, in the early morning—in a half asleep, half awake state—I experienced this vast expansion in my mind’s eye. My field of inner vision opened wide, and in that space, I saw the night sky and all the stars, and in that moment, I felt as though what I was seeing must be accurate despite the fact that I had no standard of comparison.
At the time, I was living in New York City, and on a clear night I was lucky if I saw two stars — TWO — but there in my mind, I could see them all.
Then, I woke up.
I started hearing numbers streaming through my mind.
And I took the numbers.
I typed them into planetary mapping software, and I hit enter.
Every time, the seemingly random number revealed a new-to-me asteroid, perfectly positioned at a significant place in the sky (e.g., at the same degree as the sun).
For those of you who don’t know, every asteroid has a numeric designation, and that day, my intuition told me that the numbers I was hearing were asteroid numbers. This was confirmed by entering the numbers into the software, revealing the number’s corresponding asteroid, and seeing that the asteroid wasn’t just randomly positioned in space, but it happened to be—at that very point in time—placed in a significant location (e.g., in astronomical conjunction with a major planet).
As I entered number after number, revealing asteroid after asteroid, I came to realize all the ways the information of the cosmos was flowing through me.
And I sat quietly, and I listened to the stories it told, and I took the information, and I started weaving.
The Portals of the Earth
On visions coming true & turning stories into poems.
February 6, 2022What if I was to make this story short?
As short as it could be?
I’d tell you how in August he came to me.
He came to me.
He came to me.
He came to me.
He came to me.
I’d tell you how in March, I started digging.
I dug until I saw a golden light
until I saw the light shoot up towards the sky.
Unlock the portals of the earth.
Unlock the portals of the earth.
Unlock the portals of the earth.
I heard the words echo in my mind.
And then,
I left it all behind.
I saw it in a dream:
my name on a sign, fading into the distance.
I traveled somewhere new.
I found another home
and another August
and I heard the words again:
Unlock the portals of the earth.
And I saw them unlocking.
It started with one
and grew to many.
Cylinders of golden light
like beacons
shining across the earth.
And then,
I’d tell you how I doubted.
How I was constantly doubting,
and how he took my hand
and reminded me.
He showed me a pattern my mind could not deny.
The pattern was hundreds of millions of miles away
in the movement of a small stony rock,
and it told me:
It will happen in two weeks
a great unlocking
a golden beacon.
Two weeks later,
I was stunned to see
a golden light
shooting straight up towards the sky.
Except this time
for the first time
it wasn’t in my mind.
And if you ask me now if I believe
I will whisper,
possibly
possibly.
The Portals of the Earth, an epilogue
On getting to the heart of it.
February 6, 2022But I ask again:
What if I was to make this story short?
As short as it could be?
Then
I would simply say,
We are loved, and there is a beautiful magic
weaving through everything.
Scattered Memories of a Virgin Birth
On record keeping, the writing process, and seeing repeating numbers.
February 3, 2022I keep pages and pages of notes. How many pages? I couldn't say for sure. Thousands are made from zeroes and ones and countless more from woven, dead trees.
On these pages, I write down all of my visions and messages and synchronicities. Everything I can stomach capturing without losing all sense of presence in my life. I write it down as it happens because long term memory is faulty and unreliable. I write it down so I don’t forget. I write it down so when I go to tell the story later, I am telling you the truth.
This morning, while writing, I paused to find a memory. I opened a document titled Journal 2021–Part 2. It’s made of 392 pages, and I was looking for something specific within them. I was looking for a memory of a time when I asked the gods/God/Spirit/the universe about the notion of virgin birth. I instinctively didn't believe in such a thing, but I was curious enough to ask. How did I ask? What exactly was the answer? I remembered the gist, but I wanted precision. For you, I always want precision.
So I opened the journal and searched for the word "virgin," and this is what I saw:
psst…the MAGIC DAY referenced in this note is told in this story — click here.
In a document of 392 pages, the letters "virgin" were strung together exactly 188 times. The eleventh time was on 11–11, and for whatever reason, when I went to search the word, it was this eleventh mention that was pulled up for me to see. It felt like some sort of kismet, as the numbers in the searchable pages often do.
Just last week, as I was writing The Magic Guide, I was recalling memory after memory related to the notion of heaven and the notion of keys, and in order to get the memories right, I found myself searching an even longer document. The first of its kind that I kept. It grew to be exactly 655 pages long before I thought, "I should really be splitting these notes up by year." So that's what I did in January 2021, but before that, most everything was in this sprawling document—the start of my tracking—and this is where I returned last week, looking for memories of visions I had. Visions of keys and visions of Jesus.
I searched the words in the 655 page document, and this is what I saw:
Both words just happened to be mentioned exactly 55 times in the journal. The journal that spanned three years of my life and 655 pages within which these words just happened to be mentioned the exact same repeating number of times.
As I tell you this story now, I think back to the word virgin, held within my name *Virginia* — a fact that I bemoaned in my youth thanks to childish mocking but have come to love thanks to its actual meaning: pure, wild, untamed by man. Like the copious notes scattered amongst thousands of pages.
The word virgin—I was shown—was mentioned 188 times. I was shown the 11th mention—11 of 188. My birthday is 11/18/8...6, I realize now.
And for what it's worth the first mention of Jesus had nothing to do with a vision. Instead it referenced a sticker I saw just before crossing a bridge in Queens in 2019. The bridge was painted to display the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, and with each step you took across it, a new number was revealed, which is how I feel, living my life.
With each day and each moment, another piece of the sequence is revealed. Another pattern. Another point of connection between what's happening now and what was happening then. Another vision that feels fresh and new only to be revealed as an echo of an earlier vision—a forgotten memory from years ago—stored on a page in an unending scroll of memories.
And the question of a virgin birth?
I didn’t find it in the first journal where I looked. It wasn’t where “virgin” was mentioned 188 times—why did I mistakenly look there first? Instead, I found it in the sprawling 655 page document, in an entry dated April 1, 2020.
I read my notes from then and smiled at the richness of detail and information that I’d mostly forgotten. The answer I was given then.
Then, I opened another document—this one newer and shorter. Just thirty pages complete. The beginnings of a new book, where all the notes from all the years are breathing cohesion into a scattered remembrance, seeking something divine.
I prepared to tell the story.
The Feeling & the Logic
On balancing competing modes of perception.
January 27, 2022Grandma turned to me and said, Make sure you take a formal logic class. It was the most important class I ever took.
But I never did. I read Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but I never needed anyone to tell me that A+B=C means that C-B=A. I’d been studying logic my entire life—at the dining room table, in math class, and in late night conversations with friends. (None of whom believed in God.)
I studied logic some more in the lab—where I spent my afternoons grinding ancient teeth against just-rough-enough stone. Grinding them until they were thin enough to see through with a microscope.
And then, I studied it some more at the legal center, editing Supreme Court briefs with my eagle-eye. (That’s what my boss called it, for I was known for catching every typo on the page.)
Logic? I asked Grandma, Okay, I told her, but I never once signed up for the class. Not even to later drop it in the two week grace period. Instead, I sat on the basement floor of the library—The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution in my lap—memorizing the names of every known hominid to date.
I learned that Australopithecus afarensis was one of the first to walk upright.
I learned that Homo erectus was the first to make fire.
And I learned that Homo neanderthalensis actually had a larger brain than ours, and its name wasn’t pronounced th like three but ta like tall—from the German for valley—but still, almost everyone pronounced it the wrong way: Ne-ander-th-al.
But I made sure to say it right. I always cared about getting it right.
And there, in the library basement—The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution in my lap—I saw a sprawling world of history, of beings crawling and moving and changing through time. Their bodies and minds. Their activities and creations. We are constantly changing in a state of constant creation, I realized.
And whenever people would say—as for some reason they seemed to do again and again—that there has always been war and that humans are innately violent, I felt a resounding refusal arise inside me for no other reason than I felt it. I hadn’t read about it in the big book. I hadn’t read much about it anywhere. In fact, the one book I’d read on the subject (my freshman year) put forth a compelling argument that humans are in fact biologically wired for violence, and while I was momentarily enamored with the argument, the feeling that it wasn’t right kept punching through the lines of logic the authors had drawn, but since I knew that feeling was never really enough, I decided to learn more, to check and see if maybe my feeling was correct.
I scoured the records for evidence and theories on the origins of human violence, and what I found was that people believe all sorts of things that aren’t founded. If people hear a story enough—perhaps in a simple, oft-repeated phrase like “there’s always been war”—then they will believe it. That must have been what was happening - people just believing what they’d been told, never digging deep enough to truly understand. As I scoured the records, what I learned (based on the evidence available then) was that for the most part, we were peaceful beings, and all organized violence seemed to evolve as population increased.
I had logic to thank for my ability to read and decipher the records and to cogently present their evidence. Logic, I learned, was the great equalizer between the founded and the supposed, between fact and fiction.
But still, it was feeling that drove me to ask the questions. It was feeling that compelled me to stay seated on the floor, flipping through that book when really I was supposed to be researching cinema vérité or something like that. It was feeling that inspired me to write on topics never assigned and to conduct my own research when I couldn’t find it anywhere else. The feeling was curiosity, but it was more. It was something greater.
Flash forward twelve years.
I’m lying in bed. It’s five in the morning. The sun has yet to rise, and my bed is empty. My husband’s in New York, and my cat is in some other room, and I’m lying there, wrestling with the incessant paradox inside me: the feeling and the logic.
I see them both so clearly—
The feeling that tells me, I believe it all.
God, magic, every message, every piece of evidence I’ve tracked about my intuition over nearly a decade now—the evidence that all points to something very real and reliable happening and the feeling that tells me to keep honoring it with every step. Your curiosity is a whisper. Your wonder is a gift.
And I see the logic that tells me, The jury’s still out.
Except, I also see that I’m not really wrestling with any of this. There’s enough space in me for all the faith and all the skepticism in the world.
And in that moment, in the dark, I flash back to words shared with me in a tarot reading three years earlier: "I wonder if you fear if people really knew the vast oceans of space you have within to hold their emotions they would flood you.” And then—suddenly—in my mind’s eye, I see my body as a lake.
My body hasn’t become a lake, but rather, the lake is inside me, and it’s deep, and it goes on and on, and as I see this in my mind, I feel this intense heat at the back of my arms, and I feel a vastness so great that at first, it terrifies me.
There is enough space—so much space—for all the science and all the God and all the feelings and all the thoughts and all the uncertainty and paradox to comfortably coexist.
Twelve hours later.
I cried for an hour straight. I cried on the couch, and I cried while doing the dishes, and at some point, I dropped the sponge, and I knelt on the kitchen floor—my fingers curled around the edges of the granite counters—and through my tears I spoke out loud. I spoke to God, and I said: I do believe in you. I do. You know I do. And even as I said it, I thought: But of course, I’m open to being wrong, and of course, a whole world of unfathomable possibilities are possible. And then, for a moment, I felt a tinge of envy for everyone in this world who seems to so comfortably believe in things. Everyone who seems unburdened by the desire to get it right, or simply, everyone living with the confidence to believe that they are right.
I will never tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt what is true and what is false.
I am not a believer.
In fact, logic tells me that it’s actually completely illogical to firmly believe in anything.
What I have is this - my stories (those I’ve lived and those I’ve been taught) and the humility to know in each and every moment that there is more.
Now.
I close my eyes and enter the deep lake inside my body, and here, I feel complete peace in the uncertainty. Utter bliss. This is everything, I think. This is actually everything.
It Was Given
On unexpected gifts and the call to illustrate.
September 16, 2023Whenever I’m feeling low, nothing shifts my mood faster than stepping outside and going for a walk. Inevitably, I encounter something that unravels whatever knot has mistakenly convinced me that things are worse than they are. On one such day this August, I walked to a nearby chocolate cafe, and as I was walking home, I was surprised to find a pen, lying on the ground in front of me.
If I still lived in New York City, this probably wouldn’t have felt all that special. Most likely, I wouldn’t have even noticed it between the black trash bags and crumpled up fast food wrappers. But here, in Ohio, the path between the cafe and home is primarily covered in grass. The street is spick and span. Litter and other stray objects are hard to find. And the “path” itself is not well trodden. Most people drive, but I was walking and there it was: a pen.
Not to my right, not to my left, but right in front of me. Placed at the tips of my toes. And this pen? It wasn’t just any pen. It was the exact same kind of pen that I like to draw with: a Sharpie ultra fine black marker. It felt like a gift, so I picked it up.
I saw a name written on its side in faded black ink: NATHAN. I looked around and decided that Nathan, whoever he was, was probably not coming back for his pen, so I tucked it in my purse and kept walking home.
Like walking, drawing always brings me joy. It snaps me out of the world of words and delivers me…somewhere else.
And Nathan, I learned, stems from the Hebrew verb for “gave.” Its meaning is often translated as “gift from God.” As in, it was given. And so, I took Nathan’s pen, and I started drawing.
the GALLERY
Paradise on Earth
On finding heaven here.
January 20, 2022She said, No place on this Earth is Paradise right now.
And I couldn't get the words out of my head. I couldn't get the idea out of my head. I understood why it seemed to be true, but I also felt how the exact opposite is actually true, and then—in my mind's eye—I saw how there are little pockets of paradise revealing themselves all over this earth, all of the time. Revealing themselves in moments—some as fleeting as a few seconds, others lasting for years on end, and others lasting every length of time in between.
I saw paradise. Moments of paradise like bursts of golden light flickering all around the globe. And I couldn’t help but think that I hope you are seeing this too. I hope that even amidst the shadows that come and enshroud the golden light far more often than we would like, that you are also letting yourself embrace every little moment of paradise.
For, in my experience, it’s through these pockets of paradise that the most powerful magic is born.
The Honeysuckle Bush
On getting greedy and learning to let things be.
January 12, 2022Once upon a time, when I was a very little—
We needed to pause the show for this?
Yes, yes, listen.
When I was very little, my older sister showed me a wonderful treat in the neighbor's yard. She walked me up the grassy slope to the place where their yard met ours, and she showed me a bush covered in fragrant white blooms. She plucked two flowers—one for her and one for me—and she showed me how to drink its nectar.
I was ecstatic. It was delicious! I'd never experienced anything like it. Everything I'd ever eaten came from the store. I'd never even been to an orchard—to pick an apple—and the only berries that grew in our yard were the bright red ones. The ones Mom had told us to never, ever eat. She showed us the little brown bottle of ipecac should we ever be foolish enough to try. But here it was—a magnificent bush with delicious nectar that I could just pick and enjoy!
I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I couldn't stop thinking about all of the white blooms that covered the bush and all the delicious nectar inside. I wanted all of it.
So later, I went to the garage and found a small blue plastic bucket. I walked back over to the bush, and I picked all the flowers. Every single one of them. Then, I hid the bucket in the garage so no one else could eat the flowers.
The next day, I snuck out to the garage and picked up a flower, but when I drank its nectar, it tasted terrible. Separated from its source, it had turned bitter and disgusting. I looked down at the blue bucket and saw that all of the flowers had wilted and lost what just one day earlier they'd offered so readily.
If I had just let them be, they would have still been delicious, but instead, I got greedy. I tried to trap them.
Ugh, yes, that's terrible, my husband agreed before unpausing the show. There—on the TV—we finished watching as a man poured and painted chocolate, molding it in the shape of golden honeysuckle petals. Moments later, when he was announced the winner, I turned to my husband, Does this mean I should tell the honeysuckle story?!
I think so!
A Table for Ten
On disappointment leading to something even better.
November 20, 2021I'm just bummed about the table, I told my husband the morning he canceled the order.
We'd never had a table before. After years of small New York City apartments, we'd grown accustomed to eating on the couch, plates in our laps or on the raised coffee table in front of us.
But now, finally, we had a house and room for a table, room to host friends and family for dinner. I imagined the candles I'd buy and place at the table's center, the chicken he'd smoke in the new smoker outside, and the wine we'd pour in glasses with stems (not yet purchased). My inner domestic was having a field day—imagining all of the things—but when the email arrived telling us that the table was now backordered and wasn’t expected to arrive for nine months, we canceled it, and in my mind, I removed the candlesticks, the chicken, the wine, the chairs holding my friends, and then, the table from our home—leaving the room as it really was: wooden floors beneath a burgundy carpet, copper spoons hanging on the wall, a mostly empty space I longed to fill.
I'm just bummed about the table, I said, forgetting in that moment that everything happens for a reason. I was forgetting despite the little whisper in my ear reminding me of this very thing, filling me with the sensation of antique wood on my fingertips and the smell of something solid and storied in my nose.
Long before the online searches and our latest order, I had imagined walking into a store in town and stumbling upon some beautiful antique table. And then, three days after we got the email and canceled the order, I drove into town for a dentist appointment. Afterwards, I was walking down the sidewalk when a black chalkboard sign stopped me in my tracks. It was covered in gold stars and had a single word written on it in white chalk: Open.
The gold stars on the black background reminded me of something I would draw and inspired me to turn left into the brand new shop, just opened for the holidays.
When I walked in, I immediately spotted my favorite candles, hand-poured in Brooklyn. I hadn't seen them anywhere since moving here from New York in May. I picked up my favorite scent—Sunday Morning—and held it in my hands. I turned its metal top and was breathing in the old familiar smell of jasmine and bergamot—just a pinch of pine—when the only other person in the store spoke to me. I quickly learned that her name was the same as my name—Virginia—and she told me, Everything's for sale!
I looked around and saw a big beautiful wooden table covered in candlesticks and plates, vases and cutting boards, and I had to ask, Even that table?
Yes! She told me, and I asked how much—expecting it to cost thousands—but instead, she said: $495!
The table was shaped like the one we had ordered—round with leaves that turned it into an oval—but it was hundreds of dollars less and made from a dark solid wood versus eucalyptus and walnut veneer. How old it is? I wondered, and she didn't know, except for old.
I double-checked the price on the tag and smiled when I saw the words FOX HUNT HOME—like the two foxes that topped our wedding cake and the animal that crossed in front of us just before we got engaged—and encircling the tabletop, carved into the wood, I spotted what appeared to be four oil lamps. They reminded me of the genie's bottle in Aladdin, and in that moment, I knew that this was a wish come true.
We'll take it!
And we did. We loaded its base and top into two different cars over two different days until eventually it was centered atop the burgundy carpet at home.
How many people do you think it sits? My in-laws asked. I considered the question and the size of the table with both leaves—Six or eight? Surely between that and our barstools we could host a dinner for ten.
And then, I remembered the vision board I'd made twenty-three months earlier—the one for our home—and I recalled all of the wishes I’d made with each image cut from a magazine and each swipe of the glue stick, and in my mind, I saw the phrase I'd pasted between the image of a black fireplace—like the one now in our living room—and the image of the sliding barn door—like the one now in our bedroom. It read: TABLE FOR TEN.