2018

It’s been three years since I could bring myself to eat a peach, and now there’s a bowl of them on the counter in the one place I thought would be free from the pits.

The only pit I came here to investigate is the one in the stone circle out back, near the black tarp tower of logs that are almost too big for me to haul into its center before setting the whole thing ablaze.

I brought a bunch of journals as kindling, but I’m still not sure I can bring myself to send them up in smoke. If I can’t eat a peach after three years, how long will it take me release the grief in these pages?

April Remembers

The steady whirr of breathing machines lets me know I’ve entered the corridor of death. I’ve been here with my dad for the past three days, and each time I cross the threshold of the room where he will, at an unknown time in the near future, leave in a bag where breathing no longer matters, I am greeted by the peach.

I brought it to him on a good day.

He could still say things like “thank you” when I held the straw in his favorite perfectly chilled mango smoothie up to his lips. He could still say “I love you” when I left the room to return to my family.

His appetite for solid foods was left outside the front door of the Hospice House, and it wasn’t returning.

The peach was too late. I was too late. And apparently, it was too late to save my dad from the cancer that started with the things he couldn’t find the words for and ended up everywhere.

Each time I cross the threshold, I am greeted by the peach before I see my dad. Both of them are losing moisture, shriveling up as if that’s all there is to do, and I can’t do a thing about it.

I can’t bring myself to eat the peach, and I can’t yet throw it away.

2018

The hand-lettered invitation in rainbow pencil tells me “There’s more where these came from. Feel free to stop by while walking the property and help yourself to as many peaches as you can carry!”

Would it have been a more welcoming note if it were tomatoes?

That’s a story for another time.

My Dad and his legendary tomatoes — 1996

My eyes darted back and forth between the red road on the navigation screen and the slowing traffic in front of us when my son broke the silence, saying that he doesn’t like the beginning of “Under Pressure.”

“The end is my favorite part,” he said.

He had one earbud in and pulled up the closing lyrics on his phone to read his favorite lines about love daring us to change the ways we care for those we love as well as those we don’t know and ourselves.

“It’s a good message,” he says.

“You’re right,” I say.

“Did you listen to the Moby song?”

He reminded me of his discerning musical ear and announced that he would listen to all the songs I’ve sent him after I’m gone.

Feigning exasperation, I said “Spotify probably won’t exist by that time.”

“What?” he said. “I’ve got at least another two years with you, right?”

I catch a glimpse of his wry smile without removing my eyes from the road ahead, appreciating this relentless joker with a tender heart.

Without missing a beat, he insisted that I would outlive all three of my children, saying ‘please grant this wish’ to the powers that be.

“It’s rude to sit there cursing me while I’m driving you to work,” I said.

“What do you mean, a curse? It proves you’re the best out of all of us. You created us and will outlive your creations. You win.”

I disagreed with his definition of winning but allowed that it would solve the problem I’ve been wrestling with around what to do with the piles of journals and stacks of paintings spanning decades of work I am still living into. I told him I didn’t want to leave them with the burden of deciding what to do with all my unfinished projects.

Live Footage of a Small Fraction of the Piles of Unfinished Business

He pressed pause on the teasing.

“Wait. Do you seriously think about that?”

He changed his tune on a dime.

“Wouldn’t you want me to have them so that when I’m a successful old writer, I can publish your work under my name?”

I forgive his foray into the long tradition of men claiming credit for women’s work, recognizing this moment of connection as part of the legacy of love we are both living into.

I admired the effortlessness of the geese floating in the creek just down the hill from my therapist’s office when I told her, “I can’t make him wrong anymore.”

“Why, because his ego can’t take it?”, she says.

I am watching the geese.

“No…because my heart can’t take it anymore,” I say.

She is watching me, suspended in mid-sentence as we are both ushered into a new way of relating to this same old story I’ve been bringing to our weekly sessions.

Adopting the effortlessness of this new stance did not happen all at once. It wasn’t graceful either - at least not all the time. And it was absolutely painful. Day after day, I was given the opportunity to confront those age-old issues of how he should be doing things differently, seeing things differently, being different.

As often as I could remember, I would notice my mental loop of what was wrong with HIM and started asking a new question. What would love say? And then the deeper question…What IS love, really?

This wasn’t a random question I pulled from some platitude-rich but life-less meme. I was, although I did not know it yet, painting my way out of a life that had no room for me. Original image and word were emerging on the biggest canvas I’d ever worked on, and the whole process was becoming a devotion to love.

“Love, teach me what I do not know”

Layer by layer, I carried this question into everything I was so busy trying to “fix” - in my marriage and in our family.

I have never wanted to be more wrong than I was about the truth that kept arriving, as effortless as the geese floating in the creek. Releasing my loved ones from having to be anything other than who, what and how they were didn’t wash away our incompatibilities. It revealed them. In my life and on the canvas.

I was not the same woman who entered the commitment of marriage as the one who now held the paintbrush. And I wasn’t done changing, either.

My heart was devoted to my children, my marriage, and the life I longed to build within the framework that had been faltering almost from the very start.

I am thinking about the geese.

I dedicated a section of the canvas to represent all the things I wished I could say, wished I hadn’t said and wished others had said, or not said, to me. Those strokes were medicine, and each one brought more daylight to the old tale that I’d been dancing around for over a decade. The due date for the divorce we started some 12 years prior had arrived.

It wasn’t effortless, graceful, or free of pain (at least, not always).

But once I stopped watching the geese from the overstuffed loveseat in my therapist’s office, I started watching the way that a similar sort of effortlessness was beginning to emerge from within the cracks of something precious I’d been trying to hold together.

This post poured out of me over lunch, after reading the Writing in the Dark Prompt. The whole thing - from reading the prompt while waiting for my food to get done, to the hasty opening of a google doc because the words and images were flowing that fast, to pressing ‘enter’ on my first reply in the Writing in the Dark chat forum. You can learn more about that community here.

I was stretched out on a patch of green astroturf in the basement at my best friend’s housewarming party.

It was June 9, 2001.

Behind me, though I didn’t know it yet, sat my future husband.

His quiet countenance in the corner captivated my curiosity. Who was this watcher of the room, and what was he thinking when our eyes met?

At some point, the laughter from the other side of the room drew me to sit up.

As I shifted my gaze from what was behind me to the people gathered in front of me, I heard a phrase come from everywhere and nowhere at once:

Perspective is everything.

Maybe it was the absinthe.

At the time, I had no idea how important those words would become.

Over the next twenty years, they would reveal themselves as both a warning and a guiding light.

A warning against the perils and pitfalls of mistaking our perspective for the whole truth, at the expense of being curious about another person’s experience.

A reminder that certainty can suffocate a relationship.

And a guiding light pointing toward the possibility that life can change the moment we are willing to look at it from another angle.

I am still learning what that phrase means.

Looking back, it’s hard to miss how large the Sagittarius invitation loomed over that day.

What we didn’t know that night, when sparks flew between our hands as they touched for the first time, was that the story we immediately began telling ourselves would bear only a passing resemblance to the one we would eventually live.

We didn’t know that love would ask us questions we weren’t prepared to answer.

We didn’t know that children would arrive carrying perspectives neither of us could have imagined.

We didn’t know that life would repeatedly invite us to reconsider our assumptions about love, identity, belonging, family, and what it means to become fully ourselves.

We didn’t know that some of our deepest growth would come through experiences that challenged our closely held beliefs.

All we knew was that two lost souls had found their way to one another.

Everything else would take years to reveal itself.

That is the gift of Sagittarius.

Not having all the answers.

Not being right.

Not certainty.

But the willingness to let experience broaden our perspective until we can see something we could not see before.

Perspective is everything.

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It happened again.

It was a little after 2 in the afternoon, and I needed a bath.

I’ve been working hard with some deep emotional material that feels ready to see the light of day in a new way. That has led to a flurry of beautiful activity, bringing together the images I’ve created with the words I’m writing in a way that I hope will feel valuable and welcome and maybe even like a warm, loving hug to the people who read them.

And I needed a bath before I could move on to the next task on my list, which is updating my astrology reading page and booking links.

I’ve been working on that for longer than it seems like it SHOULD take. It’s still in progress, but it’s getting closer.

My partner was working from home, and he loves creating a sacred bathing temple for me.

And I knew I needed this bath.

It’s not even a question of deserving.

It was literally the next thing to do to care for myself so that I can keep caring for the work that’s coming through me.

So, I told him I wanted a bath. And then I said, “Is that okay?”

And he just looked at me and smiled.

Like… “Really, Angel???”.

Of course it’s okay.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these words lately - “shameful behavior.” It’s part of a larger body of writing that I’ve been wrestling with for years, and, just like my other ‘works in progress,’ it’s getting there too.

We all encounter shame in one way or another, but with my natal Mercury, Mars, Sun and Moon in Virgo in the 5th house, I’ve always been a “get your work done before you get to have fun” kind of girl.

And that has led to a lot of exhaustion and overwhelm and, frankly, sometimes shameful behavior.

I never even heard that phrase until about twenty years ago.

And then it kept creeping into conversations about my kids, what they were doing, what I was doing, what everyone was doing.

“Shameful behavior.”

Eventually I realized this was a deeply embedded lexicon within the family system, which led to an even more uncomfortable awareness: That I, too, was an unwitting accomplice in advancing its narrative.

But here’s the thing that feels important to me now:

When we realize that’s what’s happening, are we able to pause and ask ourselves some different questions?

What part of this is actually shameful?

Is there another way of looking at this?

Is there another way to engage with what’s surfacing here?

And there I was, sitting in the bathtub thinking about “shameful behavior”. If I wasn’t in the bathtub, I would probably have my journal open, drawing circles while asking myself what I even think I know about the idea that taking a bath in the middle of the day could somehow qualify as shameful behavior.

And as I sat there listening to Simrit asking “Who do you think you are?”, it brought me back to the origin point of this work in the first place.

My Saturn in Gemini in the 2nd house.

“Who do you think you are, kid?”

This Virgo first quarter moon is turning up the heat on the emotional emancipation process that I’ve been consciously walking since the lunar eclipse on my birthday in September 2025.

One of the things I didn’t include in my recent blog post or rising sign readings is that this first quarter moon is also connected to what I’ve been calling the Four Degrees of Emotional Freedom event happening July 19, 2026.

There’s so much more I want to say about that.

But for now, what feels most important is this:

Maybe emotional freedom begins the moment we stop automatically condemning ourselves for being human.

Maybe reclaiming joy, creativity, rest, emotional honesty, care, and self-permission is not “shameful behavior” after all.

Maybe it’s part of learning how to live well.

And maybe that’s the kind of astrology and creativity work I want to keep exploring from here forward.

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Growing up, I thought men didn’t really have feelings. Turns out, I was wrong. I’ve been unlearning that for a long time now.

I thought this because I never saw my dad express anything except anger. That became my template for masculinity, and I carried it into every relationship. Anger was either an unruly outburst, avoided with distraction, or a smoldering fire that was kept under wraps... most of the time.

I’m a sensitive person. I was born that way. I can feel the difference between sincerity and performance—although, to be fair, I have Neptune in Libra trine Venus in Leo, so… rose-colored glasses. Sigh.

I remember the first time I saw my dad cry.

It was because of my aunt. She played Spanish guitar, had a blast at Woodstock, and made the best frittata I’ve ever eaten. She always had a tub of Dippity-Do and a collection of bobby pins to curl my hair, and she was responsible for my nickname—Sparkle Farkle—a name that, even now, feels like a seed she planted in me to remember her by. I wish she could’ve stayed to help it grow.

She died of cancer when I was 13. My dad got home from work and told me to get in the car. His jaw was clenched, gaze fixed ahead as we sped down the highway. Breaking his silence when we pulled into the flower shop parking lot, he said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” His voice was tight. I looked at him. His eyes were red and wet.

He was mad that she died. So was I. Neither of us knew what to do or what to say.

That was the first time I saw a man cry.

Today, I saw another.

I pulled up to my house and spotted his dog first. I got out of the car, ready to greet him. The dog was happy to see me, but something was off.

I looked at the man and noticed his eyes were red. Wet. He was looking down.

“Hey,” I said gently. “Are you OK?”

He cried harder.

His hand went up to shield his face, to attempt the impossible task of hiding the evidence of his sorrow. I stepped in and hugged him. And he leaned in.

I know this man. There wasn’t a bone in my body that felt unsafe—just a deep knowing that this person needed to be seen, needed to be held.

Through tears, he told me his mom had just died. She was out of state. It was expected, he said, but still… “It’s just me and my dog now,” he whispered. “I feel so alone.”

I hugged him again. He leaned in deeper this time.

I said, “I understand grief a little. You don’t have to worry about your tears here.”

He tried to gather himself. “I’m trying to suck it up,” he said. “I don’t want to be a wussy.”

“That is a lie our culture tells us about tears,” I said. “They’re wrong. You’re right. This is healthy. This is love in motion.”

I gestured toward my house. “We’re here. I work from home. If you ever feel alone, just knock.”

Life has a funny way of putting the right people in our paths at the right time.

I’ve been learning a lot about men and emotion throughout my life, and one thing that is overwhelmingly clear to me is that the feelings we try to avoid are the ones that are here to set us free. I wish my learning journey had been easier and with fewer casualties, but at least now, when I see a man crying, I know what to do.

Each month, I write a Cosmic Guide for Evolving Souls for the Listening to Smile community. For August, our theme is Soul Mastery, and I’ve realized that today’s Leo New Moon is the perfect launchpad for that mission.

✨ Soul Mastery: Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Imagine the warm, life‑giving rays of sunlight streaming toward you from the heart of the cosmos, beaming pure, unconditional love and encouragement for you to shine brightly, too. Your only job? Receive. Enjoy. Play.

Leo season lights up our hearts, but it doesn’t stop us from facing challenges. Opposite Pluto in visionary Aquarius, this lunation asks you to reclaim freedom of self‑expression at all costs. It’s an invitation to look unflinchingly at how power, control, and the fear of not fitting in shape your ability to shine exactly as you are uniquely designed. Embrace the courage to be ‘different’ in a way that brings the heart forward and connects you to others in a meaningful way.

I recorded a short meditation to tap into this potent energy designed to unearth your creative bones and reconnect with your innate wisdom, imagination, and inner fire. It’s available within the Listening to Smile and New Moon Blessing Book communities. I’d love to share it with you, too!

Restoring power to your own precious heart is a radical act of.

Uranus, now newly in Gemini for the next seven years, is challenging us to rethink old thought‑patterns, opening doors to unexpected ways of seeing and being. Paired with Leo’s fierce heart, this is a moment to bring your fullest creativity online.

Meanwhile, Saturn (the master builder) and Neptune (the cosmic dissolver) remain together, both retrograde in Aries, gently whispering: What is sacred endures. Surrender daily to the spiritual practices that nourish your soul’s presence.

May you anchor each day in the radiant mastery of your soul.

With love,
Angel

PS…use code LIVING for a discount on any Listening to Smile purchases

PPS…This song (below) has been playing in my head all week, and with the new moon opposite Pluto, I thought the vibe and the lyrics were pretty spot on for the times.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Song by

Pink Floyd

Little by little the night turns around
Counting the leaves which tremble at dawn
Lotuses lean on each other in yearning
Under the eaves the swallow is resting

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

Over the mountain watching the watcher
Breaking the darkness waking the grapevine
One inch of love is one inch of shadow
Love is the shadow that ripens the wine
Set the controls for the heart of the sun

The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun
The heart of the sun

Radical Compassion in Times of Transformation

One year ago, I purchased the domain angel-living.com.

I was standing at the threshold of a new beginning—ready to claim not just a name, but a calling. I was saying yes to weaving astrology, creativity, and compassionate witnessing into a public offering. In the process of building my first website, I took advice that, while well-meaning, nudged me out of alignment with my deepest knowing.

The site was built in two days. It looked polished. But it never quite felt like "me."

And recently, when a failed migration took the entire site offline, I was forced to start again. This time, slowly. Intuitively. With reverence for what I’ve actually lived and learned. And now, on the anniversary of that first bold act of claiming space, the site is back online—new container, clearer voice, and deeper truth.

The Container Shapes the Experience

This is one of the biggest realizations of the past year: that the structure or "container" we operate within—whether it’s a website, a relationship, a belief system, or a societal framework—shapes how we experience ourselves and the world.

And when that container is misaligned, our energy dims. Our voice falters. Our sense of reality can get distorted.

But when the container honors who we truly are, it becomes a vessel for transformation.

A Cosmic Mirror: Neptune, Saturn & the Stories We Live In

This personal experience echoes something much larger in the sky right now.

Neptune just stationed retrograde in Aries, traveling closely with Saturn. Together, they invite us to reflect on the structures that hold our dreams—and to dissolve the outdated boundaries we've built around selfhood, spirituality, and identity.

Neptune in Aries can feel like holy disorientation. A dissolving of false self-concepts. A fog that insists we stop clinging to the old scaffolding and start trusting the quiet guidance within.

And with Saturn preparing to go retrograde on July 19, we’re being asked to get radically honest about what we are building—and why.

For many, this will be a time of inner questioning. Of systems faltering. Of identities shifting. It may feel confusing, even chaotic.

But there is wisdom in the unraveling.

Venus, Uranus & the Mind in Motion

Just days ago, Venus moved into Gemini, drawing attention to how we communicate, how we value thought, and whether our inner dialogue supports our worth or tears it down.

And tomorrow, 7/7—Uranus enters Gemini, where it will stay for eight years. This is big. Uranus is the awakener, the disruptor, the innovator. Gemini is the sign of thought, information, story, and voice.

This could ignite an era of brilliant insight or mental fragmentation. It depends on how we root to the rhythm of what is real.

And that’s why Cancer season matters. Because it reminds us that the mind cannot hold what the heart refuses to feel. True insight comes through integration, not just ideas.

In my July meditation for Listening to Smile, I spoke about the Collective Heart-Mind—a field of coherence we can actually practice. I’ve returned to that meditation many times this week, as emotional tides rise and truths emerge that are hard to hold.

The message is clear: Stay with the heart. Let it guide the mind.

This Is the Work: Radical Compassion

Not just a concept. A daily practice.

Not just for the world—but for ourselves.

These transits invite us to examine what we believe is real, what we’ve built our identities around, and what we’re willing to let dissolve in order to become more whole.

Some of what is surfacing is hard to bear. Some structures we trusted are proving hollow. Some containers we built around our lives, our work, our worth—are breaking open.

But that breaking is also a becoming.

Radical compassion is how we survive it.

It’s how we meet ourselves. It’s how we meet others. It’s how we begin again.

One breath. One choice. One honest word at a time.

You’re invited to be part of this unfolding. The website is back. The message is clearer. The invitation remains: to be seen through the eyes of love.

Visit: angel-living.com

I am driving my son to his last day of English 101 at the local community college. It’s the first college course he’s taken, as a dual-enrollment home-school student. I’m beaming with joy to be witnessing this hard-won full-circle moment of completion when he says "you want to hear the song I want to have played at my funeral?" He didn't even know that I recently started my own funeral playlist (which you can read about here). I hand him my phone so he can play the song, ‘Earthmover' by Have a Nice Life, and he explains that the reason he likes it so much is because even amongst the discordant and heavy parts of the song, there is a light piano accompaniment in the background that, to him represents hope even in the midst of moments of powerlessness, like death and writing research papers.

I tell my son that I will make a playlist for him too, and he says, “you know that means I’m dying before you, right?” I’m hoping that Spotify won’t even be a thing anymore by that time, and he wants to know what I have against the app. Nothing, I say - it’s just that technology is always evolving and we can’t really know how things will be that far into the future. I never saw this (gestures to iPhone) coming. “Yeah," he says, I spent a lot of time figuring out life on YouTube while you were in your room with the door closed.” I know this is true. He says, “it’s fine though - because I love you.” We’ve had many talks like this, a fine balance between validating his experience while also allowing space for the larger story to emerge, in its own right time.

As a young single mom of one, in an age where hand-held devices were clunky car phones and not every home had a computer, my daughter and I would walk hand in hand from the laundromat to a nearby park, where the only way I knew when it was time to walk back and switch loads was by looking at the analog watch on my wrist. Our days were filled with drives to my grandparents’ home, where she would stay while I drove to work, to school and back again to her, all the while New Order’s “Substance” and the other CD’s I got for a penny from BMG Music created the playlist of our lives. The most screen-time we had then was watching Mary Kate & Ashley tapes that played on our 13" tv/vcr combo, and the Billy Blanks Tae Bo workouts I’d do in the morning before she was up for the day. As a new relationship came into my life, so did bigger screens, and the hopes of creating a life that would be secure and loving. And for a while, it seemed as though it was.

My son asks why I didn’t give him the genes to help him concentrate, or to be able to do the things he wants to do. He knows he has a problem with screen use, and his mantra that “I was raised by three parents: mom, dad and YouTube" makes my heart sink as I think of all the ways I tried, and failed, to preserve a sense of connection and innocence within my family amidst the growing cultural shift of a screen in every hand. Now I see how the introduction of video games, more computers and bigger screens was a sign not of progress, but my powerlessness to keep them from taking the place of the kind of connection I wanted to nurture.

My second round of motherhood began when my daughter was nine. The arrival of my two boys, born two years apart, was foretold in 2001 during my first reiki session with a woman who worked in the same office as me, just months before I met their father. At the time I told her there was NO WAY that could be true, affirming my mantra that it was ‘me and my girl against the world.’ I had been devoting myself to the hard and worthy work of reclaiming a sense of stability and well-being after two difficult relationship experiences, both of which left the kind of marks on me and my daughter that take time, patience and great care to come to terms with. I was re-discovering a sense of empowerment, one Tae Bo kick at the imaginary face of those who had hurt us at a time, and it was working!

No one could have told me then that I would not only relinquish that freshly found place of power within me, and that what took its place would nearly kill me, but there were clues. One early warning came from a co-worker and friend who was also a psychiatrist. His alarm at my glowing claims that “we never fight…about anything!” was like a wet blanket on my 2-year relationship that was heading toward marriage and a baby. But the years between the powerful kicks at my past and walks in the park had been hard on me, with the medication I was taking for major depression and widespread body pain dulling not just the symptoms, but also my sense of self and vitality. There was something else too, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and was too exhausted with a difficult pregnancy to figure out.

I knew that the conditions in my growing family were not totally healthy, and I worked so hard to fix them - to fix myself. I placed all of my will into fixing everything and everyone and getting us all ‘on the same page’ became my new mantra. I found the book “Parenting the Strong-Willed Child,” during a visit to Barnes and Noble with my mom, who expressed her own sense of powerlessness to help me navigate the mounting difficulties at home. As I drew more educational resources into my life that helped me make sense of what was happening, I wanted to share what I was learning. The reception of these ideas from my husband and his family was lukewarm at best, and often my ideas fell flat in the space between us, gasping for air in the same way I would, alone behind closed doors, the only time I felt safe to let those sobs shake, quake and cleanse what I was carrying. I began to assume that there must be something wrong - really wrong - with ME.

After many years of feeling like an outcast in my home and isolated from friends, I was blessed with the opportunity to share my experiences and reflections in a women’s group, where I was met with compassion and concern. Those monthly moments of a healthier version of togetherness helped me to put more of the pieces of my life and myself together and, while those women didn’t always know what to do to support me, they didn’t look away. It took over a decade of trying to find any possible way to honor my vow to stay in my marriage, but as more of my internal power returned, it was painfully obvious that this version of me wasn’t welcome in the life my husband and I had created together.

During this tender time, I turned to another female friend, a leader of sorts in a larger spiritual community group. For years we would commiserate about the angst, confusion, and dissatisfaction we were both feeling in our lives. But when I finally began to rise from the ashes that had been choking me for so long, she lashed out. My steps toward freedom stirred something in her she wasn’t ready to face. Instead of holding space, she struck back with twisted stories and misplaced accusations.

It was in these fractured pieces of my relationships that I began to see power and powerlessness in a new light. There in the shards of my life I heard the old mantra, 'misery loves company,' revealing itself not as comfort, but as a trap - one that keeps us cycling within our suffering instead of using it as fuel to recreate ourselves.

I am thinking a lot about power these days as Pluto, the planet of sex, death, taxes, transformation and POWER has pressed pause and rewind on its moody playlist. A recent post I saw about “women’s empowerment” sparked another lively internal round of review about how what might appear to be empowering isn’t always, and that which feels disempowering is sometimes the bumpy on-ramp to an embodied sense of the truest power we possess, love.

In 2011, my dad opened the garage door to the home he and my mom shared to find her unresponsive in a car that had been running long enough to almost end her life. His response was anger - the one he was most familiar with - the one that masked everything he felt but couldn’t find the words to express. This was just a few years after a heated exchange that I initiated about his habitual harsh tone and over-correction. It had been that way with me, my mom and even my daughter, but I had finally reached a place within myself where I could finally express what I’d been thinking for so long. “If you continue to yell at my boys for little things, we just won’t visit anymore,” I said through tears and a red face he couldn’t see over the phone. Standing up to him that way initiated a slow but steady change in the way my dad and I interacted; one that continued to evolve after his unexpected divorce and relocation - a rupture that, in hindsight, opened space for the kind of real communication my parents couldn’t find while still married.

I remember sitting across from him at Red Lobster as he told me how sorry he was for all the stupid mistakes he made as a father. I reached across the table for his hands, reassuring him that even though there were difficult times in the past, that I loved him then AND now. This was a message that was hard for him to swallow, and one I would repeat often over the next four years until esophageal cancer made it hard for him to swallow anything at all. I am reminded now, as my son tells me that even though he felt like I’d left him and his brother alone too often, with screens as the 3rd parent to learn about life, that he still loves me ‘now’. I am here, swirling in the midst of all that I want to do that is too much to do in the waking hours of one life and I see that the long journey of restoring power to my own heart has found its way to restoring a sense of hope within my family, too.

Hope that love can still reach us, even if it arrives late.

Hope that healing is less about fixing the past, and more about being available in the present.

Hope that even when we fall short, the power to love -and be loved - remains.

This power is mine and it is yours, and it has always been there waiting to be remembered, at just the right time.

This song, by Sleeping at Last, points to the worry of motherhood and those places within us that make it hard to experience the fullness of love.

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I remember exactly where I was when it all broke open. When I broke open.

Crumpled in a crying heap on the floor in front of the stove, two days before my 36th birthday.

It was the middle of an ordinary day in a life that, from the outside, looked full: marriage, children, a home. I had been up early with my little ones, making toast and kissing my husband goodbye with a packed lunch. But inside, I was unraveling. The pain I carried was no longer content to hide behind the veneer of “you should be happy.”

The gnawing feeling that I couldn’t stand to be me anymore, at least, not the version of me I had built in order to survive - was visceral amidst the background sounds of The Teletubbies on TV and birdsong filtering through the open windows. I didn’t know it then, but I was on the threshold of an experience that would change everything.

What followed became known in my life as the Salvia Experience. I was no stranger to psychedelics, but this was my first time with salvia. When the Bouncing Bear Botanicals package arrived in my mailbox, an early birthday gift from my husband, I had no idea that the Mazatec people revered this as “The Virgin Mary’s Herb.” I thought I was settling in for an evening of numbing myself a little more to a life that was feeling less and less like my own.

Instead, salvia tore through the illusion of control I’d been clinging to, stripping away everything I thought was holding me together, but was in truth keeping me in a perpetual state of anxious awareness, debilitating depression and a pain body that had had enough.

It was, astrologically speaking, a perfect storm:
🌌 Pluto transiting my natal Jupiter, both conjunct the Galactic Center and in my 8th house
🔥 Pluto squaring my natal Pluto
⚡ Uranus opposing my Moon

In other words, this was no ordinary moment. This was a divinely orchestrated breakdown.

Through that portal, I met the truth of my inner reality and began what I now recognize as a long and sacred initiation into Divine Will. I didn’t choose it consciously. But in hindsight, I can see that my soul did.

The trip itself lasted all of twenty minutes. I remember asking my husband, “where are the kids?”. I felt reassured when he said they were all in bed, and in the next instant I saw my body on a stretcher with a white sheet over it, my parents and husband crying at the front door as the coroner carried me out.

Next, I was in the center of what I knew to be a Stadium of Angels. They were cheering upon my arrival, and more importantly, exuberant that I was able to see them. I felt like I’d landed in my true home, only to be turned back around to the couch I’d been sitting on in our family room with these words singing in my ears: “If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be that we’re all OK.” Jewel’s lyrics were a comfort I have kept close to my heart ever since.

The fallout of this experience was messy. And the “knowing” that accompanied me back across the threshold of death and rebirth was difficult to integrate. My marriage began to unravel. I was able to articulate, for the first time, the wall around my husband - how his words invited intimacy while his presence repelled it. I began to realize that my carefully cultivated sense of “safety” was actually the suppression of my inner knowing. I had to squarely face the fact that the healing journey I thought I was on was actually me exhausting myself trying to hold everything together.

This short experience altered the entire course of my life, for the better…although it didn’t seem that way in the beginning.

The story of the path between being delivered into the Stadium of Angels and living into the message they sent me back with is one that continues to unfold. I’ll be writing more about this in future posts.

I’m sharing it now because we need more real stories of what it looks like to live through a healing crisis. Especially when the path includes sacred medicines and the complexity of family life.

If you’ve ever felt the floor fall out from under you - or if you’re in that space now - know that you’re not alone. And that sometimes the soul calls in the storm to set you free.

More soon,
Angel

PS…For those local to the Harrisburg/York, PA area, I’ll be facilitating a workshop on Conscious Creativity to benefit the Central Pennsylvania Psychedelic Society on May 10th.

Conscious Creativity: A Fundraiser for the Central PA Psychedelic Society

Can we talk about Chiron?

There’s a lot to say, and there are astrologers who have been sharing insight into this wounded healer archetype much longer than I have. If you want a deep dive, I suggest starting here. Today, this is what’s alive for me:

When I think of Chiron, I think:
The wound is the gift.
Our wounds are poetry.
The very thing that aches can become the medicine.

Today’s full moon in Libra sits opposite Chiron in Aries. It’s close enough to my natal Chiron to feel like Hercules’ arrow sunk into my own leg - and I’ve even been having an ache in that area for the past several days. It’s also lighting up the house of retreat, spiritual connection… and poetry.

Yesterday my partner, Keane, mentioned that the Sun was conjunct Chiron, and the moment he did, I felt this nudge: Today’s the day to speak your poems. So I did.

For the first time, I read my poetry aloud - at an actual poetry reading. We’ve been attending this particular Friday night gathering on and off for the past two months, so it was a somewhat familiar space to take this step toward healing the part of me that fears being seen, and unseen - heard and unheard. A step toward honoring the ways I am here, do speak, can move forward.

And I want to say this gently, in case you need to hear it too:
Whatever your wound is, it’s not proof you’re broken.
It’s a message. A mirror. A doorway.
And the part of you that aches might also be the part of you that sings.

If all of this has you wondering where your wounded healer is rising to be witnessed, claimed, and carried into right relationship with those who oppose your primal knowing, especially the one you meet in the mirror each day, send me a message and I’ll let you know.

🪞
P.S. Venus is pulling out all the stops as the planet of love, beauty, and poetry stands still after her busy review period, asking us to, again, find a right relationship with our spiritual nature. And Saturn is nearby, offering the grounding we need to bring that inspiration into form. This is a potent time to let creativity meet structure, spirit meet practice and feeling meet form.

P.P.S. Keane’s been writing a lot lately, and we discovered something beautiful about his chart and his natural poetry cycle. I’ll be sharing that story in the next post - stay tuned. It gave both of us goosebumps.

P.P.P.S.
A couple years ago, I had a dream that Keane was carrying me into the Libra Full Moon. We were spiraling toward it - almost like we were gliding across ice - slow, graceful, and in sync. Then we entered the moon itself. It was enormous. Glowing. So full of light it felt like we’d crossed into another world entirely.

And maybe - just maybe - this Libra Full Moon is another threshold.
An invitation into a world that’s more just.
More caring.
More attuned to the beauty and belonging we all deserve.

🫖 Welcome to the CreativiTEA Café

We are living through what can only be called a collective crisis in discernment.

“Is it true?” has become my guiding inquiry as I navigate the headlines and personal stories of people who are being pressed by the transformational energies of the times. The good, the bad, the ugly - it’s all on display in a big way, and it can be exhausting, disillusioning, and deeply disorienting.

As a healing arts practitioner, I see the parallels between the top-down, hierarchical structures being revealed for what they are in each day’s news cycle and those same tendencies in many of the healing modalities we’re offered.

Discovering those dynamics in my own life led me on a path toward relational presence in healing. I’m not here to fix anyone or tell them what to do (though heaven knows I spent most of my life trying).

As a reforming fixer, I surrender to the wisdom of The Activity of Love - and how it reveals itself through sacred presence. It’s not perfect. This is a moment-to-moment commitment to discovering my orientation in any given situation.

In a world full of people telling others what to do - even to “choose love” - without holding the space to feel, grieve, and learn what love really means, I am offering something different:

A space where the full human journey is welcome.
A place to be acknowledged, witnessed, and gently integrated.
A space that invites a deeper relationship to that guiding question: Is it true?

In the CreativiTEA Café, I’m not here to be the expert. I’m here to walk with you - to share the sacred process of what it means to live our story as a creative soul on Earth.

You’ll meet me inside the unfolding of a book I’m writing called The Activity of Love, based on my 2020 painting of the same name.

This is where I’ll be telling my story:
💟Through archetypal inner characters.
💟Through lunar cycles.
💟Through real-life moments of grief, surrender, revelation, and creative return.

The core of my work is this:
Love is an activity born of the intention to meet the full spectrum of life - with curiosity, care, and presence. Discernment is not judgment. It’s how we learn to live in right relationship with what’s real. And, as the photo above suggests - it leads to understanding.

Here in this space, you’re not being asked to perform or receive healing or prove your growth, or how much you know.

You’re being invited to come alive again.
To create.
To feel.
To sip something warm and nourishing while remembering your own inner rhythm.

If that sounds like your kind of revolution - welcome home.

I’ll be here, sharing the good, the bad and the ugly of my story, one sip at a time.

🩵
Angel

Hi, I’m Angel, your guide at the CreativiTEA Café. This is an imaginal space I’ve created for those ready to explore their inner world through the alchemy of astrology and creativity.

This morning, as sunlight filtered through my living room, the heart of the CreativiTEA Café, I looked at the paintings on my wall and thought to myself: none of this would be possible without her. That ‘her’ is a younger version of me - the very picture of the joyful, child-like sense of wonder that I reclaimed through my creative process.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by self-judgment or uncertain about your purpose, The CreativiTEA Café is a cozy corner for exploring these feelings. There are some core common themes many of us grapple with as we step for fully into our true nature, and they can either keep us stuck or set us free. Join me as we transform inner barriers into new creative expressions so that we can nurture a life aligned with purpose, meaning and passion.

I can’t wait to share the journey of reclaiming this part of myself and how she helped me move through my own trial of doubt, confusion, and overwhelm as I traded a surface-level sense of safety for a life aligned with my inner knowing. I share my story to remind you that the voice calling you to something greater is worth listening to. YOU are worth listening to. And I am here, listening 💛.

One of the biggest hurdles in my journey has been the inner critic—the voice that constantly questioned, “Who do you think you are?” I’ve written a series on how I transformed this voice into an ally, and I’m excited to share it with you. Together, we’ll explore how to recognize, understand, and reshape this inner dialogue so it can support rather than sabotage your path.

So, let’s begin this journey of turning self-doubt into empowered, creative action—one cup of tea, one story, one transformation at a time. 💗

In Creative Service,

Angel Living

With broad brushstrokes and an open heart, I began to reclaim my inner knowing.

I didn’t know where the path would lead…

I only knew I had to say yes.

When I began that painting adventure, I was afraid it would become another thing I started but never finished. But not only did I complete the program, it transformed what I believed was possible for me.

Since then, I’ve added teacher and practitioner of Intentional Creativity to my healing work as an Evolutionary Astrologer.

This space, and within the CreativiTEA Café, is where I’ll be telling that story.

Word by word. Brushstroke by brushstroke.

Alongside inspirations and reflections on the beauty, ache, and mystery of becoming.

It’s all rooted in love.

The Activity of Love.

This is where my deep curiosity about human love, divine love, and all the places we touch along the way has a chance to be expressed in a way that brings people together.

I’m still figuring out how it all works.

But one thing I know for sure:

I can do this. And you can too.

If there’s a knowing inside you that’s been growing toward greater self-expression,

I hope you’ll join me.

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