I’m sure I have at least one angel who is smacking her forehead at how slow I can be.

I wrote recently about a dream I had over twenty years ago. There was an angel in it who was helping me to ascend. The angel’s name was Ariaria. I remembered the name because it was so unusual.

Then, maybe a year or so later, I saw a letter to Ann Landers (remember her?) that was signed A Rose Is A Rose Is A… Ann Landers replied, Dear ARIARIA…

As I said, I almost fell off my chair.

A few years ago, I was doing a meditation to meet one of my angels. The name that came to me immediately was Rose. I ended the meditation and felt it had been a dud. Rose? That couldn’t be the name of one of my angels. Oh, well, back to the book I was reading.

That book was Radleigh Valentine’s Compendium of Magical Things. In it he talks about getting to know your angels. He wrote something like, And maybe your angel’s name is Rose…

I knew I could expect my angel to validate his or her name, but I hadn’t expected it to be within minutes. Mind blown.

Here’s what you’ve probably figured out, what it has taken me at least five years to realize:

Ariaria, aka a ROSE is a ROSE is my angel ROSE.

How many times have I encouraged people to watch for synchronicity? Keep an eye out for coincidences, I say. Follow the breadcrumbs, I remind people. Keep a synchronicity journal, I encourage.

It finally, finally dawned on me the other morning while I was lying in bed and letting my thoughts wander. As I say, I can be on the slow side.

D’oh!

Compendium of Magical Things: Communicating with the Divine to Create the Life of Your Dreams is available on Amazon and I’ll bet your library has a copy, too.

And, filed under You Can’t Make This Shit Up, as I was working on this newsletter, this came up in the daily crossword puzzle I do.

One day, I was fuming. I was so angry I could hardly think. I couldn’t think of a way to deal with the person who had gotten me enraged short of strangling them. I stormed out of the house to go get the mail. Wedged between the driveway and the grass was a small slip of paper. It had some advice for me.

Joke. Lighten up, Lady Jane. Don’t take this or yourself so seriously. Find the humor.

There’s something to be said for recognizing Spirit has a sense of humor.
I recently saw a meme that said:

You must nurture The Silliness everywhere your find it. In your mind, in the ramblings of children. In the quirky way an indoor plant grows as it adjusts itself to better find the light. You must nurture The Silliness in all its forms. It is our oldest tool against The Horrors. It is the Harbinger of Hope. Stay Silly. It is the only way.

I found that gem in the Facebook group Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society. It’s a group dedicated to religious and spiritual humor, humor that harms no one. We believe different things and that’s fabulous is one of the rules of the group as is an ethos of kindness and respect. The group makes me laugh at least once a day.

Here’s the thing: Spirit has a sense of humor. And because of this, life is funny. People are funny.

Spirit will joke with you if you give it a chance.

Julia Cameron wrote a book called Some People Say That… God is No Laughing Matter. It’s an irreverent look at spirituality today. In it, she says that God is both more humorous and more humane than we’ve been taught.

I agree. How about you?

I’m guessing that looking from the outside, my life trajectory looks like dust in the wind. My college major was linguistics and languages, I was a chef, then had a series of office jobs. Now I do intuitive counseling. I’ve moved many times.

And yet, from my perspective, I’ve been deliberate in many of my choices. I knew when I was five or six that my goal was to speak at least seven languages. In my early twenties, I decided I wanted to have children, and I wanted them out of the house by the time I was fifty. I knew I wanted to live in different parts of the country and the only place on my list that I didn’t get to was New England (there’s still time, right?).

Often in both this newsletter and in our Facebook group, I pull cards that encourage doing something concrete today to move you towards your goal. What I may incorrectly assume is that you have a goal or a dream. Do you?

My clients range in age from just twenty to almost eighty. At the lower end of the age range are people who feel they’re too young to have concrete goals. At the upper end, we have people who feel they’re too old to dream. I can’t start over at my age!

Guess what—Julia Child was fifty when she wrote her first cookbook, which launched her career as a celebrity chef. Harlan “Colonel” Sanders franchised his chicken restaurant when he was sixty-two. Grandma Moses began her prolific painting career at age seventy-eight. I transitioned from a twenty-year career as a wedding officiant to what I do now when I was fifty-nine.

So, what’s your dream? Did you want to go to college or graduate school? Take dance lessons? Open a catering business? Learn to draw? Work with children? How can you make that dream a reality?

It may not be as complicated as you think. Look at schools online to find a program you’re interested in. Find the local dance studio and see if they have classes for adults (most do). Offer to cater a friend’s party—for pay. Take an art class at the community college. Volunteer at an elementary school. You get the picture.

Take that first step. Live deliberately.

As the poet Mary Oliver said, Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Many years ago, two coworkers and I decided to try to meet up in our dreams one night. The following day when we got to work, we compared notes. Two of us had dreamt about the other but the third friend had been absent from the dream world.

Dreams have always fascinated me.

I’ve had dreams that warned of a future event, in this case, being rear-ended by a red car. I’ve had spiritual dreams, like the one where an angel named Ariaria was helping me ascend to a higher level. (Months later I read a letter to Ann Landers signed A Rose Is a Rose Is a… She replied, Dear ARIARIA. I almost fell off my chair.)

I keep a dream journal and I also love reading about research into dreams. So, I clicked immediately on this article: In a first, two people communicate in dreams while sleeping.

The two people were lucid dreaming (dreaming while being aware that you’re dreaming, sometimes even able to control the dream). The company conducting the experiment tracked the brainwaves of the participants, who were in separate homes at the time. When one participant entered a lucid dream state, they were sent a random word via earbuds. The participant repeated the word in their dream. Then, when the other participant was in the right state, the same word was communicated to them. They were able to remember and report the word upon waking.

While I think there’s still a way to go before we can truly call this capturing dream communication, it’s a start. I don’t doubt that there are people who are able to communicate with one another when they dream; it’s proving it scientifically that’s more difficult.

What about you? Do you remember your dreams? Do you have lucid dreams? Are you ever able to control your dreams? Has a dream foretold the future? Helped you solve a problem? Given you spiritual insight?

Would you be willing to try out a simple dream experiment where we send each other a shape or color or word?

I was working with a client the other day, one I hadn’t seen in a while. Her mother, a brother, and a sister all came through from the spirit side, which was validating and lovely.

Suddenly, I felt a magnificent presence and I knew immediately that it was Archangel Michael.

I work with the archangels, and I typically sense that they’re with me when I call on them, but this was different. Tears sprang to my eyes. I felt humbled, like I should be kneeling. I had trouble finding words.

“Do you work with Archangel Michael?” I asked my client. “I mean, do you talk to him and pray to him?”

She smiled and said, “I talk to him and pray to him. I even get together with a couple of other people to work on chapters from a book of transmissions from him*. He’s the MacDaddy! He told me that once.”

I couldn’t believe she had just called Michael MacDaddy. What I was feeling could only be described as awe. There was nothing cute about it. MacDaddy seemed almost blasphemous, somehow even more disrespectful than calling God the Big Cheese or Top Banana.

I have experienced awe (with a small a) before, like when my children were born, or at the opera, or even working with clients when a dead loved one comes through with an uplifting message. But this was my first encounter with Awe. Awe (capital A) is reverential. It commands respect mixed with wonder and a touch of fear.

Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written a book on awe (aptly titled Awe), says, “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.

It’s vast, sure. But it can also be simple. Go out and look at the night sky, especially when there’s a full moon. Go to the zoo and watch the lions. Listen to an amazing piece of music. Deepen your spiritual practice.

I’m sure you have experienced awe with a small a. How about with a big A? Tell me about it.

*The book is Archangel Michael Speaks: 33 Living Transmissions from the Archangel of the Sun by Melanie Beckler 

Have you ever broken up with someone, knowing it was the right thing to do, but still felt sad? Or changed jobs or moved knowing that so many good things are there for you, but still missing what you left behind?

Of course you have. Maybe you’ve dropped your first child at kindergarten or your baby at college and had a whirlwind of feelings: the sadness of a changing family dynamic, the heartache of parting, the uncertainty that lies ahead for them, pride at the milestone and seeing your child become more independent.

Now, let’s say I asked you to rate your feelings on a scale of one to ten. You’d probably laugh and tell me it’s impossible. Which emotion? You’re feeling so many of them.

So often, we label our emotions as either good or bad, rarely both. We see a bear in the woods and experience fear. Bad. We snuggle with a loved one and feel warmth and love. Good. But look at emotions like nostalgia and awe. They’re positive and negative at the same time.

For a long time, I’ve encouraged clients to acknowledge all their feelings. We can be angry that our parents didn’t love us exactly the way we needed them to while still realizing our parents did their best. We can rejoice in our freedom after a painful breakup and still feel an almost unbearable sadness. We can be so angry with someone that we need to walk away and take a break for a while and still love them.

It’s important to not choose one feeling over another. We do ourselves no favors by saying Being mad is negative and does me no good, so I’ll focus on the love. Being angry does indeed do us good. It shows us how we need to change. It empowers us. It points us to the boundaries we need to set.

I’m not talking about getting caught up in the emotion. Don’t start throwing things.

But when we observe our feelings with objectivity and curiosity, we develop emotional intelligence. This helps us not only deal with others with more sympathy, but, maybe more importantly, show ourselves more compassion.

What you may know as Halloween, is known as Samhain in witch’s circles. Pronounced saah-wn, it comes from Gaelic and means summer’s end. Samhain marks the transition from the light part of the year to the dark part. It calls us to honor our connection with the spirit world.

This is a time to honor our ancestors, something most of us in the Western world don’t do much unless we celebrate dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. The Celts called their ancestors from the spirit world by setting a place at the table for them and by building bonfires to guide them. The veil between the living and the dead is said to be thin this time of year and so it’s an occasion for messages and guidance to come through.

Fall reminds us that everything living must follow the cycle from living to dead. The transition is inevitable. This is a time to reflect on the past, release what no longer serves us, and set intentions of transformation for the future.

My favorite part of Samhain is the heightened spiritual energy and activity. It’s the perfect time for divination and prophecy. Connect to the unseen forces that influence our lives through tarot and oracle card reading, meditation, dream work, and scrying.

If you like working with crystals, here are some to use for Samhain.

• Obsidian is often used during Samhain to ground and protect your energy during communication with ancestors and spirit guides.
• Smoky quartz can help release negative energies and emotions, so we can let go of the past and embrace personal growth and transformation.
• Labradorite can aid in connecting with the spirit realm, opening up ancestral wisdom, and receiving messages from beyond.
• Amethyst is a crystal of intuition and clarity. It supports dreamwork and meditation.

Don’t let this powerful season pass without using its unique energy.

In Syracuse recently, my friend Lindsay and I were talking about our favorite Halloween costumes. It’s a fun question and it got me thinking about all the things I’ve dressed up as. Some of them were a bit boring, like a witch or a hula girl. Others were fun but inconvenient because I couldn’t sit down, like a Tootsie Roll. Others were straight-up fun, like Madonna.

What was your favorite Halloween costume?

When you’re dressed up, do you commit to the role? Did you take the opportunity to be someone completely different?

So often we want to be someone new, we want to transform ourselves, but we’re unwilling to shed what’s holding us back.

Fear, anxiety, and depression can keep us stuck, as can unresolved trauma, in which case we may need a therapist to help move us forward.

But often what keeps us stuck are bad habits. We want to lose weight, but we always stop for a caramel macchiato on the way to work. Relationships and jobs can be bad habits, as well. It can be easier to stay where we are than to risk being alone or to look for something we might like even less (but you won’t know unless you try).

Another thing that holds us back can be unchallenged rituals. We can have old rebellious responses that no longer apply, but we’ve never taken the time to examine them. It might be time to evict these past internalized enemies.

Another question to ask yourself is whether who and what you are now is your own dream or someone else’s? Did your parents want you to take over the family business or become a teacher or tell you that you weren’t smart enough for college?

You can be whoever you want to be in real life, not just at Halloween.

How are you longing to transform? What one step can you take toward that goal this week?

I’m the Toots on the right

It’s that witchy time of year, so embrace your inner Hermione and do this simple spell for abundance, wealth and calm into your home.

You’ll need a tea light and some dried cinnamon, basil and lavender. If you don’t have all three, use the one or two that you have in your spice collection.

Sprinkle some cinnamon on top of the tea light. This is for abundance.

Next, sprinkle basil on it. This is for wealth.

Finally, add the lavender. This is for a calm environment.

As you light the candle, focus your intention on those three things: abundance, wealth, and calm.

Then, as the candle burns, imagine how you’d feel with abundance, wealth, and calm. The more emotion you bring, the better.

Sit and stare into the candle, embracing your intention. Sit there for as long as you can. If you can’t wait for the candle to burn out, that’s fine. Go do what needs to be done while still carrying your intention and feeling its positive vibe.

That’s it! Expect to manifest.

And so it is.

I absolutely love this time of year. The nights are cool, the trees are starting to turn yellow, orange and red. I start to make pumpkin everything, like pumpkin ravioli, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin waffles. I even make rice pudding baked in a pumpkin. I can put on a sweater, sit outside next to the firepit and drink warm spiced wine. I wish I had a fall birthday so that I could celebrate the season even more.

In a few weeks, it will be Samhain, the witches’ sabbath that coincides with Halloween. The veil between the living and the dead will thin… but that’s a topic for later in the month.

Now is the time to turn inward and reflect.

Rituals can be powerful. Something as simple as lighting a candle at dusk can bring meaning to an otherwise ordinary evening. Say a few words of gratitude as you touch the match to the wick.

Build a fire, in the fireplace or outdoors, and release what no longer serves you. Write down what you’re ready to let go of on small slips of paper and feed them into the flames. Feel the freedom of no longer holding onto negativity, grudges, and hurts. Maybe it’s even time to release a relationship or a job.

As the darkness begins to come earlier and earlier, face and accept the darkness within you rather than turning away from it. Remember that both light and shadow are a part of life. Befriend your inner shadow, those parts you don’t like others to see.

The energy of fall correlates to the lungs and large intestines. Do some breath work and a colon cleanse to help your body harmonize with the changes in nature.

Autumn is a time of transition. Embrace the changes around you and allow them to usher changes into your life.