With Beltane (the fire festival welcoming summer in its blazing, sensual glory) around the corner, the most common topic asked by tarot clients and seekers alike is about love magic. As a Libra who most definitely wears rose-tinted glasses, I fully believe in love as life’s most renewable resource one can give and receive. Yet with all my interest in the magic of ritual, I’ve been more likely to loan my copy of bell hooks’ All About Love before advising red wax, poppets and love charms. Perhaps because, like most young witches, my first spells were for love, or so I…

“A cold spring, the violet was flawed on the lawn. For two weeks or more the trees hesitated; the little leaves waited. One day in a chill white blast of sunshine, on the side of one a calf was born.” — “A Cold Spring” by Elizabeth Bishop Springtime always evokes the poet in me and there’s nothing more luxurious than having a moment to wear loose dresses, lounging out on a familiar chair while soaking up someone’s notes from the soul, be it nightmares, wishes or epic heartbreaks. We’re in a paused moment, not quite spring, as us New Yorkers…

Many of my friends celebrate New Year’s as a perfunctory holiday or as “amateur night,” because the calendar year is a creation of modern times. Pagans and Witches alike view Samhain or Halloween as the “Witches New Year,” despite varying opinions. For me, the new year actually takes flight on the eve of Imbolc (February 2nd) and St. Brigid’s Day on February 1st. One of the 4 main festivals with Celtic origins in modern day Wicca, Imbolc is the midpoint between two starkly different equinoxes, a fire festival celebrating the lengthening of the days and the awakening of the goddess…

As an enthusiast of the art of comics, one that I’ve kept taped to various incarnations of vision boards is, of all things, a Christian Jack Chick-inked pamphlet, “Hi, There!” featuring a winking grim reaper, scythe in hand waiting around the corner for a wise-cracking construction worker who is shocked to meet his maker. When I was handed this propaganda about 7 years ago, it was truly auspicious timing and little did the proselytizer know how I received this comic strip as much needed tongue in cheek humor, nudging me to make a major decision in life because time waits for…

For my one-year wedding anniversary I escaped to Woodstock and experienced the starry night sky: a cabin surrounded by woods complete with sherbet colored sunrises and falling leaves. For a brief moment, frenetic city life and work-centered commitments were on pause and for two days only pleasure mattered. I breathed in air scented with beeswax and burnt wood. From devouring an apple endive salad to sipping hot coffee next to a table of Golden Girls-esque women — one wearing a leather jacket emblazoned with Gandhi’s face — the joyful spark of Sagittarius season was lit. A life lesson for me this…

“The candles are lighted, the hearthstones are swept, the fires glow red. We shall welcome them out of the night, our home-coming dead.” ~ Hallow-E’en 1917 by Winifred M. Letts The Celtic celebration of Samhain, popularly known as All Hallow’s Eve, is the high holy day of witchcraft, which marked the Celtic new year and is an evening of reflection, honoring the dead and receiving their wise messages from the underworld. Along with magnanimous planet Jupiter firmly placed in Scorpio for the next year, the Sun and Mercury are also residing in the sign of metamorphosis, mastery and regeneration. Heavy,…

When the sky holds a pink hue along the horizon line a few moments before or after sunset, it’s known in stargazer circles as the Belt of Venus. We’ve ushered in Libra season in the Northern Hemisphere with the Autumn Equinox, and much like Venus’s rosy belt, this time of year briefly holds the Sun’s waning glow before we fully descend into fall. For the next month we are asked to dance the delicate choreography of the “in-between” seasons and work on how well we can relate. Dion Fortune wrote about how “the months of the Equinoxes are periods well…

Butterfly that flutters in the morning light, you have known many forms before you ever took flight.” —Jamie Sams and David Carson, Medicine Cards. The last days of summer always contain feelings of bittersweet reflection along with perpetual “back to school” anxiety. For me, summer always meant the freedom to create and to live purely for the moment. Regardless of our fall plans, we are all enrolled in different grades of the school of life. Smack dab in the middle of Lammas season, these final days of summer tell the myth of John Barleycorn, the living spirit of the grain…

What’s in a name, one might ask? My name, Cat, like the animal, was first a happy accident and then a deliberate choice. I tried out Kate, Cathy and Katie, all perfectly fine derivatives of Catherine, but none felt quite right. As a girl, I was always uncomfortable so I tried to make everyone else feel comfortable — except in ballet class. There was something about losing myself in dance that made me find my confidence. My ballet teacher, Miss Kim, was a Leo and one day at the barre starting calling me Cat, first by mistake and then she…

The longest day is approaching, Midsummer, and like the missing girls from Picnic at Hanging Rock, I feel entranced by the seductive and mysterious formations of nature, day-dreaming of nothing more than wanting to escape, escape, escape. Along with the solstice, we enter the mothering, all-encompassing water sign of Cancer ending the week with a New Moon on Friday. Mercury and Mars will also be in Cancer, brave sailors navigating the soothing and turbulent waves of blue. With all this palpable lunar energy swirling around, I’ve been finding myself listening to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys on a daily…