Astro Alchemy

Last weekend, as the Sun ganged up with combustible Mars in Scorpio, the second SpaceX Starship test flight took place in Texas. Unlike that of its predecessor in April, this iteration’s liftoff was perfect. But Elon Musk’s $5 billion Starship suffered two explosions, ending its trial run in eight minutes.

Mary Moody Emerson was an original. The eccentric aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she had a great influence on the man often considered to be the greatest thinker of his time. Never married, Aunt Mary stepped in to care for her brother William’s children after he died. She set high

A few years back, I built an altar for Dia de Los Muertos to honor my parents. We have no Aztec or Spanish blood in our lineage, but I’ve always loved the tradition. Creating the altar was a labor of love that involved hauling a lot of stuff to the

An inspirational tale for the “ring of fire” solar eclipse! Composite image by April Elliott Kent. One cold day in 1936 a stray tabby cat crept inside St. Augustine’s Cathedral in London, seeking food and warmth. Several times she was cast out. But eventually she prevailed, and went on to

On a sweltering May afternoon in 2015, D’Arcy Downs-Vollbracht heard an unearthly scream. She ran out of her Bullhead City, AZ ranch house and saw three neighboring dogs viciously attacking her pet goats. The protective mama managed to save one of the goats, but then the dogs turned on her.

When staff at the Meadow Brook Medical Care Facility in Bellaire, MI arrived one recent July morning, they were astonished to find a dog curled up on the couch in the waiting room. Miraculously, Scout had escaped the night before from a nearby animal shelter, managed to scale the 10-foot

Esma Gljiva with her “Bosnian Barbie Dolls.” About a month ago, during her summer vacation, eleven-year-old Esma Gljiva from Sarajevo, Bosnia, started creating folklore-style Barbies with Balkan costumes like headdresses and decorative aprons. The timing was interesting, given the enormous success of the new Barbie movie, released in mid-July. But

Oakland-based Yeye Luisah Teish is a Yoruba priestess and a daughter of Oshun, the African Venus. When I first met Teish in the mid-80s at the Council of Feminine Fire in Ojai, California, she blew me away. As a newcomer to the ways of the Goddess, I’d never experienced a

“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” –Muhammad Ali Comedian and talk show host Dick Cavett once stopped by to see his friend Muhammad Ali being

Once upon a time in the 1830s, a young Englishman named Joseph and a young French woman named Elizabeth fell madly in love. But Elizabeth’s wealthy father, who was Joseph’s employer, refused to let them marry – and disowned his daughter when she eloped. So, the newlyweds took a brave

In her essential new book, Talking on Eggshells: Soft Skills for Hard Conversations, Sam Horn shares a story about a man whose mother had been in a rest home for three years. He used to dread driving out to see her because all she ever did was complain. Mom’s favorite

Still besties – and twin souls! Miami-based four-year-olds Zuri Copeland and Jia Sarnicola hit it off instantly when they met at school, and have been best friends ever since. The girls, who just turned ten, actually believe themselves to be twins – and they became instant celebrities when their story

The daughter of a sharecropper, Anna Mae Bullock picked strawberries and cotton as a child. While her mom and dad fought, she wandered the land, playing with the wind and the animals. When she was eleven, her mom ran off and three years later, so did her dad, leaving her

In the preface to her book, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma, Sister Dang Nghiem recounts a revelatory experience she had a few years back. After the Buddhist retreat she’d just taught was over, Nghiem was exhausted. But in deference to her hosts, she accompanied

Scorpio can be scary. It’s the shadows that lurk beneath the surface, the ferocity of feelings we dare not express, the stark reality of death. Yet it’s also the resilience and quiet power of the serpent, a creature which sheds its skin to allow for further growth and to remove parasites