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Nine steps, three hundred dolls, one patient husband

Navratri started last night, which means our living room is no longer a living room. It is a golu. For anyone who didn't grow up with it: in many Tamil homes we build a set of steps (always an odd number, we do nine) and cover them with dolls. Gods and goddesses on the top step, then saints, then people going about their lives, then animals and little village scenes at the bottom. The idea, as my paati explained it, is the whole of creation climbing toward the Divine Mother, one step at a time. My marapachi dolls, the carved wooden bride and groom, came from my grandmother's house in Mylapore in a suitcase, wrapped in my old school uniform. They go up first, every year, before anything else. This year my husband built new steps out of shelving because the old cardboard ones finally gave up. He measured three times. I love him. Every evening for nine nights we light the lamp, I recite the Lalitha Sahasranama (slowly, the 7pm version, not the heroic 5am version), and whoever visits goes home with sundal and a little bag of betel leaf, kumkum and a bangle. Our Canadian neighbours come every year now, and their daughter has formally requested a cricket player doll for the bottom step. She has been told the cricket player must sit next to the cows. If you keep a golu, post your steps. I want to see everyone's dolls.

Cheshvan, the month that smells like wet leaves

Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan today. Cheshvan has no holidays at all; after the whirlwind of Tishrei it's just... weeks. Some people call it Mar-Cheshvan, the bitter month. But my study group spent last night in Sefer Yetzirah, which gives every month a letter, a sign and a sense. Cheshvan gets the letter Nun, the sign Akrav (Scorpio), and the sense of smell. And Berachot 43b says smell is the one pleasure the soul enjoys and the body doesn't. So that's my practice for a month without holidays: noticing. Wet leaves on the walk to shul. Woodsmoke from the neighbor's chimney. Challah at 4pm on a Friday. Not a holiday, but holy enough.

Turkish tea takes about fifteen minutes in the çaydanlık: water boiling below, leaves steeping above. For years I scrolled through those fifteen minutes. Now they belong to dhikr. La ilaha illallah, on the out-breath and the in-breath, while the steam rises. Nothing dramatic happens. No visions, no whirling. Just the kettle, the window going dark over the Chicago rooftops, and the slow return of the heart to where it was always meant to face. The masters say remembrance polishes the mirror of the heart. Mine has a lot of fingerprints. Fifteen minutes at a time, then. Tea's ready. Come sit.

Day nine of sitting for five minutes before I open my laptop. I'm not good at it. My mind still wanders off by second ten. But this morning I noticed I've stopped dreading the five minutes, which feels like news.

Someone asked what Quakers do in all that silence. Mostly we wait, and not for anything in particular. Some weeks the waiting is the answer.

Three knots for the wind

There's an old story along this coast that sea witches used to sell sailors a cord with three knots in it. Untie the first for a gentle breeze, the second for a stiff wind, and the third... well. You never untie the third. That one's a gale. My nephew Kit has been learning to sail all summer at the club in Penzance, and on Saturday he's doing his first proper trip across the bay. So I made him a cord. Three strands of natural hemp, plaited on the harbour wall at low tide with the gulls supervising. I tied a knot at each of three breaths of the wind: one when it was barely lifting the flags, one when it gusted, and the last when a squall came through and soaked me right to the bone. Into each knot I spoke what I wanted for him: patience, good judgement, and the sense to turn back. He's sixteen. He rolled his eyes. He also asked if he was allowed to keep it on the boat, which in my experience is how teenagers say thank you. The part I didn't tell him: the third knot isn't really a gale. It's the one you leave tied so you always remember you've more in you than you're using. Mine has hung on the hook by my door for twenty years. Never once undone. Tide's at 3:40 on Saturday. I'll be up on the headland with a flask, watching for a small white sail.

Saturn return, second pass: a field report

Quick context for anyone new: about every 29 years Saturn comes back to the spot it held when you were born. Mine is in early Aries, and Saturn has been crossing it this year in three passes: once in the spring, once now on the retrograde, and once more early next year. I used to roll my eyes at this. I'm a data analyst; I like things I can graph. But I've kept notes since March, and here's what the pattern looks like so far. Pass one was the eviction notice. Not literal (well, a little literal; my landlord sold the building). Everything that had been 'fine for now' stopped being fine. Pass two, this one, is the audit. Saturn doesn't punish, it reconciles the books. I've had more honest conversations in six weeks than in the previous five years. I told my dad I was proud of him. I quit the volunteer committee I'd been quietly resenting since 2023. I started therapy, which I had been 'about to start' for three years. What I didn't expect: it isn't all heavy. There's a strange relief in finally doing the thing you knew you had to do. Like setting down a box you forgot you were carrying. If you're 28 to 30 and everything feels stress-tested, you're not failing. You're being asked what's load-bearing. Keep what is. Thank the rest and let it go. I'll report back after pass three.

New moon, old habits

Dark moon tonight, so I cast a quick circle in the kitchen and did the most basic working I know, the one I used to teach every new seeker in my old coven. On one slip of paper, the thing I'm done carrying (doomscrolling in bed; I'm 47, I know better). On the other, what grows in its place (actual books before sleep). The first slip burned in the little cast-iron cauldron, set on a stone tile with the window cracked and a glass of water within reach. The second I folded around a single marigold seed and pressed into a pot on the sill. No fancy timing beyond the moon, no rare herbs. The new moon is a blank page. You just have to be willing to write on it.

The woman at the well

Went down to Brigid's well in Kildare on a grey weekday, the kind where it's only you, the crows and a couple of pensioners doing the rounds. Tied a strip of old cotton to the tree (it rots away, as it should) for a friend who's struggling, said a few lines of my own to Brigid, and walked along the stream. An older woman I'd never seen before fell into step beside me. Didn't introduce herself. She said, 'She hears the ones who come in the rain best,' and pressed a little rush cross into my hand, the kind you make at Imbolc, a bit dusty like it had lived on a dashboard all year. I turned to thank her and she was already halfway up the lane. Probably just a lovely local woman. Probably. The cross is on my altar now, beside the candle and the fire extinguisher.

The kid and the labradorite

There was a boy, maybe thirteen, who came into the shop every Saturday for most of last spring. He'd go straight to the labradorite tray, pick up the same palm stone, a dark one with a flash of peacock blue that only shows at one angle, tilt it around in the window light, put it back, and leave. Week four, I asked if he wanted me to hold it for him. He looked mortified and said no, he was saving up. It was $28. He was mowing lawns. So I didn't hold it. I just moved it to the back of the tray, under a couple of plainer ones, where nobody else would spot it first. Every Saturday he'd dig it out, tilt it, and tuck it back under the others exactly where he'd found it. We never discussed it. It was our arrangement. In June he came in with a sandwich bag of crumpled bills and quarters. Exactly $28, plus the tax he'd worked out on his phone. I'd love to tell you I gave him a discount, but he was so proud of having the exact amount that I took every coin. What I did do was find him a little velvet pouch and tell him what labradorite means to me: the color is always in there, even when you're holding it at the wrong angle and it looks like grey rock. You just have to keep turning it. He came in last week, taller, with a friend, and showed her the stone. Still in the pouch. Still flashing. That's the whole reason I run this place.

Reading the cards like my uncle did

Folks ask why I don't use tarot. Simple: my uncle Roosevelt read a plain deck of playing cards at his kitchen table, so I do too. Hearts for love and family, diamonds for money, clubs for work and worry, spades for the hard things. He'd shuffle, have you cut three times toward yourself, then lay nine cards in a square and talk to you the way a good mechanic talks about your car. Gentle, but no nonsense. Read for a young lady from church this week (she asked; I don't go offering). Nine of hearts dead center, the wish card. Ace of spades down in the corner. I told her what my uncle would have: the wish is real, the hard thing is real, and you're going to have to walk through the one to get the other. She said it was the first reading that didn't just tell her what she wanted to hear. Uncle Roosevelt would have been pleased.

First day of the ninth lunar month, so incense for the ancestors before work. Three sticks lit from a match, held to the forehead and bowed three times, then planted in the bowl of rice my mother taught me to keep for exactly this. I open the window a little and I never leave the room while they're burning. My mother used to say the ancestors do not want your curtains as an offering. Then I tell them the news. My son started his first job. The persimmons are ripe at the market. The bus is late again. Ordinary things. I think they like hearing the ordinary things most.