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I sat on the G train heading south. I sat on the train, next to my fiancé, when I reached for his arm, and I asked, Are you seeing this?
I drew his attention to the woman sitting across from us, the woman with the green umbrella, its handle shaped like a duck. It matches the sign perfectly. And he looked above her head and saw the sign for the G train, saw how the green G matched the umbrella perfectly.
Yeah, so?
No, keep looking.
And I nodded toward the man with the pink backpack sitting beneath the pink sign, and the woman holding the bag with the turquoise piping sitting beneath the turquoise sign, and the man with the blue shirt sitting beneath the blue sign, and the girl with the floral skirt sitting beneath the floral sign, and I looked down at my fiancé’s blue sweater and I looked down at mine - grey - and together, we looked up behind us, at the sign hanging above our heads. It was blue and grey.
We changed sweaters. Right before we left the apartment. We both changed sweaters. What is going on?
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The world felt loose. Like a hole had been punched through reality. Something was happening. Something was shifting, and it didn’t feel good. It felt like things were falling apart. Like whatever glue typically held things in place and made the world feel known and solid was dissolving. And now, this was what was left.
It smelled like burning wood and grilled steak and decaying leaves as we walked out of the subway and onto the streets. As we walked, I focused my attention on the soles of my feet, on the way they felt when they made contact with the concrete sidewalk. I focused on my breath moving in and out of my body. I hoped this would be enough to pull the world back together, for it to again resemble the place I’d known all my life.
We crossed a bridge, its sides metal and hollow. On the other side, we saw a bright light and smoke rising from the roof of a building.
I bet that’s it. I said. That’s their house. That’s where we’re going.
And sure enough, it was.
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Inside, we were greeted by a large red dog. Its kisses and the texture of its fur were enough to remind me of all the ways the earth produced whole, adorable, solid creatures. And the apartment satisfied all my desired physical comforts - from its long, gleaming kitchen island, to its renovated bath, and the view of the city lights from the roof. Things were feeling normal again. Good, fun, enjoyable.
We ate charcuterie, and I drank a glass of wine. I pulled goddess cards with the host. We discussed wedding planning, which we both were doing, and being Scorpios, which we both were, and working with clients, which we both did. Then suddenly, things turned.
The energy shifted. She tried defining me based on her diagnostic manual, labeling me as disordered. I sat and listened as respectfully as I could as she triggered every fear that every person who vulnerably stands up and says I am psychic has had. The fear of being told that what we’re experiencing isn’t real or satisfactory, that somehow it’s the result of a flaw in who we are, and that there’s something we need to fix.
As I sat there, I felt every feeling as it arose - fear, sadness, anger, and my desire for harmony - and then, the world continued to pull itself apart, revealing aspects of its machinations that it’d previously chosen to hide, and I saw - plain as day - the energy of everything in front of me - like a glowing aura - and I saw a separate yet identical energy move in and lay itself on top of the current one. Like an old energy was imprinting itself - had already imprinted itself - on the current energy. And this vision came with a message: We have been here before.
With that message, the reality I’d come to know so well over thirty-one years fell apart, but if I’m being honest, it’d been falling apart for years, revealing pieces of itself and its nonlinear, magical nature moment by moment, vision by vision, synchronicity by synchronicity. And the falling apart wasn’t a falling apart at all. It felt more like a coming together of all that is true. Like pieces I’d ignored in service of squeezing my life into all that is presumed to be known were showing themselves to me in no uncertain terms. And as the illusions faded away, the world began to look like this: beautiful, magical, full of powerful messages and guidance - some that soothe your soul, some that shake you to your core.
That night, I was shaken.
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I called one of my dear friends who is also a gifted psychic channel. I told her what had happened, and she delivered a message to me. She said that the pattern on the subway was a warning, and I said, Yes! That’s exactly how it felt. And she told me that the energy I encountered that night wasn’t new. That’s it’s come into my life again and again over the years. That it returns as a guidepost to mark my growth, to observe how I handle it differently. That it will return again.
And I thought of the times it’d shown up before and how I’d handled it then. I thought about how I’d never noticed a warning before. I’d never seen the energy imprint itself. I’d never recognized the pattern so clearly - with my eyes. And I recognized that while the experience left me shaken, while I let the host’s words get under my skin and make me wonder if maybe she was right, ultimately, I could not deny everything I’d seen in that day alone. Let alone my entire life. I could not deny myself or what was true for me, and I looked at my fiancé, grateful that he’d been there too. That he’d seen the pattern on the train. That in him and his spiritually skeptical self, I had a reliable witness to the hole that had been punched through illusion that night.
She was wrong, I knew, and continuing to be vulnerable and open myself up to criticism like hers is part of why I am here. Next time, it will be even different, I thought. Next time, I will recognize the warning. I’ll know what to do. I won’t let it shake me. I will let the world I know continue to fall apart at my feet, rooted firmly in something. I won’t presume to know what that is.
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Later, I looked at my astrology because the very night all of this happened, the night of October 5, 2018, Venus turned retrograde for the first time in eighteen months. More than that, it turned retrograde in the same spot where Mercury and Pluto were when I was born.
Mercury is believed to dictate thinking and communication. Pluto - death and rebirth. Venus - energy exchanges. And all of this was happening in Scorpio - the sign of magic, the sign that explores the great depths of human emotion and all the mysteries of the universe. And on this night, while I’d had an exchange with the host, I’d had an even bigger one with the universe. It told me many things it’d never shared before. It revealed part of its mystery, and this forever changed the way I think about things. My thinking was reborn, just as Mercury and Pluto predicted.
This is what I was left to think:
It’s never falling apart. It’s always coming together. Entropy is misleading. It isn’t chaos, disorder. It is calculated. Patterned. Planned.
And entropy, like Venus, is about exchange. It’s about the exchange of energy in the universe.
Loosely defined, entropy is disorder and chaos. Disorder that results from the fact that no exchange of energy is perfect. There are no perfectly even, balanced transfers of energy. And science says (specifically the second law of thermodynamics) that because of this imbalance, within a closed system, entropy is always increasing, disorder is always increasing.
And because nothing exists beyond the universe, the universe itself is considered a closed system. It is all encompassing. Therefore, entropy is always increasing in the universe, and the universe is becoming increasingly disordered. But here’s the thing, “disorder” is a misnomer. When the law says “disordered” what it really means is that things are coming together.
For example, when you add chocolate syrup to a glass of milk, initially, the milk and syrup are separate. They are clearly defined. They are “ordered.” And the moment of “maximum disorder” is considered to be when the syrup is completely mixed in with the milk. That’s when the boundaries fade, when the milk and syrup become one. And in our expanding universe, the one in which atoms are slowly being pulled apart and expanding farther and farther, things are considered to be increasingly disordered. Less solid. Less defined and compact, but things aren’t really falling apart. They are coming together to form a sea of oneness.
They are coming together to form a world in which there are no boundaries and everything appears as connected as it is. And as much as we may try to organize things and create order, including in how we define one another, our effort is futile.
We are not disordered and in need of more order. It is in the disorder, the coming together, that we know truth, and it is in opening ourselves to the unknown and courageously acknowledging what’s revealed that we move toward the most authentic expression of ourselves.
