Dear Readers,
My husband and I spent last weekend with two other couples—one of the most profound ways to truly know your friends.
While dinner parties crack open windows into friendship, weekend mornings spent in robes over coffee, stretching into late nights by the fire when no one wants to surrender the warmth of connection—this is where love reveals itself as a shared language.
What delighted me most was observing how distinctly different each woman was from the others.
In our playful taxonomy, we christened ourselves: the shaman, the slut, and the scientist. I claimed the spiritual realm, another embodied the sensual, and our third friend wielded research like the sociology doctorate she is. Our debates crackled with energy: is sex spiritual? I insisted yes. My sensual friend argued no, while our scientist attempted to referee with statistics and studies about primate mating habits.
There’s undeniable beauty in seeking friends who mirror us—those kindred spirits born from the same star, vibrating at our frequency. Sometimes at parties or large dinners, I listen beneath the surface chatter to the deeper tonal currents of each voice. These undertones reveal not geographic origins but something more essential—which cosmic frequency birthed them. I can often match people from similar wavelengths, and they inevitably become fast friends.
It’s comforting to tweet alongside birds of identical feather. But the universe craves symphony, and the most exquisite music emerges when different birds flock together.
If you fancy yourself a wizard, content only among fellow wizards while dismissing the muggles—let me share a secret: the muggles are extraordinary. The muggle is you, is all of us. When we abandon these rigid categories of acceptability—who dresses like us, eats like us, thinks like us—we discover something profound.
The real magic lives in the liminal spaces between our mental constructs and definitions.
Last night, I hosted my dear friend’s fiftieth birthday celebration. She invited sixty women to my home—most strangers to me, friends gathered from every decade of her life while I represent only the most recent chapter. College friends mingled with mom friends, soul sisters with creative collaborators, medicine women with professional colleagues. They were all dressed in white, creating quite the vision.
When our DJ began, I immediately judged him—it sounded like bar mitzvah music. My pretentious mind preferred French techno to his eighties repertoire. Meanwhile, sixty women in white kicked off their shoes and danced for hours. We moved through every anthem of the eighties and nineties imaginable.
Then “Livin’ on a Prayer” began, and something transcendent happened.
We sang every single word at the top of our lungs—a choir that could make angels weep with joy. Their voices vibrated through my entire home, rattling the rafters, and I felt blessing itself entering through the frequency of our collective song, amplified by synchronized, euphoric jumping.
Here I’d been paying various practitioners to bless my home with sage and crystals, sprinkling salt around the perimeter—yet the most powerful blessing came from a group of mothers belting Bon Jovi with abandon.
What is spiritual? What is not?
This is the question I leave with you, dear readers.
Let’s be brave enough to release these definitions. Those of us who consider ourselves spiritual carry a particular arrogance—we believe we’re the wizards. Fucking nonsense.
And those who insist they’re “not spiritual”—I have news for you. Every human being, regardless of where they stand on the journey, is a time bomb primed for awakening. It’s only a matter of when, never if.
One husband from our weekend repeatedly insisted he wasn’t spiritual “at all.” He said this while sitting in his exquisitely tended garden—a space so lovingly cultivated, I’m convinced millions of fairies inhabit it—surrounded by friends who’ve loved him unconditionally for decades. A man enveloped by nature and devoted friendship? I would call him deeply spiritual indeed.
In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia
