I’ve spent the past week doing final layout for the May 2009 Horizons Magazine.  Although most of the articles and ads are placed months in advance, final layout week is not just a heavy 10 days of design tweaking, it is a constant flurry of mail and email revisions and phone calls for payment.  I’ve got a simple policy: an ad goes in when it is paid for.  Period, end of story.  The result of that is that no one ever owes me money.  It keeps everyone honest and out of debt.  I’ve got several friends and clients and advertisers who all extend credit to each other, and they are always in an uproar because of who owes what.  It’s been going on for years.  There’s always an underlying tension and judgment (why is she here at this dinner with a new $80 handbag when she owes me $100?)  It just causes more problems than it solves, so I just don’t do it. Continue reading →

Friday, April 17, 2009. Last night I watched The Millionaire Matchmaker on tv.  I’ve seen it a couple of times before.  Her website advertises it as “where successful men come to meet their beautiful and intelligent wives or girlfriends.” The matchmaker is Patty, who is a brash New York type who is almost 50.  The word yenta comes to mind. She herself is attractive enough, she just has a coarse and rude way about her.  And I always feel like blotting her lipgloss.  She charges $25,000 for a one year membership for the men and the women can join free.  What she does for that is has her staff go out on the street and approach attractive women and invite them to come for a group screening to be considered to be matched with a millionaire.  She stresses to the women how much money the guys have, and she stresses to the guys how pretty the women are.  Gosh, how can anyone pass that up, especially in Los Angeles? Continue reading →

Thursday, April 16, 2009. My brother Jerry emailed me this morning, “Interesting that we talk about this physical reality actually being a holographic image that our minds have constructed.  Then we do everything we can to have all these things that the illusion tell us exist, rather than seek to have the “higher” things that exist beyond this illusion, the very things that ARE real.   We seek friends, fame, fortune, power, sex, and a myriad of other things.  We say we seek to follow our bliss, when actually we’re following nothing but our desires.  Even the best of us are doing little more than bull shitting ourselves.  No damn wonder people have trouble reaching a state of higher consciousness, an observer state, they’re just too wrapped up in the game.  They want to play in the hologram instead of being focused in the higher vibrations.  Have the cake and eat it, too?   In effect, we think we can bring higher consciousness right into the hologram with us, and play with it like some damn ball.  We don’t want to exist in a state of higher consciousness because that would mean we would lose all these neat little toys we have to play with in our make believe existence.  It’s just a fact, people aren’t willing to give up the hologram.  They love it and will be stuck until their make believe hell freezes over.

Hmmmmmm, I admire you and how you control your time.  Your alone time gives you a chance to better control how much you bite into the illusion.  Yes, of course you’re right it the middle of the holographic game sometimes.  Playing just as hard as anyone else.  But at least you work to control it.”  Continue reading →

Wednesday, April 15, 2009. Last night I hung out all night  with Jimmy Fallon.  Well, in my dream anyway.   In the dream, I was living back in Miami and parked in the lot of a condo complex on Brickell Avenue. We met in the elevator as I was leaving and he said he was glad he saw me, he had something to give me.  We went to his condo and he began seaching through boxes and drawers looking for the item.  It began a long dream segment of him saying “wait here, I think I know where it is.”  I got tired of waiting so I fell asleep on the couch.  I woke up several hours later and he was in his bed reading.  He said he didn’t want to wake me.   I reach for my keys to leave and cannot find them.  He says “that’s ok” and gives me his door key.  I turn my purse upside down on the living room table and finally find my car keys in a secret pocket I never knew I had and leave.  When I get out on the street, I cannot find my car.  I walk around and around the block looking and can’t find it.  It was hard to walk, like a big weight keeping me moving slow.  I have learned when that happens in a dream, I usually begin grabbing on to the side walls and pulling myself along, or else turn and walk backwards. I go back up to Jimmy’s and knock and he asks “didn’t I give you a key?”  I ask if I can look from his windows down on the street to find my car.  It’s nowhere to be found.  We keep running into people we know, so there are lots of introductions. To one of my friends he introduces himself as another name and says “yes I know, I look just like him.” The rest of the dream is Jimmy and I driving around looking for my car.  In the car, he talks about how nice it is to do just regular quiet things and not attract attention everywhere.  We never do find my car but somehow that’s ok.  The dream continued even after me getting up several times in the night. Continue reading →

Tuesday, April 14, 2009. Yesterday was really a busy day for me as I worked on final layout of the May Horizons Magazine.   I took several breaks to run around the yard putting out black oil sunflower seeds for the cardinals who are nesting in the bush next to my back porch.  At lunchtime, I sat on the porch watching the mama cardinal on the nest and saw two young raccoons scarfing up the sunflower seeds in broad daylight.  Well, not so broad daylight under the mulberry tree where there is such deep shade, but I usually don’t see the raccoons until sundown.  It was like dinner theater as I watched dozens of little finchy wrens descend upon the mulberry tree. I had the sprinkler going to water in new cuttings, and it was hitting the lower branches. These little birds – whatever they are – were taking turns bathing in the sprinkler. The cats were yards away, looking at them, transfixed.  There had to be 3-4 dozen of them.    Continue reading →

Anytime I feel emotionally triggered by something, that means I’ve got emotional work to do.  It’s the same for all of us.  It usually has to do with forgiveness. There is no shame in that.  We’re all here doing the same thing.  We’re doing it together, so it’s useless to play the Us against Them game.  There is no US that is different from Them.  We are I.  We can’t be offended when someone doesn’t use the same words we use.  In every instance, look past the words to the meaning of what they are trying to convey.  Seek content over form every time.  I don’t care for the word psychic.  If I use words like “spiritual advisor,” then someone who doesn’t know that term will keep looking until she sees the word “psychic.”  So I use the words my clients will be looking for: psychic, clairvoyant, since that is their term for what I do.  Talk to people in their own language.  Meet them where they are.  Seek first to understand.  Twenty years down the road you’ll have the aha that “We Are ALL The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.” All of us, together.  Really.

Sunday, April 12, 2009.   Happy Easter Sunday. I’m so lazy today, I’m not even going to exercise my brain.  I like having these mindless segments sometimes.  When I get in these moods when I am at work, I usually sign on to Facebook for a few minutes and make some short post and it gives me a breather.  So instead of a blog post today, which I’m too lazy to even think about, and in the spirit of recycling, below are what I’ve posted in Facebook the past week.  In Facebook, when you “make a post”, your photo and your name appears in front of each post:

Andrea de Michaelis  is lazy… eating spinach out of the bag while jasmine brown rice cooks.

Andrea de Michaelis I mixed 3/4 jasmine brown rice with 1/4 Thai red rice tonight. Double yum. I’d lose 20 pounds if I didn’t eat 2 cups of rice every day…she says eating rice.

Andrea de Michaelis chatted with Arielle Ford this morning, got some good info. Continue reading →

Friday, April 10, 2009.    Happy Good Friday.  And happy birthday to me. I love it when my birthday falls at Easter.  I could never figure in advance when Easter would be until I started following the moon phases.  Then I realized it’s always celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the Vernal equinox.  I love the whole idea of resurrection, rebirth, Spring renewal.  I also like that my birthday falls on the 100th day of the year, except on leap years.  It’s not just that I like seeing zeroes at the end of a number, either.  I just like the number.  To me it means whole and complete, 100%, something I strive to be.  100% conscious, that is, 100% of the time.  Ok, all my buddies are laughing themselves silly right now. I didn’t say I was 100% conscious 100% of the time, but at this stage of the game, I can recognize pretty quickly when I start to drift.  I can usually know as soon as I’ve made an unconscious remark, and keep myself from making the next one.  But it wasn’t always that easy.  That’s for sure. Continue reading →