A Tribute to my Grandmother Edna on her Birthday

And it's a full moon lunar eclipse in Pisces today too!

It’s a full moon and lunar eclipse today in Pisces. It’s actually the start of another “eclipse sandwich” as I like to call them. Eclipses land on the north and south NODES¹, which aren’t celestial objects, but points along the moon’s orbit. Astrologically they point to our karmic past and our destined future. So, this is the first slice of the sandwich bread and the other will come October 2nd with a solar eclipse. Some astrologers call it a portal but I like sandwich.

This sandwich is about releasing karma, patterns, addictions. Pisces stuff. Pisces is the deep water sign. So deep that it takes us into the subconscious so deep it becomes the cosmic.

But the astrology is not as important as what I’m sharing today….which is a tribute to the ultimate Virgo wise woman, my grandmother.

Today is my grandmother Edna’s birthday.

If I have had any living examples of ascended spiritual masters in my life, my grandmother Edna is at the top of the list. She passed away in 2012, but the ripple effects of her love still radiate out from everyone who was close to her. And probably many who weren’t.

She always reminded me of the round, laughing version of Buddha. She used to let her cat, Nanook, lay across her belly like a shelf. She was an anchor of peace and calm with the twinkliest eyes you ever saw. She knew the power of play and had many methods and tricks to draw play out of everyone.

I could go on and on about her— but I’ll just paint this little picture for you now:

Edna was from Texas, graduated from an all-women’s college, aspired to be a pilot but instead married my grandfather and moved to DC. They had 6 kids and 15 grandkids. They were teetotalling Baptists who were part of the “naturist” movement since the 40s (through to the end of their lives) which promoted healthy family style destinations where you could be naked in nature. Nothing feels better to me now than being naked in nature, and they normalized it for me in a lot of ways. They got into square dancing too, and my grandmother sewed amazing colorful country outfits for them to dance in.

When her kids grew up she became a children’s librarian and used her collection of puppets and toys to tell stories at the library. She had the best collection of things to play with and taught me how to blow bubbles, fly kites, sew my own dresses, make cookies and candy— and when I was about 7 or 8 she explained to me how my female anatomy worked and how it was different from boys’.

Basically she taught me everything that was important.

I lived with them my last semester of college, which is how I found out about their nudism, which they had kept hidden from me for 20 years. It really rocked my conception of my grandparents when I found out, but they were just chill about it. My grandfather asked me if I minded if he lived his normal, naked way while I was in the house. Since it wasn’t my house, I didn’t feel like I could object. Plus I’m just weird. I didn’t mind. And my grandfather would just walk around naked all the time with shoes on. He would make jokes to my friends on the phone, asking them if he should put pants on before they came over— and they always screamed YES!!!!.

When my grandfather had a stroke and was on the decline, she set up a schedule for the family members to come and take turns helping her care for him. She did not want nurses or Hospice caring for him. It was intense for me to go and help with the messier parts of his end-of-life in my early 20s but her steadfastness and courage set the tone for all of us. She was just so strong when things got serious. I was shown that THAT is what families do…we care for each other all the way to the end. No matter what.

When I got into burlesque, I was scared my grandmother was too religious to approve because it was so sexualized, but she helped me make many of our costumes including our Total Eclipse of the Heart outfits— which I had to remake with her again many years later after that act became so popular in our repertoire. She even came to my show when I got into the DC Fringe Festival.

Up until she passed away, she was still driving to her church in DC twice a week to teach ESAAL (English As A Second Language) classes to recent immigrants.

I think of her so often in these divisive times.

She was truly a Christian in that she treated others how she wanted to be treated and was always compassionate, non-judgmental and capable of loving her kids, grandkids and everyone else no matter how much they fucked up. Being held by her love in your lowest times was humbling. Like when I was 13 and got caught shop lifting at JC Penny while her and my grandad were staying with me while my dad and step mom were on vacation. It was humiliating because she loved me through it instead of getting mad or disappointed. It’s actually quite sobering when there’s nothing to rebel against— just a wall of love absorbing you in good times and bad.

She was the best.

Now. I don’t know about you, but I’m already so tired of the election.

I feel the clenching of my heart when people try to talk to me about it on either side. I keep reminding myself to soften and smile. Ya’ll know how I feel— that we’ve been lied to to such an extent that I don’t believe any of what we are told about any of the puppets or the show. I call this upside down world for a reason.

Voting for one shit show over another is actually a small decision compared to the actually needle-moving decisions we make about to treat each other in the present moment— in the moments of traffic, long lines, perceived scarcity, political disagreement or when people do stuff we don’t like.

Nowadays, being kind in challenging moments feels urgent.

Can we be unconditionally KIND and COMPASSIONATE?

Can we give people GRACE and FORGIVENESS when they are messy or volatile?

Can we hold each other with LOVE?

We hear this phrase all the time— that we are just spiritual beings here having a human experience. But when you really take that in, and walk that talk— it means how we treat one person is how we treat everyone. How we treat ourselves is how we treat everyone too.

The outside world IS the manifestation of our inside world.

Which means that changing the world is an inside job.

Spirituality says that we perpetuate war by believing there is an us vs. them and that until we resolve that division inside of ourselves, war will continue on this planet. The “I’m right and they are wrong” thing is the old way of separation.

There is no THEM…there is only US.

Aren’t you tired of it yet?

Don’t you long for something different….something that feels GOOD?

I believe that our souls CHOSE our particular set of challenges and blessings in this lifetime. That’s right. Which means we chose even the race, religion, region and fucked up family dynamics that we are a part of. Our souls did that because this is the planet of friction (a “soul cauldron” as astrologer Jeff Harman calls it) that allows our souls the opportunity to evolve.

No friction, no change.

Life on Earth is an opportunity to grow and our souls love a challenge.

Growth is very uncomfortable, there’s no way around that. It means abandoning your small shell and dancing naked across the sand to a bigger roomier shell you might still have to grow into. The naked dance in the unknown is scary. We have to be vulnerable to get there.

Accepting that we CHOSE EXACTLY THIS means taking radical responsibility for our lives.

It means we abandon the idea that we are victims of anything or anyone.

There is no separation between us in the spiritual world. We are all extensions of Gaia and through that we are all extensions of the entire cosmos, which is all an extension of Source.

This experience of life on Earth is about CONTRAST. It’s about going to the edges. It’s not about winning or being “right” or succeeding at everything. If anything, it’s more about making a ton of mistakes, fucking up royally and having to fix it and about losing most of our battles with grace.

The Vedas say that we are all facets of the one jewel— we each only get to see life through one facet, but we need all of the perspectives for the jewel to be complete.

I like what Leigh McCloskey said too— that we each write our own Book of Life and that we need all the books in the library to get a complete story.

Everyone’s opinion is valid. It’s ok for us not to understand other people, but everyone deserves not only respect but support, compassion and love.

The world needs all the different ways of seeing, thinking and being. No one is all right and many things can be true at the same time. People have completely different realities, which is why life is so colorful

Our hearts are a much better compass than our heads.

May we all en-lighten-up in every moment as we move into this election season.

May we find more similarities than differences.

May we be curious about other people’s opinions.

May we play.

May we laugh at the absurdity of the past.

May we dance our way into the future.

May we replace transactional loving with real, unconditional Granny-like love of our family, neighbors and community.

We all have a one way ticket out of here.

And you can’t take anything with you.

The only thing that endures is love.

It’s the only legacy worth leaving.

I am the proof that my grandmother’s legacy of love is ever-rippling, and I endeavor to uphold her best qualities every day.

Play, strength, creativity, kindness and love, Baby!

What more do we need?

It can be that simple.

Have a great full moon eclipse, everyone.

I’ll be back soon with Episode 6. The premium side has been getting bonus episodes too. If you’re enjoying my work, consider joining the Mystery School!

Thanks for being here.

Love, Trixie

1. Here’s a description of the NODES from The Cut:

The Moon spins around the Earth like a dreidel, with a slight wobble, where one side tilts up where the other tilts down at an approximately five-degree angle. And, due to the lunar orbit’s slant, the Moon crosses paths with Earth’s orbit around the Sun at both its highest (North Node) and lowest (South Node) points — which means, yes, from our perspective on Earth, eclipses occur when the Sun and Moon intersect the Lunar Nodes. Makes sense, right? Right!

Now, another thing to know is that it takes the Moon 18 years (and 11 days and eight hours, to be exact) to complete a full “nodal orbit” — i.e., a full cycle of its own wobbling, which is different from its 28-day orbit of Earth. To visualize this, recall the dreidel again, with one side tilted up and one side tilted down: The “top” and “bottom” of these two points — the North and South Node — make a full rotation approximately every 18 years, which means the Nodes stay in the same zodiac sign for approximately 1.5 years before switching zodiac signs.