Angels In Disguise

On Money & Spirituality

Note: This letter was scheduled to go out the day the fires broke out in LA. However, it didn’t feel right to share it at that point, so I waited and began working on something to address all the grief I was experiencing. That hasn’t felt quite right either, so I’m sharing this one now to keep the creative flow going. As always, thank you for being here.

In the stillness of a new year time was elongated — like the taut limb of a ballerina — elegant yet trembling imperceptibly with tension. Sugar plum dreams began to fade, fallen pine needles were swept up and discarded. In the pale cold mornings we drank coffee with whipped cream, we shared mandarins and thick slices of buttered toast. I existed in a portal somewhere between a slow sweetness and a restless pull toward the edge of everything awaiting me.

I started thinking about money (how gauche! How unoriginal!). Within a short span, I read several books on finance — the kind of books I could never get past the first few sentences before. But this time, I wasn’t just reading; I was devouring new information — rapidly, hungrily. As I read, I felt as if a curtain was being pulled back, revealing a world I had only vaguely heard of.

I have had a severe lack of education around money and finance, as did most people in my life. I was also raised in a community of struggling artists who broke their backs just to survive and never saw a penny doing the things they loved. There was always talk about corporate greed and gentrification and a general consensus that ‘rich people suck.’ As a kid, I attended many rallies and protests to fight the system and free the people from the grip of poverty and repression.

Suffice it to say, there was good reason for all of this, there still is. But a child’s mind can sometimes oversimplify, and what I understood back then was that this thing we all so desperately needed was also the thing that would make us bad if we had it. To want money is to pull on the roots of evil, to aspire to greed. I have wrestled with this my entire adult life, albeit mostly on a subconscious level – until now.

While I have almost zero financial literacy, I was given the great gift of reading (thanks, Mom and Dad!) and, therefore, the ability to educate myself—this, my friends, is true power.

As I began to pore over these books, something beyond the basics of spending, saving, budgeting, and investing began to unfurl. Something far more enlightening. Don’t get me wrong, I am ecstatic that for the first time in my life, I understand the basic difference between a stock and a bond. But it goes much deeper.

Money is energy, much like a spirit. I have begun to imagine it as such—an opalescent specter dancing through the sky. A force that moves all around us, like love or other frequencies that pulse and pop within the invisible field. Unlike love, this energy isn’t always benevolent. Sometimes, it takes the form of a trickster or a divine comedian—mischievous, rebellious, and a little like a Greek god—mystical yet flawed with human-like qualities. While I don’t believe this energy could ever compare to or stand up to Love, it is immensely powerful. I have lived in fear of its power but have also longed for it to visit me. I wonder if you have too?

The revelation is that in all this time, I never once invited it in. I crack a window every now and again, sometimes the back door, but never have I opened the front door and offered a proper seat at the table.

The original Shakespeare & Co. bookshop in Paris has an inscription written over the doorway that reads, “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” This is the work I’m doing now—not just an education, but a spiritual and psychological reintroduction. I depart from the old relationship in which I have so often behaved rudely as a hostess.

I’m raising a daughter in America in the 21st century. That’s the reality. I want to teach her that money is an energy to be respected but not feared, embraced but not worshipped. We are here on earth having a physical experience. I want to believe there is room in this world for generosity and reciprocity but also for all of our desires, including the material ones. After all you know, we are living in a material world and I am a material girl.