Beltane by grace mcgrade

Everytime I go to type your name I get held back, like a prayer I have been conditioned to swallow.

Everytime I think your name the earth beneath me tilts, a silent resonance shuffling through layers of the earth. They say places hold memory.  I feel like if I think about you too often you’ll feel it, or sense it, or worse- hate it. I try and curtail my longing, an operate under the belief that you are just as aware as me. Fluent in etheric, invisible smoke signals. 

There is no room for intellect in this business. We are in the business of trusting resonance over logic, following psychic nudges to places that feel like home. Hunting truth. When did you give up?

I have learned how to take possession of my own timeline, by making myself big- I stretch my field far across the land. I make myself massive- in an opalic bubble that stretches- churns and crashes into the caves of Malibu, presses deep and thick into the mycelium networks all the way through the forests of Los Angeles Crest, encompassing everything. I make my timeline sensual, erotically innocent. I fill it with pretty things to disguise the void. I have eaten at all the beautiful restaurants. Charmed my way through every variation of “appropriate” man.

You can’t fake resonance. Resonance hits you hard in the heart and it procures stains on the soul that can never be eradictated. I’ve tried. Replace, Rinse, Repeat.

 and now I learn to hold that delicate void empty, sit with it, nurse it. Befriend it. Be soft spoken to it.

I don’t need you to offer me any more than what you have already, even on your worst day.



Ode to Scotland by grace mcgrade


Scotland was home before I arrived. The bones of my ancestors were sown into the skin of the soil, sang in octaves of wind, fanned through birch, alder and hawthorn.  I felt them strike me with a diligent rhythm, a primordial urgency. A call to be heeded in halos of golden light that skimmed aisles of plush soil pathways. 

Beckoning, insisting, 

These colossal cathedrals of trees. 

I listened. I listened. I listened.
Variants of green spraying through leaves in champagne prisms of shadow, delicately threaded through the morning ether. This land let me incubate like a womb, let me roll through mossy troths and moors freckled with dew and silver lichen. I held the secrets of hollow tree trunks and mushroom caves, sat by lochs and cried into creeks. Everything was animated, everything was alive. Singing. Vibrant in plush beds of sprouting emerald, dusted with wild flowers and yellow cacti that smelled like coconut.


It is the unsettling bridge between seasons, flickering boldly with the spark of probabilities. The singing wind carries an air of change. 

The summer sun begins to shorten, leaving a shading of uncertainty across the land. I am on the brink of immense change and my body has recognized it before it has arrived.


I am in Threshold Space, preparing to turn to Los Angeles,  tethered to a past that has lost is allure and glamor. 

I speculate all the things I could have done and said in my time here, and decide everything is as it should be.

I vow to leave parts of myself suspended in the Scottish highlands, safely tucked in these groves of green, right before dusk.

 In solitude but woven into everything.

With the land as my only witness,  

I vow to remain equal parts wild and pure, 

wild and pure and untarnished, 

just like the Scottish highlands.



<3 by grace mcgrade

I want to hear the lies you tell yourself that keep yourself from unraveling, coming unglued, bursting at the seams, the shrouds of artifice you asphyxiate yourself in for survival. I want to hear what THE FUCK you think is going on here, RIGHT NOW, in this malleable, nonsensical plane. I want to know if you notice things, and how you are making sense of the fact that reality gets more synchronized with every passing iteration. I want to know if you feel like your external reality is mirroring your inner condition, and if it makes you feel sick to look it directly in the eye. I want to hear the lies you tell yourself that keep a mind that has been stretched by new experiences waning backwards to old dimensions. Which parts of you fester with inattention?

How bored can you possibly be?

Unwarranted Advice for my Sister by grace mcgrade


1. Never underestimate the magic of being kind. Bring unconditional love to every person you meet. They are a faction of you. Some days, you may not know it- and they probably won’t- but be kind to them. Anything you see that you don’t like within others needs to be loved within yourself. The easiest solution for any issue is to throw love at it.

2.  Your thoughts are arrows that trail ahead of you, contstructing reality. Think with intention.

3. Your language creates reality too. Speak with intention.

4.  Spend at least two hours a day outside. Your body needs light photons. You need to sweat. This is what our ancestors did. This is how you embody the changes our consciousness is experiencing. Do it. 

5.  If you don’t feel beautiful, go somewhere that is beautiful. You are that. It all belongs to you and it belongs to no one. You can live forever. Try and catch the sunset every day.

6. Girls like you have a clear channel to God. We need to be in constant calibration and communication with that channel. Things that enhance that channel-  presence, dance, solitude, nature, laughter, rest, play, ritual. Things that diminish channel- technology, codependency, shitty food, shitty people, substance abuse, t.v, news.

7. Men are looking for God. They will be drawn to you. They will want to play out their inner God dilemma with you.  Do not confuse a mans battle with God a reflection of your worth. You are highly awake. This will intimidate people who run from themselves.

8. Everyone is projecting. Most of the time. NEVER fuck with anyone who comes into your energy field to make critiques or attack you. Those are energy vampires. In the same vein- no one else is responsible for your emotions and how you deal with them. Only you.

9. You cocreate reality with whoever you keep in your close corner. If someone doesnt believe in your potential, don’t expect miracles. Only surround yourself with people who believe in magic. Keep the aquarium clean. 

10. Try and keep track of your dreams. 

11. Don’t have sex with someone you don’t want to swap consciousness with.

12. Drop any narratives about anger being wrong. Anger converts energy. Anger gets shit done. Angry women are still beautiful.

13. Drop any narratives about appearing crazy. Inevitably, you will be called crazy. It is unavoidable for awake women. The more intuitive you feel, the more likely your “crazy girl” programming will start to kick in. Dump it in a field somewhere. You are unconsciousness becoming consciousness. You carry the collective with you in your heart.

14. You are descended from warriors of the Irish Otherworld. You can visit them in your imagination, in a forest or a liminal space between land and sea. They are rooting for you. You are a descendant of the fae. You have millions of secret helpers.

15. It is not popular to follow feelings over logic. Always do this. No matter what. Your feelings are flags. If you are in love, be in love. If you are heartbroken, let it encompass you. The more you feel the less you have to repeat the same lessons over again.

16. People who worry about being cool are never cool.

17. You are beautiful. You are the kind of ethereal, magnetic beauty that frightens others. This will bring you blessings and simultaneously make people strangely erratic.

18. Don’t become preoccupied with your appearance. That’s a trap. They dressed you like this in this lifetime so people will listen to what you have to say. This is your clever halloween costume.Become preoccupied with your message. 

19. Never curtail your appetite for mischief and absurdity. It is vital medicine. 

20. Clean your fucking room. It’s an immediate reflection of your inner state. I love you, but clean it. You will feel better. Holy spaces are wherever you rest.

21. Your job is to reparent yourself out of guilt and out of shame. You deserve reminders that you won’t abandon yourself. Resolve self judgement. This is a lifelong assignment. You are the only person who has to live with yourself forever. Your inner dialogue is the projector of all reality. Be generous to yourself. Be unrelentingly forgiving and loving to yourself.

22. You will get heartbroken- it is inevitable, it is the fertile soil from which character blooms. The people who break your heart usually agree to from a plane above time. Forgive them and figure out what they are showing you within yourself. Write.

23. Evade holding on to people who carry outdated perceptions of you. You will take on so many identities in this lifetime. If you hold a space in your life and fall in love with solitude, you will always meet people who are vibrating with you. People like us exist and we always find each other.

24. You can speak without words.

25. Glide through life with the secret belief that the world is conspiring to assist you.

26. Self pity is just lazy storytelling.

27. Multiple truths can exist at once. Pick the ones that are kaleidoscopic.





















Pisces by grace mcgrade

We are all trying to disguise various forms of etheric heartache. Always running from one love into another, in some varying amalgamation of a wound from god. A private agony, shared by everyone. For some, it is obvious, for others- this strange void is concealed. We are all looking for those that groove into our god wound, recycling our sensitivity. Reenacting the etheric heartache.  In our separateness, we weave tales of interpersonal complexes- a hostage to this spiritual wound.



Nature is the epicenter of all circulating psychic energy. It will treat your nostalgia for God. You have to get outside for at least two hours a day. Basque in cathedrals of light. Dump off emotional baggage in rural pastures. Travel by foot, become a spectator to fruitful, varied landscapes. Trudge barefoot through heavy skirts of earth. Speak to mountains, speak to mountains and listen. Nature replies, and hits you with somatic octaves of sound and color you may not fully comprehend. Let the arms of trees pluck off your psychic irritants, absorb the aromas of those that have stained you, stuck to you, without ever asking permission. 

Propel yourself into the wild, and absorb it’s natural beauty. They will stick to your cells. You visit these spaces, and they are beautiful, and because they are beautiful- you will stay that way too. You are made of the same stuff. 

Do away with the garments of conventionality and respectability. Reconvene with your wild.




I want to stretch myself across America, basque in the mundanity of a westbound highway.  Drink big gulps and gloat in the midnumbing normalcy. Speak to hanging trees and seduce strangers. Wear flashy clothes. Get rid of the old feelings. Dump off my attachments in a casket in Texas. Watch the desert while away beneath the shade of each horizon. Cloak myself beneath red white and blue fireworks, flags and fastracks. Basque in the culture of the cultureless, revel in the glory of this prophetic monstrosity one last time, before this entire empire goes caput.



Psychics Need Psychics by grace mcgrade

There is an invisible chain in the sky that draws people together, and we are led by kismet thread that expands beyond the farthest reaches of space, commanded by a silent super intelligence. I feel as though I am watching time, as it curves and contours each passing moment- for that quantum nudge back into some animal, holy bond, designed long before this hologram was erected. 

What is it? Connectivity. Karmic. A Mythical Stain. A virus that is nonsensical, altering preposterously. 

Your ghost has nestled deep somewhere,silently, discreetly.  Beyond the marble walls, moat-like borders and recesses of doubt, oblivion and apathy. Past miles of coding, strands of programming, wound right through my skin like a delicate insect. Etched and inched it’s way through sheets of misanthropy. Somehow, you got in. You have settled, sedimented and infected an echelon of my soul

I didn’t 

Even

Know

Had.

And somewhere, there, in this newly found chasm of soul, I feel myself, and I feel you. You are televised through invisible rooms, silently dancing on unstable plates- a vault of heaven, a chamber of hell. You seep out of me in uncontained moments that humiliate me. Shock me. Like a symbolic cadence, a language I forgot I could speak.

I feel you inside of me like a silent demolition. Uncomfortable, and resounding. You shot through my reality like a bullet. I have been detonated, assembled and disassembled. I have tried on a million perspectives about you. You are seismic and simultaneously non existent. Mechanically frequent, like a cosmic time bomb, terrifyingly starved of divine course.

Who builds a fire just to asphyxiate it?



Culmination by grace mcgrade

You build your own dimension, tape symbols to all four of your walls- of omens, stars, roses, the celestial bodies and their most intricate pathways. You build your own dimension, seal it, proclaim it- in hope that you can shut out the demolition of the planet. Or rather, invoke it.

You feel like you owe yourself some reprieve, that these four walls have seen enough, heard enough. Something in the determined, enthusiastic cadence of your voice, your animated commitment to self assurity, you could convince anyone of anything. So you pick leisure, let your music spill around and take on the appearance of something half feral. You decide that you belong in your own arms before anyone else. Your love is the greatest. That most people bore you. You take deep breaths. Surrendering to half spent daydreams. Looking for the thread in your emotionality that connects your body to your soul.

January feels like culmination. Insisting.

The World is Ending by grace mcgrade

I grew up in a housing estate in London, “The World’s End Estate”, the roughest building in Chelsea. Chelsea was known as the stomping ground for London’s high society, renowned for its carefully manicured streets and it’s elite inhabitants, gracefully overlooking the River Thames. It’s decadent pearly townhouses housed all of the debutants and duchesses, the socialites and their most eligible royal suitors. The Kings Road, appropriately named, was the King's favorite street. Dotted neatly with artisan cheese shops, chocolate confectioneries and boutique designer stores, each boasting glittering and immaculately rendered displays.

And then there was the World’s End estate. A towering, brown monstrosity, smack dab in the middle, just off the Kings Road. Massive industrial brick buildings, hovering over the neat boutique stories like the fucking death star. Looming over the pretty people like a comedic glyph of class imbalance. The Worlds End Estate was guarded by cycling chavs in Adidas sweatsuits and their rabid Pitbulls, bellowing the occasional “Awright Luhv?” and it was a good month if there wasn’t a stabbing. You had to triple lock your bikes and avoid walking through poorly lit areas. A great place to be a thief. The elevators, fragrant with the aromatic notes of fish’n’chips and piss. I was too young to be alarmed by any of this. It was home. I didn’t care. I had Winnie the Pooh bedding. I could get six sour gum balls for 25p from the lady with the grumpy face at the newsagents store. 

By the time I learned to read, I realized everything around me said “World’s End”. Despite me living in the “World’s End Estate”, there was the “World’s End Bookstore”, the “World’s End Cafe” and the Vivienne Westwood flagshop, marked by a giant spinning clock counting down to the World's End. This confused my child brain. I oscillated from thinking that the world was indeed, coming to an end, and all of these stores and buildings had decided to let me know through their advertisements and signs- or that we were at the edge of the planet, the corner of earth. 

My mother was a posh aristocratic artist, who had fallen in love with a working class Scottsman because he made her laugh. My dad was the son of a construction worker, who had escaped Glasgow to become a writer. Instead, he was teaching English to high school kids. My Dad would poke fun at my mothers posh voice, her eccentric wealthy parents, and sing her Common People by Pulp.

I must have been about 7 or 8 when I began to pick up on class conscientiousness, I realized people would perk up when I told them I lived in Chelsea, but wince and cower when I told them I lived in the World’s End Estate. My friends, in their shiny, pastel Kensington townhouses- were too afraid to come over. On one particular daily ascent in the piss drenched elevator of the World’s End Estate, I brought my observations to my Dad’s attention. He took a deep breath, and then crouched down to me so he was eye level, and whispered. “Listen, I know you have been told that your mothers side of the family are the wealthy ones- but who cares about that.  I’ll have you know- my family are descendants of the High Kings of Ireland. So we are royal blood. You can’t tell anyone though. And the High Kings of Ireland, they weren’t like silly English kings. They were warriors, our people. Magic. Don’t forget that. And don’t tell anyone.”  

He was lying, of course. But I believed him then. I had a skip in my step the next time we would go for one of our walks down the King Road together, his hands like big warm saucers, one of his giant steps equating to six of mine. In my mind I was a descendant of the High Kings of Ireland. And the only two people who knew, were me and him. 

 I believed him then, and I think for several years afterwards. The belief probably sat and sedimented in some fold of subconscious that informs my present behavior. So did all the signs that said, “World’s End”.