Material Girl, Mystical World: The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics. Ruby Warrington

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СКАЧАТЬ to Echo, rejecting your traditional upbringing, and running away to live on an ashram, in the Now Age, choosing to check out a more spiritual worldview is no longer seen as incompatible with an appreciation for fashion. If anything, the fact that we’ve evolved into such an exaggeratedly material, hypervisual, and device-dependent world has given these ancient human technologies a newfound allure. If social media, for example, has created what some people are calling a “disconnection epidemic,” then esoteric practices like astrology and meditation become a (necessary) way to reconnect—sure, to each other, but not least to ourselves.

      And on the flip side, spending half our lives in the alternate reality we casually refer to as the Internet (I mean, let’s take a step back for a minute; everything being “online” now, and existing somewhere in the Cloud, is actually seriously sci-fi) means we also get to investigate these Now Age practices from the comfort of our own living rooms. Not to mention the freedom it’s given us to totally blur the lines when it comes to what a person who identifies as “spiritual” should look like. Um, have you checked out Miley Cyrus’s IG feed lately? #GODDESS. The week I’m writing this, even Khloé Kardashian had penned an essay on her spiritual leanings for Lena Dunham’s “Lenny” newsletter.

      Enter mass meditations that devolve into networking events, spiritual speed-dating, and my friends and I discovering the joys of the “healing hang date.” Also celebrities like Russell Brand (God bless that man) discovering yoga and going from Hollywood wannabe and recovering addict to total Now Age pinup. Oh, and his ex, Katy Perry, telling a reporter for GQ magazine, “I see everything through a spiritual lens. I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form?”

      Well, I could not agree with you more, Katy, and astrology was my gateway drug into the Mystical World, too. I must have been about three years old when I discovered I’d been born in the Chinese year of the Dragon. Result! Most people got normal animals, like pigs or dogs, but lucky me had obviously been singled out for some pretty special cosmic treatment (not that astrology is for narcissists or anything. No, really, it isn’t—as I’ll explain in detail later on!).

      Anyway, there followed a period of about six months where I’d scrunch my features into a “scary” dragon face and do this heavy breathing thing through my bared teeth, to show everybody how the mythical beast lived in me. And then my brother was born (year of the Sheep, yawn), and people stopped paying attention.

      I also grew up knowing that my mum had my full astrology chart done by a family friend when I was born. I was an Aries, which meant I was “confident and extroverted, and sometimes quite bossy.” Beyond the home environment I was definitely more on the shy side, though, and I was desperate to know what else the astrologer had said. But Mum was always frustratingly vague about it. “Ummm, you have a lot of planets in Cancer …” she’d murmur, balancing my baby brother on one hip while stirring a pot of buckwheat noodles.

      If you haven’t already guessed, she was kind of hippieish, and we ate mainly macrobiotic when I was a kid. I think mostly because John and Yoko did. The other families in the rural country village where I grew up were the same, a tight little clique of “alternatives” who embraced natural remedies, grew most of their own vegetables, and wore a lot of cheesecloth.

      It wasn’t until I started at the tiny village school that I realized there was anything strange about my mum taking my brother to see the fierce Dr. Singha, an Ayurvedic practitioner who cured his recurring ear infections by banning him from eating dairy, or us spending weekends at music festivals where I got pink henna streaks in my hair. But my flask of homemade adzuki bean stew felt decidedly unsexy next to my friends’ pizza and fries at lunch, and even aged five I was acutely aware that my home-stitched smock dresses were no match for Claire Maplethorpe’s shop-bought tutus. To my five-year-old eyes, not only did pizza and tutus look waaaay cool—it was also evident that without them in my world, I would always be on the outside looking in.

      Up until that point I’d been completely satisfied with my social life too, which consisted mainly of hanging out with the fairies at the end of our garden, making mud pies, and tumbling down the rabbit holes in my imagination to explore magical, underground kingdoms. But now I wanted a Barbie. My fairies were mysterious and mischievous and very stylish in their own ephemeral way, but Barbie had long blond hair, an extremely covetable wardrobe, and a boyfriend called Ken, just like an actual princess. And I’d consumed enough fairy tales by this stage to know that princesses, even more so than little girls born in the year of the Dragon, got all the luck.

      So what’s this got to do with my adult interest in all things Now Age? Allow me to explain. If you think back, you’ll remember there was a lot of talk about how 2012 was going to mean “The End of the World” as we knew it, due to it being the final year to be represented in the ancient Mayan calendar. And this was certainly the case for me. I want you to keep this deadline in mind as we fast-forward to a few months before D-day, when I was working as features editor at the UK’s Sunday Times Style magazine.

      I’d obviously decided at some point that the most direct route to getting my hands on a wardrobe like Barbie’s and achieving as close to princess status as an outsider like me could really hope for was to pursue a career in fashion. I fell in love with magazines in my teens, which—by now the only “poor kid” (relatively speaking) in a progressive North London private school—found me grappling with the mother of all identity crises. And in shuffles a lineup of the usual teen rebellion suspects—early experimentation with drugs and alcohol, an eating disorder, and a six-year relationship with a much older, sexually domineering man (whom I’ll be referring to as the Capricorn), who also managed to completely rob me of my sense of identity.

      Magazines, and the glossily perfect world they represented to me, became an escape. And by the time I’d mustered the courage to leave the Capricorn and rebuild my life in the image of my own choosing, I became hellbent on pursuing a career as a fashion and lifestyle journalist. But after twelve years in the industry, I was dismayed to find that I was bored out of my mind.

      Perhaps it was because landing a job on Style magazine pretty much represented the apex of my ambitions at the time. After all, a lot of the anger and frustration that lay in wait just beyond my tedium on the job was directed at myself for not being utterly satisfied with a position I’d worked so hard the past decade to achieve.

      A lot of my friends were experiencing the sense of fulfillment I realized I was craving by having kids, but I’d decided long ago that I didn’t want to be a mother (more, oh-so-much more, on this subject later). Whereas I had become increasingly aware that I was essentially trying to fill the creative Source energy, second-chakra-shaped void (the seat of our creative energy) that had appeared in my life with copious amounts of cocktails, designer clothes, and … cocaine. Yes, over the past decade I’d also morphed into the quintessential work-hard-play-hard party girl. In the beginning, it was a world that fueled my post-Capricorn desire to fill myself up with all the FUN I felt I’d been denied in my teens and early twenties—but lately, it felt less hedonistic, more like a way to numb my existential angst.

      Sure, my “on paper” life was pretty fabulous—great job, great relationship (I’d since married the love of my life), great, generally heavily discounted, wardrobe. Loads of holidays, loads of freebies, and a home of my own on one of the most desirable streets in one of the most desirable parts of London. #Blessed. So why was it all tinged with the underlying sense of unease that something MAJOR was missing? Like, something fundamental to the purpose of me taking up space on the planet. Was writing about what T-shirt some celebrity was wearing or getting them to “open up” about the state of their relationship in an interview really all I had to contribute to the world?

      I don’t blame the drinking or the drugs, although they had become part of the problem. The morning СКАЧАТЬ