Today I launched Lumine. A new card every morning with one movement, one mindset, and one meal attuned with the energy of the day.

I launched it this morning, sent an email to my list and immediately got some downloads! I also got some unsubscribes. If anything it reminds me that those who do, and try, support others who do and try. Those who don’t, don’t. Focus on the light. Lumine guides subscribers to be their most radiant, aligned selves and it combines a bit of chronobiology, astrology, and inspiration. Science meets soul.

Lumine represents nine months of work, begun in the weeks after my last company closed, and it carries everything I learned about how women heal. Before I show you the details, I want to tell you what it takes to rebuild, to reclaim your life, and to step into the light.

One of the things I love the most about hiking is when you are slowly ascending a steep cliff, a scramble, and you can’t see too far ahead, maybe you are even basically on the rocks, knees, hands, and then you arrive at the top and you see an expanse of light.

If you are lucky you have a view, sometimes spanning hundreds of miles, maybe you see the sea or forests or small homes dotted across a rural landscape. And the sky.

This Saturday I had my birthday, or, as astrologers call it, my solar return: when the sun returned to the exact degree it occupied at 7:09 in the morning on the nineteenth of September when and where I was born.

Every year for the past 25 years I have gone hiking on this day, usually alone. I hike because it reminds me of the strength in my body, and how despite how busy I may be, or how restless I may feel, it is something I can accomplish. Some years, I have chosen 3,800+ foot mountains described as “difficult.” I have hiked in the rain and the fog and ended up shivering with mud all over me. I have, like this year and in a few years past, hiked the last third of the mountain carrying Dalton, my small terrier. This year I chose a smaller hike, 900 feet up, Long Mountain in Granby, Massachusetts.

The fifth season

September is a threshold month. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, late summer is the fifth season, the turn between the heat of summer and the descent of autumn, and it belongs to the Earth element. It is the season of harvest, of the center, of coming back down. The leaves are beginning to fall to the ground, and in a sense we are called to follow them. I wrote more about this season in The Fifth Season.

Earth governs digestion and nourishment, and in Traditional Chinese Medicine its emotion is worry. When this season is out of balance, it tends to show up as overthinking, restlessness, and a mind that cannot land. I know this pattern well. It is the two in the morning loop, the list that keeps rewriting itself.

One of the simplest ways I know to come back into balance is to ground, literally. When the weather allows, I take my shoes off and walk in the woods. Even when it is only my toes in the grass or the sand or a patch of earth wherever I happen to be, I look up into the trees and take a breath. It costs nothing, asks for a few minutes, and changes the texture of the whole day.

This year I have one thing to say, and it took me two decades to be able to say it in a sentence. Every plan any of us has ever been handed specifies what and how much. Grams of protein, sets and reps, hours of sleep, milligrams of magnesium. Almost none of them specify when, and timing is frequently the variable deciding whether the rest of the instructions do anything at all.

I arrived at that by watching it happen to people.

What timing looked like in practice

None of this was theoretical at Rêve Health, the telehealth company I founded. Most of the people who found us had already spent years inside conventional medicine. We were the end of the line. They came looking for alternative and holistic health solutions because nothing else had worked, and they were tired of being told everything was all in their head.

Chronic conditions that had run for years resolved. Autoimmune disease. Thyroid problems. Lyme.

What we kept coming back to was never a single protocol. It was that your mind, body, and spirit are intertwined. You are not separate from nature. You are part of it.

Traditional Chinese Medicine does not read the body as a set of parts to be treated one at a time. Mind, body, spirit, and your relationship to the natural world are one system, and they are read together. When someone stopped improving, the question was rarely which organ. It was what has changed around her, and what has she been asked to override.

In practice that turned into scheduling. A woman came back low in vitamin D and the answer was not only a supplement, it was moving her training outside into daylight wherever her life allowed, because the deficiency and the intervention belonged to the same system.

A woman whose cortisol was already high at seven in the morning did not need less training, she needed her sprint work and her heavy lifting in the afternoon, the same session and the same volume placed where her physiology could absorb it rather than stacked on a load she was already carrying.

A woman who could not sleep kept her program and lost the late evening slot, because the session was landing at the hour her body was trying to shut down, and the insomnia was getting blamed on stress.

In each case the plan itself was solid, but what made it practical, and what got results, was when it happened, and WHEN kept turning out to be the variable that decided whether any of it worked. A protocol that would do real work at two in the afternoon can do very little at nine at night, and when it does very little, the conclusion offered is usually about the woman running it.

The narrow door

All of that took a full panel, someone to read it, and the money for both. Rêve lasted eighteen months, and in that time I watched something work repeatedly while also watching exactly who was permitted to have it, which was people who could afford a level of care most women will never see the inside of. That is the thought I could not put down after the company closed. The timing was real, I had watched it be real, and the open question was how much of it survives with none of the apparatus.

The answer turns out to be a great deal, because the clocks running through a human body were never private in the first place.

The twenty four hour clock is the planet’s rotation. The year is its orbit. The 29.5 day cycle is the moon’s. None of that is locked inside a blood draw. It runs on a schedule published centuries in advance, identical for everyone alive, requiring no hardware and no memory of when anything last happened, which makes it the only health data I know of that is both perfectly personal in its effects and entirely free to obtain.

So each of those clinic cases has a plain version underneath it, and the plain version costs nothing. The hour you go outside starts doing the work the vitamin D capsule was being asked to do alone. Cortisol becomes time of day, and its general shape is knowable without a panel, because the morning peak is how the axis works in everyone. Sleep becomes the lunar month, since the research is now clear that sleep starts later and runs shorter in the nights before a full moon, in Argentine communities with no electricity and in Seattle students with too much of it. If you have ever wondered why the week before a full moon feels like swimming upstream, the answer has been measured. Somewhere between forty six and fifty eight minutes of sleep.

None of that replaces a lab panel, and I would still run one. It hands the timing layer to everybody, including the woman with no practitioner and no five thousand dollars.

Why the birthday

Lumine reads where the moon and the season sit and returns one movement, one mindset, and one meal matched to that day. It is the timing work I used to do by hand from a lab panel, computed instead from the moon and the season, clocks nobody has to pay for.

The chart layer sits on top of that, and this is where the solar return comes back in. The moon and the season are shared, and everyone alive gets the same Tuesday. What is not shared is the sky at the moment you arrived, the sun returning to it once a year, and the way a transit lands in your own chart rather than in the general weather. It is the same architecture as the lab work, a universal base layer with your own data written over it.

For several years the sky and I have had a running argument about the pace of my life, and I have lost most of it. This is the first year I have run the argument the other way, which is to say I stopped treating my worst days as evidence about my character and started treating them as information about scheduling.

I turned fifty three on Saturday, in the least settled year of my adult life, building a company out of a note on my phone. The sun comes back to where it started regardless of what any of us managed in the interval, and I find that steadying.

The day after I came down from Long Mountain, and every night for five nights after that, I sat up going through Python code and data files, building the first version of Lumine line by line. It is a beta, an initial app that will get better every day, and so, I have come to believe, will the rest of us.

Lumine launched today, as the Sun crossed the degree that was rising the morning I was born. Lumine is live now, with a new card waiting every morning, and subscribers to The Illuminator receive their first three months complimentary.

References

Casiraghi, L., Spiousas, I., Dunster, G. P., McGlothlen, K., Fernández-Duque, E., Valeggia, C., & de la Iglesia, H. O. (2021). Moonstruck sleep: Synchronization of human sleep with the moon cycle under field conditions. Science Advances, 7(5), eabe0465.