A profile on Arlington’s longest-running business, to date.

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In 1995, Rhianna Mirabello opened Call of the Wild Southwest Trading Post and Café in Beacon, New York, a self-titled “metaphysical supply store” where she sold herbs, oils, crystals and coffee. Three years later, she moved to Arlington. The idea was a spontaneous one.

“I was in the shower and a voice said to me, drive down Collegeview Avenue. And I said, no, right out loud,” she told me, one unusually sunny February morning. “I got dressed and walked out the door—drive down Collegeview Avenue. I was like, oh my God. I drove down Collegeview Avenue and this shop had a big sign in it that said ‘for rent.’”

As Mirabello celebrates 30 years in business—her place is now called Dreaming Goddess, located between Crafted Kup Café and All Shook Up Café & Juice Bar on Raymond Avenue—she struggles to identify the exact ingredients of her success. She does not own her building—Paldino Properties does. Around her, businesses have opened and closed like clockwork. The space on 60 Raymond Avenue has undergone three transformations in three years, switching from burger joint to fast-casual Greek to Latin fusion, and is currently vacant. Besides the smoke shops, the new Nolita boutique and the suspicious diamond store, Zimmer Brothers, Dreaming Goddess is the only retail outlet in the area. Yet, it remains an Arlington staple.

“My clientele’s really loyal,” Mirabello said, after a beat of consideration. She continued to explain that the majority of her customers are women searching to “expand their spiritual knowledge,” and Dreaming Goddess, with its diverse inventory of tools, including but not limited to divination and tarot sets, zodiac wellness kits, candles, essential oils, crystals and gemstones, roots, resins, idols and purifying bath salts, serves as a mystical, encyclopedic stop-and-shop. “When the shit hits the fan, you might not have extra money for your utilities, your eggs and what have you,” she said. “But you need to have certain spiritual tools. I have things that comfort people in times of stress.”

When I met Mirabello for the first time, there were tears in my eyes. The walk from my house to her shop was a particularly windy one, and I had not yet been awake for an hour. So, rather than “hello,” her first words to me were “Are you okay?” Quickly, I learned she is not one for conversational fluff.

Running the risk of stereotyping, I would describe Mirabello as exactly the kind of person to own a store called Dreaming Goddess. Her gray hair cascaded from her scalp past her collarbone, poofing around her shoulders, which were tattooed with feathered wings. She was shiny, her wrists, fingers, neck, left nostril and septum all accessorized with silver jewelry, which sparkled and jangled as she gesticulated. Over her brightly patterned tights, she wore knee-high boots.

She led me to a table in the back of her store, clothed in a low-resolution screen-printed tapestry of a purple mandala. She elected to sit in the “queen chair,” an upright seat upholstered with velvet, offering me the “much more comfortable” plastic folding chair, demoting me several inches shorter. Though it lay prominently between us, she did not look at my recording phone once, maintaining intense, kind eye contact.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” I began.

“That’s okay,” she said.

Mirabello spends every day in the store, along with her three other employees. She is often bundling gift packages. She updates her inventory often: “The most exciting part of work is ordering new things and seeing new products.” Being on the floor allows her to socialize with her customers—in the middle of our interview, a stout, mustached man burst through the door. “Will!” Mirabello exclaimed, throwing her hands into peace signs.

“I just wanted to come in and smell this place again,” he said with a smile.

It is true that Dreaming Goddess is, above all, an olfactory experience. The air is thick and inviting with complex blends of jasmine, lavender and santal. Besides a marketing strategy, the unceasing circulation of perfumed mist serves to ease what would otherwise be an overwhelming atmosphere—there is so much to look at, each shelf crowded with trinkets, every ceiling beam adorned with giant dream catchers. The lighting is harsh and white.

On top of her merchandise, Mirabello offers specialized services, such as her intimate classes on Reiki. Speaking literally, Mirabello described Reiki as “hands-on”: “You’re channeling a high vibration frequency through your hand and laying it on the body, sharing this beautiful energy.”

Every month, she also hosts a Full Moon Circle and a New Moon Manifestation Circle, for $16 a head. The former is exclusive to women, due, obviously, to the full moon’s relation to the divine feminine, Mirabello explained. Participants—most in-person, some over Zoom—meditate together, celebrating past accomplishments and looking forward to future spiritual evolution. “It’s a lovely way to honor yourself and your sisters,” she told me. The majority of participants are Arlington locals and a few are Vassar professors, but in recent years, Mirabello has welcomed an uptick of students, a shift she credits to increased efforts to bridge the campus-community gap. She embraces the wider audience for the financial reasons and, she added, for the history of Dreaming Goddess’ building.

Long before Dreaming Goddess existed, there was the College Inn, established in 1902 by Mary Swain Wagner and Anne Edith Lapham. When Vassar was same-sex, it was the only place off-campus that students were allowed unescorted; it became a haven for social gatherings and suffrage meetings, which were prohibited on school grounds. “[Wagner and Lapham] left a really fabulous imprint on the community,” Mirabello said. “I feel like I am living in that legacy.” Outside of the store, she feels this, too, when she performs ceremonies in the Calvary Cemetery, where student suffragettes used to rally.

Mirabello herself has always found solace at Vassar, raised five minutes away in Red Oaks Mill: “I feel like it’s my backyard.” Still, she did not anticipate spending her life in Poughkeepsie. “I was pretty sure I was headed for bigger and greater things,” she said, though the details of “bigger and greater things” were foggy. “I didn’t have any aspirations of being anything. Really, I just wanted to get out of high school.”

I did not get the sense that Mirabello ever aged into future-oriented thinking. Thirteen years ago, she bought a boa constrictor and named it Neesa, meaning “grandmother moon,” failing to consider two important truths: One, that she is a single woman in her mid-60s; and two, that boa constrictors live for 35 years and grow anywhere between 10 to 16 feet long. When I asked where Neesa is now, she informed me that she lives with “men that can handle her.”

Since moving back from Beacon, Mirabello has made numerous efforts to connect with Vassar. She used to spin fire with the Barefoot Fireflies, the student circus club. And she was the founder of the annual Arlington Street Fair, which commemorated its 25th year in September. The fair’s first iteration was scrappier than what it is today; Mirabello and other local vendors gathered around a small outdoor stage, where her friend had placed the basin of a kitchen sink, to play as a drum. “We had a blast,” she laughed.

Albeit unexpectedly, Dreaming Goddess, in Mirabello’s words, is a gift. With spirituality the forefront of her life, she “can’t imagine doing anything different now.”

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Mirabello can trace the dawn of her spiritual journey to her childhood. “My mom was very magical, her friends would tease her that she was the local witch,” she told me. “She was creative in an interesting way. She could see things and hear things. And she was an animal tamer.” For reasons I cannot pinpoint, I struggle to conjure images of a Poughkeepsie hippie community, but Mirabello’s mother is apparent evidence that there was one; she harvested all of their food and sewed all of their clothes. “She was real earthy,” Mirabello said, with pride. So began Mirabello’s fascination with witchcraft—recreationally, she experimented with amateur combinations of herbs and oils.

But it was not until the 1980s, after giving birth to her son and entering 12-step programs, that Mirabello started practicing Shamanism. As she spoke about sobriety, she massaged her Hegu pressure point, the fleshy space between her thumb and index finger. “I needed to do some work on myself,” she said. Without the internet, finding guidance was challenging. “You had to really want what you were seeking. You had to really look for it.”

Eventually, she joined a Native American sweat lodge and learned how to bead. She became best friends with a Celtic shaman and traveled to Peru. Most intensely, she trained to be a full mesa carrier, a process which took two years and involved metaphysically experiencing her own birth and death. The result: possession of an intricately-folded bundle of rocks, each of which have passed through sacred fires, representing different pieces of her personal shadow. “It’s like carrying myself in a bag,” she summarized. When I asked her about the birth-death thing, she had one word: “Fabulous.”

Spirituality, to Mirabello, takes the form of a continental buffet table—she browses, tastes and loads her plate with what she wants. “In the ’80s and ’90s, there was no word, ‘cultural appropriation.’ We didn’t have that,” she told me, unprompted, with a tinge of defensiveness. She argued that Reiki, Shamanism and mesa carrying, though operating under different names and originating from different places in the world, teach the same fundamentals: “They all have the same core and they just have different tools to get to the center.”

“Getting to the center” seems to be Mirabello’s life conquest, hence her aversion to small talk. Alternative communities like hers, in order to claim “weirdness,” are required to resist such social norms. Nonetheless, as I thought about the word “authenticity,” I was struck by Dreaming Goddess’ website. The top banner advertises a discount code for purchases over $30. The homepage is a curly word salad of wellness terms, milking the store’s female ownership and operation. There are links to Instagram and TikTok pages—collages of promotional videos for “Pillagers Potion Sprays” and AI-generated images of moon goddesses, credited as “DG original artwork.” I should have asked where she sources her materials. Online, somewhere.

I wonder why Mirabello does not give herself more entrepreneurial credit—instead, she feigns ditziness, telling me, regarding her first few years in Arlington: “Little things just all fell into place in this divine way. Perfect order. All the money I needed just came to me in exact proportions.” But she is clearly a savvy businesswoman. She knows what her customers want—spiritual guidance in cutesy packaging. It is difficult to discern where the gimmick ends.