I ache, I ache, I ache. It’s deeply painful to be a creative person who doesn’t have the energy to create. I think of my 5^th house where my Leo stellium lives, and the bleeding heart of my Mars on the south node. Mars. The planet stewarding my life is one of violence and want. The south node is the dragon’s tail, the history and the excrement, a release point.

Sometimes the little joints in my sternum hurt. When I think of my south node I think of those aching bones in my chest pulling themselves apart and cracking open to release swirls of bloodied poetry and embroidery string and the smell of a ceramic studio. Release, release, release all things that are you.

And I think of my Virgo Venus, unafraid of the mess and coming in right after to clean up the wound. Still somehow combing out the knots in my hair when my fingers are too stiff to move.

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It bleeds into everything, chronic illness. I want to write about my dad here. I want to write about how we don’t really talk at all, but in 2020 during the first phone call I had with him in years, I told him I had rheumatoid arthritis. And he told me that he also had rheumatoid arthritis. I asked him what meds he was on, and he said none. Sometimes he rubs some cream his wife got him on his fingers.

I want to write about how I was sitting in my car on my lunch break at work during this conversation and thinking about him rubbing Icy Hot into his hands before tinkering around with his truck or sitting down at his computer at work. I want to write about how that image made me want to cry.

I want to write about how when I mentioned my RA to him a couple years later, possibly the next time we were on the phone, he asked me why I had it. I want to write about how it felt to say, “Well, I presume I inherited whatever genetics gave it to you.”

Release.

Here is something funny:

When I was around 9, I got into two roller skating accidents in a short amount of time. The first was at a roller rink when I tried to limbo under a broomstick. I fell right down on my tailbone hard. I skated off into the bathroom and reached behind myself, digging my fingers into the ache.

In the second accident, I was playing basketball on roller blades and the ball got away from me. I fell chasing it as we both rolled down the road. I hit my shoulder hard in some gravel and went home to clean the wound, picked out rocks while I watched TGIF on the television in my mom’s room. When it healed, the fresh scar looked like a sun.

It’s still there if you kind of squint, the sun-shaped scar.

Both of those accidents seemed like the cause of all my pain when I was a kid, when in reality I was exhibiting signs of rheumatoid arthritis before I even had my first period.

The real joke here though, is that what I thought was the beginning of my chronic pain was actually two failed feats of childhood athleticism and I have the south node on my Mars, the planet we most associate with athletes. Release, release, release.

Maybe it’s only funny if you speak astrology.

My boyfriend says, “I don’t want to be one of those guys who give stupid suggestions to disabled people, but do you think maybe if you were better about breathing that you might be in less pain?”

Another time my boyfriend says, “I feel like I haven’t heard you breathe in the last five minutes.”

He buys me a new walking stick at the renaissance faire. I love it because it’s supportive and tall enough that I can rest on it when I get tired. The cosplay elves at the booth let me know that they can carve my initials or a rune into it. I pick the rune Hagalaz, which, according to their book, means ‘the chaos of nature, a hailstorm’. At home I braid three strings together for land, sky and sea and wrap them around one of the stick’s curves.

Release.

I was happy to begin this work on the eve of the Capricorn Full Moon. I gathered velvety ivory roses and pink sweet peas, their gentleness bound together by a wiry plum filler, perhaps dyed yarrow, though I’m really not certain. The bouquet was humble but the soft restraint felt right, suited for an altar made of bone and fur, with incense smoke curling lazily through the air. Saturnian.

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I brought the bouquet to Lake Michigan, where I go when I want to hear the Moon a little more clearly. After photographing the blooms, I saw a family taking professional portraits on the dunes. They were beautiful people, multiple generations dressed up, embracing, turning toward the camera and making each other laugh. I walked over and offered the bouquet to the group’s matriarch, a gorgeous older woman in a flowing navy dress.

They graciously accepted and cooed over the flowers. I hope the bouquet made it into their photos. I hope there’s one of the matriarch, just her alone, feet in the water, bouquet in hand at the shoreline during sunset. Maybe it becomes a Christmas card. Maybe it sits in a frame on someone’s mantle, a symbol of beauty passed between strangers.

I’ve crafted several bouquets since: one, a coronation gift, for the Sun from Venus, an apology from Mars to Venus, a welcome bouquet from the Sun to Mercury. But I think the intention, the deep emotion behind the relationship between the Moon and Saturn stays with me.

Starting the year with a Cancer Full Moon feels meaningful. When I imagine what Saturn would give the Moon for her own crowning, I think of something refined and architectural. Something that decays gracefully.

And yet, I’m not sure if it’s just my level of comfort with flowers growing, or that the Moon brings out something in Saturn that says “Fuck restraint.” But the bouquet I gathered for her at his request is lusher than Saturn’s typical preference, much more abundant than the bouquet gifted to him. But there’s something here about the type of wildness that can grow inside of structure and the ways that it can crack it open. I think of the moonflowers weaving through a neighbor’s fence, ivy creeping up the bricks of a church, moss on a tree.

I think of the poem, “Give it Time” by Wendell Berry.

GIVE IT TIME

The river is of the earth
and it is free. It is rigorously
embanked and bound,
and yet it free. “To hell
with restraint,” it says.
“I have got to be going.”
It will grind out its dams.
It will go over or around them.
They will become pieces.

The stretch of the lily in the bouquet makes me think of this. Simple, elegant, but a little feral in its reach. The ache inherent in the Protea’s bloom, so full of structure and yet its bloom looks like a delicate bird. The dark fluff on her petals’ wings. Larkspur, typically a summer flower, towering, weaving itself through.

The bouquet did age with grace, pleasing both the Moon and Saturn who both hold the concept of time for us, just in different ways.

I’m sharing this alongside the launch of Soft Fire Studio’s website, where I offer astrology consultations and written correspondence rooted in slowness. I’m finding my work is less about definitive answers and more about relationship. You can learn about current offerings and see more of my floral work at softfires.com.

Taurus Sun and the King and Queen of Pentacles

Reflecting on the Taurus Sun placement, I pulled the King of Pentacles. That felt a little too easy for the current Mercury retrograde we’re experiencing this autumn, so I thought I would pull another card to complicate my exploration. The Queen of Pentacles arrived.

Maybe that is the lesson of the Taurus Sun? The beauty in letting a thing be when it can be. And the King and Queen have arrived, in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck the King and Queen of Pentacles look the most settled of any the court cards. The couple are comfortably enjoying the abundance of their surroundings. They could have been on their thrones for millennia or for an hour. It makes no difference to them, or to a Taurus Sun. They will be there. Taurus Suns have the presence of spring’s warm light. It’s steady and true.

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There’s a thing that pop astrologers talk about with Taurus and indulgence. But I think what it actually means is that Taurus is really honest with themselves about what they want and need to live a life that feels good. Sometimes that’s food, sometimes that’s sitting very still, sometimes that’s rest.

That earthy self-honesty, knowing what you want and taking it, is magnetic. The Sun in Taurus doesn’t perform or apologize, it just shows plain-faced want that somehow becomes abundant art to feed us all.

It’s fitting I was moved to pull two cards for Taurus Sun and wound up with a couple. The sign is so relational, and the Sun is so generous with his light. My partner is a Taurus Sun and when I pulled these cards I thought of him watching TV, guitar in hand, casually strumming while I sit next to him. The Venusian ease of him at home, resting on the throne of blankets and cats and a couch that needs replacing, working on his craft without any sense of urgency.

I think of this Pentacles couple, and how Taurus and Leo are antiscia, meaning there is a day in both seasons where there is the exact amount of light. Antiscia is a kind of hidden conjunction, rooted in what the quality of light across two seasons says. I’m a Leo. My Taurus partner and I might have very different charts but antiscia reveals a shared objective: we both refuse to rush.

Light like a Taurus Sun is sovereign, beautiful, and powerful. You don’t chase it, you are it. All fixed signs, but maybe especially Taurus Suns understand that power isn’t earned through constant motion, it’s inherent. The Queen of Pentacles can sit in her garden until it rots, and the King’s throne can turn to dust, but it doesn’t matter because they stay. Staying put isn’t laziness, it’s refusal. Refusal to participate in the empire’s pace. And sovereignty isn’t the same as dominion.

The King and Queen sit on thrones, but a Taurus Sun, vital and powerful, remembers it’s a bull. It’s an animal that can be yoked or that can run wild. These Pentacles royals have cultivated their gardens but true Taurus power knows you don’t need an empire to have abundance. You need soil, seeds, and the willingness to be still enough to sit with inevitable growth.

Aries begins. And the Death card’s meaning is in the name. When I think about an Aries Sun, an exalted Sun, I think of dawn breaking over the mountains. It’s a celebration, we made it through the night.

Aries is a warrior, and so is the championed skeleton on his white horse. Aries is dawn, and I think of the sun in the background of the card. Is it rising or setting and does it matter? For Aries, this ambiguity is everything: every ending is a beginning.

I’m thinking of how the Sun exalts in Aries, how martial the sun has to be to see winter and say, “Yes, this is done now. Time for spring.” It’s a force. To have your Sun in Aries is to be a force, and death is a force, too. And there is nothing polite about an exalted Sun, not really. His job is to be an alarm clock. On the other side, consider Libra, where the Sun falls, the season of the Autumn Equinox. Putting something to rest is so tender and gentle, Venusian.

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Fire sign bravery isn’t fearlessness. It’s throwing yourself into the unsettling act of birth, over and over, because you must. Babies are super brave but they’re scared of everything. They have a martial drive that pulls them from the womb. Mars is in the room when a baby is born, and so is the Sun. I think of the baby child in the Death card and how on the Sun card, he appears again. He has dethroned the skeleton. He learned a lesson about ego and victory from him.

Aries lusts for life. The baby child in the Death card is okay with the pain and embarrassment that are inherent to having experience. In fact, he looks entranced by someone who understands the two feelings. The championed skeleton understands that the battle of living hurts and is humiliating, and that victory isn’t about a path of destruction but about freedom. He learns from the baby child, too. A lesson in tenderness and what it means to have a future. To me the card always felt like the two were looking at each other, seeing each other. Death doesn’t care about the bishop and his pleas. He’s ready to see what happens when he releases control for something else that the baby hasn’t given up on yet.

He’s okay with ending things if he gets to ride the white horse away from the cowering royalty, and in the card, that’s exactly what’s happening. Death rides toward something more wild, unfettered when he becomes transformed by the baby. Stripped of his armor. Riding through a field of flowers in the Sun.

Daughter,

Kent told me you stopped by asking for a table that Nana used to have. He no longer has the table and I believe he sold it or gave it away. He does not wish to speak with you and I would strongly advise against it.

Your father

I keep trying to write a response to my dad about the email he sent. But everything I write keeps coming out wrong:

Dad,

Thanks for reaching out! I’m sorry I haven’t answered your calls recently. It’s just that every time I hear from you, I want to throw myself into the ground and be swallowed up by the earth, and haven’t figured out yet how to say that politely.

Yeah, I went over to Kent’s place to see if I could get the table that my great-grandma — my Nana, who died when I was a newborn, had intended for me. The table she made? Do you remember rushing me over to her after I was born? My mom said that happened. Mom mentioned that during your divorce, you two discussed the table, how Nana wanted me to have it, but you worried that if Mom took it she wouldn’t pass it along. (Very silly, by the way! She definitely would have.) So, to be ‘fair,’ you decided to let Kent keep it until I was of age.

When we last spoke in early 2024, you mentioned that my Grandma had been very into astrology and tarot, after I told you it was something I’m interested in. I assume you were talking about my Great-Grandma, my Nana, because my Grandma (who I love dearly) struggled with whether it was appropriate to give me a Harry Potter book for Christmas. Our conversation was during a Mercury retrograde, I understand the miscommunication!

So, anyway, I have been doing a lot of thinking about this Nana I never got to meet as I dig deeper and deeper into my astrology studies, and I guess also thinking more largely about inheritance. And then thought maybe I should go and claim what’s mine.

I had intended to make the trip on a Full Moon in Aries! See, I was thinking about visibility and healing. And all the ways I’ve been afraid of being seen. I made it down on the following Saturday, because the full moon fell on a Monday and I was just really tired. But anyway, on that Saturday I went and I guess Kent wasn’t home.

Super strange because I heard someone at the door! And there were two trucks in the driveway, one with an open bed full of some kind of construction material. But maybe the sound was just my imagination. I left a note and this photo of Nana holding me as a baby.

You’re probably wondering why I went directly to Kent and not you. I feel the need to explain.

I remember when I came out to Kent, my Uncle Kent, because I knew he was gay. I was young, bisexual, and getting thrown into men’s locker rooms in high school because everyone wanted to pick on the pretty, ethnically ambiguous queer girl. Oh, to be confused in a red state farm town. So I did what I was supposed to do: I told an adult I trusted about something I was struggling with.

I don’t remember exactly what I wrote to him, only that I was interested in men and women and it was hard to be understood where I was and that I knew he was gay. It wasn’t my fault he didn’t trust you with that information about himself yet. I didn’t trust you with it either. When he called me to address the letter I sent, presumably before he took it upon himself to out me, he was nice, a little awkward but he was trying. I just thought you should know that.

You once said that I had ‘shared my sexual feelings with your brother, but not with you.’ (Dad, honestly, what the fuck? Who says that to their sixteen-year-old daughter?) Do you think maybe that’s why I didn’t feel safe telling you?”

Do you understand that when a gay adult, who was closeted himself, outed me to you, it caused me significant harm? (And he’s very gay, Dad, he might like trucks and Trump but I saw that funky post-modern sculptural art piece in their yard.) That his actions created trust issues that have echoed in my life for a really long time? That perhaps maybe I wanted a gesture of kindness from him after that?

I don’t expect you to understand, Dad. And that’s why I didn’t go to you first.

Yeah, anyway, all that said. Sometimes I think about how your Sun is in Gemini, and how it’s conjunct my Moon. And how that, in a way, kind of makes us a New Moon together. The Twins. I think about what that means for us. I wonder what my astrology-loving Nana would say about it. Maybe I’ll get to ask her one day.

Anyway, here’s a poem I wrote:

Hip Replacement

A wounded horse sleeps with a red F-150 in the garage. The diesel engine fills the air with sound on Sunday mornings, when I’m reading in bed it climbs to my room. Which toolbox drawer do you keep your secret cigarettes? We want to know. We’re the same in some ways, we’re the same. I wonder if you can reuse a metal hip. We want to know. Cut you open and take it for myself, call it my inheritance. Show you the open wound and then I’ll walk to the stables with ease, a new cowboy.

The same - tattered bones, Gemini placements, Johnny Cash and a cornfield. A soft jawline, a furrowed brow.

I hope you know that making you laugh always felt like someone moving a fallen motorcycle off a pinned and crushed leg. (The photo: you so young in your flannel, an International Harvester hat, and a crutch, smiling.)   

Yes, I did toss my given name down the wishing well that you built out by the barn and then I dug my boots into the grass to pull out the summer.

The red pickup parked by the south cemetery is a Chevy, still it always looked a bit like a horse in a pasture, waiting for me to offer a sugar cube before hugging my arms around his neck.

Best,
July

P.S. I really am sorry the Pacers didn’t win the championship.

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He’s the wispy sideburns I grew up so self-conscious of that make me look like a werewolf. And he’s the realization I had on an Aries solar eclipse in my first house that I’m not going to spend time removing them anymore. It’s actually pretty sick to look like a werewolf. He’s my autoimmune disorder and the rosacea that flushes my cheeks. He’s the sunburn on my shoulders after I spend all day staring out at the Lake, drawing tarot cards and journaling like it means something. He’s the knowing, as sure as the sand in my shoe and the pockets of my jean jacket, that it means something.

But he is an immigrant. Look at his gold wound.
Here’s a poem and a writing prompt:

Third Coast
A Writing Prompt

A writing professor told me
I had my fingers on the pulse of what it means
to be young and American.
Now I’m a decade older and instead
I would like to write as if I have
my hand gently, firmly wrapped around
the young American throat.

Here is a writing prompt to get you started:
Please describe in detail the dream
your great grandfather had before
he left Mexico City for Chicago.
And then tell us what
Lake Michigan looked like when
he first laid eyes on her.

Was she infinite like God?
Was she calm and clear?
Or did her waves throw
the tied boats in the harbor
like a promise?

Did he see you across the shore
with your stupid jeans rolled up
taking a video on your phone of
her tide reaching for your soft ankles?

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Mars is an immigrant. He rules our blood and helps us survive. His beauty is defiant. And in a country that cages and hunts people like him, my grandma, Elvira — who went by Vera — lived as the daughter of an immigrant and diabetic. When I slept over at her house as a child, I’d wake early to sit with her in the kitchen and watch her prick her finger to test her glucose. Mars is the needle.

My grandma Vera, the daughter of an immigrant, was also a beautiful writer. In her old age, my uncle wrote down her answers to a book of questions for her children. Her hands were too shaky and arthritic by then to hold the pen for long, but her voice still hit strong. It was in this little book that I learned my great-grandfather’s immigration story.

My grandma had some success getting published, and kept all of her writing over the decades. A couple of years ago at Christmas, my mom and her sisters gifted all the grandkids a collection of her poems, journal entries, stories, and essays, bound together and titled Through Her Eyes. I cried. And when everyone was done opening presents and wanted to play a game, my mom had to tell me to stop reading and hang out.

Thinking of Mars and immigration, I pulled that collection from the shelf on my ancestral altar, where it rests in the sun like an offering. Inside was a piece, that appears to have been published in a newspaper, about her paternal grandfather. I want to share a small part of her words here:

My earliest memory, one I treasure deeply, was his nightly ritual when we would visit him. Standing before a crucifix hung on the wall, my small hand held in his, he guided me through the Sign of the Cross. And he would speak a Spanish blessing over me. Through this ritual, Grandpa Miguel expressed his love and hope for my future. A future he had given me. In coming to the United States he had set his feet and the feet of those to follow on the road to better life.

I read that passage to my partner the other night and he said one of the nicest things he’s ever said to me, “It sounds like you. You could have told me you wrote that.”

Here’s another poem:

Writing Prompt Response
Ode to Lake Michigan

The Lake was calm and clear
when I arrived at the shore,
and I saw you
in the summer, with your ankles in her tide.
Your companion making her tremble,
skipping stones across her surface.
I saw you drenched by the Sun
eyes squinting while
you search across the water. Biting
into a peach, damp hair
and the beginning of a blush
on your shoulders.
I saw you in the winter too.
You were alone,
boots buried in the snow and sand,
eyes fixed up at the stars.
You peeled off your mittens and
with your fingers drafted a petition
into the Earth, a petition to the Lake,
to the Moon, white sigils cracking,
I saw you.
And for a moment, when you
gazed across the water and into
the lights of the City,
as you put back on your mittens and
tightened the scarf my daughter made you,
closer, closer
I think maybe you saw me too.

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In what was unintentional but feels like precise cosmic timing, I recently began talk therapy. It’s a very third house Moon moment: words meeting feeling, with Jupiter quietly supporting the work of understanding and meaning-making. Story and self slowly woven together in ritual, week by week.

During that first session, the therapist asked me to name two of my strengths.

“I’m well-intentioned, and I’m… sturdy.”

She smiled, amused by my word choice, then nodded and offered, “You’re resilient.”

I shifted in my seat, and laughed “No, I really do think sturdy is better.”

It felt important to clarify. I’m not sure I have the buoyancy that resilience implies. Resilience is lightness, and dances with mercurial wind like a kite in the spring. For all my Gemini placements, I’ve never felt light. I’m the strong-willed grip of a child running through a park, kite spool clutched tight in their hand, the tension that keeps it soaring.

I also started moving during this Jupiter return. I’m combining households with my partner who lives a town over. Under the gaze of the planet of generosity, we are making room for each other. Rearranging our art and buying new hampers. Integrating our cats and easing into the rhythm of a shared daily life.

I’m excited to watch my partner make us coffee every morning, the pour-over dripping while we make each other laugh in the kitchen. This domestic pattern-making is the balm of a Jupiter given the gifts of Mercury. It soothes my Moon.

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I moved during my second Jupiter return, too, back in 2013. I had just graduated with an English degree from Indiana University, a school I attended with my younger brother. More third house activities. I had no plan except to move back home to Northwest Indiana and leave Bloomington behind. My brother helped me pack the car. I remember emptying binders and tossing out papers I had agonized over for semesters. It was an undoing of years of effort.

When I was done with the purge, I said, “There. Now it’s like nothing even happened.”

There’s something about Gemini energy that’s like a piñata bursting onto the lawn in the spring. That grass-stained scramble for a moment of candied sweetness, and then the memory of it all happily fizzing over: sticky and formless.

My paternal grandma had a Gemini Moon, I can’t be sure because I don’t have a birth-time, but it’s very likely based on what I know. She also had Alzheimer’s. If I have the timeline correct (and I may not) she was likely diagnosed in 2001 as Jupiter transited over her Moon. I have a feeling the last time I saw her was a few years later when it journeyed through Virgo and squared her Moon.

Our Moon.

Of course, at that time, I was 14 or 15. I didn’t know I would never see her again. I’m not certain about any of these transits, I’ll never be certain, and maybe there’s a poetry in that uncertainty too. There’s definitely a grief in it.

She’s a Gemini Moon because I need her to be a Gemini Moon. I would sit with her in the kitchen and ask her to tell me “I remember when” stories.

I can still feel the warmth of the kitchen, the gold wall paper, the wax fruit basket, the way the light shone through the window over the sink, a roast in the oven. I know her stories were soaked in nostalgia, her Cancer Venus thoroughly felt. But I can’t remember a single detail, it’s all a soft buzz.

Sometimes the soft buzz sounds like the windows open while falling asleep on a breezy night, a cricket chirping, trees rustling. Sometimes the buzz is more like static coming through the car radio while driving next to a cornfield on a dark night. Alone.

Those are times I think about how my Mercury is besieged by a square to Pluto. I think about how young my grandma was when she was diagnosed. And I start counting, all my fingers and all my toes, how many good years I have left to create new stories.

So I don’t remember exactly the last time I saw her. And I don’t remember the last time I saw her son, my estranged dad. His Gemini Sun is conjunct my Moon, and really, there’s just not enough air in this piece to dive into that. Because of the estrangement, her illness, and my youth, I never had the chance to say goodbye.

She appeared in my nightmares for years after I found out she died, frail and lonely in rooms full of dust. I found her obituary online. I was sitting in my car, sobbing to my college girlfriend over the phone.1 That discovery began my second Jupiter return.

The nightmares stopped, but for a long time I wished I could have told her thank you for sharing her “I remember when” stories. A Jupiter cycle later, I realize I can, I have, and I do, every time I listen to what the Moon has to say. I’m filled with gratitude for my grandma, for those afternoons in her kitchen, one of the places where I first learned to love language.

And I’m thankful to the cosmos for gifting us astrology: a language for holding memory, even when the memory is like candy fallen from a piñata, softening and glittering in the June sun.