My father’s family originates from the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Some from Bluefields, and some from Corn Island, a tiny rise of land in the Caribbean Sea.

Spain was unable to colonise the region, then named the Mosquito Coast for the Miskito peoples who lived there, in their original conquest of Central America. The conquistadores were thus unable to prevent some of the different indigenous groups from preserving tradition, culture and language, which reflects in their survival to this day. The area also became a haven for Maroons and pirates. Later, the British formed a dubious… alliance… with the Miskito peoples, creating the Mosquito Kingdom and naming the region a British protectorate, further undermining Spain’s ambitions. The flows of power fluctuate from here, marked both by strategic adoption and rejection of colonial power by indigenous peoples, and later by enslaved African and Creole peoples.

I can’t pretend to have any ability to parse out exactly how these dynamics shifted over time. Antagonism shifting to allegiance and back again. And I feel some muted heartbreak, encountering instances where the victims of colonisation collude with perpetrators. It seems kind of apt to think of the space as a colonial “protectorate”—a space marked by the need for protection, survival at any cost, even if it means participating in slavery, reinforcing racial hierarchy, hunting down fugitives, lateral violence.

Instead, I prefer to emphasise times when these different peoples aligned against colonial power. Even if it was not for a lofty ideal of freedom or justice, I like to remember that there was at least one instance where the Miskito and enslaved Africans came together, trashing a plantation belonging to a certain Colonel Robert Hodgson on September 6, 1790, a man whose surname lives on in many descendants of those enslaved Africans, still living in Bluefields. Maybe many smaller acts of solidarity went unrecorded, lost in the overarching political tensions, or maybe not. I don’t want to gloss over such a fraught history. I am descended from both the Miskito and the Creole, and I believe honouring those ancestries involves a willingness to move beyond morally simplistic narrative. At the same time, I can’t help but have some hope that there was some kind of mutuality somewhere, at some point, much like Fred Moten’s encapsulation of solidarity: recognising that “this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”

(it is always vital to include the stupid motherfucker)

I’m still thinking about oceanic feeling. Or maybe, the obstacles to it. Interior shields, borders, antagonisms.

Also thinking about Jackie Wang’s proposal that oceanic feeling could be conducive to what she calls “communist affect”: an emotional reorientation to the limitless, infinite communalism that already exists, as long as we are never able to extricate ourselves from one another.

Fred Moten comes up again. His paper, Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh) flows through the idea that the experience of oppression, and the denial of supremacy, enables access to an uncapturable and undifferentiated mode of being—a mysticism that comes with refusing the discrete, categorised, and hierarchical concept of the human, or what Wynter might call Man. To Moten, blackness is not necessarily a racial identity—it is a “force” of “nothingness” which releases those who are ascribed with it from bounded, enforced distinction. It is “irreducibly social.” In those ways, it is somewhat akin to the oceanic. Racial blackness came about with passage across the ocean, in “the hold.”

In a note, Jackie Wang states that “insofar as blackness is defined negatively in relation to self-possession and ownership, Moten says that anyone is free to claim the gift of blackness so long as they are willing to give up the idea of home or being ontologically settled.” Maybe instead of a motherland, we have a mother ocean.

It’s terrible to have come from nothing but the sea, which is nowhere, navigable only in its constant autodislocation. The absence of solidity seems to demand some other ceremony of hailing that will have been carried out on some more exalted frequency.

An exalted frequency… cosmic effluvia, as Fanon says… and I’m reminded of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual beliefs, as recorded in Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias:

Mind-substance is the basis for the organization of self, but Alice conceives of selfhood as porous, responsive to the infinite absolute in which all matter and energy swirl. Selfhood forms, through the mind and through thought, in temporary moments. She writes, “There is an infinite storehouse of mind-substance, where atoms of thought-materials exist in a fragmentary form. . . . When you are inspired with a thought, the particles of mind-cells formulate, and conception—the basis for all thoughts—begins”.

The oceanic and the infinite are not immaterial concepts, according to Alice Coltrane. We’re inextricable on the level of matter. Vibrations and waves and grooves animate our flesh, moving us, feeding us.

I like the idea of coming from the sea. It soothes a kind of resistance to my own nervousness, allowing me to let go of an overreaching need for security. It’s okay to be nervous, to sway, to oscillate, to never let myself settle. Thinking with Kamau Braithwaite’s tidalectics: ebbing and flowing, moving back and forth in time. I still myself and quiet my mind so I can feel the pull of everything around me, instead, taking me on irregular, irresolvable paths.

Being at the mercy of external forces can be relieving. Simone Weil said “the only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.” This feels somewhat related to that quote of hers I sometimes see migrating around, about how a “beautiful” woman looking in the mirror “may well believe the image is herself,” whereas an “ugly” woman knows the image in the mirror is not herself. Being a beneficiary of conditional value coerces the hypothetical “beautiful” woman into never looking elsewhere for her worth, or never eschewing the idea of quantifiable self-worth itself. The “ugly” woman, however—who I’m sure exudes beauty anyway, perhaps uncapturable by those who believe beauty to be exclusive, hierarchical, or objective—does not benefit from that system of conditional value, and thus has no reason to invest in it, freeing her from a limited perspective on herself and bringing her closer to truth. Humiliation, whether through “ugliness” or weakness or loss of control, through being acted upon, through systemic devaluation, then becomes an opening, an invitation to untether yourself.

My great-grandmother, June Beer, was a painter and a poet. She spent most of her life in Bluefields, dedicating herself to depicting the social life around her. From what I heard, she had a deep, inner toughness—Abuela told me that she said black women have a “steel bottom.”

I never had the chance to meet her, but I like to try to discern her energy from her work. One such clue is “Love Poem,” written in Creole in 1986:

Oscar, yuh surprise me
assin far a love poem.

As sing a song a love fa meh contry
small contry, big lite
hope fa de po’, big headache fa de rich.
Mo’ po’ dan rich in de worl
mo’ people love fa meh contry.

Fa meh contry name Nicaragua
Fa meh people ah love dem all.
Black, Miskito, Sumu, Rama, Mestizo.
So yuh see fa me, love poem complete
‘cause ah love you too.
Dat no mek me erase de moon
and de star fran de firmament.

Only somehow when ah remnba
how you bussing yo ass
to defend this sunrise, an keep back
de night fran fallin,
ah know dat tomara we will have time
fa walk unda de moon an stars.
Dignify an free, sovereign
children a Sandino

I believe “Oscar” was a lover of hers. He asked her for a love poem, and she responds with what seems like indignation. She cannot write him a love poem alone; she must write a love poem for her country, for her people. She situates this love as fundamentally inextricable with all people on this earth. Even as her country is (at that point) a headache for the rich, the poor outnumber them by far, and the Nicaraguan revolution, at that time, had engendered hope amongst the people of the world, hope in the possibility of radical social and political transformation.

All love is expressed at once, for Oscar, for her country, for her people, and for the possibility of a dignified, liberated future, with time to walk under the moon and stars. Love poem complete.

My previous post talked about how you can only feel the love that is in your own heart, from learning to decode love where and when it is being encoded in action. And then, how an orientation informed by the oceanic means that it is not necessarily any special quality that makes one worthy of love—instead, it is more circumstantial. We’re granted the opportunity to love those around us through proximity and chance and perhaps fate or coincidence, depending on your beliefs. What is maybe precious is the contextual forces that allows us to remain close to those we love, and act in loving ways towards them. Being in time and space together.

My great-grandmother’s poem washes over me, pulling me towards questioning whether it’s possible to love one person truly and hate another. I wonder if it is possible to draw lines between any kind of love at all. I am unsure if it is possible to truly love an individual human and be apathetic to injustice, pain, and suffering elsewhere—I have a tentative feeling that viewing that your loved one’s fate as separate from that greater suffering is perhaps a dire misunderstanding. Maybe akin to taking the image in the mirror as reality; hoping to somehow transcend the workings of structural circumstance, to preserve a strange disconnected projection. A kind of individualism, applied to the person in front of you, instead of to yourself. Or maybe, a half-love that can only be fostered in the cushioning denials that frame a privileged life. In one of her hardline statements, one which I appreciate is more provocation than reflection of human emotional complexity, bell hooks states that there can be no love without justice.

(a little wave of grief / gratitude for bell hooks, without whom I might never have thought about the political potential of an emotional stance)

It can be so tempting to seek a little sanctuary with a loved one, to spend hours, days, weeks, even years wrapped up away from what seems like unrelenting harshness. To feel as though you’ve found that communism of two, maybe. But I’m not sure that the human capacity to love was ever meant to be contained and controlled in a single room or single person, or within a single group, a single family, or even a single country. Nor do I think it was ever meant to be triumphant. I think love is beautifully humiliating. Embracing the break, letting it bleed out.

And here comes the morning sun
I wonder if my dream will really come?

A little update: I am open for readings again if you would like to book in with me. It’s felt revitalising to practice again! And every chart I look at has been so intriguing. I already knew, but there’s really no such thing as a boring chart (or a boring person, for that matter). The link to book a reading is here 🕊️

When I was a child, Abuela told me that it was my life journey to feel interconnected with the universe. My abuela is an astrologer, and she did my chart immediately after I was born. On that night, Venus was an evening star in the sign of Pisces, setting on the horizon at the time of my birth, conjoining my Descendant. A decade or so later, when I was about nineteen and going through it as nineteen year olds do, Abuela sent me this in an email:

At the time, Abuela’s advice made logical sense to me. I resolved to internalise her wisdom. To do: love myself more. But it took much longer for me to really, truly know what she meant. To feel the meaning of what she said in my bones.

A few months ago, I was sitting down in Abuela’s flat. It was the beginning of autumn, but the weather was still hot and sticky. She gave me so many chai teabags. The smallest amount of caffeine makes my heart feel like it belongs to a terrified prey animal. However, I accepted the teabags gladly, and I later relished how they made my bag and belongings smell like spices and vanilla.

There in her living room, she spoke those words again as if plain and obvious. We can’t feel love from outside. Only within. The extent to which we love ourselves is the extent to which we can truly feel love. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be loved until we love ourselves—the most despairing, self-hating person could still be adored, could look like the personification of love to another. They could be someone’s baby, their sweetheart, their little dove, their brave bear, their own heart’s root. Their precious, special one.

But you cannot force someone to feel something through your actions. A feeling can’t be passively received. Love may be encoded in a loving act, but the receiver must decode the act as loving in order to feel the love in turn. They must have the ability to translate a loving act into the feeling of love in their heart. It must resonate with a felt sense of love that is already there, within them.

I suppose this is what underlies the concept of “love languages.” It is telling, though, that those self-help books are written by a marriage counsellor very invested in maintaining the private, monogamous heterosexual couple. The suggestion is that we learn to speak the specific love language of our partner in order to better communicate our love, to “make our partner feel loved.” There is implicit scarcity in the notion—a belief in a hardened, narrow definition of love, easily repurposed for manipulation. Thinking with Abuela’s words, perhaps a more expansive approach is nurturing our own hearts, exposing them to as many forms of love as possible through our own choices, to the point where they have the capacity to recognise the presence of love wherever it can be found.

We’re soft human animals. This is a phrase I’ve been trying to say more and more as I go about my day, interacting with other soft human animals. We have flesh that is easily pierced, and we need sown fabric to keep ourselves warm. Isn’t that darling? Fuzzy wool and soft cotton, wrapped and stitched, adorned, made especially for us. Our hearts are easily pierced, too. When I didn’t love myself, and someone did something that hurt my feelings, my thoughts would invariably land on some iteration of: which of my terrible flaws signalled to that person that I deserved to suffer, and how can I erase that flaw so that I may never ever feel rejected again? But now, when someone does something that hurts my feelings, the first thing I think is: ow, that hurt. And the second thing I think is: you’re a soft human animal, and I am too.

Many don’t treat themselves like soft human animals. Maybe they treat themselves like machines, to be endlessly optimised. Maybe they treat themselves like tiny gods who can know all and control all, chasing the illusion of mastery and superiority, and when awful circumstances align, enacting that compulsive domination over vulnerable others. Most, if not all of us are continually coerced into these strange perspectives by racial capitalist ideologies that prey upon intergenerational emotional insecurity, and we hurt ourselves thinking that limitless optimisation and control are possible. This behaviour is not at all aligned with the reality of living in the world where we can only know and control very little. It’s forgetting that soft human animals have organ brains that can only take in so much. Every thing that organ brain perceives is indelibly coloured by a complicated matrix of emotion and memory and context, which we then communicate outwards, for others to decode through their own complicated matrix.

When I remember that we’re soft human animals with organ brains, then other people’s judgments don’t sway me as much. It’s easier to not take other people’s words personally, whether complimentary or insulting. I am more considerate with communication, avoiding reductive judgments where possible, knowing that words land in other people’s minds in different ways. It also makes receiving careful feedback more valuable, as I realise that other people’s organ brains have the ability to perceive vital things that I can’t. I’m reminded of James Baldwin. I love to be reminded of James Baldwin:

The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover … If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me.

And I am also reminded of Eve Sedgwick. I love to be reminded of Eve Sedgwick:

Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of “falling in love” has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, “knowing” that another person represents your only access to some vitally

transmissible truth
or radiantly heightened
mode of perception

and if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desertlike state of ontological impoverishment.

When I remember that we’re soft human animals whose bodies are molded by history and emotion, I realise how much we need each other. Not just for feeding each other or hanging out or playing games or working together. We need to see the world through each other’s eyes. Sometimes to confirm: my sister and I, making meaningful eye contact at a family gathering, a silent yes-I-saw-that-and-yes-I-know. And sometimes to challenge: a precious friend rebuking my own self-deprecation with a “no, Tab!” before I’ve finished my sentence.

Another precious friend, Jonno, better says what I want to say in gorgeous words:

… I realise each gender, each age we arrive at, each year we move through, each person we meet, contains a singularly distinct voice and knowledge that is personally unique and valuable in terms of what it can offer the world in that moment in time, even if that knowledge is not immediately accessible. What we know as normal is only maintained as such by comparison and negation. As much as the hyper-neoliberal individualism of mainstream gender politics might ignore and detest, I was not cut dryly from the quilt of one mythology. It was other people who turned the key, undid the lock, showed me the way to glittering new worlds and unveiled them without realising. A friend described my ‘process’ and ‘style’ (and by that token my existence) as a kind of continual coming together, like a bowerbird does, making myself up with whatever was lying around: a collection of all the people I’d loved in one convenient place, as much as it was a process of elimination.

Empathic connection can be the medium through which we can perceive the edges of many other worlds apart from our own, each with their own logic and grammar. We are able to relate to those worlds precisely by recognising how little we can perceive of them, and thus treasuring whatever emerges, whatever is revealed. It is a crucial reminder of the limitations of our perceptions, grounding us in humility. It exposes us to difference, that “fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic,” as Audre Lorde says. Textured friction that enlivens us.

I can’t help but think it’s miraculous that anyone understands each other at all. Sometimes I wonder if we understand each other far less than we realise. We live our lives, humming away, in close proximity to people who have interior worlds we’ll never see, even in the midst of authentic, open connection where all agreements are honoured. There’s sides, parts, versions of that person that will never emerge in front of you. And there’s parts of us that may never see the sun, that pass through us shadowed and subconscious, intuitive and instinctive.

Even as we never get to peer inside these interior worlds, they’re not enclosed and discrete. Instead, I think intimacy is like reaching your hand into a running river. You can feel the flow of the water, and you can sometimes influence the current, but you can never fully grasp it, hold it, own it, contain it, discipline it. And it can never be truly bounded from others—the water flows to and from elsewhere. Just as the hand cannot contain the water, let alone extract what is desired from it, as the river, you cannot control what ends up floating into those fingers that reach out for you. Intimacy with yourself is much the same. A hand can only sense so much at once, an eye can only see as far as the light reaches. We’re always in a process of becoming, always fed by the rivers of other people, and always feeding those same rivers in turn.

This is the same relational energy that feeds improvisation. Learning to channel whatever emerges in the present moment, without attachment to outcome or form.

 “if it were possible
to place you in my brain
to let you roam around in and out my thought waves
you would never have to ask
why do you love me”

“what happened to the man you were
when you loved somebody before her?
did he die?
or does that man endure, somewhere far away?

our lives come easy and our lives come hard
and we carry them like a pack of cards
some we don't use, but we don't discard
but keep for a rainy day”

Jupiter rules two mutable signs: Sagittarius and Pisces. These mutable domiciles tell us that Jupiter’s purest expression is in responding to the moment. Jupiter sees the abundance that already exists in the present. We cannot receive a gift if our hands are clenched. We have to cultivate the ability to see opportunities when they arise, and we have to meet the opportunity halfway by stepping towards it. That is optimism.

Mutability also grants the ability to adapt, to move through spaces. If Jupiter loves to expand, it only makes sense that the greater benefic feels at home in signs that don’t draw lines. Sagittarius wants to go everywhere, Pisces wants to feel everything. Both orientations generate endless opportunities through what could be called a numbers game. The more you experience, the more you open yourself up, the more likely you are to find something juicy. Saturn responds to Jupiter here with a furrowed brow: wouldn’t that open you up to more suffering, too? Have you considered the risks? And Jupiter sees the message, cry-laughing-emoji-reacts it, doesn’t reply for a day or two, then forgets to respond to the question and sends Saturn a funny post that made Jupiter think of them, and then remembers to reply properly and says: yeah but it’s worth suffering for joy and you’re going to suffer anyway and also suffering is the necessary condition for joy did you even read No Mud No Lotus?

(Saturn is the mud and Jupiter is the lotus)

So, Jupiter doesn’t necessarily drop gifts into our laps, but may clear the path towards them, encouraging us to approach with curiosity and hope. Not only are we given the opportunity to expand and grow through experiencing some possible beautiful outcome, but the act of taking the step itself towards the possibility nourishes us. It supplements our faith. We no longer need a rigid agenda if we trust that the world can pleasantly surprise us. The more habitual this engaged stance becomes towards the world, the more opportunities we see. Like “fractal doorways”:

cultivate an attitude of engagement with whatever imperfect seemingly insignificant opportunities that are already in front of you, and keep an open mind & eyes, and trust in the fractal nature of reality. look for threads to pull, opportunities to pursue, and engage with people as if every one of them has something new to teach you, and somewhere new to take you that you've never been. they probably do. the more you engage the more you'll find out that this is true; trust that paths will lead to more paths even if you can't see them yet. trust that the big scary void question mark of a future contains not only unseen dangers but also an unseen unfurling infinity of options and paths, friends and lovers, work and play…

Back to being a soft human animal. When we think our life can be controlled and optimised, we often discount the possible trajectories that can emerge from random encounters. And we see the future as linear, unidirectional, with a narrow conclusion, where we hope for triumph and dread failure. We somehow believe it’s possible to predict a stable future based on extremely impermanent features of the present.

It’s true that soft human animals need to believe in some control over the future, because otherwise all motivation will dissolve away. We need to feel like we can be effective. But the only real responsibility we have to the future resides in the present moment, because the future only exists in the present moment. The past only exists in the present moment, too. We can only remember the past in the present.

This is the abundance that exists in the present, and in presence. It’s making the most of what is right in front of you. It’s improvisation. In order to access this abundance, you can gently get to know all those protective voices in you that mediate your experience of the world, living in your own complicated mental matrix. These parts, which you could see as an ego of sorts, often speak a language of control and avoidance, forming layers of residual coping mechanisms shaped by past experiences that showed us that being present and relaxed was not safe. By attempting to guard your heart from pain, danger, and uncertainty, these parts pull you away, distancing you from your embodied experience. But in the interstices of those protective thoughts is pure, radiant, spacious awareness. Like pale sunlight filtering through the shielding leaves of a sturdy tree.

With practice, I slowly learnt to see the spaces around my reactions, and sense the calm emptiness that existed around what could be considered my “self.” And when I rest in that awareness, all I feel is sensation. Energy softly trembling through my body. This mind likes to get immersed in itself, but it is just one part of my body. My mind learns to notice, again and again, that it is just one part of my body. My perceptions are defamiliarised and refreshed. It’s as if my consciousness was just dropped into my body, my life beginning again from this exact moment. My habitual thoughts become curious notions—the attachments that tug my heart intrigue me. Emotional pain and discomfort summon immediate compassion, with the same impulse that makes you want to put a bandage on a loved one’s cut and kiss it better. Occasionally, in those defamiliarised moments, I am flooded with gratitude for everything I have, almost in disbelief with how much beauty and love there is around me. And it makes me want to reach out and touch it. To really get amongst it.

Improvisation is something we do with others. We respond, and the other responds, and then we respond again. Having only played the harp for a few years, I am new to learning music and shy about creating it. A friend of mine who is a violinist came over to my place once. She is practiced in improvisation—I will note that she’s a Sagittarius—and for a while we just made sound together. I felt nervous about playing without any kind of guidance. What if I mess up? What if I make an ugly noise?

But that’s exactly what’s valuable about improvisation: it creates spaces for those discordant noises to emerge. A hand reaches into our river and something unexpected, even strange, floats to the surface, to graze against their fingers. Shame makes us want to shrink away, anticipating rejection. But sometimes we receive an unexpected response in turn. Someone who turns it into music, making the most of the moment.

“you do not have to be good.
you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
you only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”

“whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

“and daughter, when you are able
come down and join, the kettle's on
and your family’s around the table
will you come down, before the sun is gone?”

For the winter solstice, I visited the ocean. I caught the bus to Clovelly, and walked through the quiet carpark at the edge of the rocks until I arrived at Gordon’s Bay. The sun had set hours ago, and the water was black, rimmed with grey foam when it washed over the rocks. There was no horizon, just an abyss half-marked with the dull glint of stars.

Making my way closer, stabilising myself on the rocks one foot at a time, I approached what looked like an isolated pool so I could feel the seawater. In that moment, a small tide rushed over—I stumbled back, laughing, knowing I should have expected this—the water soaked one foot and half of the back of my skirt.

It reminded me of when I was learning ideal parent figure protocol from a facilitator. A relatively new therapy for treating attachment insecurity and trauma, you’re guided into imagining parents who model secure, “good enough” parenting to you, often in the form of your child self. After repetition, these internal figures can shape your implicit, unconscious expectations of relationships by teaching you what consistent emotional security feels like in your body. You can also reconsolidate memories with your ideal parent figures, slowly defusing painful histories of abuse and neglect. At times, I imagine myself as a baby, swaddled on a warm back with a slow heartbeat. Sometimes, I’m a toddler, smiling and playing, my ideal parents showing delight simply at my existence. And other times, I’m an older child doing the newspaper puzzles with a calm, steady, older man, whose eyes crinkle with affection when I figure out an answer.

After a number of sessions, the facilitator asked me if I’d like to try something different. We did a visualisation where I imagined living in an entire village of people as a child, imagining how it would feel in my body to feel safe in a group of adults, not just two parents. And then, he guided me to imagine my ideal parents taking me to the beach, and there, feeling emotional security from the ocean. My young self stepped into the water, and imagined the sensations of the tide washing over my legs, back and forth. The shifting contact became something like an embrace, a wish for closeness. It felt like love.

When that little errant wave washed up over my shoe and up the back of my legs on the solstice, it felt loving too. As if the sea had said to me: I’m not letting you leave without giving you a kiss.

Again and again, I find myself watching films centred around the ocean. And, almost invariably, the sea becomes a space where one connects with love. An absent mother, a boy raised by a dugong, a mourned son, a mourned diaspora.

The Little Mermaid, or Malá Mořska Víla, is slightly different. The mermaid seeks to leave the sea, to follow her intrigue in a human man—a charming prince whom she saved from drowning. To be able to see him again, she bargains with a witch to become a human, paying with the loss of her beautiful singing voice, the only thing that would allow her to tell the prince that she was the one who rescued him. The witch tells her that if the prince falls for another woman, she will turn into seafoam. Every step she takes on land fills her with excruciating pain she cannot express. The prince appreciates her beauty, but treats her like a interesting pet, unable to connect her to the image he formed of his saviour. Eventually, he meets another woman who he believes to be his rescuer, and they are set to marry. The mermaid is given the option of killing the prince, which would allow her to return to her life in the ocean. But she can’t bear to kill the one she loves, and instead she sacrifices herself, throwing herself into the sea and becoming seafoam. Her spirit is represented by the waves of flowers floating on the surface of the ocean.

The original fairy tale is clear in its misogynistic caution to young girls: stay in your place as desire for more will doom you. Transcendence can only come through altruism and suffering, not through resisting the roles that you’ve been given. Particularly if your wish to cross a threshold is in order to follow your own selfish longings.

Instead of dwelling in that simple moral, I think about how her choices echo the titular track on Divers, the album by Joanna Newsom:

“A woman is alive!
A woman is alive;
You do not take her for a sign in nacre on a stone
Alone, unfaceted and fine
And never will I wed
I'll hunt the pearl of death to the bottom of my life
And ever hold my breath
Till I may be the diver’s wife”

The incredible Joanna Newsom fanblog, Blessing All the Birds, put forward this analysis of Divers:

The Greeks and Romans believed that the reason women were not as capable of men intellectually is in part because they are immanent, unable to access their souls and minds because of the excess of their body’s materiality. And part of that excess of materiality was the excess of moisture in their bodies, particularly in their wombs, the site of reproduction … women were associated with water because of the permeability of water and the permeability of women’s bodies. The hallmark of women is that their bodies are vulnerable and penetrable and the hallmark of men is that their bodies are impenetrable and autonomous. There are many stories of women even turning into water (such as the nymph Arethusa who tries to escape rape by doing so) and this is a representation of the inherent permeability of their bodies. Joanna moves away from this and sees water as a source of mobility, transcendence, freedom, and knowledge for both men and women. But this can resonate with another ancient understanding of water as a realm of the earth that is unconquered, unknown, indomitable … on “Divers,” another female narrator welcomes a double-masted ship, representing Life and Death in the water. Water and its liberation can bring Death … but it also brings Life.

Elucidating further, Anne Carson states that in mythology, women’s boundaries are “pliant, porous, mutable.” They are represented as incapable of managing their own boundaries and their own self-integrity. They also “confound” the boundaries of others, opening locked boxes and doors, unable to maintain the integrity of others. And thus, since women cannot be trusted to maintain their own bounds, to contain and discipline themselves, they must be externally bounded by men, placed in the home. This allows women to be “protected” from contaminants, pollution, impurity.

The ancient wedding undertook, systematically, to redeem woman from her original roughness and sourness, and to purify her of chaos, by means of certain very specific ceremonies aimed at the dramatization and reinforcement of female boundaries. So we find in the marriage rite much emphasis on doorways, thresholds, lintels, exits, entrances, and the whole ceremonial apparatus whereby the bride is relocated from her father's house to her husband's house, from maidenhood to married status … At the moment of unveiling, for the first time, the intact boundary of her person is violated by contact: the contact of vision.

The mermaid failed to secure the love of the prince, and was punished for her desire to transcend the boundaries meant to keep her in place. But her looming punishment failed to persuade her to betray her love, and furthermore, to curb that desire. It is a failure of boundaries and control, all the way to her return to seafoam. It is notable that her father, the king of the merpeople, is the antagonist of sorts, discouraging her interest in humans and sending her the sword that could turn her back into a mermaid. She is caught between the patriarchy of the seafloor and the patriarchy of land—she chooses to die, turning into seafoam, something which cannot be possessed by either.

All of this writing has been motivated in part by a fascination with the psychoanalytic concept of “oceanic feeling.” Experiences of oneness, of eternity, of ineffable connection, of feeling inextricable from the world. When Abuela told me that I needed to feel interconnected with the universe, I think she meant something like this. It’s not merging, or union, because both words presume the possibility of separation. Oceanic feeling is the recognition of reality as it has always already existed: entangled, blurry, porous, interdependent. Particles, all vibrating together with energy, holding us in shape together as one whole.

I think I’ve felt it. The awareness flashes into me, and then back out. It’s difficult to hold onto when you have a to-do list, or when you receive a text message. But, there, together, there’s this sense of time and space suddenly expanding around me to contain everything. As if my heart just birthed the world, and simultaneously, my speck of existence becomes subsumed in a galaxy of life, drenched in love. Maybe that sounds kind of ridiculous and overly poetic. But the point, maybe, is that it can’t really be put into words. It’s just what it is.

Notably, I’ve felt these feelings most when I’ve noticed myself crushing, longing for intimacy, dreaming of being held, or, alternatively, grieving the loss of love. I see my feelings rumbling towards me like a tsunami, and as they hit my body, they break me open, forcing me to surrender myself. Fred Moten said love “incompletes you” and “fucks you the fuck up”:

… it doesn’t leave you intact. It plays you, undermines you. It disturbs and disrupts your individuation. It obliterates not only the possibility of but the desire for individuation.

Following from that, Lauren Berlant characterises a crush as that which disrupts the sovereignty of your self:

When a crush happens, what’s crushed is your intentionality. You are visited by desire. You are visited by non-sovereignty. You are visited by an inclination, a tendency, a saturation by a thing that’s both concrete and enigmatic.

I realised that my romantic feelings for people have sometimes acted as conduits for what is, deep down, an urging towards the oceanic. I chase someone, try to fall in love with the universe within a single person, attempting to meet my need for spiritual intimacy and self-dissolution within an isolated relationship. Now, reflecting on Abuela’s words, I know every time I’ve tried to touch the universe through a person, it has been another step towards being able to acknowledge that I am within that universe. Falling in love with the universe is falling in love with everyone and everything. It is falling in love with myself. It is learning to see myself as vitally dispossessed. Nothing can be contained.

I am not sure if I think of these feelings as akin to ego death. There’s something more affectionate here. I come back to myself and see my separate personhood as something sweet. Like my own child tried her best to make a suit of armour out of cardboard and aluminium foil, and drew flowers and lovehearts on it. I’ll honour the loving impulse underlying the formation of my separate identity, as a creative effort to survive in this world. An evolving collection of desires and strategies and habits named Tabitha. Seems like a waste for her to die. Maybe we could try something different. Ego fostering. Ego adoption.

The premise of oceanic feeling, however, loosens the inherent meanings that ego likes to cling to. When there is no separability and no distinction guiding your love as feeling, then you know that who you get the opportunity to act lovingly to is a matter of proximity, chance, fate, context. There is no special essence in any individual that has coaxed love out of your heart: loving is what all open hearts do. Instead, time and space aligned perfectly to bring your loved ones close enough to receive your loving acts. A different kind of scarcity emerges—an understanding of how precious these circumstantial loves are. We want to make the most of it. We feel a grief that strengthens the love.

The love in those loving acts flows outwards, nourishing other people, filtering into the light they give off, living on forevermore. Kindness and love are the only real immortality, Joanna Newsom said. The opportunity to act lovingly and to receive acts of love is contextual and impermanent, but the impact of that love flows on for eternity, moving through the universe.

Jupiter is cazimi tonight, in Cancer, the sign of its exaltation. Jupiter’s faith might find home in mutability and responsiveness, but it is elevated by cardinal water: initiating emotional bonds. We can see this so beautifully in the dependency paradox. In an individualist society, autonomy is believed to emerge out of us seemingly out of nowhere. We ought to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to take control of our lives, to steer our own ship. However, attachment theory tells us that autonomy emerges from relationship, not despite it. We feel more free to explore, to be creative, to take risks, to seek opportunities when we know we have somewhere and someone safe to return to.

People flourish when they receive care and support. This shouldn’t be groundbreaking, but it is not a logic that structures the world I live in at present. Many people grow up without the quality of caregiving necessary to nourish that capacity for autonomy. As adults, no one can truly fulfill what David Richo calls those primal needs. But sources of emotional security can be found in places other than a parent or a partner. They can come in mental images of ideal parents, or in communication with ancestors, spirits, or God. They can be found in the feeling of the sun on your skin, the wind in your hair, and the ocean at your feet. They can emerge from reciprocal care of land and country. They can be found in a recognition that love underlines reality. Time is a symptom of love, Joanna says. Time doesn’t leave love behind—love persists, time moves both ways.

Do you have any advice for when you are experiencing a lonely season? I feel like I spent the past few years building this rich and fun social life by making new friends, strengthening my existing friendships, and joining social groups centered around hobbies. Lately, it feels like all of that has fallen apart. People I used to see every day have moved away or they’re just busy with other life things so I don’t see them anymore. An outdoors social group that was a big part of my life and allowed me to meet so many new people has gotten very popular and hasn’t hosted meet ups I that could attend. I work from home also (I know I’m very lucky) so I’m just sitting at home all day and maybe going to the gym after work. I miss my friends and I miss having reasons to get dressed up to leave my house. I know this is a part of growing up and being in your late 20s, but it’s really starting to get me down. Do you have any advice on navigating a lonely transitional time in your life?

I’m kind of curious about what you mean, when you say that your social life has fallen apart. Do you not see friends, ever, at all? Or do you still see them, but just at a reduced frequency? Do you stay in touch in other ways?

I say this because, sometimes when we speak to ourselves in absolutes—using black and white language, or saying something is ruined, or destroyed—it’s an attempt to convey the strength of our feelings about the situation, rather than an indication of the dire nature of the situation itself. It could also be an accurate reflection; I don’t know your circumstances. But listening to the words you choose to use, can give you hints into the magnitude of fear, pain, or sadness you might be feeling right now.

To be vulnerable and lonely at the same time might be one of the hardest things in the world. We build self-impression through our feedback from others. We live in response. When that response is missing, it can feel haunting. Empty spaces and silences become threatening.

And then, if your mind tells you stories to explain your loneliness—stories about trust and worth—it can compound into shame, which then encourages withdrawal, and so on. You end up stuck, and the only way out is shining a gentle light on your shame, on your terrified heart, and smiling with warmth. Like you’ve found a friend inside yourself.

I hope you’re not feeling ashamed of your loneliness. It doesn’t sound like you are. But regardless, whether you’re ashamed or not, loneliness is only survived through connection. And if more conventional sources of connection are difficult to access, creativity is required.

Last year, I had a period of obsession with attachment theory. Not the pop psychology version, where people are placed into simple boxes: preoccupied, dismissive, disorganised. Instead, I was intrigued by a line of research which indicated that our attachment system works through our implicit memory system. In our current mental health paradigm where cognitive behavioural therapy prevails, narrative memory and conscious cognition are privileged as the source of emotional wellbeing. But our attachment system works deeper than that—it is unconscious and habitual. In close, attached relationships, emotional security is not shaped by our conscious perception of someone. Instead, we all have an internal working model of attachment: a set of unconscious expectations of intimacy, formed in the first years of life. A working model of secure attachment would expect intimacy to be safe, attuned, comforting, encouraging, and joyful. People with working models of insecure attachment would lack the security to assume those qualities are available. And so, they learn behavioural strategies to cope with that insecurity, whether through anxiety, avoidance, or both.

While mainstream attachment theory focuses most on the parent-child relationship, and then, the sexual-romantic monogamous relationship, I’ve increasingly felt that, as we grow up and explore beyond home, we form a kind of baseline attachment to the greater world. Our emotional expectations of strangers, acquaintances, and friends become subconscious and stabilising. And those emotional expectations largely determine whether we can feel free to move, to explore, to change, to be spontaneous, to be ourselves—whether we’re able to access, on a minor scale, some of those qualities of secure attachment in the social world around us.

This is why a nice interaction with a stranger can feel so affirming. We’re shown evidence that the world can be trusted: that strangers, and the general unknown, aren’t uncertain threat. It encourages optimism. And this is also why experiencing oppression and marginalisation can be so destructive to our wellbeing, as it shows us that the social world around us cannot be trusted to keep us safe.

I’ve been spending a lot of time alone, recently. I go to rallies, alone. I eat in restaurants, alone. I go shopping and go to galleries and get ice cream. I spend hours on the train by myself—I feel so comfortable on the train, I curl up with my headphones, listening to Cocteau Twins, immersed in writing silly little romance stories on my phone. When I get comfy on the train, resting against the window in a corner seat, it might seem naïve, but I feel a very muted kinship with the other passengers. Whether they’re loud or quiet, sleeping or working, wearing a cute outfit or their workwear. I enjoy sharing that transitional space with them.

I saw a movie by myself on Saturday. The entire theatre was booked out instead of the single seat next to me—everyone else had come accompanied. In a different mood, that leftover empty seat next to me could have been a painful reminder of my aloneness, but I focused on the feeling of experiencing the film alongside strangers. We reacted to the same things, smiling and laughing, jumping with shock. I felt connected.

Practicing solitude is about creative connection. When you’re no longer facing another person, or a group of people, there’s a space left in front of you, but it’s not a void. The space is filled with nature, strangers, sensations, daydreams. Self-attunement. Little things you notice, that you could tell someone about, but you don’t. Using your imagination to love yourself, through the proxy of a trusted figure. Creating your own secret language that only you speak. Eating tan tan tsukemen in peace. Getting dressed up all for yourself.

If you like, you could see the leftover space as space for god, for grace, for radiance. In my personal view, all of those things are inextricable from the self, anyway. It’s not just stillness and vacancy that gift us the opportunity to reconnect with the world creatively. It can come from cradling sickly anxiety. It can come with following your desire for distraction, and seeing what those desires show you about yourself. It can come from singing, screaming, or doing a Doechii growl.

This is getting away from me. What I mean to say is: when we take up solitude as a choice, an expression of our agency, and we slowly teach ourselves that we can find connection outside of conventional ideas of a social life, we can root ourselves in a way that can weather any person’s coming and going. We slowly shape our internal working model of the world to be connective, regardless of our relationships.

As Fred Moten says:

“We are in a condition of ‘quantum entanglement’. We are connected to one another … The condition within which we live is one of difference without separability. Our social life is best described as a kind of mass, massive contact improvisation; and the brutality of life emerges out of our refusal or our disavowal of that fact.”

When we’re oriented closer to this truth—of how inextricable we all are, regardless—we move closer to the warmth, the receptivity, the openness that truly nurtures connection when a person does pop up in front of us. Because we’re able to meet that person without agenda. Our bid for closeness is no longer a weighty attempt to stave off our own vulnerability that comes from a false notion of being apart from others. Instead, it is curious, lighter, more willing to respect the other’s opacity. We meet them where they are.

What if you were open to the possibility of everything falling apart? What if you looked down at the remnants of your life, and saw how interesting it is that the pieces fell in that particular pattern? What if you read the fragments like tea leaves, and then left them to compost, to see what sprouts without interference?

That being said, nurture your relationships! Enact friendship as a value! Be kind and afford other people goodwill whenever possible! Continue seeking opportunities to meet new people! Uphold mutual dignity! Don’t be afraid to message others first, multiple times even, if they’re overwhelmed and busy! We’re all trying to live on this hostile planet. I don’t place self-worth in being sought after, and I don’t care if a friend doesn’t message me first if I respect them otherwise as a person—friendship isn’t where we try to feel wanted. It’s where we get to see another person, and connect in whatever way flows. I hope this helps. Wishing you well x

What a beautiful representation of how a Saturn-ruled Mercury can be expressed. Some assume that restriction is inherently oppressive. But honouring the limits of language can allow us to dignify everything that can’t be conveyed in that language. Giving those ineffable things their deserved space.

Anonymous asks:

Hi. I came across your answer on forgiveness and I hope you know that I have been sitting with it for some time. I wanted to ask you do you think it’s possible to forgive someone you love who turned out to be extremely racist towards you, despite having built their image on this idea of A Good, “Woke” Person? Without the need for reconciliation. I am terribly sorry if this is a big ask, I am genuinely desperate and am too tired of carrying contempt for him. Thank you x

I think it might be worthwhile listening to your contempt, instead of treating it as a burden that you are carrying.

It can be so hard to turn towards our difficult feelings, but they often have an underlying purpose. Contempt in particular is an emotion that devalues and distances. Is it possible that your contempt is in conversation with this wish to forgive? Are there any inklings of desired closeness with this person, despite his actions towards you? Is your contempt communicating something about trust? Is it trying to protect you? What language is it using to communicate your needs to you?

Sometimes, the reason we can’t let go of our emotions is because they’re being continually reactivated through internal conflict. And conflict is never resolved through one side dominating the other. The other side, the suppressed side, will resist. Instead, there must be mutual acceptance and compassion. That doesn’t mean that our needs and desires are above critique, but instead, that you be generous towards your emotional responses, seeing these persistent difficult emotions as attempts at self-protection.

From my very limited perspective, based on what you’ve said, I don’t see why you wouldn’t feel contempt for this person. You love him, and he was racist towards you, which I’m assuming was also a betrayal considering how he portrayed himself. If you wanted to feel more generous towards him, you could always contextualise his behaviour: it is not difficult to be racist in this world. We all continually internalise racism as a natural state of social relating. And for some, it can become very deeply rooted, which means that unlearning racism would involve unlearning their entire way of perceiving the world, requiring psychological resources many people do not have.

When we locate someone who has hurt us within their context, it doesn’t mean that they are no longer accountable for their actions. Instead, it helps us remember that their actions are not personal, which can be relieving for us. His racism had nothing to do with you. And I can’t help but pity people who buy into racism. This kind of pity is not generous, it’s another form of contempt, that I probably use to protect myself in some way. Regardless, I feel sorry for those who build a life based on false racial superiority. No matter what privileges or material benefits it may enable, I will always believe that racism limits and deprives those who subscribe to it.

When racism plays a part in disconnecting us from people, that moment of disconnection can tie itself to a much longer history. No longer just interpersonal, the rupture can provoke all of the emotions that accompany that history: sorrow, rage, despair, shame, helplessness, grief, contempt. Loneliness. Malcolm X said that sticking a knife in nine inches and pulling the knife out six inches is not progress. And they won’t even admit the knife is there.

The wound of racism has never had a chance to heal. Excuse me for extending the metaphor, but imagine there are people walking around who refuse to see the knife in your back for what it is, let alone understand the pain of the wound. Then, they twist it. How do we forgive people who twist the knife? We can recognise that they weren’t the ones who put the knife there, and maybe they think that you having a knife in your back is normal. Maybe they thought it would be fine to twist the knife. But that doesn’t make it easy to forgive. We can remember that they suffer because they’re just walking around twisting knives without a second thought because that’s how they’ve learnt to live. They’re creating pain in the world and that can’t be good for them. Maybe some of them secretly have some awareness of what they’re doing and they’re too ashamed to confront it, to acknowledge their actions. But that doesn’t make it easier to forgive either.

Basically, I think it’s worthwhile asking what you need to do for yourself in order to feel more at peace with the situation. That might involve a more generous perspective on the person who hurt you, but it might not. Maybe it’s a matter of time, and of slowly showing yourself that you’re not in a position where this person can get close to you again. Maybe working through the events with someone you trust, resolving, integrating, turning this experience into wisdom will help.

But I can’t help but wonder if the contempt is a hint that you need more space to just be angry. Not angry at the person who hurt you as an individual, but angry that it was ever a possibility to be hurt in that way. Angry at those who put the knife there in the first place.

Audre Lorde said, everything can be used, except that which is wasteful. “You will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction.” And so many people waste anger! They direct it at the wrong people, they let it narrow their perspective, they use it to control and intimidate, to blame and shame. Lorde’s words help me remember that anger can be something that activates us, directs our focus, when we translate it and align it with our values, use it to push us closer to our vision.

I struggle with all of this too, so I don’t want to pretend that it’s easy. But I think turning towards the difficult feelings you’re carrying, and finding ways to integrate them with what you care about, will help more than anything else. Taking action to protect yourself, to show yourself that you don’t accept a status quo that hurts you, will help. It’s rough, and I’m sorry there isn’t a straightforward way to soothe your pain. I hope you can be gentle with yourself through it all. x

Anonymous asks:

hiya, i hope this is okay to ask you: for reference, i'm to mention abuse & neglect, so pls delete this ask if you don't want to answer -

i'm wondering if you have any advice for a child abuse & neglect survivor creating their own space? i'm in my 1st yr of uni (i did 1 yr at a different uni, but decided to transfer as i suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, and they had absolutely no disability support), and finally have some money i can spend on decorating my room. however, i'm very hesitant to spend money on: really anything due to anxiety around fucking up, and having been very poor in the past, to the point of not having any food or wifi at times, as well as being homeless; going from hotel to hotel.

i was never given any license to express myself, and wasn't treated like a person - i was more like a live-in workhorse for my parents; i made the family look good, i got the good grades (and was bullied by them when i didn't), was in my church's choir, etc. etc. but now that i find myself potentially being able to express myself in a new space that i love, i just... i don't know what to do. i'm so scared of getting it wrong, fucking it up, spending too money or even spending too little - not letting my inner child express herself. i am homeless since i've cut myself off from my parents, so i have to save some money for housing myself over the summer, though i'm set for the academic year. i'm pretty sure i'll have enough money for that but in my mind, if i spend even a penny, even if it's within my budget i'm going to fuck up and get it wrong. i worry, always, about spending and then needing that money later - not only for emergencies, but also just for things that might make my life better. i have big ideas for what i want to get, and they make me so excited, but they're expensive, and i have anxiety around even buying basics (hangers, storage boxes, etc.)

i know, intellectually, that i'm okay now, that i'm safe. but: fuck. i'm just so fucking anxious and so stuck. i'm in a freeze response and whilst i know what might make me happy i cannot fucking bring myself to do it for fear of the risk, of doing the wrong thing, of potentially fucking up my future - i'm predicting that i won't be able to work much after uni bc of my chronic fatigue so also trying to save up for a safety net for myself... i'm just. i'm so stuck and lost and i moved to this uni for things to be good but i'm so hard to set that shit up. i'm trying to create a good life for my inner child, but i don't know what i'm doing. this ended up way longer that i had intended, but please, if u have any advice, or can redirect me to someone u think might, i'm begging.

Reading your words makes me think of the concept of scarcity, which I remember reading about in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly:

Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don't have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants. The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. The three components of scarcity are shame, comparison, and disengagement. To transform scarcity, we need to Dare Greatly; we need to cultivate worthiness, a clear sense of purpose, and we need to re-engage.

She’s right, to an extent. We live in a culture that revolves around a strange dichotomy of restriction and excess. This naturally cultivates anxiety. Nothing is ever enough, but at the same time, there are so many people who legitimately do not have enough.

It’s important to note that Brené’s work is generally aimed towards those people for whom nothing is enough. The reader is assumed to have their material needs met for the most part.

But what I find interesting is that many of these people who live very normative middle class lives are still fundamentally insecure. They may not feel the same traumatic terror of not knowing where they will get their next meal, nor will they understand the experience of being without a home, without that core need met. But they are terrified nonetheless, because nothing is ever enough. This is why they turn their backs on helping other people, or if they do provide aid, it’s conditional and minimal—even if they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, they legitimately feel that they need it in order to feel safe. This felt scarcity also motivates conservatism, because change could potentially mean loss.

It’s impossible to find true physical security in a world structured by racial capitalism. It’s impossible to ever feel steady when profit is prioritised over basic human need. This is true of everyone, even those people accumulating said profit. The value of money itself is proffered by strange logics of desire and resource and exploitation—logics that may be a few centuries old, but aren’t invulnerable to decay and change, and wealthy people know that. To be honest, sometimes it feels like we all live in a bad dream… Dionne Brand calls it “the calculus of living and dying.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it “organised abandonment.”

So, from there, having the experiences of abuse and neglect and chronic illness, it’s very understandable to feel unable to spend, and unable to spread your wings. You don’t mention any other forms of support in your life. We all need multiple forms of support in order to feel secure. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, we need a village for our inner child to feel well and free.

I’m really glad that you feel attuned to this part of yourself that wants to feel happy and expressive. The fact that you can recognise and feel this need, even if you feel unable to meet it, is still something to cherish. Many people numb the wants and needs that cannot be met, so they don’t feel that primal vulnerability of going without. Keeping a line of connection to this inner child, affirming her that her needs are valid and deserve to be met even if it’s difficult to meet them, is self-strengthening. Keep telling yourself that you deserve more. And savor the moments when you do feel satisfied, when you do feel a hint of freedom, when you feel expressive and connected and alive. Feel them fully and let them guide you towards what you know helps you feel liberated.

At the same time, you are not your own enemy. Even if you feel frustrated about not being able to perceive your present-moment relative safety, even if you feel stuck and haunted by your past—your anxieties, your freeze response, are your survival mechanisms. It is your body doing what seems the most effective to keep you alive. And in part, it has reason to perpetuate that fear, when we live in a world that doesn’t promise physical security.

This doesn’t mean that you should completely acquiesce to your anxieties and fears and let them rule you. But I think it’s important to recognise that this trauma response is ultimately on your team, because it also wants your inner child to have a good life. It wants you to be safe above all else. It has stepped in to fill a role that is normally filled by parents and a safety net and a community of people, to ensure that you have enough resources to survive. It has learnt that no one can be relied upon to care for you, so you must conserve as much as possible.

This is the “scarcity mindset” that Brené Brown talks about. But for you, it is not something that can be simply overcome by shifting your perspective. You’re living in real material scarcity, and it’s not fair to you to expect you to get over that. It’s not fair to you, for you to feel like you should be “healed” or “happy” in this situation.

Instead, for you, I feel anger. I feel rage. You deserve so much more. You deserve a world where children aren’t considered property of their parents, and can access support to escape parental abuse and neglect that isn’t just institutional abuse and neglect instead. You deserve a world where love isn’t made conditional on fitting an ideal or standard of “goodness.” You deserve a world where you can access basic financial security by virtue of being alive. You deserve a world where you don’t have to save your pennies just to survive with chronic fatigue. You deserve a world with guaranteed healthcare. You deserve a world where you can rest. You deserve a world where you are cared for, and where you can feel the joy of caring for another too. You deserve a world where you can pursue your interests and happiness without feeling your heart constrict at the thought of spending even just one cent.

In order to navigate your anxieties, it could help you to budget in a certain amount of disposable income, or to plan to buy the “nonessential” but fulfilling purchases in advance, so you feel like you’ve saved enough above your safety net buffer to buy these things. You could also push yourself out of your comfort zone by letting yourself buy little “pointless” things occasionally, especially if they’re objects that you would genuinely love and bring you comfort and joy. Go to a second-hand store and buy some cute trinkets, items that you might never find anywhere else, a mug or vase that is like no other. Do so with full intention and deliberation. Remind yourself that fun and pleasure and joy and self-expression are needs, just as food and shelter are.

But I don’t want to act as if these tips aren’t band-aid solutions, because they are. I hope that you reach a place where you feel less restricted by your traumatic past and your experiences of fundamental precarity. But I also just want you to not have that precarity in the first place. No one is free until we’re all free. I think sometimes we’re encouraged to believe that being “healed” means winning the fight to survive in this world, which is so twisted. It should never have been a fight in the first place.

We don’t actually live in a world with scarce resources. There’s so much stuff. There’s so many clothes being thrown away. There’s dumpsters of food being thrown away at the end of the night. There’s houses left empty because it’s not profitable to rent them out. And beyond that, our planet is so beautiful and lush and sticky and dry and breezy. We have enough to all be happy and well here. It’s just being controlled by people who don’t want us to know that. They’re scared of true abundance.

I hope that you can feel some measure of connection to a world beyond the one we live in, the one where this true abundance of care and love exists. That’s honestly the only place I feel truly safe. Even just hypothetically. I know it is possible to create a place where life is precious, and that helps me keep going, even when I feel powerless and stuck and like I have no options. I remember abolition and I remember change and I remember that the land I live on and the earth I come from is so much more than extracted economic value. We are all so much more than extracted economic value.

I know that’s so lofty and broad. It’s okay to focus on what you need to do now and not think about politics or history. I just wanted to let you know that I’m stuck too, and you’re not alone in this. It’s not your fault, nor is it even your responsibility to overcome these circumstances. But living in this world is all the more reason to be exceedingly gentle with yourself, and to extend as much compassion as you can to your struggles and your sore heart, including the odd little treat here and there. Sending you love x

The morning is elusive to me as a habitually nocturnal person. I briefly studied floristry and one of the requirements was going to the wholesale flower markets to get my own supplies before class started. Every morning felt almost dreamlike: groggy, I would fill my thermos with black coffee and sip it on the quiet train to Flemington, watching the sky slowly lighten at the edges. The sun would only be rising once I was making my way back from the markets, past all the forklifts and old cabbage leaves. I remember the clear golden light reflecting off the plastic wrappings of my flowers stuffed into my little shopping trolley.

Once I stopped the floristry course, my circadian rhythm settled back into its usual routine—wake late, stay up late. But any time I had to get up earlier, despite any sleep deprivation, the cool air felt suffused with a kind of peace.

There are some interesting mythological tidbits about Venus as a morning star. The Greek name for morning star Venus, Phosphorus, was translated into Lucifer in Latin, which then became the name for the Devil in Christianity. Lucifer/Phosphorus was the son of Aurora/Eos, the goddess of the dawn. The Sumerian goddess Inanna’s rebirth after her descent into the underworld was also said to be represented by the appearance of Venus as a morning star. Going further back, the reconstructed name of the Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn ‘h₂éwsōs’ or Hausos is said to derive from the verbal root ‘*h₂(e)wes-’, which means to shine, glow red, or to be aflame. This root is responsible for ‘au’ meaning gold, and the word ‘east’. Bizarrely, I discovered that this root word also has a descendant in the Latin word ‘australis’ meaning ‘south wind’—the namesake for this settler colony we live in.

This ancient goddess of the dawn is the root of many other dawn goddesses in different mythologies and traditions. But what I find interesting is that in some of those traditions, the goddess of the dawn is identified as morning-star Venus herself: Aušrinė in Lithuanian mythology and Auseklis (who is sometimes a god) in Latvian mythology. In Albanian mythology, the dawn goddess Prende’s name is said to share the same origin as the Greek goddess Persephone. But Prende is also called ‘Afërdita’, i.e. Venus.

This connection to Persephone is also interesting, as Hausos was also speculated to be a goddess of spring, like Persephone, who was subject to an imprisonment for a period of time, like Persephone, and then liberated, like Persephone (though only periodically), resulting in the cycle of the seasons. This mirrors the descent of Inanna/Ishtar and her imprisonment by her older sister, Ereshkigal. But in that myth, it is Inanna’s husband Dumuzid, god of agriculture, who is kept in the underworld for half of the year, as he did not mourn his wife’s death (rude). Aphrodite’s name is also supposed to mean ‘she who rises from the foam of the ocean’, suggesting an association with dawn, and the Greek goddess of dawn, Eos, took on some of Aphrodite’s mythic qualities of beauty and sexual appetite.

There are many other beautiful details about these solar-dawn goddesses: they were associated with gold, warm yellow, red, crimson, and white, and described as ‘golden-sandalled’ and ‘rosy-fingered’. They were said to live on an island or at a ‘silver-gated castle’ at the edges of the ocean. They had a saffron bed. They danced on hills in embroidered clothing and spread their hands to share the Sun’s rays. They drove a wagon, which later became a chariot, gold or copper or made from fishbones, sometimes pulled by horses of shining colours, and in one instance (Prende), pulled by swallows, called ‘the Lady’s birds’.

Hausos is also known as the ‘reluctant’ bringer of light. Various dawn goddesses have stories where they didn’t want to get out of bed or they’re punished for starting the day late, which is incredibly relatable. The Homeric hymns tell the story of Eo’s mortal lover, Tithonus, who she asked Zeus to make immortal so they could stay together forever. He granted that wish, but as Eo forgot to ask for eternal youth, Tithonus still aged. Eo was said to rise from the bed she shared with Tithonus to bring light to the day. When he got so old that he lost all strength and babbled constantly, Eo turned him into a cicada. This was presented as explanation for the noise of cicadas in the morning, as well as the belief at the time that cicadas could live forever by shedding their skin and renewing their youth.

Just like the ever-youthful cicada, morning star Venus—dawn Venus—seems to be associated with renewal. Like spring emerging from winter, the morning sun warms the night air and presents us with possibility for the day to come.

Renewal and rebirth can be uncomfortable processes. We might want to stay in bed for longer. We might want to cling to our old shells, even as we grow too big for them. But, like the dawn goddess, we’re responsible for opening the gates of light in our own lives. It’s up to us to dance in the morning, to move and grow ruddy, and to make our journey across the sky each day.

Something I’ve been reflecting upon during this Venus retrograde is the gap between the projected appearance of joy, happiness, pleasure, connection—especially if you’re concerned with how you’re perceived by others—and the authentic experience of those Venusian things.

The contemporary significations of Leo and the Sun tend to centre around authenticity, spirit, purpose, heart, source, individuality, sovereignty. Our Sun sign is supposed to be who we really are at our core, the life we radiate outwards. While it is partially due to convenience of calculation and the ensuing history of pop astrology, it is also astrologically fitting that Sun signs are the most known aspect of astrology. And because of that visibility, Sun sign astrology has received the most contemporary ire. Sun signs are reductive stereotypes, they’re akin to racism and other forms of discrimination, etc etc.

I don’t disagree that some astrologers use astrology in a reductive way. I see it all the time on social media—essentialising claims about the gendered experiences of ‘Venusians’ make my eye twitch. Having a strong Venus or emphasis in Venus-ruled signs can show up in so many different ways in people’s lives. Sometimes, our Venus placement isn’t even about us. It shows up in relation. It shows up in other people around us. It shows up in spaces and gaps that are closing between us and someone or something or somewhere. Venus moves us towards. It doesn’t lie still within.

In my Lifted Brow piece, I made the argument that astrology can give us agency by giving us archetypes and concepts to identify with, that aren’t the identities handed down to us by culture, age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality. But those astrological archetypes and concepts are contextual to the society we live in. They reflect norms and culture. And most importantly, the concept of ‘identity’ itself is normatively understood as unchanging, static, transparent, essential.

Why would we want to essentialise ourselves? I’m aware that this sounds like the same sentiment that I hear when (usually older) people grumble about (usually younger) people ‘labelling’ themselves, or self-diagnosing, or claiming an obscure identity. But identification and self-labelling is not always essentialising: we may use language to describe where we are in space and time, knowing that the language will change in the future. We may choose a convenient word that cannot fully encompass our identity, just to make it easier to communicate to others.

I am thinking more about when we try to simplify ourselves in the name of pursuing some ideal self. This ideal self is an object in our minds—a parcel of desirable traits and imagery—and we objectify ourselves in order to aspire to it. We exile undesirable aspects of ourselves that contradict this ideal self. And all kinds of promises and dreams and fantasies become attached to the achievement of this self. Once I become (healed, productive, organised, rich, beautiful), then, my life will become (good, safe, well, happy, fun, pleasurable, rewarding).

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant makes the point that what we desire (and aspire to) can actually be an obstacle to our flourishing. In an interview, Saidiya Hartman says that under racial capitalism, ‘there are so many forms of pleasure that are reproductive of the order.’ These ideas together remind me of one of my favourite Jenny Holzer truisms: protect me from what I want.

The stasis and control promised by an ideal self, no matter how superficially Venusian that ideal self seems, blocks the actual gift of Venus: being affected by another. Joy from connection comes from being porous to the world. Love cannot be controlled or commanded. To me, it must always feel like a gorgeous miracle. Like a fragile butterfly resting on your hand that you cannot close your fingers around, let alone pin to a board and put in a museum.

These inherited conceptions of selfhood underlie a lot of historical violence. The need to reject what is undesirable, and to attach one’s identity to something unchanging and secure, is inherent to the western humanist subject—what Sylvia Wynter calls ‘Man.’ Racial capitalism is upheld by those who believe themselves, consciously or subconsciously, to possess inherent identities that promise supremacy. And that promise of supremacy, even as it is somewhat fulfilled within society through access to capital and power and whatever else, is still a kind of cruel optimism—it denies those people the ability to connect truly and deeply.

Frantz Fanon makes reference to this in one of my favourite quotes, which also brings us back to the Sun:

I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos—and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

Thinking like this—imagining oneself as absorptive even to what is supposedly repulsive, as not needing to push away—seeing porosity as a beautiful thing, as something reflective of connection (‘sympathetic affinity’)—this is Venusian to me. The phrase ‘cosmic effluvia’ is reminiscent of stardust, but effluvia actually means ‘an unpleasant smell or exhalation, as of gaseous waste or decaying matter.’ It’s an openness to all, a liberation that comes from being able to contact everything, because you’re not invested in pushing reality away.

The white man who doesn’t understand Louis Armstrong, cannot understand him because he is invested in that ideal image of whiteness, that sanitisation, that alienates himself from the feeling of being alive, in the body, in the flesh, in the erotics, in whatever you would like to call it.

I truly believe that these feelings of being deeply alive engender the kinds of pleasures that, instead of reproducing the order, refuse and rupture it, as Saidiya Hartman says. Loving what was never meant to be loved. Living a beautiful life that is thoroughly rooted in being alive, not deadening yourself, nor submitting to external measures.

This kind of beautiful life, I feel, comes from making the choice to open the gates of light every day, just like the dawn goddesses. Choosing to receive each day in whatever way it comes. Accepting your reluctance. Feeling awake, bare, and new. Feeling willing and wilful. Feeling anything. Sometimes, feeling nothing. Rejecting aspiration and being present to any small joy that passes your way. Remembering to look at the sky and smell a smell and feel a warmth and hear a beautiful sound and think a sweet thought and kiss a cheek. That’s what Venus is all about.

So, I’ve been rugging up. I refuse to use a heater unless it’s absolutely necessary, but I have my microwaveable heatpack, and my couch doona, and my cups of turmeric and ginger tea. I have been incredibly cosy.

Cancer is the first water sign of the zodiac. Ruled by the Moon, it speaks to emotions, attachments, bonds, family, kin, the body. In the story of the zodiac, you could see it as the moment where the Gemini twins catch feelings. Not necessarily romantic feelings. But they begin to feel attached. And that initiation into feeling is Cancer’s function as a cardinal sign. Rather than construing emotion as passive, it recognises our emotionality as active influence. Our feelings make things happen.

Planets and points in Cancer are ruled by our Moon sign. The Moon is exalted in Taurus, which tells us that lunar themes thrive most when they’re given Venusian resources: sensuality, steadiness. I find it interesting that this resonates with contemporary attachment theory, which states that we need a baseline of emotional security in our relationships with others to feel happy and well. Initially these theories were developed in reference to children and their attachments to parents and guardians, but they have now been extrapolated to relate to adult relationships, especially longterm romantic relationships. There are quizzes to ascertain your “attachment style”, and any style that isn’t secure can be subtly pathologised.

Just like with popular astrology, I feel a little worried with pop attachment theory, especially if people in distress end up internalising a label or description that appears unambiguous and static. Ironically, if we don’t feel emotionally secure, I think we’re more likely to attach ourselves to an essentialist understanding of ourselves to feel safe and minimise uncertainty.

But, there was one concept from attachment theory that I found deeply reassuring: being “good enough”. A “good enough” parent was said to be perfectly attuned to their child 30% of the time. Other times, they might struggle to attune to their child’s feelings, sometimes making mistakes, or being too distracted. But overall, this 30% was enough to create what the researchers deemed secure attachment. Most importantly, this emotional security was formed through occasional conflict and misunderstanding, not in spite of it. The child could learn that the parent was imperfect. And this was part of what was called the growing (healthy) disillusionment with the parents and the world for the child.

I’ve played a lot of what would be called “cosy games”. It wouldn’t surprise me if I’d put at least a thousand hours into the Sims 2 over my lifetime. I love the early Animal Crossing games with a passion. And I’m very close to perfecting my last Stardew Valley save—at this point all I need is more money and a few golden walnuts.

There have always been games like this floating around—before the “cosy game” title, you could call them life simulators, or errand simulators. Games where you can do your little chores. They’re notable for attracting women and girls and queer people, which has also made these game developers exorbitant amounts of money, being able to move beyond the default “male gamer” market (that already included many people who weren’t men). Because of these successes, cosy games are now a lucrative genre.

Part of their marketing usually involves a promise that the game will provide some kind of escapism and relaxation. This great piece by Katelyn Phillips talks about how these games can enable complacency, as we use these games to numb ourselves instead of addressing the roots of our pain, alienation, anxiety and depression. She notes that cosy games often involve some form of community-building or relationship-building, and that our resources might be better spent trying to build those relationships outside of games.

I agree that the games purposefully lull us. But I do not think they are always designed to encourage numbing or escapism. The early Animal Crossing games are particularly unique because they incentivise pacing. You’re not supposed to play them for hours at a time to the point of escaping your real life—you run out of things to do in a session, and you have to return the next day. But the most recent iteration, New Horizons, changed that gameplay cycle by increasing the player’s freedom and making customisation almost limitless. This meant that, instead of playing little bits every day, many players lived and breathed Animal Crossing when it came out, dedicating hours to constructing and decorating their little island. This was only exacerbated by New Horizon’s release in March 2020, at a time of great collective stress.

Sometimes, it’s incredibly helpful to live inside a game. Games can be one of the only forms of media immersive enough to numb chronic pain and illness. A study showed that Tetris can act almost like EMDR in immediate post-traumatic stress, giving us needed distraction while we process. But I also think games are their most powerful when they don’t overwhelm, but instead, integrate themselves into our lives. Just as we might look up from a good novel or good movie and see the world differently, a good game can change us and our relationship with the world. Not just through narrative, but through gameplay too. The rhythm of a game can sync with our bodies and become something we carry with us outside of a game.

If we want to sync ourselves to a game, one would think that we’d only want something soothing. It makes sense when the outside world is so stressful. But, perhaps, games only need to be “cosy” enough—“good enough”—to soothe us. Instead of reinforcing an unrealistic omnipotence, or giving us a space that is perfectly calm and harmonious, or bombarding us with twee and cutesy imagery, a game can be a place where we’re both challenged and calmed. It can have an edge, it can have hints of strangeness, it can unsettle us at times, and instead of detracting from the “cosyness”, this can reinforce the comfort we receive from the game. Because a game feels more real, more alive, when it becomes more complex in tone. And that makes the comforting aspects of the game feel more real too.

Early Animal Crossing does this by giving the villagers actual personalities that don’t revolve around you as the player. You are not beloved, you are the newbie, and it’s up to you to slowly, painstakingly, build relationships and earn your place in town. And even then, Phyllis at the post office will still be grumpy! Early Sims games do this by making randomised events that can completely derail any household—Will Wright, the creator of the franchise, noted that the initial Sims game was a critique of consumerism, as house fires would be notoriously difficult to control and items were programmed to constantly break.

The recent Zelda games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, wouldn’t be considered “cosy games” per se, but they take cues from them. Notably, one of the main composers for the games, Manaka Kataoka, also worked on Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and you can see that connection in the most comforting songs in the soundtrack.

These tracks are made to signal a safe place where you won’t be attacked. Away from these spaces, you encounter quiet, unresolved, lonely piano, or perhaps the warning sounds of battle music. But when you approach a safe area, the music slowly rises in volume, encouraging you. This safety becomes more meaningful in the greater context of the game, where you’re mostly alone and exploring and fighting.

However, sometimes you find a pocket of peace outside of the safe spaces: in the “wild”. The music for mountaintops is especially gorgeous. It has caused me to stop and take in the view multiple times, especially when the snowfall clears and the sun comes out, increasing the clarity of the music.

I feel my body change when I play Zelda. My heart rate might go up during a boss fight or drop into an unknown cavern, but it will slow down as I walk through forests, collect crabs on the shoreline, or take photos of foxes. The quiet music encourages this calm, as it makes space for hearing wind rustling through the trees, the crunch of my footsteps, birdsong, the murmur of the sea. It connects me to the geographies of the game, building familiarity. And over time, I become more capable of confronting challenges. I know I have a safe place to retreat, so I am more courageous in moving outward.

It is this ability to build your courage at your own pace that makes Zelda games so profoundly accessible. The emotional gratification and peace we feel from a game comes from this predictable gameplay cycle, where we explore, push ourselves out of our comfort zone only as far as we want to go, and then return. I finish my little chores and my little battles, I make Link warp back to Hateno Village, his home, make him dinner, put him to bed, and save the game.

That brings me to the game that I feel encapsulates the interplay between safety and fear the most: Earthbound, otherwise known as Mother 2. Spoilers for the game ahead.

In many of the games I play, your player character is a child or close to it. They’re often on the cusp of maturity, whether just about to become a teenager, or just about to become an adult. However, these characters often have incredibly unrealistic levels of freedom and power for children and young people. This is sometimes commented upon in order to acknowledge its implausibility both within and without the game. Your character’s parents are often dead or absent, to remove your ties from them and make your freedom more feasible. There’s occasional mention of you being “just a kid”.

Instead of just being an aside, Earthbound makes childhood into a central theme of the game. Almost all adult NPCs treat you as a child, sometimes being kind to you, and sometimes being dismissive or rude or cruel. Notably, spaces that would be considered “safe” in other games, like hospitals or restaurants or hotels where you sleep, feel slightly unsettling and unreliable in Earthbound, and you have to pay money to use them. In a few instances, they become places of danger.

Your battle items range from bottle rockets to yoyos to teddy bears. And most pointedly, the main character, Ness, gets homesick, a status that affects his ability to fight in battle. You need to take him to a phone so he can call his mother or go home to see her in order to cure the status effect.

I don’t know how it would feel to play this game as a child. But I know that many other games let you casually forget that the player character is a child so you can still project yourself onto them as an adult. In contrast, this game would not let me forget that the main characters were children. Even if the adventure was exciting, even if there was glory to be won, even if they needed to save the world, they still wanted to go home and eat their mother’s cooking.

And so. Instead of identifying with them, I felt protective of them. I had been given the responsibility to make sure Ness and his friends make it through their journey safely. I made sure they always had enough food or PP to heal. I couldn’t let them die, not even once.

This culminated with the final battle with Gigyas. I’d heard that Earthbound’s final boss was scary, but nothing prepared me for this:

Four children against this manifestation of horror that wants to destroy the world. Not even a person at this point, but a nebulous embodiment of dread. The main creator of Earthbound, Shigesato Itoi, said that this final boss was inspired by accidentally walking into the wrong cinema as a child and watching a portrayal of sexual assault. Gigyas isn’t meant to literally represent that assault, but instead, the feeling of encountering terror as a child. You cannot grasp it, make sense of it, assimilate it to your reality.

During the fight, the children’s offensive attacks no longer work. It is here that one of the children, Paula (in my game: Leaf), prays. She prays for safety. Her prayers are heard by all the people who helped you in your journey. She prays again and again, until she breaks the fourth wall and prays to you, the player, using a name you entered earlier in the game not knowing where it would eventually be used.

It is those prayers that eventually defeat Gigyas. The children’s strength and preparation only helps them survive.

I could not stop crying as I did this boss battle. I don’t know if a game has ever made me cry so much. The children emerged exhausted, not even sure if they could return back to their world. But they did. And then, this song played.

Relief. I felt so much relief that the children were safe and could return to their families. But the game also made it so clear that their safety was due to the love of everyone they’ve met and helped along the way, including you, the player. Instead of valuing the violence and power inherent in so many RPGs, where you have to meet the final boss on their level of strength in order to win, Earthbound’s victory came from choosing a different way to survive the final encounter, one fundamentally incompatible with the final boss’s existence: faith.

Earthbound was not cosy or relaxing. It was stimulating, interesting, at times stressful and bizarre and disorienting. It clearly portrayed the irrationalities of adult life from the perspective of children. But in the background, always, was the knowledge that those children had their own homes, their own loved ones and places of safety. It gave them a unique vulnerability I haven’t felt in other games.

And, instead of lulling me, it made me remember when I was a kid and dreamt of going on adventures. My family used to visit a beach with an adjacent park that sat at the edges of an old army reserve. My sister and I were enthralled by this place—there was a small forested area with trails that led to different parts of the shoreline. We would climb trees and scale boulders, my mother keeping a distant eye on us from the beach pier.

Once, I decided I would make it deeper into the forested area on my own. I remember it getting darker and quieter. Suddenly, I came up against an official sign telling me in bold uppercase letters that I could go no further. Imagining that I could get in trouble, with the military no less, and realising that I was no longer in my mother’s sight, I panicked and ran back.

Although I didn’t know it consciously at the time, my mother’s proximity from afar is what made me feel able to explore and test the limits of what was safe, so I could learn what wasn’t safe on my own. And this feels connected to what attachment theorists talk about when they say attunement that is “good enough” will aid in disillusionment—it gives us the courage to see things clearly, learn things on our own, make up our own mind. We learn that it is unrealistic to expect all our needs to be met, even from those who love us so much, and this nourishes us.

In Earthbound, your dad will call you every now and again, saying: you’ve been out there for a while now, don’t you think it’s time for a break? And if you agree, he will help you save the game, so you can exit and return to your own life, knowing the game is waiting for you to continue another day.

Little notes:

• I didn’t mean to write so much I just love games -_-

• There’s still room on my books for readings in late June and July!

• On the note of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley there is also this video essay critique that talks about why we consider things like classifying animals and extracting resources “relaxing” and “chill” and how those mechanics are reflective of Western ways of thinking. I would extend that further to the relationship to objects and crafting in many other games—our ability to possess items and resources is seemingly limitless and its impact on the in-game world is rarely shown. And I think it hints towards an increasing dependency on accumulation of items and collectables and decorations in games as payoff. The inventories in Earthbound were refreshing in contrast: each character could only carry fourteen items.

• I have a Cancer Moon but it is conjunct Mars, and I often find when I approach Moon topics, Mars always pokes his head in (courage! fighting! stress!)

I relate to both feeling the compulsion to speak, and also, feeling silenced and like I cannot speak. Both feelings revolve around silence as discomfort, as a sign of wrongness, whether externally or internally. It was at Feminist Killjoys that I learnt that silence can be generative. Silence is not necessarily a lack of response, but instead a different quality of response, one that can still communicate space, openness, respect, ambivalence, ambiguity. And it becomes a frame for what you do communicate—whether by giving you time to think carefully about what you want to say, or by communicating to others that you have chosen to speak, that these words are important. It respects that people have differing tempos of thought, that sometimes people translate before they speak, that sometimes people don’t wish to speak at all, and that, because of experiential histories of silencing, it can take a few moments for some people to find their voice, especially in new settings and with new people.

That being said, there is also so much to learn and to enjoy in talking automatically, in being so comfortable around someone that you accidentally talk over them, in mindless chatter, in forgetting to listen and scrambling to contextualise someone’s last sentence, in tangents, in silly jokes, in mumbling your dreams to someone as you just wake up. Words do much more than carry literal information—they become a kind of sonic buffer and wavelength. Just as our vocabulary and pronunciation of our original language shifts when we learn a different language, our communication shifts with relation and with context.

Gemini is the first mutable sign of the zodiac. We have the forward thrust into life through Aries (cardinal), and then the slowing, steadying beat of Taurus (fixed), and then, Gemini. We can surmise that, in a story that follows the progression of the zodiac, Gemini would be the (twin) children of the methodical Taurus. These kids are bored as hell. They don’t want to do the same thing every day, and they don’t want to be in the same place every day. So they leave the solid and safe Taurus grounds and they get what our brains hunger for: stimulation. They play, they bounce off each other, they learn, they follow their curiosity wherever it goes without care for morals, and in the meantime, they communicate more and more. They build language together.

But, it is important to these little Gemini bubs that things change, including themselves, because otherwise, they would get bored. They would have nothing left to talk about if everything stayed the same. Luckily for them, everything changes all the time. And it’s that state of response to all the changes, all the shifts, all the new information, all the recontextualised information, that constitutes Gemini and makes it the home sign of Mercury, planet of communication. It is the sign where Mercury can learn as many words and ideas and thoughts as it wants, and can share all of that information most readily. Mutable signs, in their responsiveness, almost assume a kind of surrender. Gemini surrenders to the information, the novelty, the stimulation, recognising its impermanence. Even cherishing that impermanence.

Although she did not have Mercury in Gemini, Octavia Butler had a very prominent Mercury in Cancer conjunct her Ascendant. This Mercury ruled her Virgo 3rd House (communication, neighbouring surroundings, learning and writing) and her Gemini 12th House (difficulty, isolation, loss of selfhood, institutions, spirituality), where her Venus and North Node was placed. This Gemini 12th House intrigues me, especially when I think of the basic premise of the Earthseed religion that she writes about in the Parable series:

Her Venus in that 12th House also makes me think of this list found in an archive of her notes, of all the things she finds sexy:

From this, I feel like something being sexy is tied to present interest, intrigue, curiosity, fascination. Hence, evil being sexy, and good only being sexy if it’s not boring, instead encapsulating the tension between being powerful enough to overcome the evil, but still human, an impure good.

Her notion of sexiness is also inextricable to what creates tension, difference, and distance between people: opposites, change and transformation, self-possession. All of these things generate curiosity. They throw what might be familiar into an unfamiliar context. These ideas placed next to symbiosis (even parasitism) seem so contradictory, and to me, so emblematic of Gemini. It helps me see this symbiosis and connection as an ongoing process, set in motion by curiosity and communication and mystery. The dependency is chosen, it is between equals who change, and above all, it is sexy.

Gemini used to be one of those signs that would get a lot of hate, just based on very simplistic sun sign astrology. It’s interesting in retrospect, because the tenets of the sign itself go against the concept of stereotype: Gemini represents an urging towards multiple truths, accumulating truths, truth that can only exist in the present moment. Not big, meaningful, Jupiter truths that carry you throughout your life, but instead, all the small truths that lie in front of you. Curiosity becomes a root, not just to the present, but to time as it flows onwards, releasing what is outdated and what is no longer relevant.

It’s so perfect that this Kelela song is called “A Message”, and it’s about wanting her partner to move on from the past, about feeling trapped and needing to be in a relationship marked by presence, not baggage. Cutting her hair is one way that she expresses that wish to release the past. “Are you even breathing” is another reference to presence, mediated by air. But the animated sequence also embodies Gemini duality so well: dynamic, amorphous, unpredictable, with simultaneous intimacy and distance.

Just as much as Gemini is about words, it is also about the spaces between words. We need air to talk, we need silence to listen, we need space to breathe, and we need time to think. As much as Gemini is connected to breadth of knowledge, information, communication, it can also point to a qualitative difference, a willingness to practice differing modes of relating through communicating, by experimentation and curiosity and openness, and by radical immediacy.

Some little notes:

• I have supported pricing for some of my reading options, and the experimental readings are very cheap while they’re new for me to practice. If you would like a reading and you’re in a tough spot right now, I am also open to negotiating lower prices or a trade of some kind.

• When I think about Gemini, I also love thinking about the hands and the lungs, and how our bodies form twin parts. Especially having a dominant hand, and doing writing exercises with our non-dominant hand and that producing different ways of thinking.

• I think it would do Gemini a service to reclaim some of the meaning that Uranus took from Mercury—radical, unpredictable. I’m going to write something on the outer planets soon, because I can’t discard them, but I feel like their place and prominence needs to be adjusted.

• To me, the idea of being “stuck in the past” or having “baggage” is perhaps only useful to convey being in stasis: not reckoning with, acknowledging, processing the past. But I don’t think the past should be discarded or forgotten—and that’s an idea the next sign in the zodiac, Cancer, is thematically linked to.

Did you know cows have four stomachs? I learnt that when I was a kid and it stuck with me. Now that I think about it, it’s strange that learning about animals is such a focus for kids. I used to pore over any book that would give me an array of animal fun facts. I miss being absorbed by things like that.

But anyway, cows have four stomachs. This is to help them digest grass properly. It’s a slowish process. This grazing way of eating is why cows are called ruminants, along with other grazing animals like bison, goats, and deer.

I suspect this tendency is part of why cows and bulls became a symbol for a Venus-ruled sign. As humans, food brings us pleasure, and to eat it slowly, to savour it, gives us an opportunity to extend that pleasure. Also, another animal fun fact for you I barely researched online: cows actively enjoy grass, especially if it’s fresh and undisturbed. A Reddit comment also said that cows will break down fences to get at clover or alfalfa. I kinda get it—there’s some treats I’d break down fences for too.

Before the pandemic and before chronic illness, I used to go for long walks in the city. I would wander around accumulating various snacks: sweet potato chips, bubble tea, cheeseburger, fancy sparkling water. My favourite was when I would walk down into the weirdly desolate David Jones foodcourt type thing, adjacent to Pitt Street. Almost none of the food looks good down there and I don’t understand its existence.

But: there is a place down there in that luxury food dungeon that sells chocolate-dipped fruit. And the strawberries are usually pretty fresh and juicy. They don’t scam you like other places that hide how overripe and soggy the fruit is with the chocolate. As if you wouldn’t notice? Fresh strawberries are almost crunchy, with that slight tang that reminds me that they have more vitamin C in them than oranges.

Chocolate is usually too rich for me on its own. But combining it with fruit, making it lighter: it helps me understand that food is a science of deliciousness. It’s more than a sum of its parts. Similarly, I used to spoon hazelnut spread into a cup and dip mandarin pieces in it. The mess it made was part of the experience.

I am not sure if walking and eating counts as “mindful eating”. I would be listening to music, walking, snacking, people-watching. But there was just something about it. Sipping a straw, fiddling with it to get the lychee pearls stuck under the ice.

Even if I were mindful for just a moment, my mind shifting from each sensation—my feet on the ground, the breeze in my face, the flavour in my mouth, the music in my ears—that can be enough. It was enough to catalyse a feeling of peace that coexisted with whatever anxieties or sadness I was carrying at the time. Now, when I return to the city, when I get a rose and earl grey doughnut and nibble at it, I feel that habitual peace return.

In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Begrudgingly, I have been learning bits and pieces about economics. As in, reading articles about concepts like full employment (which is somehow not actually everyone being employed), inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy and monetary policy, etc. I say concepts because ultimately, money and property are concepts. They’re socially produced—we make up that we can buy things with thin slices of papery plastic, and then, we forecast how much papery plastic we could have in the future, as well as how much other people will want the things we’ve already bought, and use that to buy other things.

When I did economics at high school, the made-up-ness of it all drove me to drop the subject a few weeks in. I remember learning about Veblen goods—stuff that people want because it’s expensive, not despite it—and feeling frustrated that there was no explanation of WHY people want something that is expensive. Everything was described and nothing was explained with even a modicum of depth. It was as if the people writing the syllabus took capitalism as a natural state rather than socially produced.

Fast forward to now and it cannot be impressed upon me further how absolutely made-up all the problems we have now are. When I say that, I don’t mean that they’re fictitious or immaterial. The rental crisis, wage stagnation, cost of living crisis, climate crisis, are all fucking us over, very much materially.

But it is still made up. The way we live now is not set in stone. It is not a force of science, like gravity or heat. Capitalist scarcity is not inevitable. It is not a result of so-called “human nature”. That conception of humanness—purely self-motivated, with the will to dominate—betrays much about the people who propagate it.

I wanted to write about abundance and desire for Jupiter in Taurus. But I kept thinking about scarcity and how it is difficult to enjoy things when you’re too hungry, when hunger becomes a long-term condition, not a temporary lack. It’s difficult to delay gratification, even if that might feel better in the long run, when you have the opportunity to satiate whatever discomfort or pain or struggling you’re experiencing in the moment.

The logic behind capitalist scarcity—that it pushes people to compete, to be more innovative and productive or whatever—is fundamentally flawed when you realise how much people flourish when they know they have enough. Not too much, not too little. And that flourishing is inextricable from being able to take pleasure in life, to being intrinsically motivated to care, to make things, to help.

I think, if we had the space to flourish in that way, we would maybe want these “Veblen goods” a bit less. Maybe I’m getting a bit utopian, but we would cherish the objects we have a bit more, valuing the labour behind them. We would get less things and care for them, extending their lifespan. We would not want to waste. Maybe for Jupiter in Taurus, I’ll learn to repair my clothes. It will be one way I will let this dream-future into my heart, as a sliver of possibility.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Another piece I am revisiting for Jupiter in Taurus is Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny by Raquel S Benedict—an essay likened to a political pamphlet from centuries ago in the ways it was shared and discussed at the time (at least, on Tumblr). Benedict compares the current trend for meticulously sculpted bodies, represented in popular culture, with minimally decorated McMansions—both are not constructed as homes, but temporary investments:

A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?

I find the mention of bread so interesting, from both this essay, the tweet above, and James Baldwin. And it feels kinda related to the concept of a Veblen good—it is expensive to not eat simple carbs. Yet, as simple as they are, they are so delicious.

Bread is what ties all of these thoughts together. Finding pleasure in the staples of your life makes it easier to not crave excess. Desire feels more rooted to your life, instead of a path to escape it. And the more embodied pleasure you feel—seeing it as ordinary and necessary—helps to make a home in yourself.

Again and again, I return to Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. She had Jupiter in Libra in the 1st House and Moon in Taurus in the 8th—both answered to a Venus in Aquarius in the 5th House, ruled by Saturn in the same sign. It makes sense that she was an orator, a teacher, and a lover from the place of Saturn-ruled Venus in the 5th: unflinching, serious attention on the ways structures shape us. Art and beauty and pleasure become ways to survive and even reshape those structures—“poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

Similarly, Uses of the Erotic tells us that embodied pleasure is crucial, not just for surviving, but for forming a standard of what life could (and should) be. Lorde tells us to resist the temptation to numb ourselves to the world, to resist shallow and easy gratification, and instead aspire to feel fully and completely.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ours.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness.

There’s so much else that she says that feels relevant—segregation between the emotional and the spiritual and the rational, estrangement of labor and energy from internal satisfaction, separation of sexual pleasure from other forms of pleasure. I especially love the part where she talks about work as a “travesty of necessities” rather than meaningful and fulfilling—and yet, capitalism still expects a level of investment and creativity despite that lack of meaning. Quality of work without quality of life.

Along with abundance and gifts, Jupiter brings us teachers, oaths, relief and freedom, growing friendships, repair, spirituality and religion. The kind of growth and change that flows, that doesn’t come from struggle but from inspiration and affirmation and hope.

So, perhaps, Jupiter in Taurus will make it easier for us to feel comfortable, even a bit sexy, in our skin, in our flesh. It could bring teachers to us to help us recognise the material abundance that lives around us, even as capitalism forces us to subscribe to scarcity. It could make us hungry for more, but in a lifegiving way, a recognition that we deserve more.

While we can be compassionate to our perfectionism—our attempts to pre-empt criticism and make ourselves invulnerable—we can also look outside it. We can seek a new frame of reference for who we are, not defining ourselves from how we’re seen through the eyes of others, but instead, through what makes us feel good, awake, alive, grateful.

We’ve had a Mercury retrograding through Taurus, this Jupiter ingress, a Taurus new moon on Saturday, and then Jupiter will conjoin the North Node on the 1st of June. The house Taurus occupies in your chart will speak to where you’ll feel Jupiter’s relief most profoundly. The movements of Venus will also show us where we might find the small joys, the relationships, the pleasure, the sensuality, that will be translated into Jupiter’s big joys and gifts.

And the Virgo full moon helped us usher in this particular Saturn. I think that’s really fun. Because, Saturn in Pisces will be talking to us about how to make our structures soft, pliable, able to accommodate. Soft structures that might be easier on our bodies and minds.

One example of a soft structure is a sneaker. The last Saturn in Pisces transit coincided with the release of the Nike Air Max 95. We see a shoe that looks kind of round and rippling in its shape. The design was inspired by human anatomy: spine, ribcage, tendon. It’s the first Nike shoe that has cushioning in both the heel and toe. The softness is integral to how the shoe supports the foot.

Saturn going through its domicile signs was “boot up bitch” time. We were moving through harsh terrain and needed something tough to protect us. But now, Saturn is moving through a Jupiter-ruled sign. Saturn answers to Jupiter here. Contraction and restriction will happen, but perhaps in the name of possibility instead. My most optimistic reading of this transit is that liberation will become more tangible. We will be able to make Jupiterian, Piscean dreams a little more concrete.

It also feels so weird to have completed the first Saturn return. I’ve known about this transit since I was a kid. In the past I think I conceived of it as a kind of threshold-crossing. I think youth fantasies about adulthood are more solar in their origin: we fantasise about adulthood as a space where we’re seen for who we are as individuals. Adulthood seemed to be a space of sophistication, not maturity. I thought I would have really tidy hair all the time, that I would have endless opportunities to wear charcoal suits and high heels, that my posture would be excellent, and that I would be good at doing makeup by now. That was my childlike, Capricorn Sun dream of being a grownup. I’d be wearing Jil Sander like 24/7.

I have emerged from my Saturn return without a bespoke wardrobe. I have forgotten how to do winged liner. My Birkenstock tanlines refuse to fade. Indeed, I have never spent more time in my pyjamas than I have in the past three years.

It felt like retreating into a chrysalis, hoping to become a butterfly, only to break out as the same little grub you were before.

For me, the Saturn return truly asked, would you still love me if I were a worm? If you stripped away my iridescent wings and my glamorous markings, would you still love my little grub heart? Would you do right by it?

I couldn’t escape from the present with dreams of a Jil Sander life anymore. I couldn’t reserve self-love and self-esteem for a future me that had accomplished “enough” and had impressed “enough”. Saturn made that concrete. Circumstances conspired to make that future self impossible. Opportunities for success fell through, goalposts were moved. My ambitions were no longer feasible. And so, self-acceptance could no longer be conditional. It could no longer be deferred. It was grub or nothing.

In the privacy of Saturn isolation, and the loneliness of chronic illness, I was able to embrace parts of myself I had previously rejected. I was able to see who I was when I had nobody to impress. Turns out, that person is a geek. She’s a dork. That person channels the same energy I had when I was twelve and wrote a 10k word magical girl epic for a Year 7 creative writing assignment. To some she may be cringe, but she is free.

Having room for my grub self, embracing her, tending to her, has slowly made it easier to also accept the grublike characteristics of others. We’re all wriggling around in the same dirt. No matter how strong our exoskeletons seem, we’re vulnerable and soft on the inside. We can all break. Being sick, being heartbroken, grieving, struggling, are not exceptional states, have never been exceptional states. They’re the norm. The world is more often not our oyster. It’s just a patch of earth where we try to live with others, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. Some years, the harvest is good. Other years, it is bad.

I would like to think, after these years, that I’m a little closer to the ‘hard-won adulthood’ that Toni Morrison speaks of. That adulthood seems to be inextricable from valuing ageing itself. It is a way of resisting the ‘hunger for stasis’, as she calls it. She places that ‘glory’ of adulthood as a step beyond simply aspiring to happiness. It is something deeper than that.

Sara Ahmed states that ‘there can be nothing more willful than the refusal to be aspirational’. Here, she’s referring to refusing to aspire to be whole, refusing to attempt a return to a body that has not been broken, that has not lost something. She draws on Audre Lorde’s post-mastectomy experience of being told to wear a prosthesis to help other people feel better about her loss. Lorde says in response: “What would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended on Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?”

Before the Saturn return, I remember coming across this quote from Maggie Nelson on Eve Sedgwick:

In a 1999 interview, Sedgwick put it this way: “It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” Sedgwick explains that she eventually learned “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.” Indeed, as she puts it in “Reality and Realization”: “Perhaps the most change can happen when that contempt changes to respect, a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”

It took me this long to realise that my relationship to this quote is self-exemplifying. Despite having read it years ago, and being like, yes omg so true, it did not sink in. I knew it to be true, but it hadn’t yet become real.

Returning to “Reality and Realization”, I also had never known that the original quote was Sedgwick’s musings on being diagnosed with incurable cancer and facing death. She is talking about the difference between knowing that you will die—something we all know theoretically—and realising that you will die. The possibility becomes reality.

Realisation becomes a practice, a process. Not a simple reflection of knowledge, not a “claiming of mastery of reality”. She goes on to critique critical theory and psychoanalysis with these ideas, informed by Buddhism, but I would say that it extends further outward, into the ways we relate to knowledge generally. We see it as something to accumulate, adding insight to “the list of things to know” rather than “becoming manifest as a way of knowing”.

When Sedgwick says change is possible when we change contempt to respect, I am also reminded of Carl Rogers, and the therapeutic concept that change comes from acceptance. And perhaps we can see respect as a kind of acceptance—a willingness to see something clearly for what it is, and act accordingly. More often than not, respecting something feels a little distant. It feels like stepping back and giving something space to just be. And yet, in that space, it seems there’s room for things to grow.

I made a worksheet for anyone else who is exiting their Saturn return in Aquarius. Feel free to adapt it in any way you see fit.

And sending love to all Saturn in Pisces natives for the return ahead 💙

Getting into the water is still a sensory shock though—you learn to rip the band-aid off and dive in, knowing that once you begin to move around, you’ll acclimatise. If the waves are rough enough, they’ll acclimatise you against your will, rushing against your tender belly without remorse. I feel this is a shared experience here, at this point of the continent, where ocean temperatures can be icy. And this frigid seawater is important for stewarding the fairy penguins, seals, and other migratory animals from the south.

This year there was an ‘ocean heatwave’ in January, as temperatures were 3 degrees higher than usual. And in the past few years, summer has been a time for record-breaking natural disasters borne of weather conditions—bushfires and floods. I am curious about whether this weather extremism has always been a feature of living on this land. Especially as the Dharawal seasonal calendar calls this time ‘Burran’: a time where the flowering of the weetjellan signals the need for caution. Fires must be lit far away from bushland, and waterways also must be avoided because of the risk of sudden flooding. This suggests that the risk of fires and floods has always coexisted at this time of year, and the chances of experiencing one or the other are affected by other weather patterns, now exacerbated by climate change.

Many northern hemisphere astrological accounts of these months draw on the correlation between winter and the Saturn-ruled signs, Capricorn and Aquarius. This is part of a general agricultural narrative to the Sun’s movement through the zodiac, with each cardinal sign representing the beginning of a new season. In the northern hemisphere, Aries and Libra seasons begin on the spring and autumn equinox respectively; likewise for Cancer and Capricorn and the solstices.

Occasionally, I look for southern hemisphere astrologers who have sought to reconcile the contradictions that emerge when applying this agricultural narrative despite the seasons being reversed. This piece by Brian Clark asserts that the ‘psychological’ themes of each sun sign season are still applicable in the southern hemisphere, and that the ‘essence’ of each sign ‘remains true’. This post on Mystic Medusa asserts that a ‘southern hemisphere’ zodiac should be used, and states that the centrality of the northern hemisphere is rooted in colonial thinking that centres Europe (and now, North America). This video by Spica Astrology also posits that those who live in the southern hemisphere should shift the zodiac according to the seasons they experience. The video included a citation from Dane Rudhyar that I’d never seen before:

“our [European] civilization brought its basic, not only conscious, but unconscious patterns of mind—its fundamental symbols—to the southern hemisphere. There may have been south-hemispheric centers of civilization in South America (the Incas) and in South Africa, but these no doubt had their own symbols, their own weltanschauung, and therefore their own astrology if they were actually born in this southern hemisphere. Any culture south of the equator which accepts our “north hemispheric” astrology thereby reveals its essential dependence upon societies which built these mental concepts and ways of life in more or less temperate northern regions. This is true today of Australia, New Zealand, white South Africa, and even South America; they really are all as yet cultural colonies of European nations and almost totally dependent upon social, mental and artistic patterns of Europe.”

The context for this quote can be found here. Rudhyar is also supporting the idea that the southern hemisphere should have their own zodiac—and perhaps the equatorial zones and polar regions should have their own too. He goes on a turn talking about how the poles of the earth have moved over time and that might suggest that the northern hemisphere was some kind of conduit for cosmic power. I found the wording of this sentence interesting, to say the least:

In other words, it may very well be that all great civilizations originate in the northern hemisphere, that the southern hemisphere is like the negative polarity of the globe, that therefore astrology should be "north hemispheric."

I think he’s mentioning this as a possibility and not wholeheartedly subscribing to it. For context, it was written in 1969. It’s jarring to read nonetheless. What a sweeping claim, to say that all places colonised by Europe are ‘almost totally’ dependent upon Europe culturally (and mentally?). Some certainly try their best to reproduce and even ‘improve’ upon Europe—by some eugenicists of the day, Australia was seen as a space where the white race could flourish, become more healthy, ‘vigorous’ and rosy-cheeked, away from the industrialisation and overpopulation of Europe. But it’s laughable to think of white South Africa as insular and immune from the African cultures surrounding them. I think that belief comes from a bias that refuses to acknowledge the powerful presence of indigenous people, and therefore, very real threat of overthrow embedded in colonial societies—as Fred Moten says, we have them surrounded. Australia’s settler colonial institutions and structures may be modelled after Europe, but the undercurrents, ideologies, peoples, cultures, have far less of a pure origin.

That tangent aside, I’m most intrigued by this article written by Manuel Ignacio Quiles. They suggest that instead of reversing the zodiac, one could draw on heliocentric astrology that counts the Earth as one of the planets. The Earth is always in the opposite sign to the Sun, hence, carrying the significations associated with the seasons. I really liked their exploration of each solar season with that opposition in mind.

All in all, I think astrology makes slightly more sense in the southern hemisphere if you understand the opposite signs as dialectical, in conversation. Those conversations are highlighted by the full moons of each season, which are perhaps more ‘in tune’ with the northern hemisphere zodiac. This, combined with Quiles’ theory, could suggest that the southern hemisphere is perhaps more ‘aligned’ with the Earth, or the Moon. I’ll admit that this idea is partly fascinating to me, because of the ways that so many peoples and nations and cultures of southern hemispheric countries have been oppressed, relegated, decentered, in ways that could be theorised as connected to the themes of the Moon (and the Earth?). Even the concept itself of the ‘southern’ hemisphere, of north being up and south being down, is eurocentric. (see: south-up maps)

But also, part of me questions whether astrology needs to make sense at all. And not because it is ‘irrational’ or ‘pseudoscience’—like, duh, of course it is. I’m not interested in scientific validations of astrology, including those by astrologers that assume that their theories can be projected onto others without limits. Nor do I necessarily think astrology is always just about having fun and sharing memes and being silly. I think it can be a source of spiritual strength and guidance. And, I also enjoy glimpsing the little interludes where I question it, where I acknowledge where confirmation bias might be shaping my view. I nurture my inner astrologer and my inner skeptic with equal care. I don’t want to believe in something without doubt, without space around it to question it. Especially if that space promises that my own beliefs will evolve in whatever way I need when the time comes.

I see mental space as something that needs to be tended to. It comes from looking up when outside and taking in the gulf of sheer air between yourself and the clouds. It comes from anything that slows your thoughts enough to notice the radiant gaps between them. Living in a place where astrology doesn’t ‘work’ is a blessing for this reason. It interrupts the belief, cracking it open, making it more flexible.

I got this question on Tumblr, which inspired this post:

hiya, I hope it’s alright that I ask you this since I know that you’re very knowledgeable about astrology. I’ve realised that I’ve grown to be really skeptical of it, mostly because of the really shallow ways it has been communicated through contexts of comparability or categorising people based on certain behaviour/traits that they have. I know that astrology is intimate to some cultural practices (esp indigenous ones) but I’ve just grown so appalled to how it has been taught on a ‘pop’ level? I just disagree with how like birth charts have become so deductive to someone’s personality or an astrological transit has ‘affected’ us like Saturn transits. Idk maybe I’m just cynical but How do you practice your astrology? Is there a right way to practice it?

And I felt kind of honoured. I like the idea that people can tell me things they don’t like about something I believe in… like, if I were a doctor, I’d like people to be able to complain to me about the medical industrial complex without worrying about me getting defensive. This is an invitation: if you know me and you think astrology is bad, tell me! Be honest! I will smile and say thank you and we will either have an interesting discussion about it, or I will never talk to you about astrology ever again; either way, we will both be happy.

I don’t think the problems that anonymous points out in the question are rooted in astrology. Especially as the psychological forms of astrology, those that encourage making assumptions about other people’s personalities and feelings, are relatively new. Ancient and medieval astrology tended to focus more on timing, divining events, significant periods, fortune. Personality and temperament was only one small facet of the chart.

To be fully accountable, I have done much inappropriate astrological psychoanalysing in the past. I still continue to do so out of habit, though it’s calmed down over the years. My theory is that this habit is connected to the rise of pop psychology in general—it is connected to the same anxious collective impulse to wave around psychological theories irresponsibly, like narcissism, attachment theory, trauma-bonding, codependency, etc etc. It’s a mechanism to control, predict, pin down.

If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn’t be so confounding to people, and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive. Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of colour get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything, and then monetize the ways that things move around the map. Basically literally. The museum. (Hannah Baer, Trans Girl Suicide Museum)

This isn’t to say that categories, names, and diagnoses can’t be useful. But I think it is always useful to be able to see the space around them. There is simply so much we can never know about ourselves, let alone other people. So yes, it is right to be suspicious when people try to encapsulate others with a natal chart. It is fair to question astrology’s perceived ability to ‘tell us’ about someone, or to ‘tell us’ about ourselves.

Edouard Glissant’s notion of opacity—which he constitutes as a right, as an aesthetic, as a political possibility, and a critique—can guide us in thinking astrology in a different way. Because astrology can be a language, right? And we look at people’s words all the time, and assume that we can understand them. Most of the time, we get pretty close. But there’s always a gap, always something left over. And instead of fearing that gap, that incoherence, we can treasure it. Because it ensures that we can never be pinned down, and instead, paradoxically, we can be fully felt as who we are in that moment instead. Not seen, but felt—like a texture.

Astrology can be a kind of structuring narrative, something that communicates shared themes. But ultimately, regardless of who you study, whose techniques you use, no one person is going to have the same impression of the zodiac signs. It is impossible to be objective. This is how I feel about ‘archetypes’ too. Even as these cultural anthropologists or whoever talk about the hero’s journey, I’m not convinced that it’s really that simple. Yes, a fun structure—yes, it is fun to watch a movie and play anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, historian, whoever. Good fun! But whatever you say is revealing of yourself. And the same can be said for astrology.

Glissant wrote about ‘speaking, not telling’. So, how can astrology speak to us, instead of tell us who we are?

For me, astrology speaks to me when it reminds me of my values. It reminds me that all things change, always—but at different rhythms and tempos. It reminds me that life is cyclical, not linear. It reminds me that I’m part of a greater whole, that I’m part of greater movements of people, and yet, that I have my own unique collection of impressions, thoughts, values, memories, and habits that make me who I am. The meaning of my placements continues to shift as I grow into different people. And I feel affectionate towards those placements—they imbue my life with meaning.

As an astrologer, all I truly want is for people to feel affectionate and accepting about themselves. They can look at their chart and see it as a reflection, or a map, one that might aid that kind of warm relationship to themselves. But that narrative map is always secondary to their experiences. Integrating the experiences, weaving them into the chart, is what makes it special. Not the chart on its own.

And then, finally, astrology can be a way to forge an embodied connection to space itself. Not immaterial and hypothetical—a material connection to the Moon, the Sun, the planets and stars. In my opinion, it’s good for our bodies and souls to look at the Moon, to feel the Sun on our skin, to appreciate the vastness of the stars, and think: I’m connected to this. I’m inextricable from the cosmos. And I’m not unique in that—we’re all inextricable from the glowing sky. Astrology is just one of many belief systems that remind us of that connection.

Some little tidbits:

• I do actually think that it makes sense for summer to be ruled by Saturn, but for me specifically. This is because the heat makes me weak and fatigued, and also because I’ve spent numerous summer holidays as a teenager grounded and thus completely isolated from the world. Once, the only place I was allowed to go for one whole break was my job at Maccas. I emerged from those summer holidays embittered and disillusioned.

• There’s also a seasonal affective disorder that is triggered by heat. It is more common in warmer climates. You can treat it by purposefully retreating into darkness earlier in the evenings, and keeping yourself cool.

• I’m going to answer more advice questions here, and revisit some of my older questions I’ve answered. I might make a paid tier depending on how I go.

• I’m also going to start doing readings soon! Moving through a life transition, and I want to feel more grounded before I open up readings. 🌱