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Morning Without Venus

October 9, 2018 in Age Matters, Art Matters, Astro Matters, Queer Matters, Spirit Matters

Detail from “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí.

Sad and lonely, that’s how I wake during this Venus Retrograde in Scorpio. The regret of what should have been said, could have been done. How love was failed, how missed opportunities loom–that dropped ball, unacknowledged joke, declaration unmade. How doors were shut and labors were lost and hopes were shattered. Again. Again. The so so so many ways we missed each other because of scars already sustained, burdens already borne. The clock ticking-ticking-ticking–no time, no space for the messy, complicated ways of wounded people who still want love. To give it, to receive it. To improve, to learn. It’s not just you. It’s not just me. It’s just sad.

And lonely.

I open social media despite best intentions and a Yuseff Lateef quote gleams:

Loveless moments are to be avoided.

I nod twice, fast. Then fight back yet more tears. Because: how? Love thrives in kairos, not chaos. I flash on the first time we had coffee. In his 1940s rasp, chewing gum no less, he’d said: “We’re all broken!” And that foxhole solidarity, so cheerfully delivered, made me sure we could fulfill the promise of our shared smiles.

When will I learn? We cannot protect our hearts by protecting our hearts. The only way forward is to open, wide.*

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* There’s a joke in that.

Astro PSA: Venus Retrograde Rage

October 6, 2018 in Astro Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Spirit Matters, Style Matters

For two days I dreamed that I caught a man in the act of stealing my wallet, phone, and keys—my identity, essentially— and that he was arrested and forced to return my possessions. These were triumphant, and triumphantly bald, dreams. Last night I dreamed someone stole my wallet—a pleasing, lemony yellow—and replaced it with a neon-green fannypack, neon green being one of the few shades I will never, ever embrace though I do in fact own such a horror. (It’s handy.) In the second part of the dream, I found a pair of denim jeans that elegantly nipped in my waist and made my ass a buttercup dream. I laid them aside for a pair of 90-style mom jeans that made my ass an endlessly flat expanse of Midwestern mall terrain.

Which is to say that, yes, Venus finally went retrograde yesterday. I’ve been whining about its shadow since early September, but only now is the planet really moving backward.  Lasting unofficially until the end of the year (officially it goes direct November 16), the retrograde is taking place in Scorpio, which imparts lessons about old wounds and hidden meanings, and Libra, which is ruled by Venus and thus a hot mess when mommy takes a breather. Continue Reading →

Erma Bombastic’s Bruja Penicillin

September 26, 2018 in Astro Matters, Feminist Matters, Food Matters, Queer Matters, Recipes, Spirit Matters

Monday was a full moon, an especially powerful one since it followed on the heels of the autumn equinox. Both aspects were all about conserving energy–letting go of what wouldn’t serve in the long, dark nights to come.

That made so much sense that I didn’t want to waste precious energy talking about it. Actually I didn’t want to talk about anything, which I feel more and more as toxic masculinity holds the country hostage in its hideous, withered talons. People keep saying this is its dying gasp, but if there’s one thing I know about power theory, it’s that those who have power never willingly cede it. Revolution is always necessary for systemic change, and most of us in the second year of 45’s oligarchy are too rundown to be as radical as is required.

To be clear, I don’t just feel this poison in the political realm–I feel it in my personal life, my professional life. My DNA. My pussy. And it’s exhausting. Male entitlement has completely drained me. I feel ill–headachey, dyspeptic, itchy, restless. I check my phone a billion times a day, I toss it across the room a billion and one times more. I’m not hungry, I’m too thirsty. You get the point.

So when I got home last night from a particularly trying day on the front lines of the cockacracy, I eyed that big beautiful moon and my disaster of an apartment (I’ve really let things slide since Beau stopped coming by), and resolved to concoct a special chicken soup. This witch’s brew didn’t heal me all at once, but it infused me with the power and wisdom and charisma of Diana and Sophia and Oshun and Yemaya and both Marys and of course Aretha. Also it tasted pretty good. I woke soothed and energized, ready to rise like a pheonix from this country’s flames.

Here’s the recipe. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy