Solar Returned to the Mermaid Woods
Tomorrow is technically my birthday but astrologically today is my solar return. I always tell my clients: What you do on your birthday sets the tone for your year so only do what feels really really right. On this, my 47th return, I knew, I just knew, that I had to be back in the mermaid woods since I want to be here as much as possible in the upcoming year and all the years after that. So I drove all day to arrive at Provincetown’s Lands End Inn, all soaring ceilings and bold pastel stained glass and Mucha and Erté reproductions and busts of beautiful ladies, with decks and porches overlooking seemingly the whole mermaid world. The building is at the very edge of the continent (hence the name), and I’m wearing one of those lush hotel robes with all the windows open, smelling the salt and wind and wood-burning stoves of the area. I ate very fresh oysters a few hours ago with new friends and now am drinking champagne in a red velvet chair listening to the fire crackle and the wind rustle and the waves crash and am writing to you before I open my book back up. Because that’s how I want my next year to be. The sweet semisolitude of my adulthood, garnished by Venus and the words that somehow always pour through me even when I’m tired, even when I’m sad, even when I’m not sure anyone is there to receive them. Sending my birthday light to each of you because I’m glad we’re all still here.
Love and Capricorn Rising
It’s a new moon in my native sign of Capricorn just a few days before my birthday and it’s all happening within degrees of Capricorn sitting pretty in my natal chart. What does this mean? you astro-laypeople say, not bothering to hide your rolling eyes. It means that I don’t just have good wind on my back. I have a gust–a freaking tornado–pushing me fast and furious in the direction I need to go, and I’m exhilarated. In the last few weeks life has been exhausting but today I woke up and just wanted to write write write and practice better magic than I’ve ever practiced before. Thank Goddess, I say. This aspect is not comfortable but neither is false comfort, which is basically the lesson of that shitty new bed I bought because I was cheaping out. Trust me when I say Capricorn doesn’t brook with such short cuts (and that I’m sending back said shitty bed today). So yeah, this is all about me. But to you I say: ENJOY A NEW MOON IN CAPRICORN WHILE THE SUN IS ALSO IN CAPRICORN. Hell, there are a ton of planets in Capricorn right now, and so this moment is about making it happen, captains, and suffering no fools–not even yourself.
Self-portrait by Cindy Sherman, my astro-twin and a true Cappie queen.
I’m So Sorry, Dolores
When I woke this morning, all I wanted to hear was the sweet sadness of Dolores O’Riordan, whom I listened to every day during the sweetest saddest period of my young womanhood and who died yesterday, only days before my 47th birthday, which really is the death knoll for any young womanhood no matter how well your people age (and mine age pretty well, dammit). When I listened most to Dolores and her Cranberries I was living with a man who took care of me but did not love me and whom I did not love. We had been performing a twentysomething fascimile of an old married couple and, really, it had been draining both of our life forces. We were just scared of everything else, especially of who we really were. Him: gladly, glamorously superficial. Me: a witch, not meant for anything but what I could conjure from the ashes of purple violets and patriarchy. Continue Reading →