MARCH 2016 Galactic Rabbit Horoscopes

Dear March Hares,

I don’t know what it’s like where you are but here in Brooklyn I’m walking around with no coat on and tights as pants (forever and ever). It is glorious and I feel hopeful which is something I haven’t truly felt in a long time. I’ve been reading the first and earliest of Susan Sontag’s notebooks and thinking about what it might be like to feel hungry for knowledge all the time instead of hungry for money (which is just a True Fact about living without a net).

It took me a long time to write these letters for you and I’m sorry if you feel I’ve kept you waiting. In the olden days, a love letter might have simmered for weeks in the secret inner-skirt pocket of a mistress before finding its way into the hands of her desired recipient. And, perhaps we don’t live in the olden days but I will tell you that we might as well because yesterday afternoon, on Bedford Avenue, there were lots of ne’er do wells sipping absinthe and strange unnecessary inventions in the shop windows (an IPhone charging oak log?). Not one coffee shop took cards or had Wi-Fi. It was basically the France World Fair of 1889. I’m not making excuses, dear readers; I’m just taking my role in this elaborate scene, a writer en plenair.

Before you read the text ahead I just want to thank you for inspiring me, for trusting me, for all your generous loving notes and comments. One day, when I am an ancient crone, I will take out an old USB—a relic!—and plug it into some sort of magic converter that will project all your beautiful words across my ocean-floor apt. I will do this every night to remind myself that I did a little good in the world.

Clearly Feeling Silly & Free,
Galactic Rabbit

P.S. Thank you CLAIRE SKINNER for saying yes or no to everything.
P.P.S. Thank you Marina for making me get into downward dog.
P.P.P.S. Thank you to everyone who supports this writing all the time. Special thank you to my former boss Kim Menig because for some reason I get teary eyed about it.

If you want to support the writing of these horoscopes here is the PayPal. I love you!

 

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Aquarius

Dear animal, aren’t we both animals? Don’t you hunger like me? Don’t you feel trapped, don’t you spend your days imagining the many powers you were meant to cultivate if only… Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself—perhaps that’s not what animals do. Animals survive, they move by instinct and desire. Animals, it seems, are compelled by empathy—but they are not ruled by it. Animal compassion has no god.

But, you have a god, a god that holds justice in one hand and reason in the other. Dear animal, justice lowers her head in the face of love. Here is another Aquarian woman who wrote about love as a kind of freedom and freedom as a kind of drowning: Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

                                                                                    Kate Chopin / The Awakening.

If love is an opening in the self—it is also destruction. The things we depend on obliterate us and build homes out of our ruins. When you listen to the god of reason, you move through this world, through relationships and cities, intact and unharmed. When you are an animal, the world breaks open from under you and everyday you serve your hunger. Both ways of living offer up a kind of freedom and survival, but only one of them will push you to thrive.

 

Pisces

I want to picture you walking along the Coney Island shoreline for hours, with the fog laid thick on the Parachute jump, and the ocean slapping the salt rocks. Dusk setting, the attraction lights rise up in the distance like new stars. Climbing into an empty lifeguard chair, you watch the sunset—a beautiful fluorescent gasp in the sky you suspect might be pollution. The moon is for you tonight and her abundance scares you just like the enormity of the night sky pressing up against the very breath of your body scares you.

The fear of this world swallowing you whole in its starry mouth is not dwarfed by its impossibility. All night you’ve been feeling the very real fact of your aloneness in the world, the way we are made and the way we die. It will do you no good to think of these things further.

When your lifeguards chair—your small oasis—rattles, it’s because a lone child climbs up the stripped metal rungs and finds you. She isn’t wearing a coat and she isn’t yours but, like you, she belongs to the ocean. This child is drawn to the strength in you, the very real sweetness that lives behind all your anxious gestures and moments of cruelty. She knows that it’s your turn to be the healer now. Tell her what beauty is, what living means. She is looking to you to teach her how to look fiercely back at the world and be the one who loves more.

 

Aries

How do I come into my own company—an ablution of the night’s stock film. The wall is a neutral board to echo off or to limit my veins and learn their urgency. I am seen when lost, void of language. When a formless whisper overtakes the airwaves. I am seen most exactly with open palms.

                                                                        Sara Renee Marshall / Multiplicity

I haven’t lived long in this room, the one I’m writing you from. Most of my walls are bare and there are only two plants—which is unlike me. When I think of beautiful rooms, I think of you: your blinking red lanterns and sky blue linen comforter. That one time you built a fairy arch around your tent, how you beckoned me to kneel down and notice the sweet little accents of collected moss. Recently I found a card you gave me and considered framing it. I am happy enough with my life for now, you wrote. The people who surround me give me love & hope. I’m just suffering a little bit with myself.

Today, I am thinking about that suffering, your bright young heart buoyed by love in the river of your uncertainty. These months have been a kind of mixed blessing—you worked so hard and then—doors opening with possibilities, but somehow just out of reach or not quite soon enough. You generated what you could, you kept the fire in the hearth and made good on most promises. And the days and your nerves and your body wore on.

What might you need to do to fill the beautiful room where you keep your bright hope? From now on, imagine yourself as deserving abundance. Who would you get to be if you let yourself have more than just enough?

 

Taurus

Towards the end of last year, I went to see a friend’s work in a group show. Despite my interest, I became overwhelmed by the overcrowded space and left within fifteen minutes of arriving. But, not before grabbing one of the show’s few offerings: a lone poem with no mention of author that sprawled generously around its small page.

Pay close attention // and   a long, slight     neck. // An elegant // refusal // may be // all you get. // I don’t think // I was a little boy // or // a little girl, // I was just terrified. // that can’t be right.*

I brought this poem to my girlfriend, whose childhood I imagined near those last lines. I took it to Pittsburgh; I carried this poem around the Cathedral of Learning. A week ago, I spent an evening with a poet who is Pittsburgh MFA bound and delighted in the easiness of his company. Tonight, re-reading the small found poem, I realized it must be his.

What I’m trying to tell you, reader, is that the world is stitching your thread across more lives than you can imagine. I know you drag the loss of friendships (and the dreams intimacies engendered) like drowned boats behind you—if bodies were oceans, if oceans were archives. But you are meant for great things, Taurus. Because of the nature of your heart, its steadfast coming, the world rushes to meet you where you stand.

                                                                                                           *Grey Vild

Gemini

Your face was an instant relief despite the fact that I was not aware of my own suffering. I wanted to keep your attention, keep you near. I jazz-handed my way through the hors d’oeuvres table, talking up the chips and goat cheese cups, and you played along. It’s as if we were right back where we started, years ago at an artists’ retreat. And this is where memory gets murky; where I can’t remember any one specific moment that felt deeply ours, where I can’t quite find the root of the affection. Yet it’s obvious, flexible, and untethered from time.

Gemini, as this world shrugs off winter’s last cold front, I can feel you aching to do the same. If you think the weight of these last few years—the missteps and setbacks have squandered your radiance, you’re wrong.

There is no one who is near to you who does not love your light—even if you keep most of it to yourself these days, even if you are afraid to be seen lest you are seen the wrong way. It’s getting warm and so sweet outside, I open my windows and my block is loud with neighbors chatting and sunning on their stoops. My record spins and the music mixes with the street sounds. This afternoon, I am one of them and I’m thinking of you. Open yourself to the affections of others by asking them in, making concrete plans and do your best not to break them. You don’t have to wait until you’re “at your best” to receive the support you need. Your heart is at its best all of the time.

 

Cancer

Dear sweet friend, I try my best to make sure that the artists I reference in each love letter I write are matched to the sign I write them for but, this month, I am compelled to move away from tradition. Today, I am remembering the many different ways we have tried to be strong for one another and how, when it came to heartache, you were the one tending to mine. I’m not sure how to tend to your heart, which is obvious and guarded all at once (crab life), so instead I’ve put on a song that reminds me of you.

I’m sorry that I left you with your questions all alone / But I was too happy driving and too angry to drive home / I was thinking about the easy courage of my distant friends / They said, I could let this bridge wash out and never make amends.

                                                                                    Dar Williams / Spring Street

Because it is Spring, because once we thought we could change the world with our big brains and at night, after all our thinking was done, we’d blast these songs on full volume and shake the whole house.

But I’ll push myself up through the dirt and shake my petals free / I’m resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery

Because outside of our house, there was a large still lake and a tree full of crows, because any pain we felt in those years is a small pain now. If you are hurting today, Cancer, what I want you to remember about disappointment and injury is that they are strongest in the places where they occur. Wounds are tethered to their origins but you are not. You can be strong anywhere.

 

Leo

I’m in downward dog and you’re on the speakerphone. “I should get you a Bluetooth like mine,” you complain because my head is hanging between my arms and you can’t quite hear me. “I’ll never use it,” I reply, mostly in truth and mostly because I don’t want you to spend what little money you have on me. “You’re right,” you agree, “first I’ve got to get you some new curtain rods.” You hate my curtain rods and maybe I hate my curtain rods but they’re not top priority so instead I ask, “If you had a big bowl of fruit right now, I’m talking the best of the best—perfectly ripe and good—what fruit would be in it?” We discuss the last time we had nectarines, the undervalued luxury of the perfect apricot.

This is something like that scene in Hook when Robin Williams as Peter Pan leads the Lost Boys in an imaginary feast which soon transcends their imaginations and sustains them.

If I was a rich girl… I would probably sell out just like Gwen Stefani did…and I would buy you so many things. But, since I’m not, since you’re not, our innovation and work ethic will have to do for now. In that vein, it might do to remind yourself that, contrary to some collective beliefs, money might not buy you happiness but it can grant you opportunities. For that reason, the line between pride and integrity is not well defined. It’s our job to re-draw our vision of it each time.

  

Virgo

When I first moved in with you, I had no idea how we would get along. Walking into your small nook of a bedroom, I found fuzzy green-framed corkboards, Disney posters, and curtain to rug hot pink accents. You played a lot of Dave Matthews Band, an affliction affecting 75% of the college-going residents of upstate NY, which I found ultimately confounding. Despite those factors, or precisely because of them, I fell into enduring and admiring friend love with you.

Who else would collect money to build water wells in Darfur using posters doused in glitter? Who else would wake me every morning and roll my body to the gym? Who else would teach me the true pleasure of an Eggo, PB, and Fluff sandwich?

In loving each other we pushed each other to become the biggest baddest version of ourselves. You taught me that it was OK to believe in the impossible goal of making the world a better place. And I helped you discover The Goddess, which I think is a pretty substantial contribution.

When we were young it was easy to become new, to abandon the preconceived selves that we carried. Now it seems like the harder we try to take chances, the more difficult it becomes. Perhaps what we need to remember is that evolution felt most natural to who we were when we loved something more than we ever expected and were not afraid.

 

Libra

When I was young I did not understand that I was serious. Now I understand and can only vaguely do anything with that information except point back at what I made and say, See? I’m such a libra. Libra bodies are co-dependent.

                                                            Hannah Ensor / Ms. Dryer and the Good Man

Today I’m thinking about what it means to put in the work. In the past few months I’ve constructed some kind of new career for myself in which I visit the homes of successful female artists and help them with their unwanted tasks. Sometimes these tasks are ones I’d find pleasurable without payment, organizing the quirky wardrobe of a Scorpio welder, tuning the receptivity of LED lights for an Aries painter who speaks Electricity. Sometimes they teach me a great deal, like the fact that I can send out one grant application per day for someone else but can’t manage to write one single cover letter for myself without contemplating faking my own death.

It’s easier, of course, to put in the work for someone else. Putting in the work for yourself can often feel like a last ditch effort toward survival. Clearly, this kind of relationship to self-fulfillment isn’t a very good one and it’s not easy to change. To change direction, to put in the work for one self, one might have to trust that their life and ideas matter. There are many factors in this world that can make that seem impossible but trust me when I tell you this: those factors are just evil apparitions that don’t belong in your beautiful (one, precious) life.

 

Scorpio

Last night, strolling the streets on what felt like an unseasonably warm night, my lover and I were beckoned into a bar with its barn doors wide open. Inside, the young hip artists of Bushwick gazed over their IPAs at a Democratic debate on UNIVISION. The screen turned to a Guatemalan immigrant named Lucia, whose five children were seated nearby. She explained that her husband had been deported some years ago. “I have a great pain,” she told the two candidates on stage.

When Bernie (Virgo) responded, he was quick to underline his role as her most trusty champion. “I absolutely support that,” he began, “At the heart of my immigration policy…the most progressive and strongest of any candidate…” Despite this impersonal approach, Bernie was quick to guarantee results—his vision of the future as mutable as his sign.

Hillary (Scorpio), on the other hand, began by saying, “Please know how brave I think you are, coming here with your children to tell your story. This is an incredible act of courage that I’m not sure many people understand.” If the rest of that response hadn’t devolved into roundabout talking and indirect promises—she could have won Lucia’s heart and her vote. Unfortunately, it’s very hard for Hillary to make big promises she can’t keep because Scorpios hate lying and only do so when pressed. This trying not to lie and then surrendering for the sake of image is obvious in most of her responses.

In that moment, I understood something about Hillary and something about Scorpios who have always felt at the edge of being great. When we treat the world as if it is as fixed we are—when we speak of the world as if it is unchangeable, we perpetuate spiritual weakness. When we listen, when we lay aside our bitterness at not being seen and our need to prove ourselves to others—it is then that our strength and kindness is most visible. It is then that we get the love that we have been trying to prove we deserve.

 

Sagittarius 

It’s easy with us, you say as you steer your Jeep off the thruway and into the backstreets of Williamsburg. Our date was short but fabulous: female drummers stationed throughout Brooklyn Museums’ many exhibits, telling a story of solitude and collective strength with their rhythms. I agree it’s easy, the way I can slip my arm through yours or not, the way you look where I am looking and remark, “Eye-candy” without a hint of jealousy. We’re both tired already after a day toiling away at our jobs and proud that we’ve stayed out this late. We can get a drink or I can drive you home, you offer and there is no weight in either option.

This sort of erotic friendship is a treasure and we have earned it. In the car we talk about your instinct to pull back when pursued—even if you are interested, even if the other person “makes sense”—and I am not surprised. I remember when you pulled back with me, I remember the way every Sagittarian I’ve loved pulled back first so that they might glimpse at the bigger picture.

Dear Archer, there will be years when life demands you jump in headfirst, years when the bull will find you and well… the horn etc. This is not one of those years. Trust your instinct, your steady meditation between want and resistance. The journey you are on now will create a major shift in your life. Choose the path with your full heart this time, don’t let the path choose you.

 

Capricorn

Last night over what felt like (and was) an absurd amount of meat and a pitcher of Sangria, we played my favorite game, the one where old friends recount their own versions of a shared history. Who was the one ostracized? Who was left the most unscathed? “Oh that boy, he hated me because I wouldn’t fuck him,” I said. “Remember when you made him hold his sweater up as a partition on the train while the two of us made out” you interjected, “so that he’d really get the point?” Of course I didn’t remember. Of course my memory clung so tightly to my own suffering, it forgot about cruelty.

Morality informs experience, not the reverse. I am my history, yet in my moral desire to understand my past, to be fully self-conscious I become precisely what my history demonstrates that I am not—free.

                                                                        Susan Sontag in her diary, 26 years old.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately, not so much as an idea but, rather, as a practice. At a women & non-binary writers’ retreat hosted by the inimitable Rachel McKibbens (cap-witch), Airea D Matthews (Virgo/libra Empress) stood tall before a yard of human stars and commanded us to “Bitch, Get Free!” Tattoos followed and they were bitchin’ but we all know getting free is easier tattooed than done. Getting free, it seems, is a daily exercise in mindfully surrendering the stories we carry about who we are and what we deserve in favor of the unknown possibility. In order for a goat to move on from injury and into her strength, she must let go of her injured-memory.

February Lunar Love Notes!

Dear February Rabbits,

 

Because I am Russian/Ukrainian and grew up in Little Odessa By The Sea, Brighton Beach, I have looked forward to the Lunar New Year for as long as I can remember. Starting January first (inaccurate, I know), old men with furred hats would roll out their carts full of that year’s animal from the Chinese Zodiac. Aunts and in-laws would arrive at our apartment with tiny charms to dangle from our wrists or cellphones. There was magic in those small charms and a ritual power I grew up belieiving in. Some winters ago, under a full moon, my mother told me that her older sister Anya would raise her fat beaded purse to the full moon and waggle it chanting “Goddess do you hear me? Goddess give me money!” That is why this weekend I bought two gold coins molded with monkey images, one for me and one for a friend. For money. For luck. For welcoming whatever comes next with red hot energy.

Welcome the Aquarian New Moon, lovers, and the year of the Red Fire Monkey. The year when all the work we’ve done, all the drudgery and mud slapping, gives way to clarity and swift rewards. The year that each tiny revolution in our spirit will bring forth magnificent consequences.

 

All Charms Come To You,

Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. THANKS CLAIRE SKINNER! Again always forever.

P.S. Thank you all readers for your love notes and support and yes I screenshot each one and save it and look at it when I’m sad.

P.P.S. If you’d like to contribute to the making of these horoscopes and my Red Monkey Year, here is a little link: PayPal!


 

 

 

Aquarius

In her essay “Other Balms, Other Gileads,” about being positive, and queer, and poor, and fucking run down, Bryn Kelly writes: Does the soul, which has been degraded by poverty, by neglect, by racism, by homophobia, the soul that has always been told it has nothing to live for, now, somehow, have the promise of tomorrow? Of hope and everlasting life?

Yeah, right. Gimme a break. She wasn’t born yesterday. But she has to admit; it all has a certain resonance.

This summer, in order to take regular breaks from a bad living situation, I frequently slept over at my friend’s apt. Every morning, she would leave early for work and I would descend the bunk bed (that she built herself) slowly, carefully. At ground level, I’d come face to face with a light box, an index card tucked in its corner. On the card, written in rainbow pencil, was my old mailing address and the sentence When you lift someone’s load, you don’t allow them to expand. These two notes seemed purposely paired together—where I’m coming from and where I’m going. I wondered if sleeping at her place, if finding relief instead of solving the issue—was my fear of expansion.

My avoidance, my lack of trust in my own ability to thrive, I inherited them from my mother, from poverty, from a country that never wanted girls like me to succeed. With depression, suffering is a speculative genre, wherein we all attempt to catalogue the heaviest weight so that we might shrug it off. It’s harder to chart the loss we endure from years spent under a rock, expanding. The people we forget we have every right to be. Still, I think it only fair that you try your best, Aquarius, to find out just how much this past year of endurance has taught you. Test your limit. You’ve made it this far so why not go farther?

 

Pisces

You call me and night fills up with the crackle of your laughter. Every person that has done you wrong, every bad turn, you roll them like olives on your tongue and suck the pit right out. In a story we tell ourselves when we are afraid to grow: we are always the ones hurt, we are always the ones abandoned, we are always the ones who lose. Stories, like prayers, are more powerful the more we believe in them.

When you say—I am the one love falls from—you open your hands and let go. You compromise your heart in order to protect it and then you are the one love falls from. But what if I told you that you are not that one? What if, all along, the world has been asking you to hold on a little harder?

Pretend memory is not a

hangover. Find a cure. Viola Davis my way

through a room with no wig. Call you bigot

to your face. Keep my hunger for pushing

my fingers against the wall of a lover’s writhing.

I’m feeling myself on the dance floor,

in the bedroom of my witching hour. 

What if the story of your life was not about suffering for the sake of benediction? Imagine a world wherein you have always been strong enough to forgive whatever harms you. It can be hard to finally feel strong but, Pisces, you are different then you once were—kinder at the core and luminescent. I wish you could see with clear eyes the many ways you were cared for—each of us your mother as if we knew how to be mothers.

 

Aries

How strange this silent longing for death,/ as if you could make the sun not come up,/
the world’s wheeling and wheeling its seasons/ like a cruel continuation of stubborn force.

I just took a break from writing horoscopes to make my very first ever batch of Rice Krispies treats. Melting the butter slowly in the pan and cutting the big puffs into smaller puffs, I thought about time—how it slips away from us or how we try desperately to get ahead of it. It was a funny thing to do—cut marshmallows into quarters—they stuck to each other and to me. Still, I kept doing it, one after the other. Days are like this too; we cut the whole into halves and smaller, smaller, trying to make something easier, to separate the ingredients of ourselves from ourselves.

Bear with me while I make a sudden turn. The crispy mess that might be a sweet tooth’s heaven is cooling in the refrigerator and I’m trying to tell you that the time you put in doing “the work,” no matter how tedious or seemingly unnecessary, it was not for nothing. Each gesture toward self-care: the exercise regimens, the therapist appointments, that time when you chose a little sanity over a little money.

But that’s not how it happens. Instead, light / escapes from the heart’s room and for a moment / you believe the clock will stop itself. Absence. / You see: light escapes from a body at night / and in the morning, despite the oppressive vacancy / of her leaving’s shadow, light comes up / over the mountains and it is and it is and it is.

It matters, the small things we do for each other and ourselves so that life can be a little brighter—a little more bearable.

 

Taurus

“Writing is not the body. Neither is the house. The body is the body.”- Claire Skinner

I have a secret dream where you come back to me. My face is covered in mascara and you clean it off slowly with wet fingertips because this is a gesture of love we both understand. It doesn’t matter who I was crying for because you are the answer. You, and your beautiful hands I have always loved for their elegant power to tend or to quietly refuse. In the dream, we ride down big avenues on a bicycle. The basket is alive with blooming and the wind is your hair. We never go anywhere; we never grow up into women. We ride and rest, our hips spreading into the earth and over each other.

In a series of poems about altars, or bodies, or the living space made sacred, Kristen Nelson writes: Akilah, what are the limits of the body? The first time she asked me, I said: The body is limited by our own expectations. The last time she asked me, I said: the body is limited by who we allow to love us.

You have tended to your home, Taurus. You have tended to the roots—the elders and the ancestors. You have been meticulous, picking your poisons with careful intent and your body wants to love you back, wants to feel like it too is a sacred altar in which you live.

In my dreams, each gesture of love is a candle I light for your pleasure. In this world, I hope the light in you burns bright into the night and beckons. Let healers come, let lovers come.

 

Gemini

A few weeks ago I agreed to join a small coven. What I mean is: a group consisting of my lover’s wife and one of her closest friends and me. Because women in proximity are always each other’s teachers, the three of us chatted naturally on Facebook about what we might bring to the table. One asked about building psychic barriers and the other wants to practice empowering each other. These are the two skills that make friendship powerful and witchcraft even more so. I don’t yet know what I need to learn so I’ve begun reading Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark.

“When we devote our best energies to what we most cherish, when we refuse to let our energies be diverted to further destruction or to serve other people’s end, we tap into the power that creates the everyday miracles of birth, growth, and change, touch the fires that have not cooled since the beginning of the world, shift the very plates we stand on so that new continents can form.”

Starhawk is a Gemini and I’m convinced all famous witches are Gemini (cough Stevie cough), which means I’m convinced that you, dear reader, are meant to be famous or at least very very bright in the constellation of things. So bright that when you approach the wrong girl in the wrong bar, you somehow get half a sandwich out of it. So bright that even if you are sick right now, even if you can barely leave your apartment, there is a party outside time where people are dancing beneath the image of your glowing face.

If you were to be in my coven (if you are in my coven) then everything you bring to the table, when you have the energy and even when you don’t, is something of great value.

 

Cancer

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes: The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.

I think we were taught that love comes into our lives to hold us and I won’t tell you that’s a lie. Rather, I want to propose that learning how to love is the journey we’re after. And I mean it in the biggest way one can imagine. Learning to love our families even when they can’t love us in the ways we need, learning to love our partners without judging them for the ways they haven’t yet learned to love themselves. And, above all, learning to love ourselves enough to demand more when what surrounds us is not enough to sustain us.

The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

This is a journey that will bring you to your knees with regret—and with pleasure. We create the path we roll down and we never stop rolling so it’s important, Cancer, that you remember the part you play in our own undoing. It’s important that you say out loud what make you feel good, what harms you, and when you are sorry.

 

Leo 

Remember when you were my professor and I’d watch your dogs, DVR The L word, and read your how-to books on fisting while you were out of town. I’d walk around your apartment and think about how much care you put into each rug and note of color. Your refrigerator plastered with photographs of a young dyke and lithe gay men—Fire Island probably. I was looking for a photo of the woman who broke your heart, the one who let you get away to that sleepy college town we were both in.

I am astounded / by the various kisses we’re capable of. / Each from different heights / diminished, which is simply the  law. /And the big bruise / from the longer fall / looked perfectly white / in a few years / That astounded me most of all. *

I was thinking of that woman when I called you from San Francisco years later. The sun was pounding over my head and I cast a long shadow demanding you tell me whether or not I would be heart broken forever (what I meant was what I thought I knew about your heart). You laughed at me and told me to go dancing.

But I didn’t go dancing, I was heartbroken for months, I kept crying in all the wrong places and still, I know I carried your conviction with me. Not that time heals all wounds, as they say. Rather, that wounds are just wounds—we can cry about them or not and no one is made the more honorable for doing so.

* “Each from Different Heights” Stephen Dunn

 

Virgo

One winter, long before we ever broke each other’s hearts, we walked along a Finger Lake quietly knowing each other. I lived in a town under so many stars and you were the best one that ever came to me. The wind was wet and alive against us so we climbed into the back of your card where the seats were gone and it was like we’d kidnapped ourselves. No. Something less menacing, a glitch in location in order to pause time.

I don’t remember why you were crying—or maybe you weren’t crying—maybe I was just beginning to understand the shape of your face in a moment of anguish. You told me you wanted to write stories. I asked you why you weren’t writing stories. I don’t think I ever got an answer.

Removing the notion of forever (-f) allows, ironically, for forever to emerge: The sky is, in this sense, as deep and wide as it is deep and wide. To understand this: Imagine blood vessels, say, broken in an old lover’s eyes

I hope that wherever you are now, you are making exactly what you love. I hope you are surrounded by people who value you, people who can read the pleasure and pain in your face without a moment’s hesitation, who feed you when you are hungry. Old love, if that is not the case than let me remind you, stress is a symptom not a root. Don’t confuse anxiety and fear for personal failure and don’t define yourself based on anyone else’s dreams but your own.

 

Libra

You said that there was a time when we could have been more than friends—that winter years ago when you drove hours out from the city and towards my sleepy town cloaked in blizzard. You brought me three mix cds I couldn’t listen to; at night we curled around each other and slept. You whispered, “this is nice” and I said, “this is something we can do.” I felt relief—yours, mine. I said there was a time when we could have been more than friends—that summer years ago when we pounded Four Loko on a dark stoop and took off our shirts dancing at Outpost. Phone numbers rained from our pockets and we crawled on the dance floor toward music (each other).

I’m incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I’m incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death, and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:

the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils’ surface believes…and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn’t program for: the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I’ll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we’ll never die:

there’ll be plenty of us around to
keep casting our inquiry
against the crisp light. Light is all like,
what’s up, I’m here I’m an angel! & we’re
all: no you’re not, that doesn’t exist. We all laugh and laugh…

Or cry and cry.

I don’t know what more than friends is. I love you in that queer way of two intimate bodies hurtling in a shabby car towards nothing in particular. Two stars hanging precariously over the same ocean of lovers. All these years, tenderness without knowledge, the both of us dancing to seduce no one in particular. Old friend, I never knew you. Tonight I want to know who did. Whose hand have you let reach deeper than the first sadness and into well of you? Old friend, love pours like water around your mouth. In order to drink, you must open.

 

Scorpio

Because there is a wound in the universe, a wound appears in us. Yes, all stars in relation, all pain—a belt of pain. Scorpio, you are the one who prays to stop feeling so much so much—and it’s private, the praying. A wound is tight inside your chest; a stone that glistens when wet, appears soft. Before, when it was easy to be cruel and you were interested in the easy way, you’d ask your lovers to heal that wound in you. Now nothing is ever the easy way so you sooth yourself.

I’m awake / no one is here–no one is ever here / the affect is very no the / affect permeates me deeply. thats why Im a rock Never use the word ‘is’ / the therapys to move the rock, render the affect flexible Why bother Nothing / wrong with rock, sings a rock You are not stone not stone soul, sings another thing / Yes I am Dont cry youre not allowed to. I will cry stone / I’d rather be stone than their imbecile. *

Solitude is powerful but there are other ways to feel strong. There are nights when a body can be with another body—a beloved—and each hour will lie down upon the hour before fingertip to fingertip. Whatever joy there is left on Earth (in the wake of intimate loss, of haunting loss, of violent public spectacle) it hums between them. Keep listening for that hum, Scorpio. There will be months when music is the only thing that stays with you—so gather it up inside your bones with listening and be grateful.

                                                                                                   * “Love” from Benediction by Alice Notley.

 

Sagittarius

There are days when I live in another universe where you are very much near me. We go to that place we like and order the same big vegan salad, extra dressing, extra pico, extra big smile in the hopes that something gets tossed in for free. We order gin too but later. Or maybe you get gin and I get whiskey but the important thing is we’re going to write all evening and take up lots of counter space. We’ll swap work and praise each other’s very brave hearts.

But, in this universe, you are far from me. In an email to you, I write: Have you noticed that when you sleep, nothing makes you sad and nothing hurts? Yes, you write back. My inbox is full messages with your name and the word Yes.

Such a hurricane/ Such a hurt and pain/ Trapped in my soul and I can’t explain.

So many nights I have called you with burning anger, you are the only one I seem to trust with mine. I read you an offending correspondence and you gasp with indignation. You teach me to be gracious in response, to never give away my power. In the business of being a better friend, I kindly request you show me where you keep your anger. Let me hold the ruby jewel of it to the light and give you clarity. And, when that anger pains you, let me praise your sharp mind, perceptive graces.

 

Capricorn

A long time ago, a psychic told me that I use a lot of reserve energy. I had never heard the term before but the moment he uttered it, I understood it perfectly. I understood that, for years, I’d been running on energy I didn’t have to spare—energy that I wasn’t generating for use. Instead, I was tapping into the core resources of my spirit, shifting from depressive lows to survival mode just to catch the bus or finish a project.

A goat moves up a mountain and toward a cooler altitude, looking for water. She is a marvel of gravity, a vertical dancer, hooved acrobat. She knows in her bones when a storm is coming, when it’s safest to nestle in the crag’s natural shelters. She knows when climbing toward what she needs might cost her more than she’s got to give.

Because our bodies teach us new things every day, because we were not made to work flawlessly forever into old age, and because caring for yourself can often feel like a luxury many of us can’t afford, you are no stranger to running on reserve energy. I understand. Capricorn, this month, I want you to imagine a place inside yourself where you keep your strength—emotional—physical—spiritual. Imagine it is a beautiful box. Mind how often you must open it, how often you replenish what you take.

 


 

Header Image Source

 

Galactic Rabbit January 2016!

 

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  1. Listen for the low faint hum, likened to a heartbeat. The abandoned wild paradox of one movement, one life, one existence, and billions of existences. The secret glyph of infinity tattoed on your third eye; do you feel it? / Moon Angels Malakh Halevanah Cards/ Ryan Rebekah Erev

 

Dear Galaxy of Moon Rabbits,

It took me a long time to write these little letters. I carried each of you with me, chanting the Zodiac under my breath on subway rides, poetry readings, and dinner parties that lasted into the morning. I wanted to give you something good, as a blessing. When this New Year broke open, I was leaving my mother’s house for the second time in my life, broken-hearted (again) over her inability to love me like I need to be loved (wholly). I felt poor and, in many ways, alone. But, I was not alone and I was not poor. My friends were a rich circle of love around me and my girlfriend affixed my mattress to her car with a true butch grace. Dear reader, you were also with me—giving me purpose.

Let this be the year we make better fools of ourselves. Let this be the year that the love we need comes to us in great generous waves—even if it is not from the direction we’ve been looking toward. Let this be the year that justice feels possible, imaginable. In a world where power is always linked to subjugation, let this be the year we speak to power and it learns to say our names with tenderness in its mouth.

 

All My Love,
Gala Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. Thank you Claire for being the best reader and the most Clairvoyant.

P.P.S. If you want to make a small donation to the writing of these letters, I appreciate all donations. I am endlessly grateful for the gifts I receive and they help me sustain my practice (and fill my refrigerator). Also, the “monthly” function doesn’t work!

PayPAL! 


 

 

Aquarius

What do you dream when the Black Sea calls you home? A body racked with dreaming. I don’t know, dear friend, I’ve all but lost the language of the sea. I wake with an image of my mouth, as if it is all I can remember. I haven’t walked down to the ocean shore, or braced myself against that salt wind singing there.

Have you? Have you left footprints along the wet sand, cold water lapping your numb ankles, a small body sinking into the pliant earth? If neither of us are there… I’ve found you through internet light-beams, here in my dark room where I’ve placed three Lightening Whelks on my windowsill and a knife shaped like a mermaid’s tail.

Come over. Our rooms keep us safe while we lose the ones we love. Let’s make mobiles out of planets that we know and watch them dance across the ceiling: this is Mercury, this is Ceres, a woman’s face with her future cut right out. This crumbling vortex of beautiful sorrows—it needs us, doesn’t it? That’s why it keeps breaking our hearts, because it needs us—poor thing.

 

Pisces 

“I must be a mermaid,” said (Pisces) Anais Nin. “I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” To love you is to follow you past the body’s limits. All my life, I have walked to the edge of a darkly lit pier and leapt off for you. There, in the underwater world, were sunken Wonder Wheels and glittering scales of women dressed like gorgeous demons.

In the silt sand caverns where we slow danced, a jukebox drowned the sad woman songs. Crazy for tryin’… crazy for cryin’…. crazy for loving you. Yes, you were crazy, I was crazy, in some dry universe the clock chimed midnight—we became regular girls kissing—and it was another year where no one knew how to give their heart to anyone fully and without regret.

Good thing, then, that some of us don’t belong in the dry universe. Pisces, it’s time for you to remember the world you were born to imagine, to create. A world where love is an underwater crystal cave and work is a coral reef—bright red and surprising to touch.

 

Aries 

It was the Pride Weekend when I (wo)maned a booth for Parisa wearing panties that said Dirty Queer on the ass, fishnets, and knee high boots. When you came to me, I’m sure you knew I’d say yes. Days later, we drank a little whiskey, a pit bull puppy burrowed at my feet, and you played your accordion for me (yes, we lived inside a queer dream). I was not surprised to find you crying on top of me. I felt in that moment, as many femmes must, like a fragile nest holding a fragile bird.

And, it might do us good to examine who gets to be the nest and who gets to be the bird if we didn’t already know that we are always one and the other. And, it might serve us to negotiate ways in which lovers can be good to each other if I hadn’t said goodbye to you so easily, parked in a van by the needle exchange.

What I want to evoke is my ordinary cruelty: how you tried to give me a home—how I left you. Sometimes we are cruel, lover, sometimes leaving is the best we can do. And, if this year is new, it is new with our old stories inside it. We might make mistakes again, we might both be birds, but we are not as fragile as we were.

 

Taurus

When, weeks ago, you offered me your empty apt, I was grateful but didn’t think much of it. We met over brunch and, afterward, three keys attached to a beaded strawberry fattened my pocket. How was I to know that I would spend NYE and the day following amongst your charged altars and magic cards? That your bed would carry my body and the women I love softly (as if for the first time) into the New Year, binding us together like flowers that know nothing about death?

One woman lying on her back with whale medicine at her throat—yes it was hers—but I thought of you and how you were with us watching. Recording the history of untethered love and wild resistance. I filled the bathtub with hot water and salt. Someone started crying in the laundry closet and we held her. In your home we were sanctified and made new.

If you are ever afraid your love is not enough, my hoofed angel, I stroke your fur and feel the golden threads. A world holding tiny worlds inside itself—you create micro universes with your loving attention. Anyone who is dear to you is dear to God.

 

Gemini

If there were a time machine we would both get on. Go back to our young hearts, our small furred animals, leash-less. We would be gentle with ourselves, each other. I would let you find my hand in the dark; I would walk with you slowly toward who we are now.

Instead, I remember the way the world ate at you. How your body was a sliver in the night—shining and gone. I remember the dance floor and our delighting, the lovers who looked into you like one might into a mirror, the pills and potions that did you no good.

In a story about the edge of love and violence, Gemini Lidia Yuknavitch writes:

This is kind of how we get through our lives: we tell ourselves stories so that what’s happening becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.

Maybe I had some hard lessons to learn about the difference between doing good work and trying too hard to be a woman.

Woman. Like anyone even knows what that is still.

You don’t have to let fear write the story of your life. You don’t have to prove your worth. Our failures are just moments in time, the weight they bear is the weight we give them. This month, I want you to imagine that being a woman, being a man, being gender-fluid force never contained fully by the structures imagined in this lifetime is not about defining your limits. Imagine the edge of your destiny like a body blurring with the infinite universe. Your heart is shaped—more or less—like everyone’s heart, start there and work your way out.

 

Cancer

In a small apartment, on NYE, we are like planets staying close to each other. If we are strangers, tonight we are not strangers. I am your witness, watch you pull yourself out of a bad orbit. I have so much to tell you already, you say. You put your hand on my back to steady yourself. Little moon, you change shape all night. Snake charmer. Fox barking the hungry call of midnight lovers who must risk it all to find each other. The pendulum swings open and wide beside your heart, for hours you wear a lightening bolt between your breasts.

This is an image of your power. On your best days, it saves you, brings the right people into your life and turns harmful energies away at the door. But, there are other days—days you have seen too much of lately—when your power to make the best of your environment becomes a burden, leaves you feeling depleted and smaller than yourself.

In my hand I am holding a card for you. It is the Eight Of Swords. It’s asking you to clear a mental path through the debris of expectations and emotional hang-ups that don’t belong to you. This card is asking you what boundaries mean to you, what you are willing to do to maintain them, and how honest you are willing to get when your wellbeing is on the line.

 

Leo

For as long as I can remember I have hated zoos. To see a lion pacing a small enclosure, his great haunches tight, his big beautiful head swinging from side to side—searching—it filled me with immense dread. I was afraid of a world that taught children such a cruel way to love an animal. But zoos are only emblematic of a larger cultural failure.

[A trophy hunter poses with her kill. She is proud and easy on the eyes, which does not mitigate the corpse that lies inanimate beside her. On the internet, someone asks, “What must’ve happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a beautiful animal & then lie next to it smiling?”]

We have been taught from a very early age, that to love something that is powerful we must strip it of its wildness, this desire to command love’s gaze and contrive devotion. We want to come very close, the tips of our noses almost brushing the bars of the cage so we can be intimate. But, one can’t love a lion like that.

There are times we must lie to get through this life and take care of others. But, if you have found yourself clawing at the walls…if a lover, or a job, or a project has left you feeling trapped—if you have felt your heart dying—don’t let yourself be tamed. To be alive is be free, Leo. Break the cage, come clean.

 

Virgo

I get caught up in the word “deserve” often. What does it mean to deserve someone, something, some world beyond this one? When the Black college students of Yale and NYU demand a learning environment they might feel wholly seen and acknowledged in, should it matter whether someone deems them deserving in particular? Who are these someones that decide when “fair is fair,” and why do they matter?

The demand is the thing, a small bird with a hungry throat. If the birds are not fed, there are no birds, no music, no seeds, and no flowers—a chain broken. But, lovers, the chain belongs to everyone, its work is to keep this world together. Each link deserves the next.

O Virgo, I have seen you drag the broken chain behind you. I have seen you pocket fistfuls of food while birds starve in your heart. I can’t tell you what you deserve, Virgo, I can’t promise you that love is always going to be enough. But, in the great light of you magnanimous spirit and your soft sensitive heart, let me remind you this: what your pain wants most is forgiveness.

 

Libra

Every couple of years I notice articles circling the internet describing the passing down of intergenerational trauma. How our fears and sorrows, our deepest sources of grief, are etched into our DNA and delivered into the bodies that come from our bodies. A sadness like a vampire inside you—immortal. These sorts of scientific findings compel me to wonder how quiet pain is measured. I think about the way my mother’s face turns dark at the mention of sex. I think about my father’s bad heart and how, when we were states apart, my body felt him fall to the floor. I fell down too; I cracked my chin open. Unconscious, I pissed myself and was ashamed.

In an essay about Serena Williams, in Citizen, Claudia Rankine writes:

Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.

 Libra, yesterday your body was a living record of all that has happened to you and before you. Today, your body is just a human body—it is muscle, blood, and bone. In order to protect it, the stories that evoke shame must have a different ending.  You must be brave enough to write them.

 

Scorpio

This summer, my lover was listening to Bonnie Rait sing Angel Of Montgomery with John Prine on the car radio. She was moved to tears and moved me with her. She’s been singing it all year now, another sign ruled by Mars. When I come to Bonnie, I go to the dark-side of Scorpio magic where the firey goodness I carry with me feels extinguished in the swamp of my depression.

Me, I’m lying in bed under this Mars Retrograde, Scorpio-singing along:

There’s flies in the kitchen I can hear ’em there buzzing
And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.

 

Dear witch sister, if you, like me, can feel Mars spiral back inside you—hold on and ride. Despair is a good teacher to the ones of us who have been students of melancholy all our lives. Despair is a god we understand. This month let yourself carry the sad songs in your bones. Make skeleton music in your sleep. When the day rises, rise with it. Wear your invisible blue cloak to the office, reply to the emails while humming sodalite vibrations. Return home, get on your knees, pray.

 

Sagittarius

Last night, at a bar in Bushwick, a Cancer friend and I talked about what it takes to overcome anxiety so that one might write—create—do the damn thing. “We must put lazy away,” I told her. “We’re not lazy, we would spend all night searching a moonlit desert for our lover’s ring, lose a whole afternoon to polishing our grandmother’s good silver. It’s just that writing terrifies us.”

In response to writing terror, her psychiatrist put her on a beta-blocker, a drug archers use to keep their arrows true. Stringing an imaginary bow across her chest, she mimed a pointed arrow and said, “there are pills that let you shoot steady between babum babum babum.” A parallel world exists, dear reader, where archers and writers share the same cyborgian cell structure in their aim toward perfection. “Are you still on the drug?” I asked her, enchanted by the futurity of our emotions, by the sound of an arrow that splits a heartbeat in half. “No. It took away my adrenaline.”

Turns out we need the terror to create, turns out there is no perfect pill, no easy solution that lets us be our best selves comfortably and without risk. Besides, a professional archer can’t be caught using performance enhancement drugs. Like them, you must learn to shoot from the heart and not despite it.

 

Capricorn

In a coffee shop in the Middle of Nowhere, Brooklyn, I am listening to Capricorn Aquarian cusp Chan Marshall sing Metal Heart on the Late Show with David Letterman. Somewhere between performance art and public unraveling, Chan’s body slips in and out of rhythm, in and out of itself. She holds the microphone like it pains her to bring it near her mouth.

I want to think about what Cat Power’s, or any Capricorn’s, metal heart feels like. What compels a metal heart to ache? Does it clang painfully when you beat your chest in atonement? Does it feel like a burden? Chan Marshall wrote this song from out of a nightmare, an earthquake. The earth started shaking, and dark spirits were smashing up against every window of my house … I had a tape recorder with me so that if they found my body, they’d know my soul was taken. They’d have proof. What was I going to say to people? I didn’t know, so I started singing all these songs.

Capricorn. This new moon, I want you to imagine your metal heart like a canteen you carry with you across long dry distances, sipping from slowly and with wise restraint. Your metal heart is not extra weight, not too hard to hold. It will get you through this dark winter road and to the other side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December Galactic Rabbit, The End of 2015

Dearest December Bunnies,

I hope that these love notes find you well, that you are warm tonight and only a little tired. The kind of tired that comes from spending the day doing what you love, being of good use, being a good friend, or redefining goodness altogether. And, if you are not tired but weary, if you are in bed right now wondering if you have wasted your life, my heart. If you feel the core of you push up against whatever you thought goodness was and feel nothing, next to nothing, keep pushing anyway. Just so you don’t forget the gestures. This is how we learn to return to ourselves.

When I was a teenage girl who loved another teenage girl, she would tell me often that there is nothing lost in this world. I try to remember that when I think of the people I love who no longer walk on this side of the veil, I try to remember that when my shoes get heavy with the grief of this country.

***

Once there was a hedgehog and he lost his jam, a wild dog brought it back to him. Once there was a hedgehog lost in a thick white fog, a voice said “Trust me, I will carry you down the river where the juniper twigs burn and your best friend is waiting for you.” Once there was a hedgehog who found his way back to his twinheart. His twinheart shouted “What has taken you so long? Who would I count stars with if not you?”

 

With Perfect Trust,

Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. Thank you to every single dyke, queer, lone wolf who has taught me how to love this hard.

P.P.S. If ever you want to support these horoscopes, you can paypal me donations! A little bit is still some sugar. Pay Pal

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Savanah Banana the dog, covered in rabbit light

 

 

Aries

In her poem, “On Old Ideas,” Dorothea Lasky (Aries) writes: There are old plans now that should be new. / There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die. / Follow me, I am the crusader of the new.

It’s hard to build a new dream, even harder to pursue one, what with the tricky nature of dreams—how they wear the Cloak of the Almost Impossible, how they lie just beyond the Mountain of Great Challenges. But, Aries, is there really any mountain high enough to keep you from moving toward your deepest desires? You are the Fool and the Emperor. You have it in you to dream a better world into being then command the making of that world. Follow me, you cry as you move courageously forward, I am the crusader of the new.

Now that this year is closing, take time to look at the path you’ve blazed to get this far. If there have been sacrifices, if there has been love lost, then honor whatever you’ve let go so that you might go on. Sometimes having a child’s heart means holding a love so pure it is barely meant for this world. Sometimes being a great warrior means losing with grace, with gratitude for what that loss has taught you.

 

Taurus

I’ve been reading Marie Kondo’s Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, and thinking about you, how much an object of good quality can move you, that golden turtle you never bought, each G-dragon music video, the perfect curtains. And, I’ve been thinking about the people in your life. How I hope they feel lucky, like I do, because your love is generous and forgiving, because your love is a room full of people trying their best to be their truest selves.

“Every object has a different role to play. Not all clothes have come to you to be worn threadbare. It is the same with people. Not every person you meet in life will become a close friend or lover,” Marie writes. “Some you will find hard to get along with or impossible to like. But these people, too, teach you the precious lesson of who you do like, so that you will appreciate those special people even more.”

Taurus, as your year comes to a close, imagine what it might mean to tidy up your emotional life. Let go of what makes you feel less than you are, make time for the ones that give you sparks of joy, the ones who see you. There are few better feelings in this world than being seen and you, my love, deserve to feel very very good.

 

Gemini

A couple years ago, I met a Gemini witch, a poetess. Diane Seuss. She had ink black hair and a generous eye. Under her mischievous gaze, my words rose up from the page and re-arranged themselves. Lines spread their legs across large white space; whole lyric sections kissed passionately and broke up so that they might stand more powerfully on their own. In understanding my language, she spoke a love I could understand. We breakfast covened over avocado sandwiches and poached eggs, and it seemed like she deeply cared for every single woman at the table—even the ones whose names she barely knew. Come visit me anytime, she said, showing us pictures of an animal more fur than dog that would welcome us as well.

In a poem called “Song of My Heart,” she writes her first line: If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee.

I think about this poem all the time, about the way it approaches solitude like a conquest. Yes, this is my kingdom, my body and all I own—it’s glory and squalor.

Gemini, how do you approach your solitude? Do you fortify with empathic friendships? When you drag your body to the edge of a dark wood, do you want for company, for companions who carry the light with you? Then call your friends and lovers by their true names, Gemini, illuminate their strengths and let them strengthen you in turn.

 

Cancer

There’s an old Russian song my father used to sing to himself. I get it stuck in my head sometimes when I think of him. It begins simple enough: You are my breath, / my early morning, / you’re the scorching sun / and rain. But then, it turns: I will torture myself / and become the very best, / for this very reason you / should stick around.

It’s a beautiful song, written by an Aquarius named Ada Yakusheva in what must have been the 60’s (although dates are unclear). Despite the Aquarian source, I can’t help but think of you, Cancer, when I hear this song. There’s something so determined about it, so clear-hearted and sure. For the one you love, for the community you have built, for your family, you will burn down the house of yourself and build a castle in its place.

On the 25th of this month, when the moon is full in Cancer and your heart is full with everything that you know to be true about yourself, your resilience, imagine that this is a song Ada wrote for herself, rather than for a lover she hoped would love her. Imagine this is song to your health, your incredible body, and your magnificent mind. Ты моя мелодия, ты – вроде ты и вроде я. Мой маяк у вечности на краю. You are my melody/ You are you but you’re also me/ my lighthouse at the edge of eternity.

 

Leo

When I was in grade school, I was in love with a collection of poems by Maya Angelou. I read them everyday, I stole the book from my library. I was mesmerized by the clarity of her voice, by the mere suggestion that a woman could dance like she had diamonds between her thighs.

Despite my attachment to the poetic image, to the first words she entered into my poetic memory, the words I carry with me to this day are not from any of her poems. They come, instead, from an interview with Oprah. Oprah looks to Maya, prompting her, “…one of the most important lessons I ever learned from you…when people show you who they are, believe them.”

Sometimes it’s hard for a Leo to follow this advice, no matter how simple it sounds. You want to believe the best in everyone, to push them forward, to raise them up. It might be useful to remember that in a pride, the weakest are sometimes left behind for the sake of the strong. Sweet lion, I’m not suggesting you abandon those you love. Rather, I’m encouraging you to take note of those you spend time holding up, tending to, and carrying through. Don’t let your care for others be an excuse that keeps you from thriving.

 

Virgo

Recently, Pen America featured an illustrated blog post by cartoonist Robert Kirby. In the “The Virgo Thing,” Kirby explores the different ways Virgos are characterized and which descriptions resonate with him personally. After claiming the idea that Virgo’s motto is “I Analyze,” Kirby writes, “It’s much easier, however, to examine aesthetics than it is to examine emotions.”

But, what does it mean to examine aesthetics? Should you shift into the hedonistic pleasure of language and all its abstractions, read more Barthes, buy a fall jacket come January just for the faux fur trim? Maybe. Would that be so wrong? Don’t you think you deserve something lovely for no reason at all? Don’t you think you’ve worked hard to get where you are?

It’s easy, isn’t it Virgo, to imagine oneself constantly at the bottom of the wheel—running in place and looking ever forward. But the truth is, these past few months have been kind to you, given you space to grow and flourish, to imagine all the different ways you can embody your very best self. That kind of loving attention from the universe has the power to teach you a great deal about emotional strength—how to see it in yourself and inspire it in others. Look out to the generous world, Virgo, acknowledge that love comes.

 

Libra

We’re in a bookstore called unnamable books and you say you want more poetry in your life so I shove Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely in your hands. I flip it open to my favorite page, say this one:

“Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved.”

I don’t agree, you remark, but you hold the book reverently with both hands and continue on. Then, as if compelled by a saint that lives inside you (a saint the way Libra Hannah Arendt might have been—imperfect, trying), you looked up at me and say calmly I love forgiveness, it’s important to forgive as much as you can. We go down the rows, fiction, non-fiction, we stand on opposite sides of each book. You say Maybe I have different concerns then you… I wonder what you think of me. We leave the store with Don’t Let Me Be Lonely in your bag.

I think you’re a subtle magician, a beautiful wool coat trying to weather the longest winter, a love dog running toward forgiveness. And forgiveness is yours, like this life is yours, you can do with it what you wish.

 

Scorpio

Once, there lived a poet called Eli Coppola, who was a Queen of Hearts and Ace of Swords. I did not know her. Her poetry came to me like a raft floating down a river of tears. I’d stumbled into Bluestockings Bookstore on the LES with my best friend the same day her friends gathered to celebrate the publication of her collected work Some Angels Wear Black, to read her words, and honor her passing. The love she had inspired in each person flowed through the room and forever changed the both of us.

There is a poem in her posthumous collection called “Casual Hands, Brutal Stars, Past Things.” In it, the narrator is on a kind of date with Death (perhaps something like Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop…”).

and he recalls each time past / that I called something love / and he questions me about these things / and he wants to know / and he says / you know / darkness comes and goes

and I hold his hand tighter and crying happens / and it’s just crying / and my ribcage rattles / and my throat swells like the bullfrog/ and I feel a savage, unsettling peace

Scorpio, this month, with Venus in your sight, recall each time past that you called something love. Let the meditation be a pomegranate in your hand, tap the sides, use a sharp knife, be precise and be delicate. Each sweet ruby seed has a bitter core, honor the whole. Remember the way you have beheld each lover this generously. Isn’t it time you did the same for yourself?

 

Sagittarius

It took me a long time to understand simple facts about Earth, mainly because I live in the clouds and I went to a very underfunded public school as a child. Like, did you know that the Sun is closest to the Earth in January? That it’s the angle at which the rays hit our planet that determine how much energy/heat comes to us? Here I was walking around the blustery boulevards lamenting o remember when the sun was close? Just as the Sun was nearest!

I’ve been thinking about nearness a great deal lately. How it’s easy to overlook that which sustains us. How Sagittarians are fire despite being so human and so animal. The nights get longer, loved ones gather around the hearth, and there you are keeping the tinder burning.

Sagittarius, this was the year you did everything you could to protect what mattered most. Even if what mattered most moved you father and farther from what felt like your truest self. And, perhaps your journey was lighter. Perhaps in leaving the woman you believed you were behind, you found the woman you were meant to be. More likely, there are parts of you that survived, parts that have been waiting to come back and make a dreamer out of you.

Can you feel her returning to you? The girl you used to believe in, the one with a heart as quick and precise as an arrow? You are her first mark and she’s not gonna miss, so you might as well give her everything she wants.

 

Capricorn

In someone’s re-occurring dream, you enter the chamber of a dark heart holding a hand over your eye. I can’t see with both eyes, you say, I wake into a throbbing pain, an incurable condition. You are standing, but barely, because you are afraid and your body wants to curl towards its warmest folds. You let it. Someone wants to hold you up or carry you to a soft space. They try but they can’t. Their arms aren’t strong enough, they’re not strong enough, and besides—where would you go? You acknowledge that they tried; you’re generous in your suffering. It’s so cold in the dream, a barren corridor, and someone has to leave you. Someone leaves you over and over in every dream and they are sorry.

If there is a dagger in your witch heart, Capricorn, you can blame the dreamer but you’ve got to pull it out. If there is a wound where the dagger once was, go ahead and dress the wound. This is about learning how to see with whatever eyes you’ve got left. Healer, prophet, someone’s mother. This is about teaching yourself—as if for the first time—how to care for the one who depends on you most—yourself.

 

Aquarius

Aquarius, somewhere in the parallel universe, there are three women walking along the Atlantic ocean. The worlds these women come from, the ones they left behind so that they might meet, are light-years apart. Of course, they have shared interests, one picks up the perfect skipping stone and the other bounces it along the waters surface.

How can the ocean be so still? They don’t know. They find shells that sea creatures have suctioned onto granite. A whole family lives here, a shell hotel. They try their best to respect creatures they can barely see. In this way, they wind a thread around their hearts, from each to each, and tug each other softly along the shore.

If there is raptor’s nest, they’ve spotted it, thatched atop a defunct lighthouse. If the sun is setting, they have turned their faces to the sun and become gold. If this world is full of too many sorrows, too many small wounds against your soul, remember: there is no kind of love that is impossible. Sometimes, remembering that is the best you can do, and the bravest too.

 

Pisces

I remember how terrified I was to get up on the stage. I could barely see the faces in the crowd, shrouded in darkness. A song I had been singing to myself all summer long came on… I’ve been lonely, I’ve been waitin’ for you. I’m pretending and that’s all I can do. The love I’m sendin’ ain’t makin’ it through to your heart… I began to undress for the room, for a girl I was a long time ago. A girl who felt more powerful naked than she ever did with her clothes on.

Then there you were, crawling out from under the stage lights and toward me with money in your mouth. There were two girls following you, but I knew you were the ringleader. You were the one who traded femme desire for femme desire, female gaze so warm it could melt any heart of ice.

Oh Pisces, aren’t you the one whose sweetness is oceans deep, who loves someone once and forever no matter when cities, states, bad words separate you? Don’t you know that refusing to see what others want to offer you is a bad spell? You keep taking deep breaths and hustling survival but wouldn’t it be nice to feel sure of something in this world, wouldn’t it be nice to be fall passionately, to let yourself receive? If there is girl moving toward you with an offering, you should let her.

 

 

 

 

 

November Love Notes & Horoscopes

Dear Love Bunnies,

I woke up on the couch in my best friend’s apartment. On the ground not too far from me, another friend from my youth lay sleeping. He woke up, mumbled incoherently at me, and then fell back down. When she emerged from her bedroom with her love, we put on Neutral Milk Hotel and wandered around the apartment picking up last night’s refuse: When did I make this float? Whose pizza slice is this? No one here would have ever purchased THAT beer. Is it hot? Thank god that smell is not me. Is it unbearably hot?

Perhaps this is the Sunday scene in apartments of young people all over this country, ritual of reckoning with the hours between midnight and 4am when the world was a pleasure pulse. How our bodies float up into morning with a poisonous buzz about them, wanting only carbs and coffee and soft laughter. Polenta pancakes sizzling on the pan, an experiment. Someone draws at a sunny kitchen table and someone else helps me download Indesign. We’re artists, we want to better ourselves; we cut organic strawberries into tiny bits. And, I feel bold in my leisure, the reason for last night’s debauchery being the anniversary of my birth.

The mug I’m slurping coffee from right now has the phrase “One Day At A Time” printed on it and it pleases me. I’m writing so slowly inside this den of healing, approaching my responsibility to the world and to you with great reverence. I’m full of love too, a love I have pulled with both hands from a dark room I was born into. I want to use that love to be good to you.

What I know for sure is that friendship is powerful. In these darkening days, gather close and take care of each other.

 

A Galaxy Is New Each Time.

Galactic Rabbit

If you’d like to donate to the making of this love labor, here is a paypal link:
PayPal!   (there is also a button on the sidebar) 🙂

P.S. Big thank you to Claire Skinner, as always, for being my true Cosmic Sage.

P.P.S. Also big thank you to Angela Watrous who is always supporting me. She is
magic empathic healer of the heart so you should reach out to her at: http://www.restorativeempathy.com/

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Aquarius

Do you remember the story of Persephone? The goddess who Pluto chose and captured, dragged into the underworld, and plied with pomegranates? This is how Greco-Roman myth explained the seasons: Ceres, her mother, besot by grief and rage, abandoned the kingdom of the gods and went to live amongst man. She refused to give the world harvest until her daughter returned.

While Ceres is in Aquarius, I want to know her story. Not the loss, and not the grief, but what came forever after. I want to know about a woman who knew her power so well, her worth so acutely, that in keeping it for herself she changed the way a world sustained its people. As a god, a creator, a mother.

I want to know how her story sits inside of you, how Ceres walks with you through this dark and empty field. Whatever came before, be it sorrow or challenging circumstance, it has brought you to this place of great transformation. Can you feel the power building inside you? You don’t owe it to anyone, you can do with it whatever you wish and the world will shift accordingly.

 

Pisces 

I guess I must admit to you now that although I have read lots and lots of feminist theory, there’s only one book that I know practically by heart and that book is Precarious Life by Judith Butler. As a New Yorker who came of age after 9/11, this book was a companion to my hopeful spirit. It would crest over the hard shores of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence and create new frameworks for emotional resistance. What power is there in mourning, in turning the eye of surveillance back onto the self? What can I do from where I am?

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Because war does not begin and end with a final bomb or a toppled statue, because the nature of countries and their people are forever remade, when I turn to Precarious Life, I look for a way to understand how I move through the world everyday.

When you are not the master of yourself, you might act in ways that cause suffering because you are unsure and suffering. Try to forgive yourself for loving someone precariously. When you are an animal haunted by loss, you must hold reverence for unknowing, even as it pains you. In loss we are remade, not for better or for worse, but in great symphony with the world. That, too, is a benediction.

 

Aries

On the record player, an old record spins marvelously, the tone rich and beautiful with idiosyncrasies. Maybe it’s Tina Turner or Nancy Sinatra, I’m only half listening. I’m thinking about you, how good you are at getting better, how good you are to me. I’m thinking about this time last year when you gave me absolutely the wrong gift for my birthday and I broke down crying. How, since then, you have made amends a thousand times over even though you didn’t have to, even though I forgave you almost right away. Each gift you have given me since, each small charm and literary treasure, has paled under the great big shine of your love.

I know you feel like, too often, your work goes unnoticed, like despite every effort you make towards acting with great care—few can see your generous heart. But, Aries, it’s not so. Your heart is the most obviously thing about you, even when you speak harshly, even when the mistakes you make cause a ripple of pain in the world. It’s not irreparable.

Care must arise concomitant to discord and I’m in awe of how you care for those you love. Because we have come from different worlds, we speak a different love language. And yet, in coming together, we venture to write a book. It’s an act of courage, this book, and there is bound to be confusion. What is lost in translation, if anything, and does it matter when the fragments are so rich with life?

 

Taurus

In looking for examples of romantic friendship, I came upon this letter to Edith Wynne Matthison by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I shall try to bring a few quite nice things with me; I will get together all that I can, and then when you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to you; I don’t talk like that to many people.

Although Edna was not a Taurus but a Pisces, it made me think of you and the power of your friendship instantly. I was reminded of your generous heart, your great loyalty, how the ones you love are saved by your enduring devotion. Even in your forgetfulness, in your distraction, you move through the world with a perfect balance of great force and great tenderness.

It is said that Venus was born from the foam of the sea, where waves beat upon a rocky shore. So your goddess, your great ruler, came into power where water and air met earth. This month, as Venus has moved from Virgo to Libra, I have spent time thinking about who you are at your most powerful. And this is about love, as it always is. About learning, again and again, that no act of care is a wasted moment. That the wider you open up yourself to the universe, the wider the love returned. And it will come in all shapes and all ways because whatever comes, you have spent years learning how to carry it.

 

Gemini

A long time ago, a woman gave me a book, Angel In the Deluge by Rosario Murillo. I read the book cover to cover—the English and the Spanish alongside. Then, I researched the poet. First lady of Nicaragua for decades, Rosario Murillo was once a revolutionary, a woman who fought with the Sandinistas and gave shelter to guerillas. A Gemini-Cancer cusp, an activist poet, a fighter-lover, Rosario is a feminist heroine for many women. But, power is not as easy as that, not when you raise your fist with one hand and wear the ring of the president of a nation. Power corrupts or power favors corruption (a white hat in a dirty business won’t stay white long).

My international knowledge is limited and it’s not within my wheelhouse to pass judgment on Murillo. Rather, I am interested in talking about duality. About who we are and who we were. How a poet turned first lady can no longer speak for the women under her, how our past lives inform our possibilities and our limitations. One line from Angel in the Deluge rings back to me: I am a different season.

A long time ago your anger pushed you to change how you moved through your life, it pushed you to change the world around you into a world you could love a little more. Now it collects in you, a quiver in the hands that shows at all the worst times. And perhaps this, too, is about power. About letting the people around you define you and what you have to offer. Winter comes, Gemini, but within you is a different season—a world surfacing from sleep, bursting fiercely from the earth.

 

Cancer

Before I was born, my father had two other daughters from other families. I remember the one right before me, Masha. In old photos from Moscow, where I am a child and she is a teenager holding me with my cheek pressed to hers, Masha laughs with her whole face. I know that my father is on the other side of the camera, that the love in her face mirrors his. In America, there were no phone calls and no letters. Not when my father lived and not when he died. What he knew of his daughters, their lives and small miracles, he kept to himself and took with him.

My father was a Cancer, a man who loved his family, who built his life around that love. He was also a secretive man who he kept his deepest sadness in the most private depths of his heart. My father had a sick heart, a heart that held him back his whole life.

This world will ask you to let go of something everyday. Let go of those sunglasses you left on the train, let go of the “successful” person you thought you’d be by now. In letting go, you create space for the world you want rather than the world you’ve come from. Just remember that letting go doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean locking your past away inside yourself for fear that in facing it you might face a part of yourself you can’t forgive.

 

Leo

Last night my Leo-hearted lover gave me a birthday present, The Red Book of Carl Jung. As I scanned the pages for an entry point, “The Desert” fell open to me and I read aloud: Why is my self a desert? Have I lived too much outside myself in men and events? Why did I avoid myself? Was I not dear to myself? Leo, I cried through the words, I couldn’t hold them wholly in my mouth.

Only life is true, and only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, that would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert. My soul, what am I to do here?

Because Carl Jung was a Leo and because Sun is in Scorpio, I feel I must share these words with you. If life has led you back to yourself, if you are in the desert, then you are right where you should be. Yes, your shadow follows you always where the light won’t reach, let it, shadow is a sign of life and only life is true. Not shame. Not regret. The desert of your soul grows bold in the night and your shadow-self is a coyote’s call, a small shape rabbiting up from the burrow. Leo, let darkness live in you, wild as she wants to be. You’re strong enough to house her.

 

Virgo

We are told that we only get one chance at this life, that those who are good at love, those who are good, are rewarded with enduring friendships and expansive opportunities. So we try to be the kind of people who deserve good things, the kind we imagine we might be if not for the weight of our humanness. It’s hard work maintaining an illusion, trying hard not to fail when failure is inevitable. Good thing, then, that despite having one known life, our chances are immeasurable. That one can begin again at any time.

Last night, as we rode the late night train together, and we told each other the stories of our lives, we were recreated. I have known your face since we were teenagers, I have watched it change; have watched you scrub each mask off year by year until the man you were meant to be shone right through. And yet, when I spoke to you of my heartbreak, when you spoke to me of the child in you, it was as if we had been strangers in a dark room all our lives—the lights slowly came on.

Yes, I have heard fear in your voice, a hesitation toward truth for fear of what it might cost you. But, Virgo, I see the heavy good in you and how it lingers around the softness of your eyes. Even if you’ve made mistakes, even if you’ve failed to meet your own impossible standards, you are worthy of all the love that comes to you.

 

Libra

There we were in your bedroom, the kind of scene all lesbian romantic comedies consider employing. I was inexperienced, young and confident to a fault, lingering at your doorway, the edge of your bed. Older, you wore your wary animal just below the thick strap of your belt. You were on the edge of yourself and then you were a beautiful weight with me. Yes, of course, a Tegan and Sara song was playing. Yes, your mouth was on mine as one of them sang it’s a silly time to learn to swim on your way down, a Virgo-Libra call to surrender to beauty and all its unruly conclusions.

I’m thinking about our love tonight, I think of it often. Not the blue stars on your hips I made small wishes on, not the way Prospect Park was our bedroom, or the color of your dawn rounding your shoulder.  No, I think about the way we were bad angels serving desire just so we could know what it is. How you would say listen, one day I will leave and I don’t want a reason to stay like you were a boat and I was an anchor. I would say good, go. And there we’d be, in some dark water.

I want to tell you that dark water is a good teacher and that the treasures you’ve salvaged from each wreckage are perfect gifts. The world needs them now. You can be any kind of angel that you want. Angel of desire, of nurture, angel of the big beautiful idea come to life.

 

Scorpio

Dear Scorpio, I wrote a letter to my dear friend Claire Skinner (Clairvoyant Sagittarius Supreme). I told her I was anxious about this work, this life that has so many deadlines and so few rewards. This is what she wrote back:

Today I’m practicing radical radical attentiveness (yes that’s 2 radicals!). I’m being as gentle to myself as possible. It’s challenging because I have to acknowledge my very small fears in order to be attentive to them, such as: what if the Trader Joes near my house is architecturally unappealing and vibrationally sad? That is the smallest fear imaginable. And says a lot about my relationship to the way things look and feel. And, on a rational level, it’s ridiculous. Being attentive is hard. This is my long way of saying: if you’re sleepy, you’re sleepy. What if you indulged it recognized your smallest “silliest” feelings, the ones you won’t share because they’re idiosyncratic and probably tied to personal Freudian shit and childhood trauma. You may not have to like these feelings, but they are yours. 

It was cruel (cruel to be kind?) the way Saturn stayed with Scorpio for so long. How it made Scorpio navigate the dark unknown path without a map and only a sliver of moonlight for guidance. Now that Saturn has moved into Sagittarius, you might find yourself ready to rest and you can. You can turn around and look at all the ways you have grown this past year, how you have been brave in your transformation. Be proud of yourself. You didn’t have a map because all the old maps were wrong. Rest for a little bit, yes, then get up. You’ve got work to do, Scorpio, you are the mapmaker now.

 

Sagittarius

Sagittarius, you, more than I, have a keen sense that the months ahead will be all about the work. Yes, you have labored. You have spent countless hours tending to each task before you; you have earned each and every cent using a mixture of willpower and determination never seen before. I will tell you now that there is great honor in all you’ve accomplished—even if it felt small in the grand scheme of your life. It was important to build your nest and line it well.

Sagittarius, as you continue to maintain your nest’s integrity, don’t forget that this is the time when your magic deepens. The material world is hollow without spirit and your work is needed in the psychic realm.

In the artist’s way, Julia Cameron writes: When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, ‘How do you feel?’ and you say, ‘Oh, I feel okay.’ Then you write about it, and you discover you don’t feel okay.

There is a striking world in you with a wild landscape, a world that vibrates with sad wisdom and erotic hunger. I know you feel it growing large in you, Sagittarius, it’s too big to keep inside.

 

Capricorn

When I discovered Sade I was seven or eight years old. I was rummaging through my brother’s tapes trying to find something new (I’d worn out that Coolio single) when I saw “Stronger Than Pride.” From the moment I slipped the tape into my red Sony Walkman and pressed play, I knew something I had not known before. Music was to be my companion, my friend. I took Sade everywhere, but especially to Welfare offices with my mother where I was her halting timid translator. In those government dens where all mothers walk a tightrope between indignity and pride, I held my mother’s hand and Sade held mine. And I know I talk about Sade with you often but she is the High Priestess of my love archives.

Sitting here waiting for you/ Would be like waiting for winter/ It’s gonna be cold/
There may even/ Be snow 

I want to tell you what is was like to be the daughter of a witch who worshipped convention, a woman who rewarded my translator duties with a new dress from Rainbow or Strawberry and would later take all the quarters from my piggy bank so we could have clean clothes. All I wanted was to buy myself a book.

I still really really love you,

O Capricorn, tough lover, good witch, maker of beautiful somethings from so much nothing, you go out on the tightrope everyday just to bring something back—some kind of hope. Survivor, if you need a small hand to hold you steady, to help you get across, ask for it and love with be there. Love is stronger than pride.

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER STAR LOVE NOTES!

Dear Octo-bunnies,

Here are my love letters for you this month. For weeks I have sat before the facts, the planets and transitions, the rogue comets and fierce planetoids. I’ve taken your phone calls and cupped your questions in my palms. I’ve loved you, each and every one, intimately and from a distance.

The year gets darker, the night gets longer and, for many of us, depression lingers at the edges. But, we have learned how to be our own light when the day is not enough. Or we are still learning, or we are lost and wandering dark streets like a foreigner in the city of ourselves. Don’t be afraid and don’t get angry with yourself.

Let the long night, the shadow journey, be a kind of solace. Your time alone, your time to manifest. What comes to you might not be within your control but it is within your power. And, if you find yourself needing to recharge, lie down for a while and count each star above you as your friend.

XO,

Galactic Rabbit

P.S. THANK YOU CLAIRE SKINNER (She’s amazing, she’s a poet <3)

P.P.S OMG you should totally donate to helping me write Galactic Rabbit if you can! Because it saves me every time. PayPal!

Shout out to Kim Menig, Sarah Morrill, Elizabeth Kennon Williams, and Abby Cooper for their big generous loving gifts (amongst beautiful wonderful others)!

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Aquarius

On a celestial dance floor where the mind and the heart keep forgetting how to move together, you are the one whispering one two three, one two three. Every now and again they fall in step gorgeously, but they fall out of step too, and just as easily. You are the one guiding them back to a mutual rhythm so you must speak steady and be sure. But, what if you’re not sure? What if there are days when no amount of clear communication and processing will do? What if it’s the wrong song, a clumsy night? I mean, what if there are nights when the mind and the heart just can’t seem to make it work?

In The Waves, Virginia Woolf writes: Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

There is pleasure in pretending but there is a price too, Aquarius. Pretend long enough and you forget that the heart and mind live in one body, yours, and are always touching always signaling, always flagging what it is they’re looking for. You are the voice and the dance floor. If your heart hesitates, if your mind just can’t find a reason to keep dancing, perhaps the best thing to do is change the song.

 

Pisces

Lie back, Pisces. Are your feet apart? Are your palms up? Collect energy and rock your head. Air enters and leaves you, in with faith, out with fear. Each limb, each digit, a point of connection. In some universe, a loved one is touching the tip of you. Are you worthy of their touch? Are they worthy of you? It’s ok if you don’t know the answer is yes. Or what you are worth. Your body floating in a river outside time, river of loss and river of regret, but you’re right here breathing. Where do you need extra healing? Where do you collect your pain?

I keep thinking of fire, the image of hands rubbing together, the sound of finger print skin on palms, the feel of fat, blood, and bone within.  I find myself in the center of looking into shapes that surround me.  I attempt to make patterns, layering one into the next, often with such questions: How to participate, to point, to pull back, to listen? Where do I fit in between these tables: eater, poet, judge, hungry person, floater?*

Float, river of glittering laughter and river of soft kisses, where do you keep all your pleasures? Practice un-naming each wound and letting them go. Let go over and over again. Relax your ego and soften the heart. Long ago, you vowed to heal yourself, now move outward. Everyone you have yet to love is at the tip of you. Mirror the heavens, Pisces, and rise generous into the world.

*Ronaldo Wilson/ POETICS STATEMENT IN THE GREAT AMERICAN GRILL

 

Aries

Aren’t you the one who moved across the country with barely enough money to fill your pockets and only the idea of what freedom might look like? Aren’t you the one who wrote stories deep into the night and danced until daybreak imagining a new future, a new world full of bodies pulsing beautiful rebellion? Maybe it was easier, then, to invent the world you wanted and believe in yourself enough to make that world become. Perhaps life has been a little too strict with your young heart and asked you to prove your courage a few too many times. And maybe you are done with proving anything and angry at a world that refuses to see the work you’ve done to get this far.

In her poem “she said, meditate on rage,” Akilah Oliver writes: i am inventing. i am inventing. i am inventing a woman who i can let live in beauty inside of me. i am forsaking. i forsake myself. the scarred scared bitch who answers to my name is just too hard to hear.

Is your disappointment holding you back, Aries? Is it shifting how you see yourself and your possibilities? You invented yourself once: that lover whose whole life is a journey back toward tenderness. Tenderness as a practice in letting go when what you’re holding holds you down, tenderness like a knife at a dying deer’s throat. You’re strong enough to do it again and better, bigger, this time.

 

Taurus

There are close to 20,000 trees in Central Park. Black Cherry, Cedar and Magnolia, Birch and Black Tupelo. I know this because I looked it up. Walking beside you, under the blazing foliage, I can only call them beautiful and dying. You are like me, a city girl, and you’re still chain smoking like you did when we were fourteen and had fire red hair like this tree…. and that tree too. Years ago, on a fall walk like this one, we perched on surface roots and planned our futures. I was the selfish one, running toward whatever felt good. You bent your branches toward sacrifice “If I do this, then I can give my sister this, I can give my mother this.” And you moved toward math and marriage and money but yours was a wild heart too, an artist’s heart and it was never far behind you.

In her lyric essay “Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone,” Elizabeth Willis writes:

At what cost do we separate thought from feeling?/ / What acts of will and imagination remain in the uncombed weeds of the past, beyond the histories we have been conditioned to repeat?

In the story of our lives, the narrator doesn’t have to be reliable, doesn’t have to make good on every past promise. Even if you love the work you do, even if you are good at it and are rewarded, it doesn’t have to be everything you are.  The world you chose for yourself yesterday does not have to be the world you give your whole self to.

 

Gemini 

Remember when you came over and we read poem after poem to each other? I had seen you around, had noticed your undeniable beauty and the way you always found a way to touch me, but I was careful. I was careful because you held your brightness back and I was desperate for a girl with light to spare. Still, in my small kitchen, over childhood photographs and a little bit of liquor, I was charmed by the truth-teller in you. You were a prince bearing her wounds matter-of-factly, without artifice or need, and it moved me toward you. It was not your sadness I admired, it was your ability to face that sadness head on.

In an interview with TIME, Jamaica Kincaid said: One doesn’t have to pursue unhappiness. It comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you’re born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that’s really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and it’s a sign that you’re alive

If you have found yourself without words these days, Gemini, or if you have felt the weight of your own sadness like a stone in the mouth, hold on. Sometimes the words won’t come out right and what you say is nowhere close to what you mean. You’re one way then you’re another. Pursue happiness instead of being “one way.” Take time for yourself, write yourself a love song, a love song for your spirit, for your health.

 

Cancer

Remember years ago, around this time of year, when we stayed at your family farm? The days were bright with harvest and we lolled in the green grass unafraid of ticks. I want to remember more about that weekend, what kind of friend I was to you, what we talked about deep into the brisk farmhouse nights. Instead I recall two moments precisely. One: I tried to herd the sheep without you and they moved toward me terrifying like a black cloud. Two: My then-lover was living nearby and I met her outside under a full moon (yes I remember it was full). She was a cancer too, a cancer who broke my heart simply by being who she was. But who was I? I pressed the ring she gave me back in her hand.

In her essay “By Way of Booze and Broccoli,” Stephanie K Hopkins writes: It’s not in the ability to lift heavy objects or hold my drink or suck a man bone dry where I find my strength; it’s in the soft lens of recognition, in the turning toward my own fumbling self and softening, not trying to hide her. And it’s in the fluidity of self, the being able to let go of what holds us back, like myths, like what we thought was magic but was really accident, and continue to rewrite ourselves.

I’m thinking about that weekend now because in so many ways you have seen me move through heartbreak, a kind witness. Now you must become a witness to your own heart, no matter how painful that is, no matter how many truths rush toward you like an angry herd of sheep! Feel yourself moving through different kinds of heartbreak as you touch the edges of yourself, who you once believed you were and who you are capable of becoming.

 

Leo

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” I have read this James Baldwin quote from The Fire Next Time often, the words running over his pensive face in a poster or packed ornately into a pink scalloped frame. They slip into progressive Valentine’s Day cards and sweet wedding pamphlets. They compel us towards a kind of profundity, a way of understanding the vows we make to each other. Rarely have I seen the quote reposted with the words that follow that first line:

I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Perhaps it is easier for us to imagine that love (at it’s simplest, at it’s most visible) can do it all for us, or that the passion in our hearts—our desire to be good or good at—is enough to move us toward a kind of redemption. What if we have no idea what love is (let alone who or what we are) and everything we have named it thus far has only been lip service to the god of it? What would your path toward grace look like then, Leo? What masks are you willing to take off so that you might see it?

 

Virgo

Recently, Mary Oliver—blessed Virgo poet of learning self-love—revealed a new poem coming. The lines she offered? I have refused to live/ locked in the orderly house of/ reasons and proofs.

The poem is called “Felicity,” and I am thinking of what felicity might mean for you in this celestial moment, when so many planets come to you with their blessings. What if the house you refuse to live in is the one you built and in building, loved? Yes reason, yes proof, yes order you thought you wanted all those things. You set your own rules, your own laws for the kind of person you had to be and who that person had a right to love.

When love comes and, true to its nature, it is not at all what you are expecting, what would it take for you to leave that house behind? Who will be without it? Here is your body, your handful of stars under the night sky, here is the world you wanted—offering itself over and over again. To realize yourself limitless, you have to leave the house that locked you up behind, even if you love it, even if it’s yours.

 

Libra

In her beautiful poem “Salt is For Curing,” Sonya Vatomsky writes: I don’t / feel / haunted. Exactly. More like a spice jar that’s holding / more inside than volume would suggest possible. My / little tin lid fits snug but the pressure is really something.

So I’m thinking about the spice of life and the chance that such a spice might be sorrow. So what? So what if it’s sorrow? A jar you carry with you and—you can’t help it, cupped in your hand—it changes everything you touch. Stop me if my Russian flavor is a little out of hand but here’s something the cookbooks don’t tell you: sorrow doesn’t stop you from falling in love, it doesn’t stop you from being a mad genius or knightly girl. Sorrow belongs to you, a survival tool like a canteen of water or a sword you cast through the brush.

What if you open the jar and let the pressure out? What if everything you have and everything that’s coming is yours because you have learned how to eat your way through sorrow? A spice exposed to the world slowly loses potency and after a while you can barely make out the taste.

 

Scorpio 

With the lunar eclipse, we experienced conditional darkness. Darkness like a trick, a slight of hand. If the Sun casts light on the Earth and the earth gives the moon it’s red shadow, a refraction, who is the woman standing in the mirror? There is no math in magic, no solve for X in terms of Y. One body feels unbearably heavy with memory; one looks up and sees themself small in the universe. Neither one is a liar. Scorpio, it might surprise you to find that the truth lying flat no longer concerns you. You want a truth that knows how to move, how to lay down with a lover and wake up alone without sacrificing the whole of herself. Penumbra, what is obscured and still remains, indelible planet.

“The day’s blow / rang out, metallic–or it was I, a bell awakened, / and what I heard was my whole self / saying and singing what it knew: I can.” –Denis Levertov

You can, Scorpio, you can live as both darkness and light. You can move toward love even at your most vulnerable, you can bet on yourself each time—even if the stakes are high. You knew too much, grew old too soon, now knowledge is just one way to read a map that’s always changing. Moving forward must be an act of courage, of ambition.

It’s doesn’t matter where you start. Where luck is an illusion and hard work a love letter to the firebird within you, try harder. When you lose, lose again and harder.

 

Sagittarius

One night, in a bar at the edge of town, we were talking about that one guy, you know the one, who introduced you to his wife as the girl who “wears a lot of turquoise.” We marveled at the implication, the obvious social slight. In a perfect world, I would have remembered to tell you that turquoise was a stone worn by soldiers on horseback, an amulet that protected them from falling. That it was a perfect charm for your journey.

It would have been good, then, to explore the ways in which we intuitively make ourselves more powerful. To witness our preferences in companion, work, play and, yes, even adornment as choices we have made for the betterment of ourselves.

In her essay “On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion writes: The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others.

Sagittarius, if you have found yourself lacking strength this month. If you have, in a sense, exhausted your social graces in an effort to be invited to the table, stop looking outward. Tell me who you are again, what you want to do in this world, show me all the tools you carry with you—in you—that are more than enough to see you through.

 

Capricorn

In interview up at Jezebel, writer Sandra Cisneros was asked “When and why have you felt most at home in your body and in your home, are they one in the same, do they rarely overlap, do they always overlap?” To which she replied, in part, “You must feel safe in your physical space. You have to have a state of safety and peace, safety from intrusion. You have to carve out private time to be your own confidant. This helps you see the beauty around you…”

I’ve been wondering about safety as a negotiation, that moment when you say I feel ugly inside this conversation- I feel unseen and untended to and the person you’re speaking to actually hears you over the voice in their own head. Safe like a space where you keep what’s valuable locked up inside yourself and every time you copy the key for someone else, every time you allow yourself to be vulnerable, you want reciprocity—respect.

Wanting that kind of safety, wanting not a warm blanket and a lover but to be loved through and within weakness, is knowing that safety is a house made out of intentions—a house we try to live in until it proves unlivable. Each time a wreckage, each time a re-imagining of shelter. Capricorn, no one can make you safe, not even you. Safety is hinged on a controlled set of outcomes and life has taught you more than once that nothing is for sure. So there must be another way to experience beauty, another reason to do what we do: love, create, go on.

 

 

SEPTEMBER HOROSCOPES

Dear Autumnal Rabbits,

It’s hard to say goodbye to summer, to days when lying still under the hot sun can count as an activity. It’s hard to find time for ourselves, for stillness, for thinking about each and every little part of our bodies so that we might send it love. I love you fingertip, I love you tiny toe. It’s harder still, to cater to such small concerns when faced with the enormity of this world and it’s failure to care for the people in it.

Someone has, once again, reposted the photo of a Syrian child washed up dead on the shore. An interview with his father reveals a second son and a wife lost to the ocean. You look. You repeat their names in your mind, under your breath. You think about the bodies; were these bodies that you could have loved? I love you fingertip, I love you tiny toe. You can’t bear any more looking.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish calendar, is September 23. Forty-two years ago, Syria and Israel were at war. Now Israel has the chance to practice forgiveness. This month, when I light a candle for my dead, I will count a country of strangers among them. I will remember every time I have not been brave enough to forgive, not compassionate enough to be generous in the face of scarcity.

A tiny drop in an ocean of nations, I will vow to be better. What if you joined me?

xo G

P.S. Thank you, Claire Skinner, for all your help. <3
P.P.S. If you’d like to donate to the making of these horoscopes, there’s a PayPal link located on the sidebar of the site. I appreciate you and adore you.

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Aquarius

Here we are on earth, you wrote, terra / my name / your name / all that cannot.

I am thinking about all that cannot today. About what it means to live on this planet with it’s endless war and factory line. It’s 40% off at the Banana Republic. I am thinking about what it means to be complicit in our own suffering and how that suffering rises to a pitch so high only bats can hear it.

This month, Germany opened its arms and took in thousands upon thousands of Syrian refugees. A big move for a small country but Germany, for reasons mostly rooted in historical ignorance, has taken on almost the entirety of blame for the Holocaust. While I cannot speak to the inner working of national leaders, I dare say that in doing so Germany has shifted its image in the world.

There are many ways to change, Aquarius, many ways to shift how the world sees you. How do you suffer? What ghosts and worldly wounds have you taken on as your own? To become lighter, you can’t be afraid to give more of yourself.

 

Pisces

In the beginning of this month, under the full Pisces moon, I gathered with a few sweet friends by the beach. What I love about the night ocean, what I look for in most things I love, is the moment when darkness is a lens that unifies what lies separate. What I mean is the sky and the moon and the water, all one. What I mean is you, Pisces, and the moon you are: wound, healer, and the keeper of precious things.

The water crests and crashes over itself, slapping the rocks and sucking at the shore. The lunar light is brilliant and white like a hole in the universe.

What is made there, what is birthed and destroyed beneath the water’s cloak, is what lives in us. Feminine divine. Uncountable stories. In some parallel universe, you know them all by heart. In this one, they come to you, in dreams and in heartbreak. In the sparkling night, we’d come to honor your power, to charge our crystals and stones beneath you. I held a rock quartz to my third eye and felt an immense clarity, an opening that vibrated deep into my bones. I knew this was your gift and I felt you with me. You have come so far; you’re stronger than you’ve ever been.

 

Aries

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Aries, when I remembered The Velveteen Rabbit—written by a Cancer, I thought of you. I thought of you because the Lunar Eclipse will fall in Aries (Decan 1) this late September, and because Cancer is the star in the sky that understands your drive and devotion more than most. I thought of your young heart and how the world betrays it.

I want to tell you about how much I loved The Velveteen Rabbit as a child new to this country, how it made me feel optimistic about being accepted and loved. I desperately wanted to become “real,” whatever that was. I wish someone could have told me that we are always real. That there is no amount of love or ruining that can deem us worthy of each other. As far as reality goes, we can be wild rabbits in a field or stuffed horses with missing parts. It doesn’t matter. We are in this book, this room, together. We are for each other, beautiful and real, even in our separateness.

 

Taurus

Once my friend L called me out of nowhere. We hadn’t spoken in what felt like years. GALI! She exclaimed over the phone, I have some questions for you. L had just begun a graduate program in mathematics. She was one of the few women admitted and the isolation of her experience had catapulted her into re-thinking her identification with feminism. What L wanted to know was: could she be a feminist and still prepare dinner for her husband?

Such an absurd question came out of her desire to make things black and white, this or that. It didn’t matter that the question was absurd, or that she left her husband shortly after our phone call, moved across the country and began to date women exclusively.

What mattered (then and still) is the way life has a way of teaching you over and over that if you are stuck in a quandary (career path, relationship, friendship, etc.) and looking for an easy answer—you are probably searching for the way out. Which is, in many ways, the easiest answer of them all.

 

Gemini

I have known two kinds of Gemini, the kind whose every love was their Big Great Love, and the kind who wandered from lover to lover indifferently casting their affections. Even as I write this I know that each of these Gemini was one half of the other. Still, I remember my friend J, whose journal spilled out with crosshatch sketches of every boy she kissed. And, I remember S, who never talked about desire, who to this day rises up in photographs alone and beautiful on tropical beaches.

When the moon sails out / the waters cover the earth / and the heart feels it is / a little island in the infinite*

Today, I am thinking of this Gemini dichotomy, the great lover in you and the butterfly flitting from flower to flower. I want to ask each of those twins how they thrive. How do you, Gemini, make space for the one who wants in you? The one who is curious about everything in the world? Where do you rest, winged one, when all the flowers fall asleep? This month, imagine the little island in the infinite that is your heart, let it be home to both Gemini in you.

*Federico Garcia Lorca

 

Cancer

On car rides to Mount St. Helens, over Dar Williams cds, we would hash out the meaning of feminine and masculine, human and animal, Christians and Pagans, non-violence and self-defense. We would talk over one another, interrupt, reach for answers where there were clearly none to be found. We didn’t care. If my girlfriend was in the car with us, she would come to me later and say, “All you two do is fight. Doesn’t it exhaust you?” No, I would tell her, quite the opposite. Our arguing invigorated us, made us respect each other, made us close.

It also made us sensitive to one another. Perhaps that’s why when my girlfriend and I broke up, you were the first person I thought of. I needed your expansive mind, your strong logic to guide me toward every truth I had forgotten about myself.

My sweet friend, my partner in feminist praxis, who is asking you the tough questions now that we live so far apart? The ruby of your great mind is in full effect, do you feel as if you’ve honored its capacity? Don’t be afraid to go it alone, Cancer, to figure it out for yourself. Be brave. The people who love you cast a wide net and they’ll be there to catch you if you fall. But, dear heart, I know that you won’t.

 

Leo

On your back on a rooftop in Brooklyn, under a night sky that is not without stars, you can feel the world pulse on. Cars honk and skyscrapers blink. There is the faint sound of music. You pulse too but it’s a soft pulse. A sad song, I hear it, have heard it for months. What balm could you rub on that strong chest of yours? What more can you do than what you’ve done? For years you’ve built a damn around your heart but life rivers through, erodes the land. That’s the nature of rivers. Your heart aches but it won’t break. Hearts are unfathomable in their fortitude. No matter their weight, their darkness, their hard jacket with the collar turned up, they go on.

You have been dead a long season / And have less than desire / Who were lover with lover; / And I have life—that old reason / To wait for what comes, / To leave what is over. * 

Life—that old reason. It’s not shallow, not a small feat, to look at the person you’ve become and take her hand. I want to give you something powerful: a crown of black onyx and rose quartz, a tea to soothe your beautiful lion heart. I wish that it were possible to know just the right thing, but there is no right thing. Do whatever you need to do to live in this world, to leave what is over and begin again.

*Louise Bogan

 

Virgo

The Solar eclipse and the sun in your eyes, dear Virgo, may the Earth be good to you. May you eat the seeds of this world, and the next, and not be held responsible for your hunger. Let yourself know desire, let your shame become the ripe fig you tongue at the edge of your longing.

This is your beautiful everything, your thick elastic flesh molded from the shapes of ancestors, survivors, lovers who dug their nails in deep and refused to let go. Or, was it you who held on too long? It doesn’t matter…

Dear Virgo, may this month be the month of clear sight, a chance to see yourself as you have been and as you are now without regret. If there is a world out there you have held yourself back from, consider yourself welcome to it. If you have convinced yourself that love must prove itself to you before you can know what it is, consider that you are already full of knowing. Autumn beckons, the garden is thick with offerings.

 

Libra

Libra you, more than anyone, know a pattern when you see it. Surely, you might have guessed by now that the frequency of Mercury’s slip into retrograde has a greater purpose than messing up our emails and delaying our flights. We can’t blame a planet for our bad habits, our tardiness and our inclination to hit send too fast. We can, however, feel some kind of way about Mercury’s insistence on forcing us to confront them.

Mercury asks us to back up our hard-drives because that is an act of care we can perform for what we produce in the world. Mercury is here to teach us about listening before we speak, thinking before we act, and knowing what we want before we say yes. It forces us to take a good hard look at the obstacles we construct to get in our own ways and asks us if we are ready to dismantle them.

Well, Libra, are you ready to dismantle them? If the answer is yes, if you know what you want, then don’t be afraid of which way the planets move. Remember that you are your strongest astral influence and the universe aches to harmonize with you.

 

Scorpio

It’s no coincidence that poetry’s sad darlings, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, were both Scorpios. Who else could have courted death so famously? Who else could have been so brilliant in their darkness, captured the topaz light of a dying leaf so precisely that their genius would appear almost effortless? Two night dancers defying the gravity of language, the ghosts of Sylvia and Anne have often suffered a woman’s death—where their craft takes a seat behind their surrender.

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. / The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, / And comes from a country far away as health.

Beyond bank statements and painful conversations, beyond the anxieties of getting from one day to the next, there is a world where you are very very powerful. Scorpio, forget psychic death, forgo any form of surrender that does not yield pleasure. Let health become a country where you claim citizenship, move there. No matter how estranged, no matter that you’ve forgotten the language and the customs. Start small and soon you will remember.

 

Sagittarius

In the years when my grief was deepest, when the hours between getting home and waking up ached on and on with slow hands, you were my lighthouse. Maybe it’s because you were stationed between my home and the rest of the world, maybe because I was only willing to bicycle as far as your front door, I demanded your company. And you were good to me. You welcomed me in even when you were tired; you brought out a bottle of whiskey and let me live at its bottom.

I don’t mean to suggest that I knew you then, or that I know you now. I have, little by little, figured out that there is little merit in claiming that we ever truly know anyone.

Archer, I sensed the lone animal in you, the warm live thing at the center of your solitude. I sensed and moved toward it. What contained that animal, what contained you and kept you from relief, I could only guess at. I loved you indiscriminately. Loved the good in you. How big that good was and is, like an animal’s heart beating hot under all her fur.

 

Capricorn

I know a man who is an alcoholic. He’s not a bad man, or he wasn’t, although who can say who is born bad and who becomes? This man, he has a mother. Everyday his mother wakes early in the morning and begins the arduous task of baking specialty cakes for her son’s restaurant. Everyday her son moves through the day toward his next drink. The restaurant gapes empty and the man’s wife keeps surfacing with bruises.

The mother’s heart breaks over and over. The mother can’t bear to see her son so broken; she can’t bear to witness his cruelty and his weakness. She bakes cake not knowing whether her son will pick it up or not. Not knowing if he will leave the cake in his car while he drunkenly lumbers in a haze until dawn.

What she can’t seem to put together is the way the cake is both a bribe and a form of permission. That, in preparing these cakes everyday, she is trying to establish a pattern in a world that is falling apart, to manipulate a return to normalcy. How have you, Capricorn, created relationships where your labors are lost? How have you, Capricorn, maneuvered to control what is outside your power?

August Offering!

Dear August Love Bunnies,

I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I have, in many ways, been waiting myself. For inspiration to arrive, for the right words to come to me so that I might give them to you. But, as it turns out, there is no such thing as the perfect time or the right words. Surely, I knew that.

Still, I moved slowly and it wasn’t until I witnessed my beloved friends getting married last week that I found the perfect offering. So, I will share with you here what I have written below for the Pisces of this Galaxy.

At a wedding in Oakland, in a Botanical Garden wooden hall lit by soft light and over sixty hearts dipped in honey, I watched two people dance to this song. And in dancing, they offered it to us and each other.

You are a sea of goodness
You are a sea of love
Bless you, bless you, bless you
Bless you for what you are

We can all learn to love each other and ourselves in this way and perhaps we must if we are to know anything about love at all.

With Gratitude,
Galactic Rabbit

P.S. Thank you for supporting me, for believing in me, and for giving me hope every month. I believe in you too.

 

Aquarius

Once, a sky god could not rest until each star hung just so against the night. That sky god was your ruling planet Uranus. Uranus loved his children but he loved beauty more. Over and over he made small shining gods. Then he destroyed them. I know about that kind of creation, a love that blooms outside the heart and has no blood to live. A love like airplane lights you make wishes on just in case.

How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true, / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

With your North Star heart, you always mean to be true. You brave the night and orient yourself toward the brightest thing in the distance. But, you must know that even the false is tender, Aquarius. Even the false can call your name. It’s ok if you want to answer, if you surrender to the dream that ruins you. If you want, Aquarius, you can build a whole new life in a new country that has new names for stars. Or, you can choose isolation and call it solitude. Architect of the mind, you hold so many intricate plans inside you, so many different blueprints for Heaven. None of them is wrong, but if I were you, I’d choose what sustains your pilgrim soul. I’d be the man that loved that soul in you.

 

Pisces 

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the wedding of two people I love very much.Their song selection was “Revelations” by Yoko Ono and Cat Power. Watching their first dance and listening to the song, I thought of you.

Bless you for your greed / It’s a sign of great capacity / Bless you for your jealousy/ It’s a sign of empathy / Bless you for your fear / It’s a sign of wisdom

Pisces you, better than anyone, know the duality of this world. How, each form of suffering, of disjuncture, is also a form of growth and expansion. You move through tributaries of emotions, lovers and buildings and people streets, you swim through the pulse of the current toward the heart of the sea. It’s ok if you are sometimes afraid, if you are sometimes in pain. It’s ok if you want more than you can handle, than you can have.

Let this Aquarian song blessing river into you. Make the decision, every day, to honor your emotions and desires as they come, to hold them up to the light as evidence of your humanity and your journey.

 

Aries

For a long time now, I’ve been asking you to challenge yourself to be brave. I wonder now what that advice must sound like to you, someone who has made a life out of being brave. Perhaps we must learn to define courage in new ways. Your courage, it seems, must witness your anger and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. It must learn how to strip fear from rage so that only hurt remains… and inside of that hurt, empathy and new understanding.

All your life you have been the keeper of fires. Now is the time to understand how fire works, how it breathes and relies on gravity. Anger is a conversation. When tended to it can feed a revolution, when unchecked it can burn down an ecosystem. Your anger is your insight, your brilliant mind, and it is your insecurity—your refusal to grow.

Once, courage must have looked like an obstacle to overcome, a fear to dissipate, an impossibility to make possible. Now, courage must move through you more quietly, slow and insistent light. A kind of daybreak. A beautiful fire that lights up the whole sky.

 

Taurus 

Recently, I came across an article on boundaries. Boundaries, according to the writer, are difficult to maintain. Especially if you are one of two types of people: asshole narcissist or crazy co-dependent. Since I can’t imagine anyone who would willingly self-identify with either of these categories, I decided to imagine more generous forms.

Perhaps the crazy co-dependent is just someone who desperately aches to be vulnerable after a life of having to be walled. And the narcissist? Maybe withholding her full self is the only way she knows how to act strong. There are so many ways that we, bumbling creatures, can fall into these patterns. And, it’s important to remember love can make mirrors of us, both kinds of lovers at once. Narcissus and Echoes.

A boundary is not a rigid thing. Rather it’s a line in the sand, redrawn with every gust of wind or high tide. There are some things we know for sure about who we are and what we are willing to endure. There are many more things we can only begin to make allowance for. Taurus, this Venus Retrograde, consider where you draw your lines. How can you learn to be vulnerable on your own? How can you be strong without fortress?

 

Gemini

In Virgo, communication manifests in the tangible world, what you mean is what you do. Words are not enough. How does this affect you, Gemini? Where Virgo digs deep into the work, frantically prioritizing what feels right to her, you flood with language for a world that feels beyond your control. Praxis and practice, you ache to marry the two but how? It might feel like, in this onslaught of conflict, if you could just say one more thing, one more way, everything would fall into place.

You could learn something about hierarchies from Virgo, about when having the last word will not serve. Power is what you leave unsaid, Gemini, power is allowing space for interpretation without fearing what that interpretation might be.

There’s nothing to worry about, anyway, the worst is over. Mercury will slip into Libra soon and you’ll feel the expansive balancing love power of Venus and the exacting edge of Saturn in Scorpio. In this world with its ebb and flow of misunderstanding, you know you can let the waves make a mess of you or you can get up, dry off, and go where you feel seen and loved.

 

Cancer 

Because Sappho lingers in your orbit, I want to offer you this fragment from (cancer cusp) Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho:

Come to me now: loose me from hard / care and all my heart longs/ to accomplish, accomplish. You, / be my ally.

I’m thinking about how to be your ally, Cancer, or how you can be your own ally. How “all (your) heart longs to accomplish, accomplish.” Slowly you have begun the task of honoring your energy, the service you give to the world, and saving some for yourself. Slowly you have begun to carve out a space for the small kernels of your most intimate desires. You’ve given that space a name.

What now? Nothing to do but love more, love yourself and the want in you. Develop a language for what you desire and practice speaking it. Start with those closest to you then get wider and wider. If there’s a full cup waiting for your lips, let it come. You, who have served the world enough, must trust the world to serve you in return.

 

Leo 

When we were younger we knew how to signal our despair. When our hearts were torn, we’d put on our dresses of sadness and wade out deep into the dark. When I needed you, I’d go looking for the lone breath of your cigarette flickering in the violet light of a children’s park. I’d sit beside you, unspeaking, for hours. We knew how to send up smoke, how to be found, but the closer we got the more evident it became that we could not see each other.

The seeing would take time, decades, and even now—there are days when we fail. So often, the failing becomes the thing we hold onto. We forget how much the failing teaches us. Truth is, the more we learn about our hearts and the way they govern us, the better we understand the pain and suffering of others.

Now, when I need you, I text you and say Are you working today? I am suffering. And when I find you, I am not afraid to drag my sadness into the light—to put words around the unsayable. In doing so I give you a chance to see me, to see yourself in me. I hope that in these days ahead when you come to me, you give me the same chance, so that we might be learn how to be vulnerable together, and strong apart.

 

Virgo 

Three nights ago, in a city where I once loved you, I began to cry with your name in my mouth. We were always laughing, I said and in saying it felt the absence of your laughter. Even as the world fell apart we would wake up laughing. There was and is something about this part of our past life I can’t help but mark as a true loss, as evidence of the beauty of our love, of how necessary we once were to each other.

Not long ago, I found an interview with Leonard Cohen about his song “The Traitor”: (It’s about) The feeling that we have about betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it. And then, coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it, that the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself.

 

When a sign finds herself in the shadow of her ruling planet, she feels a great pull. When Mercury’s shadow flows over you, take time to think about the parts of you that you’ve labeled traitor. How has fear of loss, of betrayal (done to you, done by you), kept you from being the kind of lover and creator you know you can be? Remember love’s city, how it flooded with tears and kept afloat with laughter. In this new life, there is deeper courage in you, Virgo, deeper strength. 

 

Libra

This flower reminds me of a summer night / that ripened in a backyard in Brooklyn under / a tent that was just a sheet draped over some / strategically tied string fastened to corners/ at seventy degree angles like we were / equating a math problem / under this canopy my head rested in your lap / my mind wandered out into the night air

                                                                                                                     –Francesca Fay

Last night, while painting sunflowers at three am, I remembered you. Petal after petal, limb to limb, your heavy head full possibilities in my lap. I wanted to keep our love alive longer than I wanted you. You kept cutting the stems and I kept placing them in water. Or, you kept saying it’s over and then you kept saying come back. Until there was nothing to come back to, until we could barely recognize what we ever fell in love with.

Under the math of who stays and who goes, who wants more and who doesn’t have enough, under the canopy of what gets left behind, we were just trying to love each other for a little while. And that was a noble thing, a worthwhile thing.

In this Venus retrograde, while you are sitting down at the table of your heart fixing bad equations, don’t forget the sunflowers. How they change, not only the table you sit at but also, the room where that table stands. There are sunflowers growing wild outside too, Libra, full of hundreds of seeds just waiting to open in your mouth.

 

Scorpio 

Let’s give ‘em something to talk about, Scorpio, a little mystery to figure out. Who knows more about mystery than you? Who knows better how to hold it pulsating and alive in her dark hand? It’s a good thing you know what you’re good at holding because this year has already taught you so much about what you’re willing to lose. There are people out there who wouldn’t see the blessing in these lessons but you’re not one of those.

You want Scorpio, you want without expectation or assumption or regret. You want in the places that once flooded with need because you need so little now.

Above you, the Sun is a Lion opening his red mouth. If you’re hungry, watch the Lion hunt. Your future might be unclear but it’s not without direction. This is when what you do becomes much more important then who you’ve been. This is when you harness your hunger, spot your game, and earn your feast

 

Sagittarius

In a Pitchfork interview, about her penultimate album Biophilia, Björk said: “I had to reach so long—between solar systems—to connect everything.” Of her last album, Vulnicura, she can barely speak at all without choking up. In fact, days ago, Björk announced her decision to cancel the Vulnicura tour, describing the performance of its songs as too painful.

And isn’t that the way is seems to go, Sagittarius? First, one feels compelled to hold it all together then, one can barely hold onto oneself. The last few months might have felt just like this, a continuous labor, followed by an utter exhaustion. Well, good things come, as they always do (and must). How else could we survive in this world, this solar system of horrors and delights?

Björk doesn’t intend to give up now. She’s just gonna keep making beautiful things, first out of heartbreak and then out of healing. She knows that in surrendering to making, she is remade. What have you to learn from your fellow Sagittarian? This month, begin again. Create what you know you must. It’s necessary for the world and for you.

 

Capricorn

All night I’ve been sitting in my best friend’s apartment watching videos of visual artist Janine Antoni (Capricorn). We’ve listened to her describe the experience of publicly mopping a floor with ink using her hair. How the mopping and black ink was evocative of her mother, how being down on her hands and knees made her feel vulnerable, and how she reclaimed power from that position.

I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it. I try to do that in a lot of different ways, by residue, by touch, by these processes that are basic to all of our lives…

Capricorn, I am thinking about the ways in which you reclaim power. How do you, in the process of making—of creating and manifesting in this world—negotiate the places where power is transferred, where it can be lost? Capricorn, if you feel powerless, you are not powerless… not over your own life, anyway and isn’t that the only life you’ve got? And, if you are down on your hands and knees, make sure it’s because you want to be, because you know that submission is a gift and a demand.

July Galactic Rabbit

Dear July Bunnies,

I hope these horoscopes find you hydrated and surrounded by love. I hope if it’s raining where you are then the rain feels good, like the sky made an offering to you. And, if you are lying in the sun, then you are kissed all over by it, feeling full of summer, your fingers sticky from the sea.

I want to tell you that even if you feel less than who you are, even if this world feels impossible, even if your body hurts, you’re powerful.

And this world is for you. And you are for this world.

 

-Galactic Rabbit.

 

P.S. As always, if you feel moved to donate to the making of these horoscopes, there is a paypal button on the side bar for just this! I truly appreciate it.

P.P.S. Thanks, Claire.

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Aquarius

“I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.”

-Amy Lowell

The waiting is awful, isn’t it? The promise of something big on the horizon might feel like almost too much to bear in the face of the everyday search toward meaning. But, here, on this Earthly landscape you wind your way through the crowd and thrum of humanity. You go home to your apartment full of still beautiful things. You train your telescope on the moon and call it down. You ask her to be one of them.

But the moon won’t come down; she is tacked to sky with her own mission. She can’t be your beautiful thing, can’t be still for you. And you are better for it, for aspiring, for longing toward something bigger than you can fathom. Train your eye on her dark light and ask her to show you more. Open the book, pick up the chisel, and begin the work again. This month let the reaching for greatness be the thing, the love affair you’ve longed for, the jewel in the crown you wear to dress up your ordinary life.

 

Pisces

Last night I heard a pack of coyotes yipping and yelling. That sound scared me, so I had to snuggle down deeper in bed. But, at the same time, I wanted to go out there and hang out with the coyotes, yip with them. That is what the Pisces inspires in me, both fear and allure. – Claire Skinner

Pisces, I sit here, in a muggy Crown Heights apartment that is not mine, imagining myself a witness to your revolution. I cup my hands around the shadow of Chiron, press the tips of my fingers to Neptune’s water mark on your spirit. I welcome the whole of you, the twin fish swimming fearlessly in the rivers of ancient human knowledge and knowing. Flowing and Flown. Akashic Record diver, you are the soft seer of this world.

But, what do you let others see? How do you, star of recovery, make space for those who can’t see the wound in you. How do you share the moon with those who do not yet know how to yip at the moon because she scares them? Let down your guard, Pisces, let yourself try and fail again, let your safety come from your belief in yourself, not your isolation.

 

Aries

When I lost you I knew that I would never find a lover kinder than you. Oh, you were not always nice. In fact, you would often get me to doubt myself, underlining my sharp tongue, pointing out my bad humor without subtlety. But, deep into the night you would rise and traverse the rickety staircase because I was thirsty, because you wanted to be the kind of lover who took care.

I don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,/ do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,/ often. I want my feet to be bare,/ I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–/ you can’t plan on the heart, but/ the better part of it, my poetry, is open. – Frank O’ Hara

The question isn’t whether we’re better now than we were then. It’s what we forgot to see in each other all along, the impulse to go up when one goes down, the sharp and sweet, the hunter and the one who worships the hunter. We wade into the unfamiliar so that we might see our bodies again as if for the first time. We attract what we are not so that we might test our limits. It is what we do at the edge of that difference, how we learn to thrive, even in the most unfamiliar landscape that reveals our boundlessness. So it is with love, with work, with what you bring forth into world.

 

Taurus 

I hope the summer has been good to you, has given you a wide expanse of sky to run under. I hope that you look up at that sky and see yourself there, expansive too. I hope, I might even know, that this month is neither the beginning nor the end of a love affair you have sparked with your one and only life. You have been, for a long time now, tending to the treasures inside you, like small wildflowers along an un-blazed path. Now your garden is a wild garden and it loves you back, gives you strength.

Still, there are days when solitude feels more like loneliness, when shadows of a past self sit down beside you and you almost forget how much you’ve learned.

Soft bull, when you imagine what it might be like to be your best self, don’t forget to honor all the selves you had to be. There is no rule written that states your sadness and your strength must exist separately. No better time than now to hold what has hurt you, has disappointed you, firmly at eye level so that you might see your part in it, your own responsibility and your forgiveness.

 

Gemini

 Yesterday I was so sad. I just couldn’t shake it off. Not that sadness needs shaking, not that we aren’t allowed to weep into our kerchiefs whenever we damn well please. It’s just that I’ve been trying to be better about getting on, about being the kind of woman who can knock back a double on the rocks and crack a side smile while I state, without artifice, that life doesn’t always feel worth living.

I know you’re better than me at this. I know that you can scrape your life up of the ground and make something attractive of it, something that obscures sorrow. I know, too, that your sadness is not like mine, not a furious ocean that wears away rocks and lovers alike.

No, your sadness is the quiet kind. The kind that lingers at the edges of your heart even when it feels full, even when you feel loved. And you live with it like we all do, with a kind of resignation, an understanding that one can’t have it all. But, what if this month your sadness got a little louder? What if, instead of making life look good, you didn’t make life anything? Gemini, maybe having it all just means spending some time feeling it all, figuring out what got you here and how you can get where you want to be.

 

Cancer 

For a long time, I came to you to learn about the order of the world. You were, to me, the high priestess of logic and empathy. Athena of the heart, you knew how to take battling minds and call them to the table for dinner. You were and are always my favorite sparring partner of the mind. These days, I think you’ve grown tired of fighting. Tired of playing the mediator to imaginary realms when life itself won’t give you any room to rest.

Even gods lie down in the occasional field and pluck petals from dandelions. Even goddesses know when it’s time find a good book to live in. What I’m trying to say is even immortal beings take breaks from their roles in this world so that they might remember who they are beyond what they do.

Cancer, summer is your season. Your magic is high and your third eye open wide. You know better than anyone what makes you feel powerful and cared for. Instead of making sense of everyone else’s lives, take time to bring yours into focus.

 

Leo

Leo, when you wrote me, you said you were newly in love, and my heart clapped loud for you. And when you told me of your new shows, your galleries and invitations to perform, I knew the world was clapping with me. But, I sensed sadness in you too, a closed mouth trying to drink from a full cup. And, with that sadness, an inability to see the agent of change in you, the brave animal who knows who they are in this life and what they can make of it.

You have your reasons, your grief over friends and lovers and lives whose loss no language could serve justice to, your fear of loving something you could lose.

Leo, I can’t promise you that you won’t lose again, and I wouldn’t want to. Each loss has brought you closer to who you are, has stripped you of illusions. Since when did our lives become about how hard we can hold onto something? Since when was having something to lose not reason enough to love what you have and who you have yet to be?

 

Virgo

When I was in college, a new feminist, I believed words like “safe space” meant something. We would get together in the evening, under fluorescent basements lights, on ratty old couches and ugly stock furniture and make our big signs. We wanted the world to change and although we weren’t quite idealists, and certainly not idiots, we believed that we could change the world with words.

Problem is, despite the occasional relief of seeing a rainbow sticker, you can’t just call a place safe and make it so. So it is with this terrible violent world that grants us legal marriage and burns down Black places of worship. So it is with our inner lives, the jobs we go to and the relationships we hold on to.

Virgo, there are places in this world, people, that will never feel safe even if they look it. It’s not up to you to make them so. But, if you want, you can make the big signs anyway, write the big poems, tell your story one more time. Not because you have to change the world but because in believing you can, you give yourself a reason to stay part of it.

 

Libra

Sometimes, when my throat gets tight, I play a game. I imagine what it might be like to be an animal, a raptor with wind rolling over my airborne body, a snake dragging my belly across the hot cracked world. I imagine I’m a brown bear, wild in an Oregon river, catching salmon in my open mouth. I think about honey in my mane and dirt in my paws.

I cast a wide net for a different body, a different life. I think, maybe, if I were a brown bear my heart would grow strong and grizzly.

 

You talk so much whisper, Libra, but your heart isn’t half as bad as it feels. In fact, it’s getting better and better all the time. And I’m only telling you this because I don’t think it’s something we get taught. That there’s pain in getting good, there’s a lot of coping mechanisms we have to surrender so that we might rise more swiftly into ourselves, into the air. A lot of shedding before the body we drag through this world is the one we know is home. This month imagine all the animals are with you, in you. They are helping you grow strong; they are leaving honey for you so that you don’t forget what sweetness is.

 

Scorpio 

I wish I could drag you to the beach on a day that looks promising but turns out overcast and cool. I wish I could lay my towels down and remind you that wind bites more the higher you are so come lie down and hold the ground with me. I wish we were two girls, yes girls, on our backs watching the clouds, our upper arms sticky against each other. You could tell me about your journey toward yourself, and I’d say yes, oh each muscle’s a painful callused wound.

If we cried we would do it toward no resolution except that our throats ached from the salt we carried. And, letting the wind dry our faces, our hard hearts would soften up the way sand is soft when dry.

Scorpio, it’s hard to love the small animal in you but you have to try. You have to try even when she looks weak because you must learn how to love yourself through weakness. Try, even when she forgets how to be kind, because being kind means being vulnerable and that takes time. Scorpio, the small animal in you protects your heart., she is the wild thing inside you that knows how to love. So you must be brave in claiming her and feed her well and pet her often.

 

Sagittarius

“the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must save for it and gather honey.”-Rilke

Alive with night, I am thinking of you and what you’ve taught me. There are the obvious things, the things that friendships bring out in us, generosity, a striving toward mutuality. And, the not so obvious, like the way you’ve taught me (and you might find this hard to believe) about the construction and maintenance of boundaries. I am thinking now of the many different ways you’ve said no to me.

No you couldn’t drive me to the airport but knew well enough I could take the express coach bus. No you weren’t in the mood for company and were thoroughly enjoying the sensation of your pajama-ed body sinking into the carpet as you stared up into the ceiling with despair. No because no matter how much chemistry we did or did not have sexually, we would love each other for a long time without wounds.

Sagittarius, perhaps I was easy to say no to because you knew I would see underneath to the woman in you who chose to take care of herself first so that she might give of herself without compromise or resentment. This month let that woman be the one who speaks for you, even if she inspires solitude, even if she gets mistaken as unkind.

 

Capricorn

There is a danger in living life inside the house of yourself, in letting the shape of it shape you. You fill your refrigerator, you sweep the floor and wipe down the dust, and you imagine what it would be like to be seen at your best, in your element, like this. You imagine what it would be like to be seen. To be loved for the good in you.

But, goodness is speculative. Goodness is something we can both keep digging up for each other until our knuckles bleed rough from dirt and neither of us feels good. And neither of us feels clean. So there must be something beyond goodness, beyond the imagined limits of houses we have made of ourselves.

I want to give you what you need but on mutual terms. I imagine your body in a doorframe, a body that has learned to take the shape of that frame, to hold fast to the structure that feel safe, familiar. I want to come into your house but only if you can understand that the people who we let inside us change us as we change them, often irrevocably.

 

JUNE Horoscopes!

Dear Bunny Readers,

I give you these lovenotes today with a heavy heart although I have tried my best to be good to you. While writing these horoscopes, I have also been reading and bearing witness to a world that often refuses compassion in the name of power. When I was an idealistic kid in college, I believed that what we needed most was celebrating life together. I organized a peace festival full of anti-war music, I made sculptures out of recycled plastic, I wrote poems about Iraq and my body. I imagined that to be enough.

But it was not enough. It was not intersectional, not interested in the lived experiences of my black peers, there was not one person of color in my arts activist house of twelve. How can I be surprised, then, when so many people fail to recognize the injustices people of color face everyday? How can I be so heartbroken by the sound of each heart closing, comment by comment, to the story of Kalief Browder, to the coverage of a teenage girl at a pool party forced face down in the ground because she dared to believe she belonged somewhere. Because she thought knowing her rights meant she was free.

Learning how to hear the suffering of others above my own is a life-long lesson and I am interested in living it. I hope you are too, reader, I hope that work is something we are doing together in this very wide galaxy of ours. I want to live in a world where we more than just try to understand each other. I want to live in a world where that young girl is helped up and held by someone she trusts, a world where she would never be brutalized. I want to live in a world where Kalief can let himself love being alive. I already know that this is not that world. But what would it take to come close?

Love,
Galactic Rabbit

As always, if you feel moved to donate to the making of these horoscopes: there’s a button on the sidebar available for just that <3

P.S. This is me in Russia:

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Aquarius

There’s always music in the world. That’s a fact you know and hold onto. Like a dancer of the heart ambling down the street, honk and rumble of cars and trains, bing bing bing of the streetlights, sha sha of pants rubbing, they get you, they move you along. And, because you trust music, because you believe in the unpredictable beauty that comes out of chaos, you are never afraid, never asking “What is the end goal? What does it mean?”

Can you re-imagine the current events of your life like this? Can you take the world as it comes to you with its hands open, with hands that are not hands but small portals of sounds and light? Can you allow for mistakes, for moments of cacophony and tonal dissonance for the sake of something altogether new?

Imagine, Aquarius, a life without fear of the unknown, where what is unpredictable is exciting, where chaos is your teacher and your greatest source of inspiration. A life like a body moving to music. At least for a little while, let that be your life.

 

Pisces

On the dance floor last night, a girl was dancing by herself. Her curls were seagreen and blue and as she moved her body to the music, a tiny ocean crested and crashed around her. It was lovely and sensual and almost entirely impenetrable.

Dying with curiosity I moved tentatively toward her. “I know this sounds like a line but I’m just dying to know! What’s your sign?” Giving me a little side-eye, but with a smile, she replied “Pisces, why?” I told her that I was impressed with her power, the strong way she held her space. “It’s not on purpose,” she replied, “I wish it wasn’t there.” Slowly we began to dance together.

I’m thinking now about what we want versus how we ask for it. I’m thinking about how connections are so easy to make once we stop being afraid to be vulnerable and how vulnerability is about being ok with what’s uncertain, letting someone see you try and fail. I’m thinking about you, Pisces, and the way your solitude is also your sorrow. Don’t waste the night waiting around for someone to see through your armor of shy cool. Ask yourself: how am I an agent of my own desire? How do I manifest what I need most in this world?

 

Aries

The raft is used to cross the river. It isn’t to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn’t the moon itself.

I’ve read that this might be the month Mars (your ruling planet) keeps a low profile, that due to a solar conjunction the red planet is all but unobservable throughout the month. That might be all for the best because on June 24th, Mars enters Cancer, house of emotional work, and Aries would do well to rest up for such a visit.

Where cardinal-fire Aries does, cardinal-water Cancer feels. The moon, after all, rules Cancer, and the moon is all about what we take with us into the dark of ourselves, our unspoken truths and undercurrents of meaning.

What can that mean for the days ahead? Well, my bright star, I suggest you practice identifying the moon in you and what it does. When emotions arise, when they are beyond your control, relinquish control. When they fill you with uncertainty, imagine them as slow waves, as tides that recede with the shoreline given time. You are neither the waves nor the shoreline. You are everything beautiful that they create together, seaglass, seashell, searock smooth and slick with moss-life.

 

Taurus

When an animal like you lives in this world so totally, when she throws herself against the earth with each run, when she smells and tastes of it, it must be hard for her to allow for the possibility that there’s another world, another way. But I believe there is. I believe that we are all capable of living many more lives than we do. Lives that nourish and sustain us.

I have this little game I play with my heart sometimes. When I’m sad, circumstantially, when I need to hold someone who is far away for example, I say “In a parallel universe I am holding you tight.” And I imagine this is true, I let it become true. The parallel universe I want is not so different from the one I inhabit and in creating it (because we are always bending and expanding in time) I create the possibility for convergence.

Soft bull, what parallel universe would you imagine into being if you could? How could imagining such a universe help you create convergence with the one you feel with all your earthly self?

 

Gemini

Remember when I thought you hated me or you thought I hated you because we were maybe dating the same person at the same time? Or, maybe it was a gender thing and wewere just femmes who both liked bois and taking our shirts off in public spaces and the world wanted us to stand opposite instead of side by side? We kept dancing together under the same strobe light exclaiming “I don’t hate you!” but it never stuck. It’s like we couldn’t get around to accepting that in loving the same people for so many years, in moving our bodies to the same songs, we had always been learning how to love each other.

The power of the feminine in all of us, and especially in you, is the ability to let beauty move us toward each other in this world. What I’m trying to get at is a kind of softness, an opening of the heart, the possibility that you are more than deserving of enduring and sustained connection. What I mean is forgiveness, true forgiveness, which begins inward and makes allowances for any and all prior mistakes you can’t bear to admit you made. Allowing yourself to love and be loved without fear of being misinterpreted, misled.

For your birthday month, let the good words stick, the good intentions matter and the good feelings last. Each butterfly on each flower knows your name and they beat their wings for you.

 

Cancer

I’ve been thinking about the way crabs molt. How they must do it even into adulthood, expand until they crack their own shell and then grow a new one. I love that. That’s your desire to challenge yourself, Cancer, your fearless journey toward your best self.

Oh and I know this might seem obvious but the crab has got to extract herself from her own shell! What I mean is even the littlest bits: thin pinchers, difficult claws, eyestalks, all. It’s arduous and dangerous, Cancer, possibly fatal! And then, if she succeeds, if she doesn’t die just getting herself out, she’s got to manage in the world all soft and watery and new until her shell hardens again. Good thing all crabs have to know is how to be crabs.

It’s harder to be human. Your signals get messed up. You expand but you’re not ready to leave the shell or you’re ready but being human has made an existential fool of you and you fear death too much. Or, you’re brave and shed that old shell so there you are all vulnerable but you can’t just hide under a rock. You’ve got a job, responsibilities, a partner who needs you. Fuck. Wherever you are in your process, if you’re breaking open or broken or so fucking new everything feels both terrifying and possible–don’t give up. And, if you need a rock to hide under, know that self-protection is a form of strength, a necessary ritual.

 

Leo

Clutching the wheel with both hands, I’m learning how to drive and your soft sure voice is the anchor keeping my racing heart from rising up my throat. I turn and don’t yet know my own circumference but I’m never scared, I feel myself grow braver in your presence.

Because it is sustaining, the sun loves us everyday, bravely, and without absence. Heliocentric, we mark our days and nights by its proximity. We don’t know how to name a love like that. It’s too all encompassing. Too always. Your heart is the least boastful part of you and perhaps that’s why you often feel unseen in your quiet enduring generosity. It might even occur to you that there is weakness in your lovers, a dependency that you encourage and disdain simultaneously.

But, Leo, in loving you we behold you and in circling you we give you a place in the universe. There’s nothing invisible about that, nothing weak. So, there must be other ways of talking about being seen and appreciated ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another that are not simple, that do not deal in false binaries, that know how strong tenderness can be. I believe in you, more than anyone, to discover those ways.

 

Virgo

Tiny tornado of anxieties and delicate perceptions, mutable animal, you know too well when things aren’t quite right. What’s more, you work so hard to make it right. You write the letter, make the phone call, connect each loose end as best you can.

You are the only lover, only friend, I’ve had or will ever have who mails me packages with supplements inside, who fixes my refrigerator door while I’m at work, who calls me just when I get too sad and asks: are you ok? Are you too sad?

When I told you in May that you should let someone else be the lover, I didn’t mean for you to throw yourself, heart-first onto the nearest fire. And I know, I know that you are not simple in your devotion. But as my brilliant friend Claire once told me, one’s ability to love and serve can be greatly hindered by a lack of boundaries/complex ego desires. In the spirit of building stronger boundaries, I suggest taking it slow, making sure you really want the lover you take, the job you accept, the big move cross country, any and all compromises in the name of bettering someone else’s life. With Mercury (your planet, your god) just out of retrograde and moving direct in Gemini, ask yourself what it might take to live a life where you come first, where coming first is not about being witnessed by another.

 

Libra

It’s not easy knowing what you need in this world. There’s your body and the soul it contains moving slowly through time. They have wants. Sometimes those wants conflict but often they are not one without the other. But, then there’s the world. The whirling incandescent light of it, the terrible endless misery of it and how it changes us. One can’t always resist the big gusts of wind that knock us about and ask us to lie down in their path. You can’t always help letting the life you never asked for ask too many things of you.

Even so, I know there is a new strength in you, a will. I see you, little by little, learning how to feel the core of yourself again. Even lying down, you have begun to resist. Let the winds come, I surrender to them. With the world blowing, you hold on. Not to be too corny but my friend Claire did just send me the plastic bag video from American beauty and it’s like, ok, that bag is getting blown all around but it’s still beautiful and never not itself.

You are so lovely, Libra, in your path toward your truest and strongest self. I can’t wait to see just what magic you’re capable of. And, uh, if you want to take a look at that bag:

 

Scorpio

Did you hear the news about Pluto? Turns out Pluto has got some moon problems, some floppy moons. Well, the deal is that Pluto has a moon named Charon and Charon is so big she’s practically her own planet (not that everyone agrees Pluto is a planet but I do so). Well because of her status as a Big Beautiful Moon or BBM, she’s got some gravitational pull working for her. It’s got all the other little moons messed up. They can’t decide who they want more, BBM Charon or broody Pluto. Love is hard and asks so much of us.

We are learning that chaos may be a common trait of binary systems…

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because Pluto is your ancient ruling planet and it’s currently doing the weirdest dance in the galaxy. And, because what these scientists are learning about binaries, about chaos, is something you’ve always known. That power is not an equation and freedom is not the price you pay for freedom. Love is not Hegelian, quite. Two planets learning to live together (and let this be about what lives inside you, who you think you are and who you want to be) each with their own orbit, they might have some moon problems, might look crazy, but there’s also the possibility of grace.

 

Sagittarius

I knew this guy once, a Sagittarius. He was really unsure about his place in the world, what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be. He’d placed his bets on a dream that wasn’t elastic enough to stretch into the life he wound up living. So, he bet on himself instead, got a house, a dog and an engagement ring for his girlfriend.

What he wanted was reassurance, a sense of self that belonged to him. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to find out that none of those things stuck.

Wanting to be depended on, wanting to be loved unconditionally, wanting something we call our own, these are the most human of desires and ambitions. And they are infinitely attainable. When I say infinitely, what I mean is that fate comes for us in uncountable shapes and configurations. What might look like the quickest way out is actually the longest way through. Because when you lean toward clean fixes, when you try too hard to obscure your own suffering with ready-made versions of a life well-lived, you are building a wall between who you are and the life you live. Your sadness has within it the answers you need, take down the wall so you can hear them.

 

Capricorn

Let me be honest with you Capricorn, sometimes I get anxious writing these horoscopes. Sometimes they linger above me, begging loudly to be checked off of my to-do list. I resist them for a long time because I have a problem, a lingering disbelief in myself, the notion that no matter how hard I try I just can’t will my hands to do what my soul wants them to. This is also a belief in circumstance, in only being able to accomplish within my means. Because my means are discouraging, I often give up too soon.

But, when I don’t, when I take a cue from your work ethic, I surprise myself. I realize that in doing I am creating a new world. By choosing to believe in myself and what I am capable of, I expand my means and therefore my possibilities.

The way you create the world you want is your power. When you forget that, you run the risk of getting into the same rut I do, the one where the hole you dig is who you are and who you have to be. It makes you angry, it makes you tired. When you remember, when you’re your best confident self, what you accomplish is awe-inspiring, is something we can all learn from.