Tag: galactic rabbit horoscopes

Galactic Rabbit September. 2016

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Louise Bourgeois

Dear Autumnal Rabbits,

Today I bring you these letters, a small harvest I collected under the light of your stars. It’s almost 90 degrees outside in NYC, as if summer never ended, and I am grateful for the warmth of this day just as I am grateful for the cool crisp days ahead. I’ve spent the week feeling strangely envious of children, the incredible charge that came from the first day of school, a fantastical conviction that this year you would different. How your Lisa Frank folders and trapper keeper, particular mechanical pencils and three-colored pens, would raise your cool factor and make new friends a breeze.

My friend reminded me that in addition to the excitement, there was terror and isolation, fear of being found out for whoever we were then, and inevitably who we wound up being now.

In the spirit of excitement and fear, the kind that falls sparks us well past the age of childhood, I want to end this letter with a beautiful video of a “Soy Yo” by Bomba Estéreo.

Y no te preocupes si no te aprueban cuando te critiquen tu solo di / Soy yo
Soy yo soy soy soy/ Soy yo

 

With Love and Little Apples,

Galactic Rabbit

P.S. If you would like to contribute to the writing of these horoscopes, you can donate at my PayPal. 

 

AQUARIUS

I remember the state of your guitar particularly. The gloss and fullness of it, bodily, the strap sorta 70’s and almost wholesome. Like, Karen Carpenter wholesome. Like what’s happening under the surface of you where are you and what have we lost you to, sweet songbird? And I loved her bright clear voice like I loved your guitar, earnestly swinging behind you.

There’s grief, I guess, for the lives we imagined for ourselves and lost the blueprint to. And that grief is never-ending despite the fact that we didn’t begin this road together and we sure as hell had no idea where it would lead us and at what cost. When I saw you last, you were living in a house that might as well have had a white picket fence. You were in love, teaching music, you took me to a small town gay bar and I saw the best drag show of my life. Now I don’t know who you are and the possibilities pain me.

I stopped by your life and left so I guess this is a coward’s letter. The kind of letter you write to keep a memory intact then tuck into the corner of a musty cabinet. The internet with it’s river of voices is not so different from a black hole. But, if you are reading this, I want you to know that I remember you powerful. In my mind, you move through the world irreverent and unafraid of love’s possibilities. In my mind you are never lost, never unclear of the path you must choose toward feeling strong and free. I’ve got faith in you, songbird, your dark heart, and your guitar so sweet and clear.


PISCES

I didn’t know how to ride a bicycle until I was about 20. It was something that embarrassed me but I had excuses: my father was disabled and unable to teach me in that running-behind hands-on way, my brother never offered to, my friends would always stop being my friends etc etc. It took me a long time to commit to learning, to decide I deserved that particular kind of freedom. The first person who helped me help myself was a dear Pisces friend. For a couple of hours on a cool summer day she ran beside me as I tentatively pedaled her bike back and forth along Flatbush Ave. Later that year, I found a Kelly green Schwinn abandoned in an old shed behind a college house I was living in. I cleared it of cobwebs and claimed it.

This isn’t a letter about that bicycle. This is a letter about the moment when, riding around town with a girl I had been seeing on and off, I glanced behind me and in her face saw a happiness I dared to hold between my two open hands. It’s a letter about letting yourself hold happiness for as long as you can without being afraid of going too fast and falling too hard. About trusting yourself to brake when you need to, to take turns well and with grace. The freedom this new venture offers you, you deserve it and you know what to do with it. Wear a helmet, get on and ride.


ARIES

When a small animal is put in our hands, we are given delicate instructions. We accommodate its wriggling squirm and scramble, shifting our arms this way and that. Fragility is the obvious thing, the small bones and thin skin mewling. We know a woman can love a suckling pig and bring that pig to slaughter. That is a tenderness too, no matter its conclusion. Where does such tenderness come from? Asks Marina Tsvetsaeva of Mandelstam and his eyelashes although his love for her was hardly tender, often cruel and dismissive.

Sometimes, I have encountered women who moved me toward tenderness as if by compulsion—a dull ache in my hand to tuck her loose hair back behind her ear, to smooth the tension from her neck with a light stroke. More rare were the times I felt tender toward myself, stroked myself from collarbone to pelvis like a long worry stone. No one taught me tenderness toward myself, no one said, “be your own small animal, be gentle, be kind.” It was something I learned for myself and keep learning.

Each day you abandon yourself is a day you become less soft and less able to love others. So each day of your life you must say, “you are my charge, my tender thing, I will bring you what you need.” You are where tenderness comes from.


TAURUS 

We were there the moment Miriam opened for breakfast, a young woman propping the door with one hand and gesturing us in with the other. Grateful we’d arrived at the same time, our paths intersecting at the cross street, I felt a kind of hope flood me—a knowing. What is life and how do we think our way through it? You scanned the menu and I knew what both of us wanted. Summer cleaving into two parts, your time teaching in the woods and your time after—but this was a break in time, a day of endless meals and friends arriving—you knew soon that what “real life” was, you were returning.

Well, how does it feel to have returned? So many of your responsibilities, roles you anticipated and waited years for. And if it isn’t what you wanted—that is not a failure. It isn’t our lot to walk toward an oasis and settle peaceful amongst the grazing animals. We are not that kind. We were made to re-imagine to world, the clear a path through it as a hoofed land animal might—moving persistent through tall obscuring grass.

We were bathing in the dim light of morning and warmth of endless coffee re-fills. I said I feel too aware of the world—too aware of the intentions of others—what they mean versus what they say. You said I have always been this way, all my life. And, I knew that was where your strength came from, your ability to push through and onward toward a wide and more ample landscape.

GEMINI

I have a funny feeling about moons. Seems like I’m always looking for one when I’m in the mood to get a big eye-full and all I get is clouds, the obfuscation of cosmos. And, there I was, naked in a Hampton Bay waiting for bioluminescent transcendence, thwarted by the greedy light of the big full moon. In the dark water I swished my hands back and forth to activate barely visible small crystals of light, one doesn’t get what they want when they want it. I thought about how lucky I was to be swimming with my love, my friends and strangers, queers of various ages and races—free under the hooded eye of night.

Maybe life is all about chance, a double-sided coin that falls how it may—despite everything we learned about odds and probability. Or maybe there’s fate in it—a fist you can’t see grips the coin out the sky and slaps the back of your hand with the answer. Yes or no, go or stay, this way or that. Whichever power governs our lives, we stand square in the midst of these forces and we are culpable in their outcomes. We are the ones tossing the coin, looking toward the sky for answers and choosing whether or not to listen.

If you can’t see the moon imagine the moon. If you are walking through a dark path, let your eyes adjust to the dark. You are more than capable of getting where you need to be, you are not lost and you’re not without help. Be patient with yourself and the moon, it will light your way softly for a long time.

CANCER

A while ago I read an article that encouraged those of us going through heartbreak to lie down on the ground and feel it all, submit to Kali, Hindu goddess of chaos. I thought about this article for a long time after, remembering friends of mine who had gotten sober and tattooed the word surrender on their forearms—grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change… And, I thought about my friend Willow who told me to “lie down in it” when I told her the pain in my heart was at times excruciating. How does one go about practicing surrender when surrender is not in one’s nature? Write it down, Cancer, a page of what you mean to surrender.

Remember when we found a poster advertising a “gesture store” and we stood for a while wondering what we could not know before deciding to find out? How the man with the gold flag welcomed us into a ramshackle alley and two foreigners looked us over as if we were the experiment? We could have never known, hours before, that we would be perched on stacked pallets getting the veins in our feet traced by their paintbrushes. How quietly we folded into the demands of that universe, how easily we played along—teaching the foreigners a hand clapping game we both knew from childhood.

The folds in our lives are sometimes slight and sometimes so sharp they change the shape of the page entirely. You might be surprised to find that you never needed it the way it was. What leaves you, what you leave, it’s just one page of a book. Your book.


LEO

In your bathroom, I’m standing with my shoulders squared and my feet hips-width apart, breathing even breaths so as not to move while you cut the fringe on my forehead in a diagonal curve. That’s my exposed futuristic eyebrow, I explain, and the other’s my relaxed bohemian behind a curtain. You laugh and seem to understand perfectly, tufts of my hair fall on your chest and make you wooly. Hair is an intimacy, I think, my mother saved my long Russian braid from when I was a child. I would open up her chest looking for costume jewelry or handkerchiefs and come upon my own hair, a golden color it will never be again. And then, there was the way you described your dead sister’s childhood braid in your mother’s hands. A rope that lead to Jane who wasn’t.

It’s been a year today, and when I ask you about this month you say a hard month. When I think about what the stars say I think compromise, suppression, a lasting wound that shapes you.

How does one parse themselves from themselves, a bruise on the heart from all other bruises? Here I think about Stephen Dunn’s Each From Different Heights. Yes, we talked about the falsity of tender things and, yes, we know some bruises fade. But what do the living owe the dead? What do you owe the ghosts of relationships past, the girl you thought you were and the women you discovered you are?


VIRGO

On the news all morning the North Dakota Pipeline protestors representing tribes near and far, on horseback and on foot, children and elders chanting go away go away pushing attack dogs back with their big voices. I’m so moved and so menstrual, I witness their unrelenting courage and burst into tears. What comes to mind is the summer we drove through the Dakotas. The fields now flat now undulating, the sky true blue and so wide I felt like we could drive right off the earth. Wheels of golden hay punctuated the landscape and we saw a horse faint from heat. Powwow to powwow, we went looking for fry bread like your grandmother’s. You told me how you dreamed of coming back here, to help kids who might or might not be your relations—teaching them animation skills so they might tell their stories.

Today the protestors are out there again. People on horses and one man is wearing a Russian scarf around his neck for protection against mace. I imagine I am that scarf, glittering, sentinel. I imagine you there too, your strong legs braced, your shoulders squared against menacing oncomers. Then, I imagine you wherever you are in this world, watching this same video, wondering what you can do from where you are. It doesn’t matter what you held you back before, the wrong turns and false starts. If you want to be of beautiful use to something bigger than yourself, if you want to do something that matters, you’re ready. Just make sure the help you give is an offering in response to a need, a need wider than your own.


LIBRA

When I was eleven, my erotic eye opened—a butterfly—resting on beauty. That was probably how I found you, with your long black hair layered in thick wisps, your always perfect pearlescent nails, the waist band of your Adidas running pants flush against your narrow hips. You probably don’t remember that I loved you this way, only that we were different and the same somehow, only that it was good to sit beside each other, play MASH and draw flowers.

Last night at a bar full of hipsters braying about Bushwick being “just like high school,” I got my first drink with you in over a decade and outside we saw a boy I dated once that you did go to high school with and he was on a date with a girl he went to high school with. New York is a small town, all of it. “I don’t know why,” you interjected mid-sentence, “I just feel like I can tell you everything because you’re you and I’m me.” And, listening to you, I was reminded of who I had been all this time—the ineffable aspects of our characters that must have been inherent to us as children (our shameless flirting with strangers, our ability to sigh into a heartbreak and then lay it down to the side).

Sometimes, when the world’s demands feel endless and you think you must be changing into someone you can’t recognize, it’s powerful to remember that there is a core self—a butterfly—that informs your relationships to others and to yourself. That butterfly is always open to the world, she is young-hearted and easy to love.


SCORPIO

In order for the truth to set you free, you’ve got to believe that there’s only one truth and any kind of freedom but you know better. You’ve learned that no matter how true something feels, there’s always a little lie in it, or a little lie around it. That’s the bee in the honey, the worm in the mushroom. A poet I admire, a Scorpio skilled at seeing, recently complained that in her Myers-Briggs profile, she had morphed from J to P, judging to perceiving. She asserted that the P made her vulnerable in her empathy.

What’s funny, or strange, or just right, is that there exists a path that Scorpios do walk which leads them from judgment toward perception. When a Scorpio is young in their spirit, they are said to be scorpions—stingers—moved by instinct. The truth of the scorpion is a truth that pours from fear means to wound others. When a Scorpio begins to walk their path with mindfulness, they are said to be eagles. They are interested in self-awareness and precision. But they are also hunters and they don’t wound until they mean to kill. These are the Scorpios that hold their truth for a long time before burning one large and final bridge. The third Scorpio is said to be a phoenix. This is Scorpio that lays its judgment down in favor of perception. It does not mean to tell you how you are; rather, it means to see you for who you are. This is the Scorpio that knows how care for someone by caring for their damn self, how to love someone even as they let them go.

Scorpio, because fall is coming and that is kind of walking towards death—not mortal but seasonal, spiritual—I want you to think about the kind of Scorpio you are. What has your commitment to judgments (about yourself, about your life, even your workspace) held you back from? Maybe freedom begins by learning to see the many complicated truths you are capable of.


SAGITTARIUS

In Brewster NY, there’s an organic farm belonging to my friend’s family. There is a centenarian Sycamore grows right by the house we sleep in, a house so old it feels like I’m on a tour in one of those towns where women are hired to wear bonnets and turn butter. The bed I sleep in has ropes for slats. My friend informs me that these ropes have never been replaced and I go to sleep thinking about how long a good rope can last.

I did not come to test ropes or stroke Sycamores, I came because of a donkey named Romeo. At the pasture where Romeo grazes, I behold a Bay horse. What I want is to be close. The horse’s handler is away so we climb the fence, bunches of sweet grass in our fists. Neither animal is afraid but the more we touch them the more they seem to recognize us. Romeo doesn’t want my grass unless I press it softly to his mouth—which is bristly and warm. The horse knows our nature now, he nudges my friend to fetch him grass, he wants to be stroked along his back.

The horse makes me think of you, how there are times when you appear reserved by nature. Or, how you reserve yourself, afraid to give away your softness lest it makes you soft indefinitely—vulnerable and bad at lying. Like the horse, you project a kind of wall but lean softly towards a hand with sweet offerings. Imagine what life would be like, Sagittarius, if for a while you trusted the universe to protect you and you let your reserve down. What if, for while, it was you who made the offerings?


CAPRICORN

It’s the end of night and the talking has become a little laborious, a little slow, Vicky’s sipping tequila and Mina’s tattooing a slow and fine canoe into her arm. Someone begins to wonder about power and fear, how each relates and where they diverge. I’m thinking about the relationships power creates, something beyond Stockholm syndrome and closer to Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the dependency of meanings. Who am I without you? Asks each from the other. A Hegelian puzzle: who is powerful without having power over? Who is weak?

There is book of the collected writings and statements of Louise Bourgeois lying on the table and so I pick it up and let it fall where it may. A statement she made about spirals strikes me and I read out loud:

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The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control: of trust, positive energy, of life itself.

Although these words attend to power, they are not interested in what power does to us. Rather, they want to know how you place yourself in relation to control, seeking or surrendering. I want to know how you place yourself at all, Capricorn, in this moment, which is a spiral like any other. If you are retreating, know that there is no disappearance, only a point when the world becomes so taut—it is a bud at estivation’s end. When you think you’ll disappear is the moment when you’ll burst forth.

 

 

GALACTIC RABBIT JUNE 2016

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Dear Lover,

Stars are dying and we are their ashes. It’s hard over here like it’s hard over there, I know. Today is the first day that I will not mourn at a public vigil. Today I’m listening to Mazzy Starr and a gun control filibuster on the U.S Senate floor at the same time. Anger and grief, I’m holding it.

I feel as if the years have slipped away and I’m spending the summer with my girlfriend, whose heart is a herd of horses galloping toward me and I’m ready to lie down before them. I was on my knees beneath a print of the American flag in a small gallery near Brandeis. In my headphones, Sharon Hayes was reciting her 2008 performance piece “I March In The Parade of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I Am Not Free.”

She was reading a love letter and a political testimony about 9/11, about Bush and Bush again, about how many times we rose up against war and America just rose right into it. She was talking about the ecstasy of being gay and angry and I was crying. I was crying because that was the summer when my love for you reached a fever pitch, because Sade was singing so be gentle and be kind and you were fucking me with a non-metaphorical peach, the pit slippery and hard. You said you loved a man once but you couldn’t live within that kind of privilege and I admired your masochistic streak.

There is no prison in any world into which love cannot force an entrance, said Sharon. If you cannot understand that, you don’t understand anything about love at all.

When will love force an entrance into America? I’m frantic, my love. I want everything back and none of it. At the Stonewall vigil, Cuomo makes us chant NOT ONE MORE and I can’t get my mouth around it. A Russian gay refugee stands up and says “I came to America for this?” Do you remember when almost every month a queer child committed suicide and the news called it our bullying problem instead of indoctrination into homophobia? Dan Savage said It Gets Better but I don’t know for whom. Brown women are disappearing in frightening numbers here and across all our borders. Last year 23 Transwomen were reported murdered and 12 more this year and we know it to be more than that and counting and counting. And, now I’m looking at an eighteen old girl who is alive in her photo but dead everywhere else. She’s wearing a graduation robe, which makes me think of her parents and of mine. My mother hasn’t mentioned the massacre but, I know if I was shot dead for who I’ve loved (you), she would give them a picture of me in a graduation robe. She would want to remember a moment when she was proud of me.

Claire says all angels are genderless. All angels are queer. Queer angels, is there a dance floor where you are? I’m getting sentimental. I’m in my feminine Sapphic mind. I want to love you more in the face of this. To kiss wildly and fuck all! All these years they’ve been taming us so we could become them. “Come into our beautiful prison,” they said, “you get a piece of paper, you get to join the army, you get to kill for us and live in this gilded box forever. It doesn’t matter who you love.” It matters who you love. It matters who you are, love. How you love your body into a new world they can’t understand.

When they run out of guns they will use their hands. When they run out of guns they will have brutal imaginations. When they’re afraid of what lies outside their prison they will imprison us. Laws can control guns but who will control them?

We open the cage and discover a cage. We kiss each other and are obliterated.

I need to speak to you my love, of your life and of mine. Of our past and our future. Of sweet things that have turned to bitterness and bitter things that could still be turned to joy.

Stars die everyday to become part of us. Lover, even if we’ve never touched, I open my mouth and wait for you.

Gala(ctic Rabbit)

Consider Sending money to those grieving the shooting and the lives lost in the Orlando Massacre. Black, Latinx and Puerto Rican families are often deeply underserved by government agencies in times of crisis, especially when some of these families are undocumented.

https://www.gofundme.com/blog/2016/06/16/over-4-million-raised-for-orlando-shooting-victims/
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/the-latinos-who-died-in-orlando/487010/

 

 

Aquarius

Secret Heart, what are you made of? What are you so afraid of? I’m singing this song by Feist (Aquarian) and it makes me think of you. I’ve channeled it and I’m running on a low tank, so tell me Little Wind: what’s got you stalling? Could it be that you feel yourself on the great big wheel? The one that promises you stars if you just run fast enough to the top then threatens to send you back where you started before you’ve even gotten to enjoy them?

The wheel is a dual image, isn’t it? When you’re stuck, when you’re down on yourself, we say—it’s the wheel—you’ll come up before you know it. But the wheel is threatening too, how does one move forward in a loop? How do you, Aquarius, break a bad cycle if it works well enough to convince you that it’s the only option you’ve got?

The wheel we imagine is not the one we live in. Imagine a spiral, imagine a circle that doesn’t close but also cannot break. In each new city, new pathway, new lover, new loss, there is a familiar suffering and a familiar joy. The lessons might stay the same but you do not and that is a good thing, Aquarius. Honor your moments at the top, however brief, and bear witness to your time at the bottom. They both fuel what makes you, you who are everyday becoming.

Pisces

Sitting in my room feeling sorry for myself (because I am good at feeling sorry), I envy an event that I’ve not been invited to and can’t afford to attend. I scroll the images that are slowly rising up off the internet: my friends in elegant outfits, my dapper girlfriend and her beautiful wife. Then, all I can see is your name. You’re texting me for the first time in what feels like a year. “I’m lighting this award show,” you write, “I feel like you should be here. Come! You can sit in the booth with me.” How did you know I was feeling like the loneliest girl in the world? What god did you conspire with so that you could prove me wrong?

This is the way our friendship works: we find each other and we let each other go. At first, this might have felt like a kind of heartbreak. The universe made you soft and glimmering, reflective. The universe brought you lovers who peered at themselves through you; they were slivers of light coming together or light breaking apart. Shadow play, you were good at complicating an image. You were good at slipping through the hands.

Pisces, the little string that tied me to you, I know how it stays unbroken. You tend to it in your own way—from a distance and with no expectation. That’s a powerful and vital way to care for someone and for now it’s more than enough.

Aries

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplations – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love.

Just hours ago, Surrounded by the lush coral bouquets and shushing trees, I read these words by Toni Morrison aloud as I performed your wedding ritual. Now it’s night and we’ve all changed clothes. Your guests are getting drunk or gone but you are on the couch with me, a couch you assure me is very old, and you’re asking me about my mother.

It’s as if we’re not at your wedding but back in that small town where we were neighbors and I was always crying on your couch. Your reckless generosity pierces me with its beauty.

When you are stretched out thick with sleep beside the one you love, I hope your heart floods with the knowledge that you, too, have been doing the work. You have been learning, slowly, that your desire to control a situation is often the only thing you can control. And, even if there were days when you were afraid and so, spoke with fear instead of gentleness—your gentleness remained. Aries let the world teach you, again and again, that you have earned love, are always earning it.

Taurus

There is no cure for temperament it’s how / we recognize ourselves but sometimes within it / a narrowing imprisons or is opened such as when my mother / in her last illness snarled and spat and how this lifted my dour father / into a patient tenderness thereby astounding everyone / but mostly it hardens who we always were
                                  Ellen Bryant Voigt

I remember when you used to call me all the time and ask questions about love, about sex, about how to be a feminist or not be one at all. I guess you got it in my head that I should have answers ready lest you came around and requested some. But how am I supposed to answer you when you call me after the Orlando massacre and say, What do we do now? What can we do?

Nothing, I say which is not good enough for you but I’m afraid or heartbroken—which is the same. I send you links that explain what patriarchy is because that’s what I’m blaming tonight and every night. You take me to task. Should we stop dancing? Should we stop having children?

In lieu of action plan, I can tell you what the temperament of the world is. How, no matter how stubborn we are, it gets into us and becomes us. How it convinces us we were never meant to survive. In order to resist it we will have to love each other more than we ever thought we could. That is all I know.

Gemini

In Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (Gemini), which is less of a novel and more of a capsized ship at the center of the human heart, the protagonist wanders through the night combing ideas and worshipping mad women. When she seeks to know about eros, about the woman she wants, about the nature of night, she is told: There is no truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make it a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known.

I have seen you on slow velvet morning, wrapping up the many old versions of you that you’d let die so something new could be born.When all the planets play with your shadow and shadow you in turn, when it is your birthday month and your rare magic amplifies, how do you direct your power? This year has taught you so much about letting go but what you put in the ground must stay in the ground, Gemini, so don’t spend so much time in the graveyard of your life; don’t waste another moment wondering what you could have done differently.

Anyway, every part of our lives is made up. The bones of the past would look nothing like what you remember. Memory is fiction and it’s exciting! An open door. However you present yourself, whatever garment you drape around your life—that’s the real you if you believe in it.

Cancer

If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn’t/ explanation, at the end of the day, what the sturdier/ truths most resist? It’s been my experience that/ tears are useless against all the rest of it that, if I/ could, I’d forget. That I keep wanting to stay should/ count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.

– Carl Phillips

All the time the animal comes. How she got here is beyond your understanding. Before, you watched her survey the periphery of your home, gentle maw in the grass, twitch and bristle. Aware of you as you were of her, neither of you ready to touch. Slowly, we let go of the dream so that we might stand in awe before the ordinary. She would come baying and she would come baring teeth. All the time you were wanting to feed her. Take her in. Learn her secret animal language, which is eye glint and a tail stiffening. But she had plans for you and does; she hunts the dying parts of your life. She picks them off from their familiar ground and lays them at your feet. An animal must give something up that it loved in order to feel strong.

Cancer, what known life would you trade for this one? What woman would bury her heart in the ground and expect to grow another heart? Sharp teeth retracted in the mouth. The sun breaks on her haunches and you glisten. Her heart beats by your heart and the rhythm is almost close. The body alone with the memory of wildness: neither one belonging to the other but with.


Leo

All my life there’s been a Leo teaching me how to love. Oh you might not know it since I’m all talk, all watch my mouth move around the idea of the thing—the big looming specter of it—but you lead by example. Like the boyfriend I cried about so much he had to leave me for my own good. Like how angry you get when I rely on emotional subterfuge, forcing me to speaking my truth even though it’s really fucking hard. What I mean is, these lessons are often ones that are not curated by you; rather, I’ve learned them from loving you.

Right now, I’m working on a full bladder at a café with no bathroom and the stereo is rasping Love, love will tear us apart again. I don’t think it’s so thematic. Music is always trying to tell you something you already know. I’m thinking about this baby I’ve been taking care of, how his whole entity is a little mystery. It’s a mystery I accept: why are you hungry again? Why are you crying when I’ve fed you and changed you and burped you and held you and sung you and swung you dutifully in my arms? Oh you just try all the things over and over and eventually they work or not at all and the baby just falls asleep. Wakes up laughing.

Love is like that too but we make up lots of reasons beyond the basic ones. “You’re walled with me,” “You don’t appreciate me,” “You don’t respect me,” “You want to control me.” Basically: If you love me, you love me in a way I don’t understand. So what? I don’t understand why the baby’s smiling either but there’s pleasure in watching it, in being so close. Maybe pleasure is worth more than knowledge this time around.

Virgo

To love women is not simply to fuck women. To love women is not about obscuring their narratives so that you might graph what’s left over your own life. To love women is not to approach the most accomplished/ conventionally beautiful/ same race as you/ masculine/ best dressed women in the room and vie for her attention while purposefully icing the women who are with her. Especially if they are feminine. Especially if their bodies are bodies you were taught not to love. To love women, a woman would have to love herself more than she loves being noticed, more than not being alone.

Everyone hates women. Men hate women. Women hate women. They hate themselves. That’s why they can spend their lives surrounded by men who say horrible demeaning things about them, just laughing it off and joining in.

We might not be able to change the world, Virgo, but we can make more of it. We can, regardless of our gender or sex, commit ourselves to honoring the feminine. To approaching femmes in the room first as if to say: I see you, I value you. We can bear witness to the lives of transwomen: intrepid, ingenious, and always at peril. We can, YOU can!, meditate on the feminine in your heart, the moon side—the sweet shadow side, and be proud of it. The feminine is a deep and fierce well of love that lives in you. It will nurture your spirit through the most trying times.

Libra

Sometimes people come into your life and you think oh this isn’t IT, but it’s nice. Then time builds on top of time. Then you can’t wait to see them, to hear from them, to know that they are near. You forget what it was like without them. You forget what you were like without them, you forget yourself.

And that’s nice too, at first, but then it becomes disorienting. Then you have to get a really big flashlight and walk into the dark forest of yourself and figure out where exactly you’ve been keeping yourself. It’s a long and very difficult search. The kind that might make some people leave you because they are impatient or because they are afraid that the girl you find is a girl they don’t know and aren’t ready to meet.

But you realize that, despite all the risks, the girl in the forest is a girl you miss so you bring her back and you keep her company. You realize she’s important to you. That she doesn’t mind being alone if that’s what it costs to fully exist in the world.

Scorpio

Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it.
-Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill

It should come as no surprise to you that Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior amongst many other wrenching books, is a Scorpio. How she pierces so forcefully through the vinyl veneer of our intimate lives and, through the flapping hole, pulls dead rabbit after dead rabbit–that’s Scorpio work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about obsession, the dead rabbit in the bed. How we obsess ourselves of the sicknesses inside our connections. We spend our down time journaling about the self-destructive impulses that make us commit so intensely to relationships that diminish us. We think we are doing ourselves a service, a form of self-care. What we forget is, above all, we’re allowed to make some wrong choice in name of desire. We are allowed to pick the thing that doesn’t always feel good because something in us believes that it feels right.

After all, there are lots of ways for you to learn your lesson, Scorpio. Have a little fun instead of wasting your time worrying whether or not it’s your responsibility to teach yourself.

Sagittarius

Parts / of your / body I think / of as stripes / which I have / learned to love along. We / swim naked / in ponds & / I write be- / hind your back. My thoughts / about you are

not exactly / forbidden, but / exalted because / they are useless, not intended /  to get you / because I have / you & you love / me. It’s more / like a playground / where I play / with my reflection / of you until / you come back / and into the real you I / get to sink / my teeth. 
–Eileen Myles

O every time I see you I feel like I’ve missed you all of my life. In the park the grass is damp and we are too with the breath of it. You roll right into the earth because you are full of animals. I’m carrying around this baby that’s not mine. I lay him softly on the blanket. I play with the soles of his feet so that he knows everything’s ok. You take out a can of sardines and a bag of green beans like an elegant hobo. They’re Portuguese sardines, you say, that’s why they’re so large. Uh huh I say shoveling sardines into my mouth. Sardines make me think of my late father, which you don’t know and that’s ok. You know enough about me to bring them to our picnic.

The baby giggles on his back and over him we eat green beans and try to figure out where sadness comes from. I feel like this is the year you’ve gotten soft and I’ve gotten hard. Something about the loss of direction. A young heart with nowhere to go. We can laugh until we cry about it. For the record, when you stand up tall like that–you look just like a statue of a Greek god, shining with cool water. For what it’s worth, I think you’re as close to happy as a lost girl can get.
Capricorn

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world.
                                                                        –Maggie Smith

I want to sell you the world, Capricorn. I want to sell it to you for a dollar so that it’s a legal transaction but basically free like you’re a squatter who plans to make a freegan mansion out of a run-down tenement building. I want to make everything beautiful with you. I want us to be making instead of crying (now that the time for crying is past and the time for action is upon us). The world that we want, it’s gonna have a green roof and rain water barrels. It’s gonna compost straight from the shitter, it’s gonna generate its own rainbows, it’s gonna surprise even us with possibilities.

Capricorn, do you know that in Orlando, the Angel Action Wing Project is protecting mourners from the West Boro Baptist church that has come to add insult to injury? Angels are flying to Florida from across the country wearing futuristic robes with wings so big and wide, they obscure the violence of West Boro’s hatred.

O Capricorn, channel you anger and grief into good work and you will find yourself relieved of the weight that anger brings when it lives in you too long.

 

 

Galactic Rabbit May 2016!

Gala 5 Comments

Dear Rabbits in Galaxies Far and Wide,

I’m writing you beside a bouquet of dying flowers in an apartment that is not mine. This bouquet has peonies in it and lilacs too, which are my favorites, which are the flowers I ordered for my mother on Mother’s Day although she was not speaking to me. I wanted to show her that despite her inability to be the mother I want and despite my resistance to ease up my boundaries around her carelessness, I would not forget about her and I would always offer her beauty. This month, I spent a great deal of time think about mothers my birth mother and “the many gendered mothers of my heart” a la Maggie Nelson.

There are those of us who have always felt alone in the world, intrepid, aliens in every community we find ourselves in. We have had to learn our love language from strangers and take it on as if it is natural to us. Which it became. Then there are those of us who have been loved well our whole lives—and now must learn how to love others generously, without fear of loss. No matter what love planet we hail from, whether it is a planet where no life thrives or a planet full of mysteries, it is our job to take care of ourselves and each other as best we can when what the world offers is not enough.

In these letters, I aim to be your champion, a kind of mother, or lover
or anything that lets us touch each other.

 

Yours,
Galactic Rabbit

Thank you to Claire Skinner, as always, for being my Clairvoyant Friend.
If you’d like to donate to the making of those love letter scopes you can visit my PayPal! XO

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Aquarius

Recently, my dear friend Angela Watrous (Aquarius), who is an empathy-centered healer, shared this a quote from Gertrude Stein (Aquarius) about writing and creating: After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. – Gertrude Stein, “Paris, France.”

Despite my reluctance to hold Gertrude Stein in my mind for too long, lest she rises from the dead and decides to write MY autobiography, I couldn’t help but find it timely. There’s something about spring, about the promise of new life and new adventures, that brings out the wanderlust in all of us. And if we are lucky, or privileged, or very particular about how we spend our money, we can have what we want. We can trade apartments with friends in foreign countries, make money under the table picking weed in California with the new loves of our lives, travel all along the old Eastern Bloc and redefine who we are as artists and makers.

You can do any of those things as long as you remember, my dear Aquarius, you are someone who lives in two countries. The one you rise into everyday, weaving in and out of the life you’ve built—your accomplishments, your obligations, your loved ones—and the country that only your spirit knows by name. No matter where you go, no matter how far you’d like to be, it is your task to take your spirit with and tend to the home inside yourself. There is no else and no other place that will do this for you. Knowing can be both a kind of freedom and a kind of weight, practice recognizing it as the former.

Pisces 

When I met you, at a dinner party full of strangers, it was as if we had known each other all along. Something about your face, the shape of it, your unruly hair and the way you danced—stomping almost. Something about your mouth against my mouth, not perfect but young-hearted, it made me want to see you again. I imagined our affection like two wild ponies from separate herds necking in the dark.

And, even though it took you months to write back to me, I wanted to take that walk with you in the rain. I liked the way we cut through April, the spring in our hearts babbling and strewing flowers. I liked that we wanted to eat at the same place, that we took bites from each other’s plates. I liked, too, the bookstore after, with that horrible open mic and the ridiculous lesbian erotica. I said I’m free unto the world, but you have someone waiting. You said There’s no one waiting and we went to a bar where you held my knee between your knees for a long time before kissing me.

I want to write this here because in our texts since then, the pony in my heart has walked through an evasive fog. I want to tell you that I know how to let beautiful things alone. This spring, I’ve walked by dozens of Magnolia trees and never took a petal for myself. Pisces, whomever you open yourself to next, whatever door you come to, it might do you good to figure out what you want before you knock and how best to say it plain.

Aries

In the month since you’ve been far from me, we’ve relied on the phone to keep us close. You at a residency in the middle of nowhere trying to generate new work, me juggling two new jobs on top of my old ones, time is difficult and ceaseless. Running back and forth between obligations, I’ve carried two voices with me: yours and Elena Ferrante. Of course, I have no idea what Elena’s sign is or what her real name is… or anything else for that matter. What I know for sure is this: there is something radical inside her work, something so brave that the woman who writes it can’t stand to be compared to the women she creates.

There is a violence in her books I understand. The kind that calls a girl down to her knees, the kind that makes you think brute force would be better than nothing. You close a chapter and stand still as if seeing your own adolescence again: Wasn’t I just as cruel to myself? Wasn’t I just as selfish in the face of suffering?

Since finishing the second book of her Neopolitan series, I’ve felt the force of her absence and yours simultaneously. Which is really the trouble with distances and finding books to live in. Your presence and her language a kind of call toward opening in me, I want to bring you to that place and show you to each other. In lieu of impossible things, I will tell you this: whatever you are making in this world, if you are brave, if you go beyond what feels good and toward pain, then you will find an opening. You must know what it takes to lower yourself in without getting lost. You must bring the necessary tools to get out.

 

Taurus

In the New Yorker, Claudia Rankine wrote a reflection on the work of Adrienne Rich. It’s titled “Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Transformations,” but reading the essay (which is pulled from a forthcoming introduction to collection of Rich’s work), you might find that the one who’s transformed is Rankine. Over and over she recalls a young version of herself, a writer and activist coming into her own and looking for voices that could keep her company. We see her at the table of her youth, pouring over Baldwin and Rich and Lorde, trying to understand what art is for.

Rankine shows us the poems, draws lines between where Rich’s craft began and what it grew into. She also shows us her political letters, including this one regarding her decline of the National Medal from the Clinton Administration and the NEA:

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Re-reading these words, which I have read many times before in a state of admiration and awe, I imagined I might bring them to you. Taurus, does your work, your beautiful energy and commitment, decorate a dinner table that you would rather not sit at? Do you wake feeling like you have given away so much of your creative force, that you barely have any left for yourself? If there is a power that holds your best-self hostage, learn to recognize it. If your boundaries are being crossed, it’s your job to maintain them.

Gemini

It’s close to eight when my brother (Gemini) calls me. I’ve spent the day cleaning my apt, visiting my friend who is injured, babysitting an infant, and moving to the West Village to housesit for ten days. His phone call finds me finally beginning to write. I don’t want to pick up, to interrupt the solitary space I’ve carved out, but I do it anyway. My brother doesn’t call me often, if at all. We talk about work, I tell him how I spend my days, how hard it is to make ends meet. And, even though he replies in kind—detailing how little he gets paid, how long his workdays are, how little he sees his kids—he lets me know that if I need any money he’s got me.

Because it’s embarrassing, I’ll admit that I treasured those stories we read as children, the ones where the girl and her brother go off bravely into the woods and find a way to survive. They aren’t brave at first, just lost. And yes the girl is clever. She feeds the wild cat and knows what lights the dark heart of the forest witch. But her brother is her champion. Not because he is bigger or stronger—and he might be—but because he sees in her a great power and vows to protect it.

In my heart, my brother and I are those children. In this world, I know he doesn’t have me, can’t protect me, can’t champion me in any way I’d understand. When he makes his offer, I want to say just call me more, just try to know me but I don’t. I thank him; I ask him if he’s happy, if he likes what he does. “Listen,” he pauses, sighs. “It’s been a rough few years, you know? It’s like I’m being born again. I’m new, I’m re-building my life.” This admission, hopefulness, it catches me. With those few words, I realize that in this story, I must be the champion. Gemini, if you move bravely toward your new life, I will be your champion.

Cancer

You wrote me a letter and every day since its arrival, I’ve looked it over and considered you. Considered the night I gave you my hand and you led me through a forest so dark the moon could barely do its work, the coral ring you bought me on a cruise with the girlfriend you said you were leaving. The month my family rejected me and you showed up drunk. How the car swerved and my heart lurched with disappointment.

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson quotes (a beloved song of mine) Emmylou Harris’ Red Dirt Girl:

  1. One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain’t no bottom,’ sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.

I’ve read Bluets over and over for years. I read it when I moved across the country and away from my homophobic family; I read it when my father died and when my partner and I separated for good. When I read it, I never thought of you. Not because you didn’t break my heart—you did. I didn’t think of you because I let you go. Dear Lover, You were so beautiful, with your perfect mouth and square palms. We built a world with our love. We were covered in dirt and smelled like fire. We were water animals who felt too much and there was a time when time did not matter.

Time matters now and there is only going forward from here. You can’t be who you were, can’t raise the dead. Put the spade down and climb out of the hole, dear heart. Like the moon, love is never gone. It just keeps changing shape.

Leo

There is a string that ties us to each other, this much I know and not much more. A decade ago, in a small bookstore-turned-punk hovel that I sometimes treated as my home, you chanted your poems and they settled in me. Years later, we were at the edge of a dock, pouring honey into Seneca Lake, singing. I sent you a package made of art scraps, things that I thought might please you. You sent me your lover’s book, bound by metal bolts, picture of a girl against naked trees—furtive—you note scribbled at the edge.

The taxi ride in Oregon, our friend’s writer’s retreat in NY you demanded I attend—even if it meant paying for it yourself. A moment when, gently against the wall, you touched me as if in all those years of sailing past we’d made a lover’s cartography.

The last time we saw each other, backstage at a small show, your chair was so close to mine I thought there was only one chair. You bit into an apple and I felt your teeth, the apple’s flesh sprayed against my arm. You handed me the apple and I, knowing where your eyes were, dragged my tongue slow along the bite. A map is not a life, Leo, only a handful of coordinates that show us where we might have ventured and boundary monuments that keep shifting despite our best efforts. There’ll always be great loves that barely happen to us, an apple for each paring knife, each mouth. Look to the stars, Leo, the sea that carries you—even if this particular journey feels done, your lessons are not done.

Virgo

Tonight the sky darkens in what feels like slow motion. We’re sitting on bleachers packed tight with bodies, waiting for awe. There is a structure on the river that’s part Navy vessel part pigeon coop. We’re preparing for Duke Riley’s Fly By Night, birds affixed with LEDs brushing the sky. The bird-themed music cuts off and the streetlights dim, a recording of pigeons chirruping, cooing, wings beating, comes on and it’s a little overwhelming, the way these sounds are here and not here.

The birds murmur quietly at the edges of their roosts until the recording cuts off and they’re beckoned to take flight. What if they shit on us? You ask. What if I never feel awe? I wonder. They don’t shit on us and I marvel at how peaceful it is to watch these creatures weave in and around the night, clusters forming and breaking apart against oncoming clusters. The sky begins where ground ends and we are not so separate from them. You keep pointing to a bird that flies a little too high, a little too far—that one is not coming back. But they do. They come back because their power is not solitary. If love is anything for these pigeons, it flickers above us illuminated: submission, shared language, the desire to touch freedom and then return to the hand that knows you.

What if I’m powerless? You ask as we walk home slowly, after the birds have returned to their boat. We’re talking about our families, wanting to change things that seem utterly unchangeable. You have power, our friend replies, the joy you bring to others is a kind of power. I think about the birds, their luminescent dance, the way Prince’s When Doves Cry came on and how you pulled us all in for a group hug. She’s right about you, about the kind of love you have for this world, its potential like hundreds of beating wings.

Libra

Last week, as we walked slowly around pillows stitched with images of Stone Butch Blues and maps of ye olde lesbiane textes at an exhibit called “Queering the Bibliobject,” we wondered aloud at what makes a distinctly Libra poem. Is it the quest for beauty? I ventured, a poem like a crow pecking around for jewels. Does it have something to do with balance? You replied a little sidewise, as if balance wasn’t something one could achieve with a poem.

For a long time, we shared this city and did not know each other. The lovers who bridged us were bridges on fire or bridges under construction or an ex with whom one of us was in love and one of us was a pillar of salt. So, no, we never met at a park or poetry reading or late night café to talk about the many kinds of pain we are capable of enduring for love. But, we were tied by it and If our bodies were not capable of such destruction, they could be beautiful.

 

Tonight I’m thinking about beauty as the ultimate balancing act. A Libra poem about the gorgeous ways our bodies are bridges and how we cross them and how we burn trying. And, there is the water rushing through trying to teach us something about what we’re scared to lose. And, here, the mysterious boats we board so that we might sail under the shadows of what we’ve built and destroyed, into wild worlds yet unknown to us.

 

Scorpio

In another universe where we live seaside lives, you are always shucking oysters. Here it is, another crustacean, another tight-lipped little treasure box and you with your perfect knife. You were born to open what wants opening, to tip it just so, and suck the secret out. But in this life, Scorpio, your job is not so clear-cut (unless, of course, you truly work in the sea and even then there are limits to what you know of the secret life of oysters). In this universe, you can’t force a secret out, can’t demand trust and surrender at knife point.

Even if you are gentle, even if you practice the oft-cited golden rule “do unto others,” no one owes you intimacy—no one has to do unto you what you do unto them. Intrinsically, you know this. You’re perceptive; you hold reverence for the hard protective shell and the pearl all at once.

Why waste your time with prying open what wants to stay shut? Could it be that this time, like many times before, you’re looking for intimacy in all the wrong places? What you’re drawn to is a kind of shadow work—you are the hand and the shore where closed things wash up at dusk. But, it’s not your job to pry out everyone’s truth and show it to them, not your place to lick sorrow from a tight mouth. Sometimes, you just have to cup what comes to you in your good strong hand, and give it right back to the sea.

Sagittarius

We’re on a road trip together to a place neither of us has travelled. New Mexico, maybe. Your dog is with us, napping in the back seat. Or, for some reason, you haven’t brought her. We spend our pit stops watching videos of her casually slinking over to her drinking bowl or staring solemnly out a window. On the road, every song is a song we reinvent to suit our nostalgia, every snack break a guilty pleasure waiting to happen

For however long this lasts, a few days or a week, we write the story of our lives. We call on the energies of the great Sagittarians and channel their powers. Tonight, in a desert dive bar, we are meticulous as Joan Didion. We suck up local phrases like water, quietly leaning toward the other tables—nosy anthropologists. Tomorrow, we’ll be all passion and sunrise, Cisneros-brilliant, building a new language out of marks in the sand.

 

What I’m saying is, there is a possible world, a moment forthcoming, when you will have the chance to feel easy. Open and flowing toward the great river of being, nothing to live up to, owing your goodness to no one. You’ll be treated as good because you’ll say you are good. Your love and attention and care will be more than enough—it will be vital to the any shared journey. You will ask for what you need and, darling, you will get it.

Capricorn

It’s over 70, I’ve got a baby strapped to my chest in a wrap so thick I’m afraid he’ll overheat and I’ll never be allowed to nanny again. I pull his wibbly head out and support it on my arm. He’s so relaxed. Why not go to the library? In the main lobby, two separate women look me over and say, “Bless you” very matter-of-factly. “Bless you!” I reply, wondering if we’re all talking about Jesus or what. I wait at the fiction reference desk until a librarian appears and asks, “do you need help?” Like standing by the desk glancing from side to side is not indicative. I’m looking for Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston. “It’s upstairs in History,” she looks it up and writes down the number.

At the history reference desk upstairs, I ask for directions. He points me to a bookcase; the book’s missing. “I was sent here,” I explain. He apologizes, walks me over to a collection of travel books. “This can’t be right,” I conclude as if I’m the librarian. He looks the book up again. It’s available. Do I want to put it on hold for when it turns up? Possibly in a week? Maybe it’s on display. I guess May is Voodoo month. He calls the Voodoo display woman. She doesn’t pick up. I go down to the main lobby and there, in a glass case with a smudging bowl, I find Zora.

I go to the reference table. “Can I borrow a book being used in the display?” I ask but I know the answer’s no. The baby stirs. “You can put it on hold and have it in a few…” she starts to suggest but then “O it’s on hold.” “Shit,” I say and leave the library. I cross the street, settle on a nice patch of grass in Prospect Park. Then, I think about you, about Zora, about doing what needs to get done even when it’s hard—even when it makes you uncomfortable. I think about the baby in my arms that would prefer I be walking, rocking him with my stride. The baby begins to cry but I need to rest. Sha sha I whisper in his ear and download a pdf of Tell My Horse. Accept what you can’t change, Capricorn, and don’t spend too much time trying to make a thruway out of a dead-end street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Galactic Rabbit January 2016!

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         d2e92770-4446-48bd-9092-a98aa9bb2c4c

  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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER STAR LOVE NOTES!

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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.