Tag: galactic rabbit

Galactic Rabbit November 2016

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Because we live in in the new world order, which is also the old world order taking off its veil, I am writing toward the moon, my love, this evening and well into the night. Under that wide-open eye we are all illuminated. The ocean of brutality is unknowable, intimate and dangerous, but we are powerful together—a glimmering school of healers and survivors.

In the streets, there are those of us who were born lucky enough to move through the world with hope’s fire in our hearts. I see the fire doused in you now. I know you will find a way to stay warm and warm others. I know that you are here because you want to be of use to the world, to serve the greater good. And there is so much good, I promise.

In the streets, there are those of us who have always felt so invisible, so valueless to those who are in power, that fascism comes as no surprise. I see the well of your knowledge overflowing, and it is unbearable. You have no illusions to shed. You admit you are tired, you admit that this country broke your heart from the very start. You have never had time to lie down and rest.

If the winds of fate have brought us here, a wheel turned and we are at the bottom. And the earth was dry on our journey, and there was blood soaking the soil we walked on, however reverently. Beloved, you drank from the sorrow in the well, forged weapons in the fire. What do we know of our limits now? For years we have counted the bodies they said were not worth counting. Now, who will drag the dead to the feet of our autocrat and make demands?

If we have failed, we must fail harder. What we risk for those who are most vulnerable in our communities must equal what we risk to love one another and to love ourselves. For many of us, these factors are not distinguishable and for this reason we must protect each other when we walk together and we must be vigilant in our witnessing, since seeing is wrapped in knowing and knowing is historical.

To respect your history, I will love you and not expect love in return. I will fight for your right to rest and I will find honor in the fight itself, never the recognition. And, since our country has never wanted us, it is to your joy that I pledge my allegiance. I can’t tell you who I am to you, only who I aim to be.

Your Lover & Accomplice,
Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. This is entirely an unpaid labor of love by someone with no financial “net” so if you would like to donate to the making of these horoscopes, you can do so here!


Aquarius

Outside everything is grey and I’m in bed listening to Placebo because, apparently, the threat (see: certainty) of a white supremacist inside the White House makes me regress. The singer is repeating the words “Protect me from what I want” over and over and this is reminding me of Jenny Holzer’s projections which is making me wonder if the world ever changes at all or has it always been like this and always will be—kings in golden thrones drinking the blood of the poor, cointelpro pitting us against each other so that our energy boils at the bottom of this brutal capitalist well and stays there—evaporating our collective power.

How many Cassandras have we birthed and discounted? Who trusts a woman whose knowledge is integral to her very being, has come from no man’s mind. And how often have you, Aquarius, aimed to prove yourself through acquiry? The books you’ve read in an attempt to be an expert at your own life stack high in your mind and cast foreboding shadows.

In a world like this one, you are taught to doubt what is innate in you, your own readiness to be yourself. It is your job from now on to unlearn whatever has diminished your sense of inner knowing, to traverse the universe of your mind with great anticipation.


PISCES

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

-Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

We were talking about darkness but not our own, because it is easier to talk about the darkness of others. You proposed that there are some people out there who think they’re the underdogs, despite their own excess of power, the kind of people who bake pies and sing hymns while their neighbors are dragged from their homes, the kind of people who invest in liberty only as much as it allows them to barricade their lives from the suffering of others.

These kinds of people are a shadow side the way the moon is a shadow side, always present and especially visible in times of darkness. In talking of the shadow side I remembered a woman I had known. She was very tall, her body a thermometer with mercury levels indicating a nervous, melancholic disposition. This disposition lent itself to many subtle cruelties, as melancholy lends itself to self-indulgence, but she believed herself a healer and a self-less lover, a woman at the knife’s edge of surrender. In remembering her I know I remember all the ways I saw myself in her.

The Piscean journey, I know, is that of a healer who must face their wound always. Who must, against all forms of outer and (especially) inner resistance, recognize the shadow side of their nature and reckon with its intentions. There are no self-less healers among us and cannot be. When you act, what part of you acts from the wound? When you listen, what wounds within you obscure your ability to witness the wounds of others?


ARIES

Tanks of the blown-off world. He is my beautiful offshore a caw caw of major spills and elsewhere no, no. Cut the dialect the binary the dear word so precious and forbidden. They use the machines to take the streets of the world. Horizon my headwater cut cut the cable my beignets my else an appetite “poor politics, poor poor pols.” Waters of the world in media cut cut the lines manipulate desire and show the word show the Man show the tablets a Paleolithic grab all the twilight fields of discontent that shadow governments rise up people of the world of many wounded galaxies of discontent. And hear you, people of the word.

–History Will Decide / Anne Waldman

Because last night I was in a small room where Anne Waldman (the woman, the legend, the triple Aries) cast a circle. She cast that circle not in salt but in poetic bellows charged with grief for the optimistic delusions we have allowed ourselves to live inside and the consequences of our enduring commitment to an economy of brutality. The last straw of honor broken across this country’s back, she proclaimed and I felt the straw break in my mind, recognizing at once that the straw had been broken long ago over the bodies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, and Renisha McBride (among too many others).

This morning, while listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution,” I heard the call to action again—a call that refused to claim weakness or abdicate its own claim to power—and I wondered what an Aries could teach us about fighting for the world we want. And, I wondered what an Aries would need to learn in order to be a good teacher.

Because we know that we cannot hope to be given power, and must instead learn how to claim it, the onus is on us to understand the many ways that grasping for power corrupts our perception and empathic capabilities. And, if you are to understand power, you must understand your relationship to control—how much you want to have and how much you fear to lose. Be especially mindful of your intimate circle, Aries, since it is the first circle you cast and the one that fortifies you against the cruelties of the outer world. Tucked into every fearless fighter’s armor is the handkerchief of a fearless lover.

TAURUS

Dear friend, I mean to you write you tonight but instead I write here and feel you very close. I know you have been out in the streets for days, chanting among the dissidents in all kinds of weather. In my heart, I walk beside you and witness your keen sense of injustice. It is something I have always known and admired in you: the power of your convictions. Strong but not inflexible, you are both open to learning and yet entirely devoted to what your heart knows to be true.

It is your will to change that I appeal to now and although typing those words has reminded me of Adrienne Rich’s Will To Change and I have found the title poem to share with you—how it indicts us as Americans (we immigrant who have never felt truly American)—I am moved to share some lines from Planetarium with you instead.

The radio impulse   

pouring in from Taurus

         I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the   

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most   

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15   

years to travel through me       And has   

taken      I am an instrument in the shape   

of a woman trying to translate pulsations   

into images    for the relief of the body   

and the reconstruction of the mind.

I choose these words because I can feel a space opening within you. Or, perhaps, what I feel is the Rubik’s cube inside you shifting, twisting, an alignment you could not have foreseen. It is as painful as it is clear, this reconstruction, but I know you are strong enough to bear it. Not only bear it but also embrace it. Taurus, on the other side of chaos is birth, a woman whose strength is this country’s backbone. A woman who is not afraid to surrender to love’s power over her.

GEMINI

And as I stand before you now, I am hopeful in my rage
You know love has finally called for me, I will not wilt upon its stage
But still smaller than my nightmare now do I print upon the page
Do we have to live inside its walls to identify the cage?
–It Won’t Take Long / Ferron

At the KGB lit bar, three women are writing their way out the mind’s prison, or painting the bar of the prison of their mind so that they can see it, and I am walking to them. On the way, I pass a kickboxing gym that’s filled with only women. Sweat and spit fling from the womens’ orifices as they exert their force against punching bags that hang heavy and indestructible. They are like Amazons readying for war, I think. They are Amazons readying for war.

And, the poetry of the night is a kind of mental kickboxing by which I am made limber and supple with tears in the opening act before my Gemini friend invites the audience into the ring to roundhouse with language. Garish erasures of Playboy, the magazine all women are slipped in the prison of their minds, vector from her sharp frame of lace and opaque gemstone. Intimacy and hardness, interior and exterior war, when she is done we go outside and repeat her words back to her like they are roses in our hands. I want to say the line “practicing a knowing toward love,” but I can’t be sure of what I heard or what I might reveal about myself in the repeating. So instead I touch her hand and look into her face, lit in burgundy light like a pomegranate seed.

O Gemini, what will you do with everything you know? Do our minds protect us from our hands, even as we crawl on hands and knees toward our destruction, toward the demons that live in us and through us who know pain’s astonishing intimacy? Remember the boxing gym aptly named Overthrow where the Amazons box. How, in boxing, one protects their hands—the very thing ones uses to inflict hurt and compel submission. Practicing a knowing toward love… I think I understand. It’s admitting a weakness that is also a tool. That is also a weapon.

CANCER

I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

                                                                                                           Camera Lucida / Roland Barthes

It is true that in mourning our hearts open wider, a wound like an aperture that absorbs all light, all suffering, the foreground and background distinguishable only by lines where a figure might cut through. Why do we open the aperture? To bear witness, to catalogue what will be destroyed so that in looking back we know what needs rebuilding and must be overhauled. We open the aperture anticipating the larger possibilities of the future (believing that there will be one despite all evidence to the contrary).

In your home filled with the birth and death of flowers, we sing along to “Chelsea Hotel” and wonder aloud the thin line between sex tender and tendered. Who does the song belong to, the man who wrote it or the woman who never said I need you, I don’t need you? I compare it to Bishop’s “One Art” and, so, while you mince the dill so fine and green, I read the words aloud Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love). What I’m trying to say is that in the morning, over music and language and simmering vegetables, we determine that the grief we endure, for this country, for the ones we have lost, for the parts of ourselves we have had to lay to rest, will not strip us but instead empower us. We are the government now, you say.

In writing this, I take a picture of our power and protect it. The vows we make to each other will outlast this world we live in now and see us through to the next. Cancer, if there are moments when you fear you’re alone in this fight, you are not alone. What is an opening is also a light. Your wide-open heart: a signal. We see it, we move toward you, stand behind you, ready to claim and rebuild our broken world.


LEO

In a basement over boxes I packed so long ago I can barely remember what each one holds, I am parsing through my past and S is reading aloud the different kinds of love language we are capable of. Is gift giving one of your primary love languages? I exacto a flimsy strip of tape and pull out a blanket Maya bought me years ago simply because she adored how taken I was with it. Not really, I venture. But, remembering how much this blanket compelled me, I can’t be sure. It is true there is a Leo in my life whose offerings soften my heart. It is also true that I would love her just the same without those gifts, that I recognize the gifts as her love language and regard them as such.

According to someone who is very Christian named Gary Chapman, there’s five love languages: receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion), and physical touch. When S reads these aloud to me and attempts to pinpoint what feels like love to her, I getting a sinking feeling that I must be one those greedy bitches that just needs it all. And, aren’t there larger, more unconscious, love languages? My Leo friend has this unrelenting will to illuminate the best qualities of everyone she loves while simultaneously forcing them to face their weaknesses and overcome them. It is the love language of witness and pride, the love language of her very being, and what draws me to her. When I take the test on the official website, I find that I score highest with “words of affirmation.” I think of my Leo, the way her praise feels so entirely genuine and perceptive, and a lump of recognition fills my throat. Feeling affirmed. Seen. Known.

Leo, the world is need of generous leaders and no matter what you do for money, your energy is precious now. So, you must spend it wisely with compassion for yourself as well as others. Can this approach to the language of love translate, for you, to a kind of creative force? A hope to “participate long term in a greater good.” If so, then it is in the interest of the greater good that you learn what compels you toward your life’s purpose. It is within your power to invoke the love you want.


VIRGO

And all this nation. Not nation. What was once expanse. You, I, they, us surrounded. Unable to ask forgiveness of itself, to inscribe particular in its own body that got left begins. As we separated to say.

Not of this nation and not of another.

–Face / Melissa Buzzeo

I’ve been sitting in a Starbucks in the town of Easthampton NY for over an hour, writing these love letters and waiting on my lover’s wife to return from her own writing group. I’ve also been watching one couple, a man and woman who appear in their early 60s, drunkenly claim and disavow each other. The woman climbs onto his lap and weeps. The woman strikes the man’s chest because her own heart aches. The man wraps his arms around the woman and then his arms fall limp. The man’s voice cracks with tears as he lists the wrongs he has endured and then it rises in anger. The woman leaves “until he can calm down.” The man grips the sides of the ugly puce fake tufted leather chair and I can hear the tears dribble down his face although he is silent. He leaves and in ten minutes they return to together. She crawls into his lap. They laugh and then they fall apart. A simple sentence! He yells and only she knows what that means. He calls her Girl and she says Please and strokes his face. If that girl sitting there finds my body dead, he gestures toward me, we’re through. I look down and don’t meet her gaze, thinking … well that’s indisputable.

Just this afternoon I was watching a video called “Why the Poorest County in West Virginia Has Faith in Trump.” In an opening interview with a former gas station worker who bides his time waiting for visitors at an inoperative station in McDowell County, West VA, an elderly man with eyes that resembled my father’s claimed “all the good activity is gone and we’re just sitting here now.” Now, I’m listening to this couple try to speak to one another and they just can’t and I know substances can make mud of meaning but the man sinks deep into his chair and declares, “I’m not a BUM! Just because I can’t afford to live here doesn’t mean I’m a bum! People know that I am good at my work. My work is good.” Suddenly, one of the poorest counties in America and the 5th richest county in one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world don’t seem so far apart.

Virgo, I’m writing you this now because I want to remind you that there is a wheel in this world that is always turning. Our surroundings determine our experience of the world and it is we who choose when to look and when to look away. And, although it might be true that “the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich,” we move through this world with an ever-shifting relationship to our past, our labor, our lovers, and ultimately our future. Just because you were handed a certain kind of package when you arrived into this life doesn’t mean you can’t alter it to look more like the package you want.


LIBRA

I want to begin by telling you that when I sat down to write this I was listening to Ella’s Song by Sweet Honey and the Rock, which was composed by the inimitable composer (and Libra) Bernice Johnson Reagon, and thinking about a Libra approach to liberation. In listening I remembered a few weeks ago when a friend of mine and I took turns counseling a Libra who had recently lost a loved one to a shocking homicide. I’m so depressed, he sighed, sprawling his upper body across the table, what can I do? The three of us sat in triangle formation for a while. Grief takes a long time, my friend suggested. Your depression is perfectly expected at this time. Her permission seemed to relieve him; she knew his loss in a way I did not. Still, it might be good for you to take up some kind of social contract, I proposed, an activity that provides you with the opportunity to generate connections and beauty.

Libras are social creatures, after all, and sweet interactions can be a kind of salve over the difficult wounds one must face when alone. I suggested soccer, a sport that seemed to offer rituals of value to him. Instead, he described writing workshops he led wherein he felt integral to opening the imaginations of other participants. Which of course brings me back to Ella’s Song, the part where the ensemble sings:

The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on 

Is when the reins are in the hand of the young who dare to run against the storm Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me
I need to be just one in the number as we stand against tyranny

The Libra approach is an approach that thrives on community support and collaboration, a group of like-hearted souls working like hell to honor a loved one or, if a Libra feels capable of acting globally, tear down a regime. Unfortunately, that approach can at times be thwarted by Libra’s sensitivity, a trait that can trick them into feeling misunderstood and better off alone. But, Libra, although you can survive in solitude, you thrive in company. Just make sure the company you keep is the company you want, people who reflect the person you want to be in the world.


SCORPIO

There must be a reason that November stretched so long. Each morning the leaves get brighter and redder and it feels ok to wake up alone or, if not physically alone then, alone in the mind wandering into the morning as if it were an echo of every morning you have ever lived. The work is there, it keeps coming, but there is something about the quality of time that does not allow the work. So many beginnings without end, have you found yourself attracting strays? Have you found yourself looking too long in the mirror wondering what beauty is and what it can never be?

Someone taught you there is only so much of you someone can take. Someone taught you to measure your love out bit by bit. When you make coffee, you take a small spoonful of sugar and drop it in, then add more. You carry the mug with you from room to room and each room inside you feels absolutely necessary.

The love inside you fills the house of you like music. You can open the windows, you know. You can let the world right in with all it’s honking daybreak. You can put that song on, “Daybreaker,” because Beth Orton’s voice is a very good friend.

We burn our boats each new year

Silently watching the flames
And an old life disappear

We’re burning a new sunrise into
Yesterday’s skies
An ashen fingerprint
Melts into the sea

We’re doing fine now
Yeah we do
We don’t feel sad or bad or blue
And you know
We’re never defeated
Or broken inside

All that is fine
Yeah, all that is fine


SAGITTARIUS

There are certain kinds of nights that make me think of you and last night was one of them. For hours S and I played YouTube karaoke videos of Violet by Hole screaming take everything take everything take everything so that when we walked into the bar we’d be prepared. A blonde woman unknown to both us threw her arms around the two of us as we entered, proclaiming the party officially on because we had just arrived. S moved through the crowd greeting people she knew while I made a nest on the leather couch, the fireplace to my left and the singers to my right. Luxury. Two men, one of them recently out of a relationship, were singing I don’t want to lose your love toooooooniiiight. The blonde woman was up there with them too, sort of swaying, her long thin limbs extended toward every person in the room—especially but not exclusively the men.

Karaoke of the mind, it was the kind of night when every song a woman ever sang in the 90’s felt relevant. I leaned over to S and asked her if she thought the Blonde was practicing an unrestrained and playful kind of power or whether she was falling into a deep drunken well of weakness. In asking I remembered that Dar Williams song, “As Cool As I Am,” when she sings, “You play the artist, saying ‘is it how she moves or how she looks?’ I say ‘it’s loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks. And as long as she’s got noise she is fine.” And the woman was fine, happy to take up space the way men often do.

Watching her fed a whirring thing inside me, a thing I know you understand. It’s that thing that compels a woman to leave her whole life behind and begin again with nothing. It whispers bad ideas in your ear and makes them sound real good. Sagittarius, you and I both know that chaos is cathartic but it is not a cure. And I know the world is crumbling around us. I know how that crumbing can make you feel like life is too precious to waste and must be lived apologetically now now now. But, Sagittarius, living unapologetically means losing a lot more than you might be ready to lose so you better figure out what you need right now versus what you want. And remember, when you get what you want, well, you’ll never want it again.

CAPRICORN

Because whenever I hear the word angel I think of you, who has a name for every angel, and because I missed you, I went to listen to your poems in a dark and shadowy corner of Bryant Park. And, seeing you I felt the years since I’d seen you last and felt, too, the brightness of your laugh that is unlike anyone’s. And, I felt the crowd immersed in your all-seeing genius, your hard hoofed exploration of the world.

What parts of me shake loose dirt. What parts wait until you are bare. My jejune bluegrass, why do I eat your light. There are grasses growing up the shabby fence. All of them fluid blade. We sway. creep easily. What parts of me are wild. What parts storing up for the choke. How do I tell the difference. 

                                                            —Tatterdemalion / francine j. harris

And afterward, we hunted our own good time, the New York night deserting us and Ginger’s almost empty but for a handful of gay men whispering in corners. It was on us to create the space we wanted and so we did, my IPhone propped against the glass window of the deli we danced outside of. It was after 1:00 am and men walked in and out of that deli, young men and homeless men, most of them brown. And there were those who came to interpret us and there were those who yelled out just what our bodies could do for them out their passenger windows. And then, there were those who stood watching, whose eyes for the first time in a long time felt sentinel and without threat. There was a keen sense that the street did not belong to us but could, with Dej Loaf’s “Try Me” playing on and us singing along. It could have been that we were on every street corner in America and we were the only sirens that mattered.

What we manifested in that moment, with our wiggling girl bodies, was a moment of freedom in a country where freedom felt and feels like the deadliest illusion. But, illusions can be tools too if illusions are ambitions. It is time for you to be ambitious now. And, if you are dancing tonight, Capricorn, I hope your dancing is an ode to your own power. I hope you know that no matter how impossible the word safety is, no matter how often it falls short, you can bend it to your will and make of it what you must

 

 

 

 

Galactic Rabbit September. 2016

Gala 3 Comments
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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.

 

 

JULY 2016 Love Notes

Gala 3 Comments

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Dear Summer Hares,

Today is July 19th and there is a full moon in Capricorn. Today would have been my father’s 79th birthday so I’m thinking of him and who he taught me to be and who he never got to be and why. My father was already disabled when we came to America. He had a vulnerable heart and spent most of his time being my caregiver, organizing the apartment, and hiding needful things in useful places where we never found them again. Once, in a life before I ever knew him, he had been a photographer, a “speculator” in Moscow’s shadow markets, and an alcoholic. My mother said he “loved women” and that I must have taken after him. He spent a lot of time alone in this country and when he died, his death was just like his life here—neglected by doctors, numerical, shrouded in a language he never understood.

When I think about my place in this country, as a refugee turned citizen, as a Jew fleeing violence and a girl too gay to ever go back, I wonder what it feels like to belong anywhere and at what cost? Citizenship is dissociation, the art of forgetting: to belong in America is to forget America. What wars has this country waged for its citizens and against them? We fill our tanks, we pay our taxes. Who walks blithely over the graves black and brown bodies make—men and women both, named and unnamed? This toxic whiteness—which is not new but is also not inevitable—is a pollution we accept, build houses on, grow food in, swim. It is a thriving not in spite of death but because of it. Patriarchy—root of capitalism, which is fascism’s disguise, which claims there are those of us who are disposable—how can we extricate ourselves from its power? That, too, is a mythology our money has made real.

I spend my days unraveling, following a thread of violence and suppression that only has to whisper its presence in order to expel power over me and who I believe I am meant to be in this world. And what about you, reader? What have you agreed to so that you might feel this free?

-GR

P.S. You can support the writing of these astro-loveletters at my paypal site OR

You can donate to FIERCE instead, an organization I value in NYC
“FIERCE is an LGBTQ youth of color-led organization. We build the leadership, political consciousness, and organizing skills of LGBTQ youth.  In New York City, we organize local grassroots campaigns to fight police harassment and violence and increased access to safe public space for LGBTQ youth. ”

 

Aquarius

It was not until I became a student of women’s liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father. I needed an ideology that would define his behavior in context. The black movement had given me an ideology that helped explain his colorism (he did fall in love with my mother partly because she was so light; he never denied it). Feminism helped explain his sexism. I was relieved to know his sexist behavior was not something uniquely his own, but rather an imitation of the behavior of the society around us.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

-Alice Walker “Can I Be My Brother’s Sister?” Ms., August 1979

Today I’m thinking about the fullness of your experience, what you allow yourself to feel
and know—deep in your bones—and what you file away for a later date when you think you’ll be ready. Our books only teach us so much. And countries too, with their invented histories, their every-day pleasures and heaps of garbage, what can they tell you about your purpose in this world? Your reflection glimmers beautiful in shop windows and is gone.
I want to believe, given all this war and death and violent denial, that this summer has been easy for no one. Still, time presses down on us with her thumb and demands work, demands we eat, demands we smile when someone takes a picture of us standing under a waterfall. And you must go to the waterfall, Aquarius, no matter how broken the world. You must go to the waterfall and watch the cataract beat down on the rocks at its foot, watch the water shape them. In what other types of suffering is beauty born? And when is beauty a seed? And when is beauty a burden?

Pisces

You run the hot water over the dishes in the sink, of which there are many. They are evidence of a beautiful morning, a morning making food for a lover or a friend or your kid—who is coloring now in the other room and really only sometimes on the table instead of the paper—which is to say, evidence of your life. There is soap too, in this water, breaking down grease from butter and meat and from meals before this meal. Is this what it’s like to have a beautiful heart? Small tasks adding up to a daily life, which is not removed, which has today to worry about and tend to.

You tend to it. You pluck each dish from the hot basin and think about gloves, about needing some. You can do this. You can clean each separate thing, sometimes gently and sometimes with your elbow deep in it. This work is an offering, a gratitude, a time to think about the rest of the day and the many meals that follow this one. Not all of them will be beautiful but each one will be a choice you have made in response to some kind of hunger.

Once, life was a different room everyday. You walked in and walked out, you were always changing but nothing felt changed. These days, you walk into the same room and it is the room of yourself. In this room, you let the right ones in and you know you are strong to care and be cared for, both. In this room, you do the work, you get dirty and you come clean.

Aries

In response to a question about the future of Queer art in relation to “Society’s” progress and growing acceptance of “Others,” Avram Finkelstein, famous for his political and collective-focused art (Silence = Death poster), replied:

I think the idea of queerness as we’re talking about it at the moment, in academic circles, the idea of queerness as a way of describing otherness will always be true. There’s only room for 1 percent to rule the world. We can’t all rule the world, although, I’ve spent my life trying to figure out how we can.

And that’s what my work is about—it’s a battle, and you never stop fighting, and every time you figure out one way to navigate power structures, they figure out another way to absorb it, so it’s a constant, ongoing struggle.

The generosity of the artist’s vision, his ability to balance grief and action, pride and humility—I wasn’t surprised to find out he was an Aries. Aries, the visionary, the optimistic heart, the one who believes a skill they don’t have is just something they haven’t learned yet.

For the past few weeks your generosity has drained you. In order to care for those who depend on you, you split your world into two: creator and nurturer. You felt like you had to choose and in choosing lost sight of how—in the many other lives you’ve lived—the two not only met but also thrived at once. Aries, you maker of new possibilities, rest up and let your collective visions return to you. Imagine a life where the nurturer in you has boundaries that rise up out of love and never out of fear, where the creator in you makes art that is a reason to live in this world.

Taurus

In another world we are walking shoulder to shoulder through an exhibit called Twice Militant. It’s at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center and it’s all about Lorraine Hansberry. We want to honor her brilliance of course, to scan her ingenious arguments for the liberation of women, black and gay in particular, her commitment to being exceptional and her suffering from it. Her suffering feels very present in the room the way genius can change the air when it is made visible.

What holds onto us, what always holds, are the secret things. The lists she wrote privately, her likes and dislikes, her contradictions and her clear river of want:

Lorraine Hansberry, age 32, 1962:

I regret
That love is really as elusive as everybody over 30 knows it to be
….
My consuming loneliness
All the friggin’ hurts in this world
That a certain lady let my letter be read!
The shallowness of the people who have come into (and lately been expelled from) my life.

I like
69 when it really works
The first scotch
The fact that I almost never want the third or even the second when I am alone. Praise fate!
The inside of a lovely woman’s mouth
The way little JW looks in the movies
Her coquettishness
Her behind—those fresh little muscles
Parts of the lingering memory of a betrayer

I am proud
that I am losing some of those fears
that I struggle to work
hard
against many, many things
and on my own
of my people

I should like
…
to be utterly, utterly in love
to work and finish something

Taurus, as this month comes to a close and the full moon rises thick with strong will, I want to imagine you writing a list. You can start with the easy things—a job that fulfills your strong spirit, when you have enough money to make time with friends luxurious. These things are easy because you know the limits of the material world. Now go deeper. To work and finish something. Now go deeper.

Gemini

You’re in my room with the door closed and I can hear the drill driving into the drywall. All day you’ve followed amiably like a bright kite string as our mutual love, my best friend—your lover, tugged us along. Here to there, this way then that—she’s the boss, even when the plan is in my best interest, even when I’m the one who said Ikea? Fort Tryon Park? She says soft serve AND hot dogs, house margaritas and a whole pizza pie.

We might have our own concerns but none of them apply. Yes bring it all over. Let’s make a room beautiful together, bending seductively over hammers.

It’s not impossible to commit to beauty, after all, to a day spent tightening and un-tightening the same curtain-hanging system. And isn’t this a kind of worship? A kind of being there for each other—the witnessing of daily tasks: bringing bags in from the rain, fumbling for the dropped screw through the under-bed dust bunnies, the sticky margaritas that splash up everywhere.

Dear Gemini, if the words that fill you now seem impossible to say, it is ok to make what you mean. To offer up the physical thing: small offerings, gentle tidings, something material you’ve imbued with love power. This is about ritual and intention. About having a clean heart. But, keep in mind that an offering won’t guarantee you anything, not love or secrets or even a gift in return. An offering is made for the pleasure of giving, the lightness of it. I see you, your Gemini gift might say, you are so important to me—this is a symbol of my gratitude.

 

Cancer
I’m listening to “Don’t Stop Believing” at my local café and the song is turned on too loud (Can one even listen to the song on low? you might ask and I might answer…yes). It’s infiltrating my mind and flooding me with images of who we were a decade ago: irreverent philosophers, whimsical radicals, patriarchy smashers. Who knew Bon Jovi could conjure up such feminisms?

Last week, I found you in the East Village and we took turns people watching. At our final destination, Tompkins Square Park, we watched a six-person cover band sing American hits. Everyone danced in their own way: one women swayed her arms up from her fold-out chair while her husband thrashed around a few feet away, a young man walked the periphery pumping his limbs in rhythm to the beat. We were talking about loss and heartache, about when what we love holds us back and when it helps us grow. We were also talking about people, the people dancing, the people we love, the people walking by with dogs that looked exactly like them.

Even though it looks entirely different than how it once did, I know I grew up in that park. I fell in love with lost girls, I thrashed around in misogynist mosh pits and I want to tell you that it’s ok, everything. That even though we’re grown up, we’re not done yet. When we were young, we felt large in the world and everything was ours. Now we are smaller and so we lose things: our old self-beliefs, the futures we thought we wanted, the parents we imagined we could have. We can’t have everything, Cancer, not even most things. But we can have a bench to sit on, a bad song to sing along to, a good friend who rubs our hand gently and says Even if it feels impossible, one day you’ll be grateful that you lived through this.

Leo

I knew I had no business there, in that stark white basement room full of bodies wringing hands and tapping feet. I went anyway. I went every week on a Thursday evening for a month until, faithfully, I was bestowed a 30-day chip, a coin with the number 1 on one side and the words One Day At A Time on the other. And yes, there was alcoholism in my family, plenty stories of the man my father had been and who my brother was becoming. But, I wasn’t there to think through either of their lives or the effect they had on me. I was just chasing a dead relationship in a foreign city and I needed ways to nurse my sense of self-worth.

What I understood: Sobriety isn’t always practiced in weekly meetings guided by a nameless God and twelve step lists. Sometimes it’s the practice of seriousness in regards to the self, of understanding emotional limits and physically wrenching restraint. I didn’t give up substances, I didn’t get sober, but that month of listening, of impromptu post-meeting dinners held in the generous homes of women with long beaded necklaces and wise eyes, drew a line around my body and defined me: a boundary between my own pain and the pain of others, the place where our lives met and diverged.

This month, I encourage you to think about what sobriety means to you. Even if you are wandering home drunk, even if the soft rattle of Klonopin in your tote bag brings you a sense of safety. I know you might be out there doing the hard work of fighting for your life. I understand that you might be nursing a soda at the bar, leaving parties early because the smell of pot is bringing up waves of nausea. But, Leo, your commitment to yourself—to knowing your own limits—is more than what substances you consume. It’s the relationships you have, the jobs you take on, the amount of time you spend sitting still within your own grief so that you might touch its edges and soften them with that touch.

Virgo

Just as I sat down to write this lovenote a Virgo texted me and asked whether or not she is crazy, a Virgo who I don’t know well, a good friend of good friends, almost family. I couldn’t give her a straight answer, mainly because I know that for many Virgos “crazy” is a loaded word and an even more loaded state of being. Perhaps it’s because Virgos give so much of themselves up to other people, their love leaks through their very presence—their hands and their good deeds. Or perhaps it’s their mutable nature mixed with their very human(e) sign that can feel nothing less than crazy when our country—and this world—feels on the brink of very great disaster. It permeates our being, this suffering racist world, whether or not we know it.

I think feeling out of place can make you feel crazy. I think buying dozens of self-help books you never finish can make you feel crazy, especially if your idea of self-help is unraveling the minds of great philosophers. I think that folding your whole self into the life of someone else, whether it is because you are afraid to lose them or afraid to find yourself, can make you crazy.

If this month of late night bacchanals and badly timed commitments has left you feeling alienated, outside of some greater picture, outside of yourself and what means most to you—I understand. Virgo, returning to yourself is a work that is never over. We fuck up, we start again, we find reasons to be better versions of ourselves that are beyond us—whether it be the work we have left to do, the people (sometimes very small) who look up to us, or all the lives that have conspired to bring us to this very troubled moment.

Libra

What’s passion anyway and who knows where it comes from? For a long time, it all seemed sort of cut and dry: some people are passionate people and some are not; passion exists in some nebulous part of our psyches, evoked from us if the flute plays just the right song. O if it were so then make it so, sister. What I’ve come to, and this knowledge was not wanted but needed, is that there is no lack of passion inside anyone and passion is not summoned from the outside by anyone.

If you want to pray to the goddess of passion on your own terms, to light a large votive candle, look no further than the face (and Amazonian everything) of Serena Williams. Libra-extraordinaire, Serena is asked to prove to the world over and over that she is worth adoration. It must be daunting to work so hard, to give up your life, to know that your own country will cheer for a stranger before it cheers for you. Watch this woman, only in her thirties, this world a trembling passionate muscle in her arms:

“I felt a lot of pressure I guess, I put a lot of that pressure on myself. Obviously had some tough losses… I had to start looking at positives and not focusing on that one loss…Once I started focusing more on the positive I realized that…um… I’m pretty good, and then I started playing better.”

Passion, you have it, more than enough—even on the days when you feel weak and small in the world. Make something. Make something everyday even if you’re feeling like nothing you do is close enough to your dreams. Focus on the way small wins lead to the big ones. Focus on Serena, or any Amazon who raises her racket and never backs down.

Scorpio

Once, in rags and mesh, you were two girls belonging to no one. The East Village community gardens were just as much yours as the open sky raining. Each night, when you ran away from your family, you ran to her little storefront teeming with roaches and radical road shows—women and books and guitars and lost cats. You were seventeen, queer, and unafraid to die. She read your tarot card under a tin tile ceiling painting dry-blood-red. Now, over a decade later, you’re sitting in a blue-carpeted living room and a Himalayan salt lamp is glowing over the Ikea furniture. It’s a different era but the magic has only gotten stronger.

She turns over your cards one by one and you know she’s the only one you trust to tell you who you’re becoming—since you’ve been becoming in front of her for so long.

Queen of Pentacles, the signifier, eight of pentacles the cross, and so it goes: a reading where the universe screams abundance and you can’t look anyone in the eye. This is the truth you’ve known all along, the only thing that has kept you going despite your most valiant, self-destructive, efforts. Whatever you believe in—it believes in you. However empty your pockets, your cup overflows. Bring the cup to your lips, Scorpio. This month, make a contract with the universe. Honor it everyday and in your best interest. Don’t let yourself down and you’ll not be let down. Promise.

Sagittarius

I’m lying alone on a beach in Cherry Grove and so far I’m the only naked one here. Both my girlfriend and I have Eileen’s books out on the blanket. She’s re-reading Chelsea Girls, which is making me nostalgic for when I was reading Chelsea Girls. It was so good all of it, the butch bravado, the playful puppy-dog narcissism. I’m reading Maxfield Parrish but the poems—there’s labor in poems—they make all these holes threw me. I just want to laugh about Sagittarian impulses like in “1969” where she wrote:

We were both Sagittariuses and had enjoyed standing outside the library at night, smoking cigarettes and talking about sex. We laughed a lot.

Ugh, and I’m so selfish I don’t care I want every life we’ve lived to exist all at once. Like right now. We could be drinking G&Ts together over a big cabbage salad while I scan your essay and you scan my third eye AND we could be watching the sunset over a strip club in LA, splitting a Xanax for the road AND you could be walking me along Coney Island beach in the middle of October and letting me kiss you because my father is dead. I guess we cry a lot too. Laughing and crying, all the women we’ve been together—it’s getting easier.

I don’t care if I’m the only naked one out here; don’t be afraid to be feminine. I’m getting up and going in the water. Can’t you feel your most vibrant capable selves returning? I feel it. Everything you’ve been doing has brought you to this moment. Don’t be afraid to choose your life on your own terms.


Capricorn

What does it mean to be self-made and how to go about the business of un-making oneself? There are pop cultural narratives of course: the overnight success, rags-to-riches, the lonely girl who got herself out of a nothing town and into the arms of a big city stud. There are narrower interpretations as well, the mural artist discovered on the street, the YouTube singer gone viral, how one perfectly crafted Tindr profile got someone their life partner. These stories serve to fill our imaginations with limits, to keep us wanting the same thing—so that we might never question what is underneath all this wanting. Narratives of fabricated lives, of blind luck, tell us nothing about the day-to-day work of loving one another and ourselves. They give us no road maps for becoming; they say sky’s the limit but they paint a sky on the ceiling over our dreams.

Well, what if our dreams are deeply rooted in one another? What if, beyond the painted ceiling there’s a universe where you and I—we can build the world we want? We would first have to look at ourselves: the person you imagine yourself to be, the unique and only “I.” Ask: Have I fallen victim to capitalist ideology? Has the hardness and scarcity of this world found its way inside me and, despite my best intentions, I have harmed more people than I’ve helped, lost more friends than I care to admit?

There will always be two sides to our lives (and maybe more, maybe many more): the side that is illuminated and the underside the floats us down this river. Capricorn, have you dealt with the underside? Seek counsel, journal your nightmares, take a swimming class. I know you trust your intuition but maybe it’s time to learn other kinds of trust.

GALACTIC RABBIT JUNE 2016

Gala 2 Comments

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August Offering!

Gala 4 Comments

Dear August Love Bunnies,

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

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

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

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

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

With Gratitude,
Galactic Rabbit

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

 

Aquarius

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

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

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

 

Pisces 

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

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

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

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

 

Aries

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

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

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

 

Taurus 

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

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

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

 

Gemini

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

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

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

 

Cancer 

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

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

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

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

 

Leo 

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

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

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

 

Virgo 

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

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

 

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

 

Libra

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

                                                                                                                     –Francesca Fay

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

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

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

 

Scorpio 

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

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

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

 

Sagittarius

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

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

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

 

Capricorn

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

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

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

July Galactic Rabbit

Gala 5 Comments

Dear July Bunnies,

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

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

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

 

-Galactic Rabbit.

 

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

P.P.S. Thanks, Claire.

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Aquarius

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

-Amy Lowell

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

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

 

Pisces

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

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

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

 

Aries

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

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

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

 

Taurus 

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

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

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

 

Gemini

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

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

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

 

Cancer 

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

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

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

 

Leo

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

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

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

 

Virgo

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

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

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

 

Libra

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

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

 

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

 

Scorpio 

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

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

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

 

Sagittarius

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

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

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

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

 

Capricorn

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

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

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

 

JUNE Horoscopes!

Gala 3 Comments

Dear Bunny Readers,

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

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

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

Love,
Galactic Rabbit

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

P.S. This is me in Russia:

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Aquarius

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

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

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

 

Pisces

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

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

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

 

Aries

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

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

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

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

 

Taurus

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

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

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

 

Gemini

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

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

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

 

Cancer

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

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

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

 

Leo

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

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

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

 

Virgo

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

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

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

 

Libra

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

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

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

 

Scorpio

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

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

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

 

Sagittarius

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

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

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

 

Capricorn

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

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

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