!! Life !!

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Happy Pisces season 🐟

Pisces is the end of the zodiacal year which implies that the sign is the oldest and holds the most wisdom—if the zodiacal year is a parable for our lives, shouldn’t that be old age? But Pisces instead is the afterlife, the everything that comes once we die, about which we know nothing—so Pisces has the greatest wisdom of knowing how much there is we don’t know.

The archetype of Pisces rules the mystical, the romantic, and the creative. Pisces rules art, spirit, and meaningful service. Pisces must do what it believes in but is open to belief changing. Pisces is the mutable water of the middle of the ocean, with water all around you and below you and heavens above.

All mutable signs are concerned with change and adaptability, and Pisces exemplifies this by being about the constancy and the fluidity of change. As the final sign in the zodiacal year, Pisces underlines that stories go beginning, middle, and change.

The difficulty of Pisces is that all that belief, all those options, all that spirituality can be overwhelming. Pisces can tend towards inertia, needing to lie on the couch for hours because it simply cannot do anything else. Whether or not you are a Pisces, you are deep in the shadows of Pisces every time the couch pit of overwhelm happens to you. The shadows of Pisces include addiction and escapism.

Pisces’ ruling planet Neptune has spent the last fourteen years in its home sign, describing both the way that a kind of woodland elf aesthetic has gotten really popular in the last decade, but also how we are doing a lot more drugs than we used to. This coincides with the legalization of Cannabis in Toronto, ketamine therapy being popularized, mushrooms being something that health influencers take, and many of us drinking rather a lot. Luckily for me, it’s also coincided with increased interest in astrology and the occult. This year Neptune moves into Aries and we enter a new 14 year Neptune cycle where belief and vision shifts to the individual, to bravery, to self expression and to action and energy. This is a bit spooky to me given *everything* but I also think it can teach us that conflict in and  of itself isn’t bad, and that sometimes we simply must stand up for ourselves.

These horoscopes focus on your own Pisces side, based on your rising sign. If you don’t know your rising sign you can read for your sun sign, or read through them all and see which you identify with the most (and if you want to know why I recommend you read for your rising sign, read this.)

I hope those of you local to me are able to enjoy how pretty this snow is, and those of you not are keeping pace with the transitional season we’re in.
Amelia

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Photo by Krystle Merrow

It’s Scorpio season.

We often hear this time, referred to as being the time of year when the veil is thinnest. The space between our realm and the realm of that which we cannot see this permeable, flexible.

One time, and I can’t remember if this was during Scorpio season or not, I was asleep in my partner’s bed. In the middle of the night, I woke up and hanging above the bed from the ceiling, about halfway down the mattress, with a ghostly apparition of many many pieces of dusty fabric. Sheer gauze and cheesecloth, all white, all old and tattered. Whether this was a mid-sleep, hallucination, a waking dream, or a visit from the spirit world, I don’t know. I sat up looking at it for quite a while, continuously blinking to see if it would go away and it didn’t. At one point I tried to reach out my hand to touch it and then common sense stopped me from that—I don’t watch a lot of horror movies because they scare me too much, but I watch enough to know that trying to touch the ghost is a bad idea.

I’ve taken this apparition, this memory, as such a literal metaphor of this veil between worlds. An actual veil! Of all ghosts to see, this was a pretty good one.

We love to talk about Scorpio in the context of the spooky. Scorpio is certainly the spookiest of the signs, not just because Halloween/Samhain falls under her purview. Scorpio rules the things that we are afraid of, Scorpio rules fear itself. Scorpio rules the feeling that you have when you have conquered a fear, when you have faced it and said that you “permit it to pass over and through you” (Dune, in general, is very Scorpio).

In medieval anatomical astrology Scorpio ruled the reproductive organs and the rectum—Scorpio ruled sex and shit. This sign is about transformation on its most profound and most mundane levels. The transformation of our bodies coming together to make other bodies. The transformation of our food into poop. All of this is Scorpionic.

Each of us have every one of the signs of the zodiac somewhere in our chart, with or without planetary placements. Each of us has a Scorpio side—each of us has a part of our life about which we are passionate, intense, and focused. This part of ourselves (and if you have Scorpio placements, this part will be louder) can’t be backed away from. This is a part of yourself you need to lean into, allowing full expression.

Your Scorpio side can teach you that every time you have felt like you are (or you have thought someone else is) too much, this can be easily reframed as an abundance of self.

Happy Halloween and remaining days of Fall,
Amelia

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Photo by Krystle Merrow

Dear Readers,

“Infinity is duality:
the outside
and the inside
of everything
and nothing”

—Sun Ra, “the alternative to limitation”

Happy Libra season, happy autumnal equinox, or vernal equinox in the Southern hemisphere. Here we hang in the balance between day and night, equal parts light and dark. Libra season this year starts with her ruling planet Venus in her sign, on the tail of the lunar eclipse, in a week when I’m in a funny kind of chain letter with some friends encouraging each other to look at the moon every night.

Whenever I see Libra clients, I wind up telling the following story (so here I am giving away the cow with the milk):

This story comes from brilliant dancer and choreographer Justine A. Chambers. I was taking Justine’s class some years ago and she had us experimenting with gravity by standing high on one leg, up on a demi-pointe, while extending our remaining limbs as far from our bodies as we could, always maintaining a center of gravity. There was some spacey ambient music in the background, and the effect was one of a bunch of flailing orbiting bodies in a big empty room.

While we did this balance dance, Justine walked around the room and told us a story (with my apologies, Justine, if I’ve been telling this story wrong all along). She was once on a long bus ride that took a stop somewhere at a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Justine got off to stretch her legs and walked around the gas station. During this walk she came across a man tap-dancing on a piece of cardboard outside, doing this incredible movement balanced on the very tip of one shoe while orbiting the rest of his body around at great risk and momentum. Justine, as I remember the story, was transfixed and watched him until he finished his dance. Afterwards she approached him and disclosed that she was a dancer, and asked how he balanced like that. He told her, “balance is just moving in every direction at the same time”.

I think about this story always when I see Libran clients, trying hard to bring harmony to everyone, trying hard to advocate for their own needs, trying to seek balance but thinking too much in terms of this-or-that. This is not to say that all Libras are binary thinkers (patently untrue), but that a major feature of the archetype of Libra is the unit of two. The symbolism of Libra is the scale, moving things off of one side in order to balance the other. Libra is Cardinal Air—all air signs are about system, communication, thought, and all cardinal signs are about beginnings. When I think about the beginning of a system, the first kind of system we can understand, I think of a binary. Little children learn opposites, and this is their introduction to systems.

The other thing I always mention in my Libra readings is that Libra is 100% the Carrie Bradshaw of the Zodiac.

When the Libra side of us is in difficulty, we need to shift the perspective from the center out, balancing the self with the other/outer. Libra is about the appreciation of beauty, and I think about how reaching out of the self to notice something beautiful helps us achieve this kind of infinite duality, this every-direction balance between ourselves and everything else.

Happy changing of seasons to you,
Amelia

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