!! Life !!

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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Photo by Krystle Merrow

It’s Leo season, and as I watch my cats go from lying down dead asleep to fighting each other in two-minute increments, I am thinking about how Leo the lion is kind of just a giant housecat—and the astrology this Leo season is kind of like my cats fighting at maximum zoomie speed at 2 AM, running up and down the house sounding like bowling balls wearing tap shoes.

This is to say—there is a lot of astrology.

The big story of the sun in Leo takes place in the mutable signs of Pisces and Gemini, with Virgo briefly joining the fun towards the end of the month. Jupiter and Mars will be conjunct in Gemini from the 13th–18th, and Saturn in Pisces will square them during that time and hang onto his square with Jupiter until the start of Virgo season on the 24th. Towards the end of that square, Venus in Virgo will briefly oppose Saturn and square Jupiter/Mars, forming a two-day transiting T-cross. During the peak day of that astrology—August 19th—we will also have major astrology in fixed signs, with the full moon in Aquarius, sun conjunct Mercury in a transiting T-cross to Uranus in Taurus.

Two T-squares, a full moon, and a Mercury retrograde cazimi. Did I mention it’s the first day of the Democratic convention in the USA?

This astrology is: tense, changing, unstable, and yet: stubborn, unrelenting, change resistant, and yet; unreliable, confusing, and yet; expansive, opportunistic. Sounds exactly like US politics.

Although there’s plenty of memes and reasons to get more into US politics with these horoscopes, I’ll back off that content in favor of what I do best: the personal.

These peak hot days of August will be confusing, busy, and intense. They will be ripe with opportunity for interpersonal conflict, feelings of resentment, and interpersonal 180º surprises.

One thing I love about a T-square is that they’re lovely to interpret. They’re common in natal charts, frequent in transits, and have a nice key for understanding how to balance them. Tracy Marks describes T-squares as a three-legged table in which the table is missing its fourth leg, and instead of balancing out the table by replacing the leg, we pile stuff up on the corner opposing it to prevent it from tipping over. It’s much more efficient to simply replace the leg, but we get lazy and hyper focus on temporarily patching the problem instead. When interpreting them I consider the opposing point of the focal planet of the T-square—I consider the point where the table is missing a leg.

For these horoscopes, I am focusing on the mutable T-square with Mars/Jupiter as the focal planet and Sagittarius as the release point. To translate: I am focusing on the astrology that sees a lot of tension between signs that are about adaptability, and which bring a lot of attention to planets about anger, violence, and expansion. To combat that, I am asking us to consider growth, learning, and foreign experiences. 

With hopes we can all find that wisdom,
Amelia

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