Venus wants you to create through your specific taste and preferences, through what you love.

Venus wants you to remember that connection is always available when you look for it.

Venus wants you to feel how your desire is the strongest magnet to create what you want to exist in the world.

An old colleague reached out to me last week. Listening to her voice notes, I recalled the density and weight of lockdowns weighing heavily on each of us, when we were both working with women experiencing homelessness during the pandemic.

It’s not just the things we want that are on the other side of what scares us.

It’s: who is the person that has the courage to do the things that scares you today?

I was talking to a Gemini rising who embodies the art of asking really great questions, and we spoke about how it can literally feel like you’re pulling teeth when you ask a question, the person responds in a way that essentially peters out the convo with no follow up question, no back and forth, no further generating of energy between the two of you.

I recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, a novel on the nymph-goddess-witch who was exiled to an island and had an ongoing romance with Hermes, messenger god of the gods before she ended it because he was just there for the goss.

Hermes is the clever, cunning god in Greek mythology, adopted in Roman myth as Mercury.

Recently I took the train to the country to see my friend perform with her choir.

We got there an hour before the performance, and her choir mate exclaimed - “I can’t believe it’s sold out!”

“Sold out? I don’t think I’ve even bought a ticket yet!”

Under the lunar eclipse on Tuesday, I started walking towards KFC, debating with myself (yet again) whether to walk straight back home to eat my leftovers of mushroom and butter beans.

Last week I realised a part of me has stayed stuck in a pitch black pit when there’s actually a luscious open meadow with flowers and sunshine and butterflies.

When I first started thinking about writing publicly, I kept returning to a long email I wrote my friend Al, an internet friend I made over Tumblr when I found a comment of his on the post of a photographer we both adored.

A month after my birthday last year, I fell in love with a Scorpio.

As I move through this past month with an aching loss in my heart, grief keeps opening a certain clarity and vitality in it’s wake.

There is an emptiness I feel a rush to fill with noise and someone else’s voice. Some days I do, until my eyes and ears says: no more.

As I have gradually folded in somatic rituals into my everyday life, it has become less of: this is what I rigidly do and stick to every single day like my teeth brushing routine, and more: what is it that my body needs, and how can I tend to myself in a way that feels accessible right now?

Luxuriate in this feeling of sparkliness.

So I did. And it grew and shifted and landed deeper in my body, the deliciousness spreading all over.

Here are so many points of separation, apart and away. A tear that wells up and falls, another wave that rises and drops. Under an exalted Moon in Taurus ruled by an exiled Venus, I reach still toward connection - my body wrapped in the lapping waters, the sun hot on my face, my sister at arms length.

Deciding that we are now choosing connections because we want, not because we were chosen first.

Imagine taking responsibility for what we actually want.

Aquarius the water bearer is our connective tissues, fascia, circulatory and nervous system - that which stretches all over our bodies, keeping all parts of us connected, fluid, moving.

Complex defenses built to protect what has been harmed, to carefully guard the parts of us that have been betrayed in micro-doses over the years, to put the lid on trust because the Scorpio part of you has learned that it is better to be cornered and sting yourself than to risk being stung.

“But I have 20% pampering. Nice strong cigarette, nice strong coffee, nice dark chocolate. Otherwise life is gray. You need some pampering.”

Whenever I remember to, I walk into his garden to eat three kumquats straight from the tree and climb onto the trampoline, reaching my hands towards the clouds.

A year and a half later, at Emerald Bay Beach, my father picks up a piece of putat laut fruit and twirls the stem between his right thumb and index finger, his left hand turning the rest of the fruit.