Anonymously

We drove through orange groves, wildflowers and neatly plowed earth. Off road gravel paths, through narrow corridors of field. He said he wanted to live anonymously, in a small town like this, where internet is scarce and everything is painted vibrantly. The hills glid over us like emerald blankets, accompanied by palm trees that fanned out, cloaking the town in strange shadows. The land shimmered with energy. There were oil painted hummingbirds everywhere, hand woven rugs, sacred hearts and distorted clay sculptures of deities and monsters. My hair had turned the color of topaz, burnt by the light of the sun. His seemed to capture it, and he shone the color of finely spun gold. He was handsome in wise, timeless way, with a perfectly square jaw and hands made for percussion, that left trails of fire on my skin and shortened my breath. His eyes were as dark as his hair, and they held a steady, unbreakable gaze. Penetratingly truthful. Hauntingly honest. There was no rational justification for the depth of our connection. 

He seemed to animate a deeply exclusive, animal energy inside of me, that rendered me powerless in a whirlpool of wanting. 

The narrow roads were crumbling into orange dust, so we mainly travelled by foot, his hands on the small of my waist, guiding me into the ocean.  In the evenings we lay under the stars, moving like we were underwater, melting and welding into one another, each of his breaths stealing one of mine. Incinerating my inhibitions, currents of breathless surrender encompassing my body. Until we were covered in sweat and each other’s tears. Then we charged into the clear, purple ocean and lived this day over and over again. We were humble and unknown, but never bored. Dizzy from the humidity and overloaded with sensation. 

How To Survive Dating A Scorpio

I don't abide by sweeping, astrological generalizations, and as an astrologer I find myself breathless when rushing to explain why your sun sign is a small part in astrology. I am constantly asked questions about compatibility, which is honestly bullshit too, as we each have soul contracts and timing more intricate and designed than simple commonalities between signs. If you are in a relationship, it has nothing to do with compatibility or convenience, and so much more to do with the lessons both parties require for individual growth. I do, however, think it is important to note the differences each sign experiences when embarking on the deeply terrifying, deeply entangling and revealing conquest that is intimacy.

The preexisting patterning for the Scorpio Lover is based on the fear of abandonment, vulnerability and lack of control. A lot of Scorpios dealt with these themes in early childhood. In psychology, we look to childhood for early pointers of the relational patterns repeated in adulthood. In astrology, we believe that the pattern was chosen long before childhood, but we can look at childhood for a simplistic expression of these archetypes- because they are actually occurring within us. If you are intimately involved with a Scorpio, there is an aspect of yourself that is eager to know your own intensity, your own power, your own relationship to abandonment and control. This is your shit, not there's. 

The Scorpio’s purpose in the zodiac is to transform from the inside out. To experience so much inwardly, that one has to alchemize and become someone else completely . To live eight lifetimes in one. To regenerate. To die through sex, through change, through trauma, through catastrophe. And throughout these feats, most of which would terrify the majority of the zodiac, they additionally must learn how to be truly and deeply known by another.

The Scorpio has the depth and mental agility to be able to keenly observe the psychological behavior of their partners, whilst maintaining one eye inward, looking for interior indicators of lies, betrayal and any energetic imbalances between the outside and the inside. A lot of relationships with Scorpios involve the undercurrents of what is happening behind the exterior: what isn’t being said, what can’t be revealed and what doesn’t meet the eye. Almost as if most of the relationship exists underwater, exists in the psychic and in the things that are intangible and unspoken. The Scorpio, ruled by Pluto and Mars, is the sign most aware of it's own mortality. Imagine if, at all moments, you were keenly aware of other timelines or instances where you have died. All decisions are ruled by the instinct to survive for the scorpio. If your life was being threatened, all thoughts about finances and your neighbors would disappear in an instant. You would only be aware of your nervous system, and a forced clarity would overcome all secondary chit chat. Such is the mindset of the scorpio.

They are intense, magnetic and seem to exude an indescribable depth, and simply being in their presence pulls you underground. They seem to have been born with X-Ray No Bullshit Goggles on. Navigated correctly and healthily, the Scorpio Lover will shine a spotlight on bits of yourself buried deep beneath the surface, and take you on an all access tour of your innermost desires. Navigated incorrectly, you will be pulled into a silent power struggle, and merge so deeply that you won’t know where your feelings begin and the others ends.  

Expect sudden abrupt disappearances followed by periods of melting intensity, passion and obsessive behavior. Expect them to know when your faking at anything. Expect to lose your capacity to lie. Expect to never know everything, and to learn how to be comfortable in the stagnancy of the unknown, to find solace in the dark. Expect sex that lingers with nervous system for little too long. Expect to feel watched when you are not being looked at.   Expect that you elected to learn these sacred lessons, as they truly belong to you. Expect to resent the forbidden power they have. Allow yourself to greet each milestone of depth with a silent joy, with an invisible sense of achievement (this is what they do, too.)

Cursed With Beauty, Blessed With Rage

When I am in pain, I want to vanish into the darkest skirts of the earth and never return again.I want to evade the eyes and words of everyone around me and descend into a cave, with moths and indigo bubbles and scarab beetles swarming my head, protecting me from dark thoughts.  I want to devour everything that is natural and purge all that is artifice. I want to return to the ancient way and dance with the old gods. To run. Tripping over a thousand roots eagerly drinking from purple soil, galloping into the sky, pirouetting, dancing in the ether with the stars, until I fragment into a thousand pieces and become one of them myself. 

I find myself puzzled by these aspects of my character, so eager to keep my secrets close so I can be all things to all people. Isn’t that silly?

That I don’t want to belong to anyone, but I want to belong to everyone. I am obsessed with the human condition and I want everything to feel forbidden. I am afraid of losing the most beautiful years of my life. So I spread myself out, like strawberry jam, hungry and eager to observe new lands and people and ideas with an insatiable appetite. I want to inhale it all and leave nothing unexplored. Remain exhaustingly alive and lucid. Feel my secrets  worn as layers of ruffled satin, of encouraging mysteries, that only increase my intimacy with myself. To comically observe my own abrupt alternation of insane joy and the most unbearable anguish. I wonder if all of the secrets I accumulate will stain me, taint me, or become treasures of my reckless life that I take out and observe in my old age, one by one, like precious jewels. Giggling. 

Perhaps in spreading myself so widely, I rid myself of the vulnerability in being truly known. Or of being seen in totality, rather than in curated, bite sized portions. I had to tape goddesses, fairies, magic symbols and divine avatars all over my world to protect me from the trauma of being alive. To stop the world from happening.

But the world doesn’t happen to us, they tell me. It happens in response to us, in a dance with us. It takes the form of our resonance. To be a Witch is to know this. 

Onward

I ask if you feel violated by all the photographs, if it exhausts you to be looked at by millions. Embossed eternally. Mass psychic attack. I imagine all the people that leak and bleed and ooze into you without asking permission. 

I am sitting on your green velvet couch and you have a pen in your mouth and one of your eyes is squinting which is what you do,when you are straining to reach a thought while you write. I have a book in my hand, legs crossed, heals brushing the carpet. Staring at you with a wide eyed look of mischief and interest and you stare right back. We speak in an invisible, soundless language sometimes. It’s like tuning into an etheric current of something built just for us. Sometimes we sit for hours in silence, studying each other's movements. You say I move like I have an audience. Capable of intense tenderness and instant flashes of vengeance. You unravel all of my secrets with a carnal indulgence. You are impossible to shock.

It is hard to be caught in this place, oscillating between fragile and dangerous. You taste the bad and good in me, and yet you want them both. I say that I will only write about him if I am writing away from him, and into you. I want you to suck the poison he left inside of me out, as if it were a lethal snake bite. Quickly, urgently. An angel with a monstrous appetite. This is what happens with fire, it can’t stay still. It eats and consumes itself.

On Fire

My sister says dreams are the same as real life, but much quicker. We think it's funny that people interpret dreams, but forget to interpret the symbols or characters in waking life.
Fire will always be a potent symbol for me, the symbol of regeneration, of ferocious passion and unforgiving change. Red and intense.  Having walked through it I have assimilated a healthy fear, and weariness in it's riveting ability to swallow things up into some unknown abyss. Bits of myself were swallowed by the same abyss that evening, perhaps my blissful naivety and trust in that which shouldn’t be trusted.

I wasn’t there, but I imagine it started silently. Searing and rising with a hushed urgency across my room. My room was a museum of memorabilia for my short twenty four years on this planet, anointed with totems of adulthood and declarations of individuation from my own broken home. Sometimes when you see the world in an intense and strange way, it is hard to imagine that you could belong or fit anywhere, but you try anyway. You suck it up, and try to guise your distaste in a world that makes people sick. You try and try, and inevitably you get there, with the help of some ethereal magic and sheer determination. That space was the notion that I could anchor in heaven. Fairy statuettes and angel wings. Clothes from simpler times. Tangible evidence that I could adequately be human. almost.

 I imagine it started silently, but ferociously, because I think that fire, above all things, possesses an intelligence unbenounced to twenty four year old girls. Even witches. Fire, like all elements, possesses a consciousness. An agenda. It is the creator and the destroyer. The element of transformation, of passion and will. It removes what is excess and reveals what needs to be revealed.  

It was burning white hot, like a starry virus, gliding across my furniture, mangling and distorting it's contents. Decades worth of love notes and photographs, clothes, feathers, crystals and books all engulfed with a quick hunger. The flowers I pinned to everything, sparking and converting. Drawings and journals that bore witness to the strange and nonsensical happenings of my life, devoured and fragmented into dust. Shoes that lead me through the scottish moors and letters that kept me alive. The fire blurred the edges of all of these things, melding and twisting them into each other. Illuminated, cackling and then suddenly rotten. Ending loudly, eager and furious, intent on transmuting and destroying.Devouring and wrenching smoke down the hallways, spewing streaks of darkness and carbon through the sky. Flames licking the ether with a malevolent determination. Disintegrating and searing into flakes of white ash, floating through the august air, immune to the panic and shock of inhabitants gazing up from the cement. A personal apocalypse. 

It opened my chest up with a searing white pain and broke my heart. I felt like a ghost, shattered and fragmented. Incapable of speech, revisiting the same experience in all of my dreams. It seared down inside of me with immersion and passion. Made me depart from my body, while bright red lights flashed above me, and fall to the sidewalk. It rapidly collapsed timelines of normalcy and calm. It made me softer. It made me stronger. Clearer. Sadder but wiser. 

In the days following, I watched the way people reacted to it from three feet above my body. Floating around hoping that the earth would open up and swallow me, not out of self pity, but exhaustion from living. The way people responded was more alarming than the fire itself, it made the hard ones strange and distorted, and the kind ones sweeter. It was like there was still smoke, a haze and airbourne fogginess that shifted from person to person, clouding judgement and circumstance. Some people displayed a tenderness and hospitality I thought to be the stuff of fairy tales. A miraculous kindness and love that conjured healing in places it did not normally exist. There were scarab beetles that circled my head and blue butterflies everywhere. More synchronicities in those three days than I have ever seen in my life, like I had entered an alternate timeline where crisis made sense. Holy conjurings of signs and coincidences that added an erie design to the whole event. 

Weeks later, I think about the crisis as if I were in that room, gliding with the fire, following it eat up my silk and wood and steel and asking each rising flame questions. Why. What next. Where does it all go. Where does all of it go. 

I don’t know if it is appropriate to think of crisis symbolically, but I’m hardly appropriate and 

always thinking symbolically- and to me this was spiritual. Like a terrible portal, it brought in newness rapidly. Exposed what needed to be seen. All trauma can be like that, a visceral narrowing of timelines, a reveal behind curtains. A change in location, an elevation and intimacy to all my relationships that were truthful, that buzzed with the frequency of honesty and empathy. Fire is not bad or good, it is neutral. Powerful, but neutral. It is our emotions attached to loss that assign meaning. Crisis is sacred, it is initiating, it is loud and revealing, it is the portal from one mentality to the next. It condenses and focuses your personal lense of what matters. It shows you what is real and what is false. There is a dissonance in knowing that I will never be able to look at certain things with the same blind naivety, but there is no room for self pity after the display of love and clarity that followed the events of that evening.
Life is hell and then ecstasy, and any pendulum swings in one direction guarantees the swing in the other.

I hate that I run around in unspent dreams, and the flourescent light in supermarkets makes me feel sick. Sometimes I want to surround myself in green and look for you inside of me. I want to lay you on the summer grass and prance around you, spinning. I want to kiss your wounds and sing away your pain. To listen to the ocean inside your chest. To feel you rattle when you laugh. To intertwine like celtic knots, to fade into each other. I trust you with all of me, until the last star dies. It’s a sensual and intricate contract, ours.

Love Spell

It was not love at first sight. 

It was soul recognition. A buzzing. 

We had to be two feet away from each other to notice at first. It was like remembering a song, once heard, impossible to forget. 

My soul throbs wildly for you, with a shining white longing. You put lightning bolts through my spine. You are a  libido awakening deity, an agent of holistic madness, a megaphone of epiphanies. Built of the Mediterranean, with olive skin and warm palms, and when you sweat you glisten, and smell like oranges and the sea. Your eyes speak of a remote cove in Greece, and tell stories of Gods and their angels, sent down to earth, battling human desire. That seems to be all you think about, a celestial battle of good and evil, of right and wrong.

When you look at me, it is always in an almost pained way, like you are straining to see something you can’t quite make out, or solving a puzzle with a missing piece. You are funny, with a full bellied laugh, that sends comets of sound around the room, that draws your whole body back and forth like a rocking horse, quaking. I love your laugh. 

I liked the way your fingers feel clasping the nape of my neck, the way you recount your dreams each morning, with the same animated expression. Full of wonder, and far too easy for me to interpret.

I want to be your mythology, an unmarked map, a dousing rod for your inner battles. I want you to study my body like uncharted territory, tracing my lines with delicate cartography. I am in love with your inner revolution. You are a rare jewel, a strange unearthed space thing, carrying distinct light fragments of perfect pain and rushing pleasure..shining into you from all sides. Your madness transports people with you. I want to swallow you. I want to be your cosmic experiment. Your avant garde home, your ecstatic adventure.  Your sweet, honeysuckle breath whispers god back into me. 

A Reminder In Trying Times

Let me remind you who you truly are. You are an alchemist, turning all your wounds into fluidic light.

A temporary expression of human density, carved from fractals of kaleidoscopic light and fine woven gold. You are a mutant, an immortal, holistic vigilante.

Comprised of the stuff of stars and carrying the chic, worldly exuberance of important pain. 

You heal through mischief and the fabrication of dreams. 

You are a seance at the Madonna Inn.

You are a dictionary of nonsense words and a tapestry of surrealist mythical creatures.

Chorales of angels chant your name while you sleep. 

You have secret allies behind the veil.

 They laugh at all your jokes and clap for all your mistakes. 

Your world is opening up.

You are blooming and all of matter is calibrating in your favor.

You are a spectacular miracle, the most imperfectly perfect version of yourself to exist in all of time and all of space. You are the symbiotic intimacy of all moments, sounds and colors, vividly experiencing themselves. 

Your avatar is secondary to the cosmic, magnetic pull you carry. 

You are full of wonder, High on hope, hungry for the infinite, and it is looking for you. 

The giggles you make in rooms you leave behind, stay and linger and bounce across the walls like golden comets.

You are the gasping, delightful shock and abandon of a first orgasm.

You are the medium of the in-between, the mouth piece for the stars.

You are a paradoxical mythology, of gods and monsters and angels and loss. You are a festival of chaos and a church of bliss.