Encrypted Message

This is an encrypted message. This is code. I trust you’ll be smart enough to decipher it. It’s encrypted because let's be real honest, there's a few people who would love to think that I wrote this about them. I know you hate that.

When I feel scared by the intensity of a situation, I try to exercise control by making sure I have ALL the facts, and then picking and choosing who else gets to receive them. This is probably why I’m an astrologer. 

I told you, the ecosystem of my life has to be a pristine, pure kind of clockwork now. The walls of protection cannot be breached. We’re in the business of concocting miracles, in the age of the apocalypse. I’m still here, but  floating on a different layer, a new sheet of ether.  From up here, colors and shapes and sounds buzz differently, everything is alive, everything stares back. Stomping through the hills of the land of dream screens, hiking to sex rap, getting angry at artificial intelligence and wondering why everything here is backwards. Why should love ever involve pain. Why I have historically wanted to destroy things that make me feel too much.

And I do, I do, I do.  I really love you in a way that is deep and timeless, and doesn't seem to follow the Disney Princess la-de-dah bibittiy bullshit programming. It doesn’t make any linear sense. You can try to dance around it and not look at it, but I know you feel it too. Because energy doesn’t lie, even though we can- and we make lying look like a goddamn sport. 

Sometimes love has it's own clockwork, life, shape, path, whatever. And when two people don’t agree or see eye to eye, the love part sometimes doesn’t care, it just keeps going. So if our love was a plant, or a child with an adult face who knows far too much, it was told it wasn’t real. It was told that it can’t exist, and it has nowhere left to live. It looks absurd to everyone else, abstract and depleted of any nutrition. It wasn’t given enough sunlight or validation for how sacred it was- so it just sits there, stagnant, still completely absurd. 

So what do we do? We can’t buy real estate for it in outer space.  Do we let it rot, sediment, become fossilized in the peripheral?  I try to put borders around any speculation. I try not to think about it, I try to build narratives around it, I try to keep walking and talking my way away from it. I try to let it exist in the background.  I tell myself that I was just wiping the bits of myself I didn’t like, onto you, in hopes that I could fall in love with those misshapen fragments.  The ones that aren’t so beautiful. I tell myself I just poeticize the person I sleep with the most. That the architecture of how you would hurt me was built into my body long before I had a choice.  Our pain recognized each other. The pain I felt, became a messiah. A slingshot towards something higher. You were maybe just a catalyst. And there's a different untainted version of us somewhere, somewhere tropical. Where no one knows our last names. And you're diving into the ocean and I’m healing and the air isn’t poisoned, and you don’t get scared shitless when I look at you.

I know where you live, I used to live there too. You aren’t one of them though, you are one of us. I’m not interested in anything short of self revealing confessions. Your dreams are begging to be listened to, without the temporary slide into the two dimensional abyss. 

There's one coin left in this fucked up pinball machine. Don’t use it til your reflexes are ready. Don’t use it until you are lucid. 

DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE

He tells me that I should come with a sign that says:

 DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE

Tells me I am often in a million places at once, that I’m from another place. A stranger plane. That the things that I do that look like accidents are not really accidents. I often think about how there are a million avatars of me prancing around peoples heads, some dark, others inflated. I think his is closest to the truth. He sees the constellations in my eyes when they are closed, the imagery, the vagueness, the myths.  When you like someone they seem to develop powers, but you can’t always pick which powers they get- and that’s scary sometimes. 

You are the like the desert and I am like the forest. You have a holy horizon  and are full of mirages, golden warm, sweltering and dotted with cacti that give you keyholes into distant planes.   If you are the desert, I am the forest. I am green and changing with the glowing and dimming of light, hard to regulate, with no fixed pattern, the stage of a fairy tale. Study the shadows and you will become unafraid of your own woods.

Your eyelids become mine briefly, and I see with astigmatism. My skin has regained it’s sensitivity, and you transport me to a richer universe. We are two spirits, wrestling.  I want to learn to control the part of me that bleeds into everyone I come close to. It's a different kind of feeling, not wanting to fall into someone but still wanting to explore them.

I like the apocalyptic pace, encouraging us not to hurry our natural unfoldings before calculating the safest bet. 

After we kissed you couldn’t stop vibrating, your whole body electrified and alert with a brand new oscillation. It went on for hours, and you left thinking I had done it on purpose. With you, the synchronicities come in animals, because everything is shut down. We are warriors fighting the invisible airwaves. The Phantom Enemies. The Psychic Warfare. We're in the business of freedom, immune to everything happening around us.  We see pairs of doves and fire ants and stars within the stars, whispering a blue mythology of ancient secrets. I have to remember to stop eternally narrating for the planets and start speaking about my feelings. I like that you can get lost in watching me retract from reality, and have gasps of these understandings at the symbolic layers that are more comfortable for me. 

Most people feel like another species to me, but not you. I want you to undress me the way someone who understands stars should be undressed. You are erotic, because you leave me with things think about.

DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. 

Crisis Calling

Crisis and trauma have the ability to show us what truly matters, to shift timelines, to awaken, to become portals to truth. Sometimes in this vague and dreamlike world, we need to be shaken and stirred, and frighteningly transformed. Crisis reveals what is underneath things, who people truly are. All crisis can become a gateway to self knowledge, paths to knowing the divine intelligence working through all moments, intricately. Even the humanly painful ones.  There are answers in surrender.

Crisis makes simple things important again. 

Survival means we stay in our bodies.

In between the spaces between flesh and soul.

Staying in my body has been an act of defiance. The easy thing is to stay cold, hard or distracted. To depart to the virtual world, to chase forgetting. The more difficult thing is to stay present, stay feeling, ever subatomic emotional current running through your uncomfortable skin suit. To stay in the painful business of remaining in love. Reminding you of your ability to react, respond, alter and direct reality.

I explore AGAINST the drowning of mass distraction. Fragranced by forest and lit by mountain light. Exchanging lively conversations, swapping honeyed research with the urgency of the apocalypse. Protected by extraterrestrial ether. Flicking fire ants of my ankles and falling in mud. Gathering mustard seed with a bleeding heart and almost swallowing angel’s trumpets. Weaving flowers into my hair. Pirouetting through fantasies both infernal and celestial.  

The sea blue stars watch above us,

Pointing to the south. 

Breathing, leaping, like tall flames.

YOU. HAVE. TO. STAY. WILD. 

Stay natural. You are nature.

You have got to STAY WILD.

If you stay wild, you can be knocked over, trampled on- and yet repair overtime. 

Your grand call to destiny is not your career, or to get rich, or to be admired, Your purpose is linked to how you respond to trauma. Who do you become in the crisis. Never how productive you are, but how hard you fight to stay lucid. Basque in the beauty of your own mortality.  That is the soul's journey. From down here it looks like suffering, but from up there, it's just growth. Surrender is where transformation begins. How you deal with crisis. You meet yourself in those moments. 

The collective shadow is stirring. It is big, but only because so is the light.  In these shifting forms, there are new sheets of ether draping over our earth. There are sudden, subtle microcosmic lights flickering everywhere. Tiny flowing currents in your spine. 

Small footsteps of lightmarks are making unknown spaces in our bodies. Ready to peel out the lies in your blood. These lights are giddy and excited to reacquaint with you. Let your body feel this recognition. 

Reality is recalibrating. Pick your direction.

LA Love In The Time Of Corona

I drew a symbol on the window facing the skyline of Los Angeles this time two weeks ago. A symbol to banish evil. I lit a black candle, carved with ancient sigils, ringed in rose petals. Tied nine knots in a strand of red string and whispered of the things I wished to be rid of. Toxicity. Pain. Hurt. Illusion. Hatred. 

 As a punk, Oxford Witch once said to me, 

“Leave that shit at the altar, babe.”

We’ve been driving through Mulholland and as always, I am exploring the dichotomy between my hate and love for this strange city, it's canyons deserted and doused in the uncommon rain. We all anticipated and predicted this in some variation. As an astrologer, there is a mighty mythological quality to these events, unfolding like a darkened sacred geometry. It’s like a puzzle, insisted by the planets, with terrible ticking clocks and invisible monsters. The change could be felt a year away. Most people don’t live in a world where cards spell out the future, and planets weave stories with their vast shadows and cylicar movements.

But it’s here. The dimmed urban light. The vast terrains of mini-malls, bland and barren without all the pretty people. Labyrinths of zigzagging streets in the hills, pocketing secrets of 70’s black magic and rockstars who sold their souls. There is an unsettled silence, an airborne anticipation that seems to hover above the freeways, sidewalks and winding pockets of the hills. I’ve never felt such omnipotent suspension, a dense layer of worry cloaking the streets. A swallowed prayer. Who knew the apocalypse would be invisible?

I suppose this is a blip of time, a mere wink in the earth’s story. Perhaps the past will be erased with a single, violent stroke, and we will begin from nothing. And no one will care who you were, where you were from and what you did before. It will just be about regenerating this mistreated planet, built on phallic falsehood and lies.  It’s like we are all waiting for extraterrestrial intervention, or messages from the airwaves of the night. It’s a dark kind of romantic, this garbled, mass unknowing. I feel a strange kind of surrender, a drowsiness and still, growing in the spaces between the panic. If this is it, make it good. Make it more than invisible.

Grocery stores are the new anxiety themed nightclubs, with lines around the corner. 

Harshly fluorescent and alive with a dark, primal electricity.  It’s like seeing flocks of ghosts, brooding with a meditative temper, all in disguises. Grocery stories have always made me believe half of us might be ghosts anyways. There's already people wearing Supreme face masks and pleather hazmat suits, stocking their clinking carts with gallons of milk and strange variations of processed goods, yogurt, beans, and toilet paper. Toilet paper, naturally, to clean the collective, exploding root chakra problem in this country. The single men look at me with a hungered, primitive eagerness that both terrifies me and excites me.

Everyone I speak to is running a different story, a separate narrative about the state of the world. When we speak, it feels like these realities have to take time to buffer, before they collide, as if we are all underwater. I hate the idea of being cooped up in our virtual worlds, forming  separate realities. Heads bowed, necks strained. My Dad always said, “Whatever you spend the most time doing is what you worship.”

Some of us are informed by 24 hour news, bound by fear. Others, hopeful, helpful, looking for silver linings. Some of us have glimpses of the deeper meaning. Stepping into the roles of Protective Witches. Lighting candles every color of the rainbow, inventing concoctions and channeling french cooking. This isn’t a dress rehearsal anymore. 

 Capitalism is suspended. Suddenly, we have time, luxurious time, to read, write, and nurture ourselves in ways we have neglected in pursuit of distorted ambition. To recultivate and rearrange our respective worlds. To incubate in our wildest dreams.  Time to get to the top of the mountain, to sing, to cry, to feel what our inner resonance feels like. 

So I walk and walk, and climb through towers of wildflowers. Try to stay in my body, stay awake, stay fighting, stay breathing. Even though I hear they’ve poisoned the air too. It is my inconsolable rage at the rape of this planet that has kept my nervous system buzzing for years. I hear of frequencies that cast nets over our city, driven from giant towers disguised as menacing trees. As the world trembles, I strike the ground back with the soles of my feet. Reminding both of us, of the sacred imperative of survival.

I remember that I miss the sea, so we go there, and play fight and kiss, contrary to the inclinations of this world. In those moments I lose my fear of fear, and the snake that has been bound tightly in my stomach uncoils. It feels easier to be lovers at the end of the world. Somehow, shared pain is more bearable. In the curling foam of the seas lips, I am reminded that we are the virus that keeps replicating our crimes on this planet. Infecting and possessing the land with a wretched, bottomless hunger. Mutating and mass producing. I don’t want to be eternal, I want the mountains to be eternal. The sea to be eternal.

There are Swans gliding through the Venice Canals, and Deers are patrolling the New York subway. Thousands of jet streams missing from the sky. 

We are all hostage to an uncertain eternity. People will stay indoors and write poetry instead of giving handshakes, and the earth will regenerate in our absence. 

The world won’t really ever end, but there will be vast change. There is healing to be found in the earth and in love and in the new kids, with their new dna. 

Freedom

When I was a child, I remember having to collect stuffed animals. It was not so much that I needed nurturing, but I had too much love and not enough places to put it. I felt overwhelmed with it, disarmed by it. These stuffed animals were my placeholder siblings, children, partners. They were animated by my imagination. When my parents would yell at one other, I would take all of them to the back of my closet and cradle them. Comforting them first.

He lived in servitude to a Monster in his head, that only arrived at night. A chameleon virus, shaping into people and spaces and leaving them worse off. I watched this Monster puppeteer his actions, swallow his life up, in splintered fragments. My sacredness diluted by it’s carnal indulgences. Four years, I spent watching the rare and celestial be traded for something cold, brash and hedonistic. It was the last time.

When you have too much love, no one teaches you that there can be a wrong way to feel it. That there are very, very wrong places to put it. That it can extend out of you and loop around things that are dangerous, forming a psychic toxicity that can kill you. Disparage you and pull you out of your body. 

You have to learn to put the love back into the earth, because it is the only big enough container. You will see yourself in cranes, deer, and scarab beetles that prance around your head when you are thinking the right things. You will feel yourself in the way your feet feel in the grooves of a mountain. You will use your fire and intensity to climb the mountain. And the earth, in her interconnectivity, will love you back, unconditionally, asking nothing of you.

The last time I sat next to him, I felt a pit of emptiness in his pulse, breath and veins. For so long he clung to my skin with a sticky feeling, swollen inside me like a brilliant knife. Somewhere, nestled deep between the unnatural palpitations of his heart, lay a silent cave of childhood grief. Too deep for me to return to.

I had my friends lay beside me, and exorcize me, one by one. Some with poems, others with energy work, extracting cords and etheric “No Trespassing” signs. Until I felt the spell break, the snake around my heart uncoil, the ghost reluctantly depart. 

I know the danger of tricky memory. I am far enough away to only stare, unblinkingly, ahead.

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.