The cycle of Venus is the most elegant, reliable, visible cycle of the planets, but it doesn’t fit neatly into our current calendars or clocks.

From Venus’ movements as Morning Star to Evening Star, to her times of invisibility during Venus Retrograde, Venus-Sun conjunctions, Venus Cazimi periods, Venus is honestly the most magical and mysterious.

Venus can be tricky to attune to unless you know when and where to pay attention. You'll attune pretty quick once you know, but it's good to have a guide.

If you're still trying to hold yourself (and others) to pre-2020 standards, please don’t. Yes, some of us have even enjoyed some of the social shifts that have happened since then, but none of us are truly okay.

We talk about relationship as a foundational spiritual tenet, and it is, but I think part of what gets missed in the attempt to (re)integrate it into the sacred-obsessed western spiritualities is that relationship is often expressed most in the mundane. 

Interdependence doesn't have to be some deep fancy special different thing, despite its challenges to the tyranny of individualism. It's moving your hand two inches on the subway car handle bar to make room for someone else to hold it.

Perhaps I've just been "doing astrology" for long enough that it's ingrained in everything. I think, rather, astrology has always been ingrained in everything and I've just opened more to it, let it in, built relationship and allowed myself to be guided by the cycles of the planets and luminaries. 

When I first began my work on the I.C. at the end of 2017, I found myself trying to “elevator pitch” the idea of the book. While my astrology practice was forged in British depth-oriented psychological astrology, and the American currents of evolutionary astrology and revival of ancient astrologies, especially Hellenistic astrology, what I found myself doing in client consultations was not purely any of those things.

In fact, my practice itself was emphatically a remedy to the parts of “my” traditions that were unsatisfactory or could even be harmful when I sat in session in the beautiful, queer, traumatized, young humans who were my clients (and myself). Shifting within the movement of “queer astrology,” I defined my work and research as “relational astrology” as a corrective move to the main currents in so-called "western" astrology, the currents in which my astrologer-self was raised.

The IC in astrology, the Imum Coeli, as the darkest part of the chart is the deepest part of the forest. It’s where the witches gather and the gorillas play. It’s where the children are wild and the elders are trusted. Because it is unknowable by rational means, it is overlooked and denied.

As astrology becomes further institutionalized and accredited, for good reasons such as ethics, but also in a bid for popular validation, I don’t want to forget the poetry of it, the hidden pieces, the dark places.

Many of us won’t and can’t forget, of course, and a balance of rigour and imagination is the most common way to practice astrology, but there is always a risk of loss when we prioritize technique and empiricism over lived experience and romance. I want to balance depth of knowledge and rigour of technique with the expansive uncertainty that is exploring the unknown, which necessitates memory and poetry and dream, the irrational and ungraspable.

Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius seems to be, in part, about the absolutely final undeniability that we, as a species, are all in this mess of Earth-based existence together.

In Taurus, I see the non-human. In Scorpio, I see the non-living. As the moon waxes, I wonder where we go when we are gone entirely.

Do you remember your first major extinction?

It’s probably the same as mine: the baiji, or the freshwater dolphin of the Yangtze River, declared extinct in 2006. Short story: struggling with habitat degradation for decades, the completion of the Three Gorges Dam marked their final disappearance.

Astrologers are pretty down on the Scorpio moon. I get it, it’s the Moon trying to Moon in the depth hell of Mars, with all our lovely analogies such as composting and sewers, decay and waste disposal. In Taurus, the Moon gets to hold on and up without tax nor sacrifice, while in Scorpio her holding becomes constriction and compression, sometimes imposed without mercy.

The sumac is reddening at its edges here. Yesterday, while driving through the backroads of western MA, I longed for my autumnal affect to be any one other than grief. I miss the Cancer striving while in the grasp of shortest nights. That ease into the lazy summer heat of Leo. We have one last breath of Virgo accounting for it all while there’s still more light than dark.