The morning rain falls steadily on the yellow plumeria blossoms below the terrace.
A rainy day is a writing day.
An exhale. An excuse for slowness to take up space.
It’s Saturday in September now, Virgo season. Earthen. Grounding. Confronting. Empowering, if you want it to be.
Yes, we independently survived Leo’s August fire, a revelatory Mercury retrograde for the books.
A lot has been lost.
Do we miss it?
Before that, July’s watery reckoning, emotionally Cancerian as a storm-swept sea. High-low, high-low; tears here, tears everywhere.
And, of course, the Geminian spark of it all in the shape of shameless regression, June’s airy disco-ball duality culminating with that wild-hot Summer solstice, a full moon so fiery it cooked some things to perfection; burnt others crisp to the ground.
My five-cent astrology aside: since then, it's been a season of sifting through ashes and embers, breathing life into what little remains. Perhaps there’s a story in here of a phoenix rising from it all, a snake shedding her skin into something magnificent. But I’m not sure we’d recognize her if there were.
Or maybe we’re just that blind.
We all love a happy ending. A little redemption. But life isn’t exactly a fairytale. Not everything deserves a photograph. And like birth in a thunderstorm, midwifed at home alone, not all revolutions make headlines.
Today, the crescent moon waxes toward our impending equinox. The sweet lemons are yellowing from green, abundant on heavy branches beside the wall-climbing bougainvillea.
The mango tree is in bloom; too early, I fear. I worry what that will mean for her fruiting season, come April. What it will entail for the monkeys and birds, reptiles and bugs who live from her harvest. Their cycles disrupted at the hands of man. If we’ll be here to find out.
Still, the ants return to their line of pheromones etched across the teakwood floor beside my mat. Returning to order from chaos; my broom ultimately no contestant to their insatiable service. There’s something diligently predestined about them I find comforting, inspiring even.
I’m returning to my work, too, after a three-month hiatus I hadn’t planned but savored all the same. Returning to some semblance of order from my own chaos, perhaps.
There’s a certain self-discipline I appreciate about Virgo. An intolerance for mediocrity supportive of discernment, solidity, clarity of decision, strategy, action.
“Are you ready?” a bold sister-friend asked me in her fifth-floor, park-facing Brooklyn apartment last week, eighteen hours or so before my flight back home to the jungle.
Some dreams you only share with the people who have lived close and far enough to really see you. To understand that what you’re telling them requires a readiness you’ve been running from and toward for what might have been your entire life. The people who have risen from their own ashes a thousand million times, and have witnessed and held you while you did the same, owl eyes wide enough to see your strength, dancing white beneath that starlit February sky, even when you’re crying-blind and miles and miles and miles away.
“Yes,” I didn’t say, because sister-friends like that and I both know we’re never gonna be ready for the dreams we’re crazy enough to say yes to. The dreams we do because we’re meant to. Because even the chaos we self-inflict can’t sweep us away from the etched-in pheromones of our predestined selves, all those skins we’ve crawled out of and left to rot into soil along the way.
Because right now, like a bullet train snaking around the bend, I’m too blinded by the late-Summer light to see anywhere but straight in front of me. Wheels on tracks. Ants in a line. Headed home.
Perhaps the phoenix is a wolf, howling blind from her embers toward a mango-ripe moon.
The sun peaks through the clouds. The birds are talking. I wonder what the ocean looks like. I think I’ll make pancakes to celebrate.
It is Saturday, after all.
“The say snakes go blind for a while
before they shed skin for the last time.”
“How can we prepare? We cannot prepare.
But we are being prepared.”
images by Felipe Sanchez | @granoysal