Yesterday was one of those days when nothing could go right. I don't know about you, but I cried four times before 9am, and that was only the start of it. From talking with friends, it seemed that pretty much everyone was having a similar day: full of frustrations, misunderstandings, conflict bubbling to the surface, pressures finally caving in. Not enough and too much, all at the same time.
You can be an astrologer, knowing that this month contains some of the toughest astrology of the year, and still feel caught off guard by the intensity of the quaking earth beneath your feet. It's the distance between head knowledge and heart knowledge, between preparation and experience, that can only be closed by living through the moment.
And we are living through one hell of a moment—one that Mars Retrograde nose dives into with all the subtlety of a bomb.
Mars, the red planet of conflict and courage, of desire and want and sex and action and even war, stations retrograde roughly every two years, and it feels Peak 2020 that it would, of course, be happening this year. This retrograde cycle, which begins today and will last through November 13th, demands that we examine our individual relationship to conflict, to how we take action, to our frustrations. To why we are crying four times before 9am. To feelings of power and powerlessness. To how we advocate for ourselves and especially how we don't.
This shows up in our real lives, of course, but it also shows up in our writing. How comforting is the passive voice, how challenging the more active? Where are we living vicariously through our characters who make choices we personally never would—and why? What personal topics just feel too off limits to write about—but what boundaries are formed out of healthy respect for self and loved ones, and which are, in fact, enormous walls constructed of anxiety and fear? Mars forces us to look at our lives and look at our choices.
These months will challenge us, personally, but also ask us to look at Mars energy on a broader, social scale: at the perversion of Mars energy in our lives—the valorization of war, the police state, the toxic masculine that insists on a head solution over a heart one, as if those things exist in binary. There is no cheat code here, no avoiding these conversations or confrontations, much as we are exhausted, numb, overwhelmed, depressed, and otherwise [insert feeling here] by the collective events of a pandemic and civil war in the same year.
But there is no outsmarting the knowledge of our bodies, our relationships, our creative processes or our feelings about our creative process that have been simmering in isolation and quarantine for months. Breathwork is your friend. To-do lists, long walks, social media breaks, good food, taking a dry month from substances, taking a break from stressful friends—whatever will help you lengthen your fuse and cut out the unnecessary sources of difficulty, do that sooner rather than later. Schedule your therapy appointments now. Guard your writing (and reading) time like it’s sacred, because it is.
Our creativity can feel like a luxury, but Audre Lorde once reminded us that poetry is not, in fact, a luxury. And that is the creative core of your work for these next few months,
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
P.S. Here is the guide to the rest of September’s astrology. And the next newsletter—next week’s New Moon in Virgo.