on the new moon in leo and simone biles

and also, a new offering

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Before we get into today’s juicy New Moon (a missive which will extra-appeal to gymnastics fans), I have a very exciting announcement. For the first time ever, my partner Meg Jones Wall and I are collaborating on a workshop. It’s been a hell of a year for us, and from what we’ve heard, it’s been rough for many of you, too. A lot feels uncertain, with our social feeds alternating between fear-mongering and love-and-light spiritual bypassing — none of which offer tangible solutions for how you can ground and support yourself in this exact moment. 

For us, it’s not enough to simply critique those aspects of spiritual practice if we aren’t putting another way forward. And so, an offering from us to you: for your overwhelm, for your anxiety, for your worry of “what to do” when the world is seemingly crashing.

FILL YOUR CUP: TAROT & ASTROLOGY FOR EVERYDAY NOURISHMENT is a live, 90-minute experiential workshop in which we’ll talk about practical strategies for how to use these powerful tools in easeful, accessible ways that are readily folded into your daily life. From new tarot spreads and moon meditations to strategies for managing doomscrolling, we’re going to work through it all. This workshop takes us all, from the beginner to the professional, back to basics so that we can root into ourselves and, from that grounding, refill our respective emotional wells. 

The workshop will be Saturday, August 17th at 3pm Eastern on Zoom. If you sign up between now and midnight next Wednesday, August 7th, you can grab early bird pricing — $33 off! — with code QUEENOFCUPS. Hope to see you there.

The New Moon arrives at 12* Leo on Sunday, August 4th at 7:13am Eastern. With artist-lover Venus also in Leo and the moon moving towards a gentle, supportive Jupiter in Gemini, which helps support us in our growth, this is one of the more potent and beneficial lunations of the latter half of the year. Here, we are enabled to find courage, to embrace visibility, to nurture the relationships that help us be our best selves. 

I’ve had my eye on this lunation for months, but sometimes, life happens and derails the best-laid plans. For those who are new, I’m nearly four weeks out from a total hysterectomy. Unsurprising to everyone but me, I have not managed to finish my current book proposal edits, let alone go on submission with this new book project. The launch of a major collaboration that I am deeply excited to share with y’all (hopefully soon!) had to be pushed back to accommodate my surgery and recovery. I am also not back at my writers’ group; walking around the block in this heat tires me out, let alone walking ten minutes to the train, going up and down subway stairs, and then sitting upright with my friends for a few hours. 

As I’ve slowly got my brain back, the gap between what I want to do and what I can do has widened. Some days, it is easy to forget that I’m healing from being drilled into and blown up like a balloon and having organs and big, second trimester sized tumors removed. And I’d be lying if I said that this current state of affairs, however necessary, was not very, very frustrating, or that I was at peace with it.

Which is all to say, the timing of this year’s Olympics has been particularly poignant.

simone biles training at her home gym

Women’s gymnastics lives right alongside figure skating in my all-time favorite sports to watch, and this year’s team is extraordinary. But in the haze of painkillers, it took me a beat, when watching the qualifying rounds, to remember that this was Simone Biles’ first Olympics after pulling out of Tokyo due to a life-threatening case of the twisties.

My first thought was, how fast has time flown? The Tokyo Olympics from summer 2020 seem an age ago. I was mere months into living in my old studio, the Barbie Dream House. Things with Meg were weird and awful because, shocker, we both had feelings that had not yet been expressed. There was no COVID vaccine, and New York still reverberated with applause at 7pm every evening as people went outside and cheered for healthcare workers. My agent and I were in final edits on the Heretic book proposal, about to take it out on submission for a second time. 

And I remember sitting at my desk overlooking my neighbors’ gardens, writing, as I watched the reigning all-around Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles inexplicably lose herself in the air and not successfully land her vault. Then she pulled out of the competition altogether, and Twitter exploded. 

We know what came next. The good: a renewed conversation about the importance of athletes’ mental health. The bad: how many commenters did not believe a Black woman’s testimony of her own experience, who proceeded to bludgeon Biles with crude accusations of selfishness and failing her country. The moment was all the more tender for how it came in the wake of the Nassar trial, although elite gymnasts (including Biles, Aly Raisman, Maggie Nichols, and McKayla Maroney) had yet to testify to the Senate how, behind the scenes, the FBI grossly mishandled and delayed the investigation into the sexual abuse of hundreds of young gymnasts.

In a dominant culture that values prodigy and productivity, that demands peak performance but also that workers must maintain peak performance throughout a career, with nary a dip, Biles’ withdrawal was stunning. It was a deviation from the system that says, perform at all costs or be punished. Biles prioritized her own safety over satisfying the system, and it sent a shockwave that, years later, is still rippling.

Perform or be punished is a familiar message, because it’s woven into the fabric of American society. My parents — so puritanical, so working class — drilled into me that you show up on time, always see what other people need, and always give 100%. After all, God can empower you to do his will, so there’s really no excuse not to (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” right?). Duty over everything. Grit and bear it. Don’t break your promises — even if conditions and your ability to fulfill that promise have changed. It doesn’t matter if you feel sick of mind or sick of body. Do your chores. Do your homework. Go to church. Go to school. Push that pain way, way down, and pray that God erases it.

There’s a reason I wrote so much about the Protestant Work Ethic in my memoir. The idea that your value is inherently tied to your work and productivity (to be considered a good Christian, or as I argue, a good citizen) has, at this point, transcended religion and woven itself into the values of dominant American culture. It’s the expectation of “always be producing, always be contributing” that has been so poisonous to work/life balance, to our relationship with nature, to spirituality itself. Because every heartbreak, every pain, every illness that is pushed down will, eventually, come back up. 

It’s a little on the nose to be recovering and unable to do my Art at the level and pace I know I’m capable of while watching one of the best living athletes return four years after her own body forced her into an extended recovery. She is modeling how rest and recovery is not only necessary, but essential to gains.

After watching the women take gold in the team final, I put on Simone Biles Rising, a Netflix docuseries about the road to Paris. The first two episodes, of an eventual four, focus heavily on Tokyo and its aftermath. Comfortable and cozy on her living room couch, Biles shares the all-too-relatable feelings she had when she lost her air awareness in Tokyo. Why is this happening here? Why now? Couldn’t this wait until after this big event I’ve been working toward for years? There was sadness, because it was a loss. Frustration, because it was something that was happening to her body entirely outside of her control. 

Predictably, she tried to go right back to the gym at full force. But that didn’t work. Biles says, 

I had to start from the basics — kind of like when kids come and ask me for advice, when they have a mental block, or they’re scared. I’m like, we’ll go all the way down to the basics and build your way back up…. So that’s where we started from: square one. But not just building the skills; it’s building the confidence and the trust, because I had to learn to trust myself again. I was still in the process of understanding why it happened.

For a year and a half, Biles was irregularly in and out of the gym, just to play with what she could and could not do. Her coaches and teammates who were interviewed emphasize how much the focus was on play. Not fancy tricks. Not trying to recreate the routines. Just flipping around on the trampoline. Back to basics, to the foundations of her practice. But even that wasn’t easy. “Those months, I was still getting lost a lot,” Biles says. “A couple days I’d be okay, and then I’d be lost for a couple days. Then I’d be okay for another day. Then I’d be lost again.” Because healing is not linear. 

Healing. Is not. Linear.

On, off. Inspired, not inspired. I have it! I don’t. 

Human beings are not machines that can be calibrated for consistent peak performance. Human beings need time off and prolonged seasons of rest. 

(I write this because I have so much trouble accepting it.)

Biles didn’t start seriously training for Paris until last year. In part, this is because she took the time to go to therapy, unbuckle herself from expectations, and genuinely figure out if she even wanted to go to Paris. If she desired it, just for herself. Her answer was, obviously, yes, which is cause for so much of the audience’s joy, I think. I know that as a fan, I am not only inspired by her but also genuinely thrilled for her, that she is doing what she loves and is fulfilled by from a more healed and holistic space. That she isn’t punishing herself, or being punished by those close to her, for her boundaries. For her rest. In a set of Instagram posts addressing the talking heads who criticized Biles for pulling out of Tokyo, queer influencer mattxiv wrote, “Simone Biles will not only be remembered as the best gymnast of all time, but also for proving wrong the (patriarchal) idea that success must come at the cost of safety — that being the best means brutalizing yourself. It doesn’t. It requires taking care of yourself.”

This is not the Protestant work ethic. This is a healthy and holistic life ethic, one that says you are more important than what you can do for people. One that accepts that things happen on a timeline that is often outside of our control. And one that rejects duty in favor of devotion.

the strength card in the shadowscapes deck by stephanie pui-mun law, often considered the leo card

It took me a few days to finish this newsletter, which would normally be banged out in one writing session. In the time since I started this missive, Simone Biles has won two more Olympic goals, in the individual all-around and individual vault. But when I watch her absolutely crush her routines, I’m reminded of why that excellence is possible: because she took time off. She gave herself the gift of rest.

Leo energy is about doing big, brave, and scary things, but those things aren’t always public or sexy. Sometimes, the big, brave, scary thing is to step away. To say “no.” To stop. To rest. To play. And we might think about why those things are scary in the first place: because they go against the grain of dominant culture. Because too many systems and industries punish us the second we let our foot off the gas pedal, even if we’re about to crash.

Bravery, after all, rarely feels like bravery. Often, it feels like making a decision in spite of our fear. It is not brave for me to write, because I’m not afraid of writing. It is resting, actually, that I find much more frightening than a word count, which seems a bit perverse. But that also means that practicing rest is what actually deepens my understanding of myself and my creativity. Walking alone in the dark reveals the psyche — and in the morning, all is bright and made new.  

Where are you afraid right now? Where is your fear crowding out the hope, the knowledge? Where are your expectations mismatched with your reality? Where did those expectations come from in the first place? What courage is available to you in this moment? 

This weekend’s New Moon in Leo is asking.

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