Hi friends. What a month we’ve had.
Last Tuesday, as Americans went to the voting booth, Venus, the keeper of the feminine, was at her anaretic, critical degree in takes-no-bullshit, what-are-you-going-to-do-for-others Virgo. And we turned out en masse to continue to rebuke the Republican party’s efforts to continue to take away our reproductive rights: in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and elsewhere.
And in so many states across the country, local elections held the line against further encroachment on school boards and public library boards when it came to the subject of book bans. In my home state of Iowa, 12 of the 13 candidates endorsed by the so-called Moms for Liberty handily lost. (A reminder, for those interested in the astrology of book bans, that my lecture on the subject is available for free.)
The results of this election are heartening, but Scorpio season isn’t done with us, or with the hard issues still facing us. The collective grief of what we are witnessing in Palestine. How to continue moving when faced with the overwhelming feeling that what we are doing is not enough. How to make art in difficult times — for which purpose, might I recommend this interview with R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries and the forthcoming Exhibit? Kwon and I spoke in the wake of a series of devastating mass shootings in 2022, and while the context is different, the larger questions are the same.
As I wrote then,
There are no concrete answers here. We are, all of us, grieving. But we are, also, hopefully, still writing.