sometimes you spend months years searching for insight, sometimes it finds you even when you aren’t moving ,
eating a blood plum and listening to the eagles hotel California all of a sudden connects you the the tree that grew over the garage in a haunted house you lived in for two years as a child.
I forget the power of sensory tools even though I know flavour and smell is so closely linked to memory. I forget you can use them to access memory.
Maybe sometimes things clear a path back to certain times, like a portal and you can access them again.
the thing I’ve realised is that even sitting in the one spot for years, in a room, life still happens to you and around you.
there’s a quote by Kafka, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
and as a teen I thought this was so fkn good and romantic. wow yes even with my limits, the world will come to me. I mean it’s not often the ecstasy he wrote of, but it’s true whether you try or not things will come to you.
my friend once said after getting in a car accident, he was lying down with a neck brace on and said, “ everyone is so busy and loud, it doesn’t need to be like that, everyone needs to just slow down”
and in that dark and quiet hospital room, it felt like a real wise plea to the world.
I saw on Tiktok there’s this fragrance that is made to smell like space, and they say it smells like fear and anguish, rubber and burnt cookies, cooked steak. Maybe if we had to smell space once a month just to appreciate the fresh clean air we were born from, things would be different.
Okay so the Mercury retrograde/ Mars retrograde had some real road rage, technological rage, simmering frustration and a sense of urgency.
What I found interesting was with Jupiter so close to the moon and so visible from earth it felt like, a huge lens with the power to magnify, directing this sentimental lunar energy onto us. Like a kid with a magnifying glass using the lens and sunlight to fry ants, we were getting fried by the silver lunar rays, hitting us with a sense of memory, of loss and the unconscious, of grief.
with the sun square Neptune and Venus trine Jupiter, and as we celebrate the solstice, there is some Venusian and dreamy fragrant energy to help lift us out of a potentially quite moody intensity. The moon is in Virgo today, and I would take that as an opportunity to use that energy to help organise the sentimental and sensory information that came up during the last two weeks. Journaling is very useful and pertinent. sorting through photos, looking through your notes ap.
As things come up that feel challenging or like a slog, focus on practices that are enjoyable and give you a sense of being in your body. I know like that’s a bit of a cliche at this point but the information age brings us out of our bodies and into the ideal , the abstract and the world of possibilities.
More and more I think about the knowledge of trees and the strength and vulnerability it would take to stand for decades or centuries in the one spot, trusting that you won’t be cut down. The feeling of sap running up through you, feeding the leaves so they can hold onto the sun. Where is the intelligence of the tree held, that knows it’s friends are near by, who knows it’s sibling needs more nutrients and so freely shares. Maybe it doesn’t need a brain to know these relations and it’s just the way of life. I should research that, it does remind me of something I heard on a podcast about mycelium networks and root networks, apparently the joke in the tree and plant science research community is that someone should invent invisible soil, because they are so limited in how they can research as soon as you take something out of the earth you compromise its true nature. This means our scientific knowledge is guided and limited by what is possible to do with time and patience. Meaning there are many mysteries we cannot know for now
The last thing I will share, is that, for years and years I searched for a plum as red and juicy as the one from my childhood, every time I would buy one and hope that it would be the one. And most times I would bite into it and see it was yellow, and I would be so disappointed. Or if it was red it was sour and hard. It became a quest. Even the ones that have been close still fail to capture the experience of a sun warmed over ripe plum, that survived to maturity after so many of the other ones were turned into ammo by my brothers, or eaten by birds. I wonder if it’s still standing, and the garage underneath it, and the three hand made sheds I couldn’t go near without the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. If the sap glistened in the sun on the stump after it was sawed down, If in that sap it held the memories sad and strange, and the good ones too. What happens when the witness is gone, will they feel it through the prefabricated walls of a new build? Will it feel sweet and fragrant in the room they build on top of where it once grew.
Anyway, that is to say, the thought that came into my head the last month, somehow in spite of all the world news, in spite of my own challenges, clear as a bell the thought entered by mind.
Sometimes, good things happen.
It feels important to believe that on some level at the moment. After years of yearning sometimes, good things happen
okay okay okay
my recommendations,
9th house/ sagittarius stuff like, higher learning and religion/ spirituality, some kind of elevated experience, learning a language for ten minutes a day, watching documentaries, visiting old libraries or buildings.
romance feeling romantic, reading romance /poetry
movies about the ocean
fennel
star anise
sleep
So beautiful, so wise ❤️