sometimes your crown won’t stay on because you’re already wearing one made of the ways you’ve successfully been wounded.
yes, it’s true. unthinkable harm and violation occurs. and yes, it’s true. removing each individual thorn is painstaking, excruciating work but the scarring and the bandaging is worth the alleviation of the suffering, a beautiful Bodhisattva phrasing a sweet querent recently reminded me of last week through blessing the impact of my work.
as we know, thorns are protective asf. I walked through a rose garden last Venus day, the same rose garden I grew up around the corner from, and was reminded how unapologetically the medicine of beauty and softness must be defended. first, you must recognize there is something worth defending. secondly, you must use the thorns where they belong, which is not pierced inside of your head as a symbol of the pain of inverted power.
forgive yourself, beloved. what has become self-inflicted always has its origins in a moment of pain and powerlessness we did not choose.
it was that same house around the corner from the rose garden where my earliest memories of being violated, powerless, and wounded lived. in 2019, that childhood home was destroyed to expand on a residence for the dying. but the stories started there in my memory continued to live through my experiences, shaped by decisions I couldn’t recognize as risky because I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be protecting: me.
removing the crown of thorns is a process of re-storying. you can restore your power through (re)writing the story. while you may not be able to change the beginning, you can change the end. you may not even be able to change or control the external circumstances of the story, but it is the stories living within us that compose most of how we experience being ourselves, in our bodies. you can change you, if you want to, in the ways you want to.
I didn’t realize just how deep the crown of thorns was embedded into my psychic body/nervous system until I’ve spent the summer intentionally removing as many thorns as made themselves known to me, and now I can feel a difference that doesn’t fade away in the next trigger. I sat in the sun under my Sugar Maple friend today and cried at the relief. I have been thinking I am burned out but what I’ve noticed this weekend is that I feel so much more replenished and erotic after realizing I was bleeding out from old wounds I hadn’t known how to clean out and bandage yet.
in less mysterious language: there were feelings I hadn’t given a moment to feel into and truths I hadn’t let myself state, even if in the privacy of my own journal. those were the thorns; removing them meant feeling my feelings and being honest with myself, then asking questions about what belief was hiding underneath.
I don’t care how long it takes, I am removing as many thorns as I can so that my true crown of Beauty, Power, and Pleasure can stay the fuck on.
I speak more about these kinds of initiations into sovereignty on the latest episode of The Magic of the Spheres podcast. Sabrina Monarch interviewed me about The Eroticism of Saturn and Crystallizations from a Saturn Return. listen anywhere you enjoy podcasts!