don't fuck with what you just got free from

full moon in taurus
wednesday, october 24 @ 12:45PM EST | 1 degree

it’s full moon day. horoscopes are in the Commune (check your inboxes, subscribers), magic is being made, love is abundant. to get us through what may end up being a wild ride, I’ve been listening deeply to the multiverse. here is what has come through…

sometimes feeling powerless comes from trauma. sometimes, ego keeps us there. power is not from outside of you. it is from deep inside.
it’s not about perfection or all-knowingness. we do what feels right in the moment. we adjust when new wisdom comes to what feels right in the next moment. adrienne maree brown says, “another thing that burns people out is wasted effort.” call your power back and call it forth. take the space you need to recalibrate the management of all your resources, including energy, because what the sun in scorpio cannot tolerate is wasted effort.

to thrive during this season, hone scorpio energy. HOLD your power, don’t run from or misuse it. deepen the intimacy & pleasure in your life by deepening the nonnegotiable boundaries with who/what harms you. we’re learning that individualistic approaches don’t care for collective needs; being resourced by your power allows you to center community without depleting yourself. now is an opportunity to do healing that transforms your long term & contributes to community. it is uncomfortable but this is what the full moon conjunct uranus in taurus, opposite sun and venus retro in scorpio is bringing.

these aren’t just fancy phrases- look to your lived experience. whatever is coming up for you IS your full moon story. reckon with your pain AND your power. when things change you’re not being punished, you’re being evolved. all the scorpio energy (sun, mercury, venus, jupiter) is asking us to redefine power by eliminating egotistical attachments to it & cultivating compassion for self & other. when we cling to ego we conflate confidence (among other things) with power. we conflate performance with truth. anything built on those conflations will be shaken under this moon + venus retro.

don’t stay afraid, that is forgetting your agency. trust, surrender. your intuition is magic. use it for good. learn to recognize your own light, love, and beauty so you can protect it from here on out. learn not to fuck around with compassion because it’s a powerful gift and we often misuse it to stay in relationship with toxicity. trust that learning what you need to know for your own liberation is a collective contribution. the freer we are, the freer the collective is, and the more we can give.

this can be a turning point, where we either spiral into who we were BEFORE or choose to let our grief generate new selves, boundaries, & possibilities. it’s important to feel through things because the emotions need to be honored or they will use ego as an outlet. this is why we need ritual, too. grieve what you need to leave. connect to what holds you steady. choose growth, choose flow. because holding on tightly to what is dying becomes toxic. uranus ON the full moon is freeing us from what keeps us small, in scarcity, or in danger. once you get free, don’t use all the fresh space to return to ways of being that are comfortable & familiar. don’t fuck with what you just got free from.

oxo
saltwater & stars

p.s: if you need help accessing your power & recalibrating your relationship to it, I highly recommend Staci Jordan Sheltons UNRAVELED: Reclaiming Power. I have experienced it twice and each time it has changed my life.

throne yourself

new moon partial solar eclipse in leo | saturday, august 11 @5:58AM EDT 

"how many prayers must cross in the sky, at odds, to confuse the gods into hiding? (for isn’t it true that the idea of god corrupts us, tricks us into diminishing our divinity until we forget how to be answers?)"-adrienne maree brown

our doubt that our full hearts make for clear eyes and that we will KNOW it when the love is real is at odds with the reality that we are god. this leo eclipse hopes we are no longer interested in striving for people to change. this leo eclipse wants us to be in our own godliness so that it doesn't matter if they change or not. it is time to throne ourselves. not to engage in mimicking our oppressors domination olympics, but to do right by ourselves & our people. to offer our most necessary, righteous, holy, & humble contribution.

every eclipse is a portal & what we carry through matters. we don't have to settle or try to make anything less than what feels right work. because miracles exist and are out there spiraling towards us. we are them, too. we hold within ourselves the capacity to simultaneously be who we have been, who we could be, & who we are right now. everyday, you choose. you may not be feeling very strong right now. you may be feeling all the tenderness of what it means to be human, to be changing, to be vulnerable. you may be coming up against the humanity of others, which is sometimes disappointing. sometimes glorious.

being in right relationship with our selves is what allows us to accept & adapt, rather than feeling subjugated or resistant to what is evolving in or around us. there are no on & off switches. it is all a practice, a play, an experiment. we will have a full moon total lunar eclipse in leo in January...consider from here to there your time container for learning what it feels like to be in all your power & to own your response-ability to shape.

when the moon is new & this moment has passed, the process of integrating will still be here. be patient with it- because it is only the measure/illusion of perfection that makes us think we are supposed to be anyone but who we are right now. 

may nothing less than deep presence & life-giving love come through this eclipse portal with us.

oxo
saltwater & stars

new moon & uranus in taurus

uesday, may 15 @7:49AM EDT | 24 degrees

happy new moon in taurus!  

uranus goes into taurus tonight.  

intentions are so important currently- not just so you have a harvest you can resonate with when the full moon in taurus comes late october, but so you can anchor the energy of this 7 year shift of uranus in aries to taurus. you don’t have to know them today, or ever. it may be enough to pay attention to how you feel & know how you want to feel. but if you have space, be with yourself & think about this time container of 6 months (new to full moon) & how the change-god uranus is on your side.  

I’ve been thinking about how intentions are different than goals. goals can be useful when they’re reframed by our agency, not determined by obligation. goals feel very pragmatic to me. intentions (especially when we’re working with the moon) feel more like space-making. like we’re creating room in our hearts & minds & life for what we want to show up. we’re shaping a container without necessarily being in control of the specificity of what fills it. like, we don’t really know what will come, how the container will change, what the contents will actually be at the end of a cycle. 

goals feel action oriented- we need to stay focused, accomplish things strategically, & be committed. intentions feel intuitive- we need to trust ourselves, know what we want, & be willing to be flexible with it. we navigate with intention. we arrive at goals. neither is better or worse, right or wrong. it seems like two different ways of moving that are both useful in appropriate contexts & with the nuance of understanding our relationship to the pressure within both. 

creating intentions at the new moon can often feel like pressure. we’re releasing what’s no longer necessary to hold onto, we’re opening ourselves up to something new or more. there is tension in this, stretching that must be done gently but firmly. an intention feels more like energy work & goals feel more like tangible/practical work  

I think it’s important that when working with a collective/outer planet like uranus, we’re remembering that we cannot embody this energy. it’s not your job to BECOME uranus, to change everything all at once, to know all the things. it’s your job to trust yourself, to be willing to evolve, & to move slowly enough to do so intentionally. 

keeping this in mind, what do you want to begin now? what way of being, relating, moving through the multiverse do you want to explore? what seeds do you want to plant, knowing that you’ll water & tend to them as needed? remember that you have agency to shape this transition  

be tender with the lessons of the past 7 years of uranus in aries. be tender with the hopes you have for the next 7, as unknowable as they are, as uranus travels through taurus & brings us new opportunities to experiment. uranus will reframe the taurus part of your chart. some of it may feel like it’s happening fast or already happening. don’t be surprised if you’re anxious. inhale & exhale. there is no room for fear here- connect to the abundance of the multiverse that has brought you to this moment & trust it will continue to support you.   

oxo

saltwater & stars

translucent: full moon in scorpio

Sunday, april 29 @8:58 PM EDT | 9 degrees

  (from latest post on instagram. you can find me @saltwater.stars. 

CW: this is going to be a more personal post with references to family trauma & parental dysfunction. I am a scorpio with multiple planets in the sign packed into my 4th house. with a full moon here, I can only get real right now. this is a vulnerable moment for me- thanks scorpio full moon! only because it feels tender & raw. not because I don’t want yous to know I been through some fucked up shit. I know many astrologers try to separate their work from their stories but one of the ways I’ve learned astrology most deeply is by reading those who have woven it into their lives. I hope you can find comfort & resonance within this, as well. 

 the message of figures looking to the left indicating the past, forward indicating the present, & to the right indicating the future has been coming up around me lately. I realized this is actually very relevant to the full moon in scorpio, it being a water sign in-between two others. it occurred to me that this trinity of direction could be correlated to the water signs. cancer looks to the past, to the left, to lineage & ancestors. scorpio looks to the present, to transforming pain carried over into power for everyone surrounding them. pisces, the final water sign, the final sign, looks to the future- how it ties into the past & the present in synchronistic & unseen ways. 

 the 4th house traditionally belongs to cancer. it holds themes of home, family, the past, ancestors, & emotional/spiritual lineage. this full moon has me thinking about my relationship to these things, particularly the parts that cannot be transformed. because individuals cannot embody what is supposed to be communal work. and it doesn’t matter how much I shift my perspective or drop into compassion, it doesn’t change how dangerous & harmful some people we’re born belonging to can be. there is individual healing work which also means there is often simultaneous boundary work necessary to create the conditions needed for there to be a release from pain & reclamation of power. 

I am grateful for the spirituality I was able to salvage from religion, even as I abandon the spiritual bypassing it colonized & gaslit me with. but I’m not about to use my experience to frame anyone else’s. I’m inherently very careful when talking about abuse, personal power, and healing because I know what it is to be gaslit by conversations on these things. I know what it is to be told to be compassionate when you should be angry & to then begin believing it. compassion is a practice that must benefit the impacted, those whose power has been stripped by situation & dysfunctional dynamics. not position them for more harm to be done. I know what it is to not be at the place where this conversation of healing is constructive. If you are there, I see you. 

 recently I had to end a relationship with a toxic relative for the second time. one of my parental figures. I knew this is what needed to be done for me to be free enough to transmute pain into power. so that future generations would not carry this weight of bargaining to be loved by someone who claims they do but doesn’t embody it. as I witnessed the grief of this, it was as if it was happening in another realm of my experience. just an echo of a deeper grief, a deeper pain I hold from having to extricate another parental figure 2 years ago. one who raised me. 

 the reclamation in this is that for the first time, I was able to give myself compassion. all the overextending I was doing to center compassion for the other individual was now available to me. and instead of grieving the trauma that inhibited either of them from being able to be in healthy relationship with me as I have been doing for 20 years, I was able to grieve the innocence I forfeited in being a child who has to make the decision to put relationships with parental figures to death. I may never recover that innocence- there’s an awareness of the depth of trauma that is possible that you can’t unsee. and I don’t think I want to unsee it. because within that has been my portal to change & transformation, my commitment to love & healing, my centering of compassion. 

 the real time nonlinear process of this is that my hope is also forever impacted. it takes more focus & intentionality to cultivate it, to stay curious. because I know how dangerous it is to not be able to see clearly enough to know that what you’re hoping for will actually harm you. it’s a risk of being human that we can’t forfeit, sometimes. this makes it easy to question myself, hard as fuck to trust others, & opens up this whole grey area of the unknown.  

translucent: permitting light to pass through but diffusing it so that persons, objects, etc., on the opposite side are not clearly visible.  

that’s where I spend most of my time. stretching. this stretching is so translucent. so clear and bright and weird. I have to be in the act of creating new possibilities while also being ready to navigate unexpected consequences. stretching into trust with myself. stretching into space to trust others too. stretching to trust love. to recover hope. to practice innocence. exploring this space without inserting or attaching my needs for validation or approval. explore it free from my pain or giving away my power. and therefore explore it spiritually. slowing down enough to notice where the self-manipulation, the fear, & insecurity come in. 

 because healing is death work. healing is cycling through layers & layers of shit you knew & didn’t know was there. this death & grief work must be done though, to access joy. I’m not saying we must be in pain or go through trauma to feel joy. but that if we have been through it, this work may be a way out. I want to engage with the power of scorpio because I want to flow into the future of pisces. I want to believe that unconditional love, interconnectedness, & safe, sacred imagining is possible. 

and then I want to help you stay believing in it, too. may your full moon experience be bright, deep, & transformative in ways that bring you joy & power  

oxo

saltwater & stars