Hanging art while the world burns.

a bit on nesting, a bit on Mars, a little bit on Saturn.

I talk about Mars and Saturn in the newsletter, so I’ll instead use this space up here to encourage you to take some time on Monday to enjoy the Cancer Full Moon.

Astrologically, it is a bit finicky. It is taking place almost exactly conjunct retrograde Mars in Cancer. Astronomically, it will be pretty. Maybe it will remind you of warmer summer nights and sticky sea air and bug spray and waking up to sunshine.

In this week’s newsletter:

• Nesting is challenging but can be done

• Thoughts on Mars and Saturn and personal responsibility

• Links to five uncomfortable but worthwhile things to read

fish and such.

I am hanging art while the world burns, yes.

“Nest” is a four letter word. “Yes, duh” you might be saying. “Fred, I can count the letters right there, there are four of them, I think.” Exactly. To nest, I believe, is as scandalous and as h*rny as anything else you might come up with. Let me explain.

It is extremely challenging to decide to make a space that I live in look nice and feel nice. I lose track of things, I am terrible at noticing when my space has gotten gross, and I am truly bad at cleaning. Weaponized incompetence except the victim is myself. I don’t know how to choose items that will look good with other items, I have a lot of hubris so I don’t want to spend money on things that I think I could do myself (gay DIY disease), and I have moved houses something like twelve times in the past ten years. Buried in my brainstem is the idea that I’ll have to pack up everything I use to decorate anyway.

Between the bad taste, the reticence to collect stuff that will have to be moved, and being poor (swamped by silly debt, really), I’ve been caught in a lifelong struggle against the tyranny of white, blank walls, dusty floors and surfaces, and waiting for a lease to end.

No more, I say. Starting in 2025, I am committed to becoming someone who *****¹. I am putting things on my walls. I am striking a balance between the DIY impulse and buying quality items. I am going to fight anyone who tries to make me move out of this apartment before I have been here for at least five years. I refuse to update my address with the HR people at work again or torture my cats with yet another relocation. I am selling my old vacuum and have replaced it with one that doesn’t require any setup, a vacuum that I just have to grab and push a button to use.

I am optimistic for this change. Normally I might not be. I was just this afternoon discussing with my sister that I don’t at this moment in my life believe in the ability to force a change. I maybe don’t even believe in willpower. Pretty much all of my experiences doing hard things that I did not passionately want to do have borne out the idea that it’s not so much willpower as changing circumstances that allow a hard thing to happen. It’s not my white knuckling that gets the job done, it’s the alternative becoming so appalling or my goal becoming so desirable that I can’t help but make the change.

But, astrologically, a few things are happening. We’re rapidly (relatively speaking) approaching the end of Saturn’s time in Pisces. This means the end of my Saturn return, a time when Saturn has been squaring my Moon in Gemini, pushing hard on my ideas of what it means to be accountable to my needs and to my home. I think my recognition that I am not likely to take care of myself unless it’s as easy as possible is supported by this uncomfortable Saturn action. Or, if not “supported”, it’s described by it. One of the lessons Saturn is meant to teach is what is real. Saturn does not let us pretend. You can’t trick Saturn, you just have to live through what Saturn brings and face it head on.

On Sunday, we also saw Mars re-enter Cancer in retrograde motion. While this isn’t the most pleasant arrangement due to Mars’s discomfort in Cancer, I believe it’s been supportive of my dynamic with my home. As an Aries Rising, Cancer is my Fourth House, ruled by the Moon. The Fourth House is a place that represents our home and our family. It’s located opposite the Sun’s zenith² on the day you were born, the lowest point, the most private place. Whether Cancer is on your Fourth House or not, Cancer is a sign that tends toward certain comforts and security. I’ve described Cancer as a tide pool before and Mars in Cancer as a shark that’s gotten stuck, left behind by the receding tide. The shark is alive, but uncomfortable without room to swim. I see my experience with Mars in Cancer as describing the feeling I’ve had lately that I need to make this place, this tide pool, work for me. Some Martial intensity directed toward vacuuming and making my bed and hanging art.

What’s going on in the Cancer house in your chart? Review the house meanings here and do some reflecting. Want to talk about it? Reply to this email! I would love to discuss.

On a grander scale, it’s hard to sell any version of Mars retrograding through Cancer that is truly positive. He is an apex predator being poked and prodded and teased until he leaves Cancer late in April at which point he enters Leo and will finally begin to let out that pent up anger. Just a few days later, of course, Saturn will move into Aries. So, this year, we see both of the traditional malefics spend a good amount of time in the parts of the sky where they are most uncomfortable, the places where they are least able to do good work.

Already, this seems to reflect a lot of the news on my feed and global events we can expect to take place in coming months. Fires throughout Southern California, an incoming fascistic U.S. president, an ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the laundry list of additional villainy that the global elite seem to be lowkey obsessed with doing at the rest of us. I would encourage them to get hobbies, but when they do that it tends to look like starting DTC brands or hunting lions or flying private planes to see the glaciers that they are melting.

It’s rough out there and sad and there’s too much for any one person to fix it (except anyone in like the top 5% of wealthy Americans, they could probably individually do a lot to fix it). The rest of us really have to focus on our immediate surroundings for the most part. I don’t really mean decorating our houses, though, like I said, I have found this to be a good, grounding, non-digital way to spend my time. Extra points when you are able to reuse or recycle materials that would otherwise go to landfills. What I really mean is what I always mean which is knowing your neighbors and giving food to people who need it and cash to people who need it and trying to make your corner of the world as good as possible. The idea that we need to rush off to every disaster personally and fix it is the plot of a Marvel movie and not a humanity sustainment strategy.

I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from helping disaster victims, obviously, if you find a good way to support people who need it then you should. But I think it is worth recognizing that these disasters are not done, they will not go away, they will continue to show up in new ways and in new places and it is entirely likely that there is a disaster, perhaps a slower moving one, occurring in your own city. And if you don’t have money to give, maybe you have time. My ongoing goal moving into 2025 is to give my time and my healthy, functional body to more local support work. Money too, of course, but I want to be as physically close to the people who need help as possible. I don’t want that distance that money creates.

I started this post talking about decorating my apartment. This could seem unrelated to global climate collapse or even callous, considering all the homes of people and animals burning down. But, as Mars works backward through my Fourth House, here is what I’m trying to remember: just because something will end (I will probably eventually move) or because it isn’t exactly how I want it to be yet (I cannot just go to an antique mall and buy everything that is preptty), it does not mean it is not worth improving. “We could make this place beautiful” and all that.

Thanks for reading! I shared this on IG a few days ago, but here’s a family in Gaza you can support, if you have a few dollars to send. My goal is to do more in-person work, but it feels right to try to compensate for at least a few of the tax dollars I’ve paid to bomb their homes and set their community on fire.

Some things to read:

1. We’re in the anti-social century. It’s a long piece, but good. Later in it there’s a section discussing the paradox that we are more connected to our closest people than ever, even when living geographically separated, but don’t interact with a person at the grocery store or the Post Office. I found it scary and accurate.

2. As a follow-up to the above, here’s an older piece by one of my favorites, Hannah Baer. She’s a little more nuanced and thoughtful about The Youth™ than the Atlantic piece, I think, so I’d say either read only this one or read this one after #1. Shot and chaser, etc.

3. Hamilton Nolan wrote about how humanity will likely do the upcoming years of disaster as well as how we might try to do them better. Excellent and quick. If you aren’t already subscribed to his newsletter you simply should!

4. Buy this book or google “free PDF how to blow up a pipeline”. Better to buy it and support a very important small press, but, especially if you think you might learn from it and take action… imo read the free PDF why not. Pretty sure it exists on the Internet Archive in full if you don’t mind reading it tethered to the Internet.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

1. Nests. I will be someone who nests.

2. You might say it’s at the nadir…