SXSW and cedar trees and very good weather.
I don't have a question to tie this to and I won't even try :)
Week Ahead Astrology:
Last night through the rest of today (3/15) there’s the final of three squares between Mars in Gemini and Neptune in Pisces. There could be confused fights, numbing through fruitless activity, or oversaturated attraction. It’s not not giving “Drunk in Love”.
Following the above, on Thursday there’s a square between Mercury in Pisces and Mars still in Gemini. If you’re not careful with how you communicate you end up in fights you didn’t want to have. Gemini doesn’t give Mars (you) ground to stand on and Pisces keeps Mercury (you) from knowing what it wants to say.
Sunday morning the Moon meets up with Saturn in a conjunction in Pisces. This is the first time since Saturn’s been in Pisces that the Moon’s had a conjunction with it. The Moon being the closest planet to us and the planet associated with the body and our emotions makes it the transmitter between the other planets and our experience — what messages of boundaries or structure can you hear this week?
Next Tuesday the Sun meets up with the Moon for a new moon in Aries around noon CT. Look at where in your chart Aries is and consider what seeds you’re planting that you’ll want to see come to fruition in about six months when we have our next full moon in Aries.
Last Sunday in Austin was the kind of spring day that convinces people to move here. It often happens right around SXSW, something I never remember is going to happen until I’m swiping on Tinder and there are suddenly hundreds of men who are founders, “LA natives”, or both.
It’s a weird time, because the sky is perfectly blue, the temperature ranges from comfortable to perfect, and the wildflowers are just starting to paint the sides of roads. The live oaks are suddenly a brighter green, indicating they are ready to start dropping pollen, coating cars and sinuses throughout the city. Cedar trees all over the Hill Country shoot their own pollen into the air, creating puffy, dusty clouds—it almost looks like a Dr. Seuss illustration until you’ve lived here long enough to understand why it’s threatening and why you will have to medicate to protect against it. It’s a significant problem, the cedar problem, and in some ways I’m proud of it.
Those are our trees, those weird, violently allergenic junipers that won the reproduction lottery when colonizing white people came in and started putting out fires that used to naturally decimate new growth cedars throughout Texas.
Because we (the various stripes of European people who came here and started building missionary churches and then cities and then venture capital hubs) didn’t want there to be prairie fires, there are a now so, so many little cedars all over the middle of the state. Every year they become the most talked about shared enemy of everyone.
We all fight the cedars in our own way. For one weekend every March, my extended family goes to the communal property in Kerrville and cuts down the little cedars that we can. We leave the old ones so the Golden-Cheeked Warblers have bark for their nests, another feature that, despite it all, endears them to me. I take a generic Claritin and try to carry tissues. Texas Parks and Wildlife does prescribed burning from time to time. And for a little while, people all over central Texas talk about the pollen instead of the weather.
I don’t really have a direction for this newsletter today, I wrote this a little late after waffling for a few days on how I was going to write about the feeling I had in the car this past weekend. I was driving around Austin with the windows down, Jo Dee Messina playing loudly, the skin on my left arm baking slowly in the sunlight through the open window. It made me grin, full mouth grin, and that made me laugh by myself in the car.
I’ve had a strange start to the year, dealt with some damaged relationships, probably lost some of them, and started making some changes. Got a new job. Visited friends and family on opposite coasts. I’m excited to write about those things at some point, later.
What occurred to me is that as weird as the past months have been and as nice as that feeling last Sunday was, there’s not a way to orchestrate (read: control) whether the next moment is better or worse. Obviously, yes, there’s choice, there’s responsibility. But I appreciate that a few years ago there’d have been some significant over-analysis and reverse engineering following that grinning moment in the car. I’m feeling more these days like those sunny feelings don’t have to be gripped so hard, that holding a little less tightly to them might be good practice for letting the less sunny feelings go too.
This was more navel-gazey, I generally don’t want to write these kinds of newsletters often, but it is what it is. Hopefully you enjoyed it — if you didn’t, the delete button in your inbox is free 🥸 I wanted to address that, at this point, I’m just giving in to a weekly send time of Wednesday morning. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s what’s been happening and will happen!
I’m going to be looking around for more local mutual aid in Austin to be donating to and, in the future, aggregating what I find here! In the meantime, if you feel like joining me, I’ve set up a monthly donation to Little Petal Alliance to support their “Transition Fairy Godparents” services.
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.
P.S. Send me your Enneagram and astrology and random questions why not?