your witchy writer friend checking in: end of Aquarius season edition
on the Water Bearer, UFOs, and the dizzying duality of modern existence
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Hi lovelies,
We are now in the tail end of the weird and wacky portal of Aquarius season. And I mean, of course there are multiple alien-spacecrafts-oh-wait-they’re-just-unidentified-objects being spotted in—and shot down from—US and Canadian airspaces at this time. At this point, why are any of us even surprised?
If it really do be aliens, I’d like to invite them once and for all to pls come and get me post-haste.
That aside—or in spite of?—I have been enjoying myself thoroughly. By this I mean that I have my hands full with the messy business of finding a new way forward in my life, work, and daily activities. My experience in holding space for my Self and my spirit. And that part, well? It feels pretty damn good. Did you know, for instance, that if you prioritize your rest, your health, your family and friendships, and your passions for even just a few weeks, life suddenly begins to feel less stressful—at least when not considering impending doom via multiple “darkest timeline” scenarios converging?1 Funny how this does, indeed, actually work…
But let’s talk about Aquarius. Derived from the Latin for water bearer, this air sign is often, understandably, mistaken for a water sign. But the name is more about what it’s symbolically carrying—since ancient times, Aquarius has been deemed the carrier of the “waters of wisdom.” Perhaps that’s why it’s often seen as nonconformist, unpredictable, and at times contradictory; certainly, the Aquarius personality is one full of nuance, and like its fellow air sign Gemini, it’s not always easy to read, albeit for different reasons.
This could also be due to the fact that Aqua is ruled by Saturn, the taskmaster and stern paterfamilias of the galaxy, and Uranus, the planet most known for fearlessly shaking things up on a cosmic scale. It’s no small wonder, then, that the unapologetically unique and unconventional Aquarius is a study in paradoxes—the “rebel of the zodiac.”
And so, in this last week of Aquarius season, how can we find more ways to rebel? How can we buck the conventions of our current (shifting) paradigm, or look for new ways forward within structures that may appear at first glance to be unforgiving?
Plenty of recommendations ahead!
Current reads:
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield. The things this did to my brain! Evocative, intricately wrought, and completely and utterly strange, this novel blends sci-fi and Gothic horror in its depiction of the dissolution of the marriage between Leah and Miri, during and after Leah’s mysterious 6-month disappearance while on a deep-sea submarine mission. The prose is so haunting and lyrical as to be arresting, and—avoiding spoilers here so I’m treading carefully (pun intended, heh)—while this novel isn’t perfect, I would 10/10 recommend it for the writing alone. And by “isn’t perfect”, I mean that if you value a book for its plot line over character-driven prose, this may not be for you.
I binge-read Bunny by Mona Awad, Isabel Kaplan’s NSFW, and Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica one after the other. Recommend them all, but the deliciously bizarre Bunny was my favorite. They are similar enough in theme that I’m thinking I’ll put together a separate newsy dissecting my thoughts. More to come!
A few errant links to be consumed:
Go Ahead and Ban My Book, a searing article for The Atlantic penned by the inimitable
. Burn them to the ground, Margaret!If Not Joy, Then Joy’s Direction, via writer Harper Jones on Medium. My friend Elaine shared this with me just after I was laid off, and I wanted to share it here now for anyone in need of light and inspiration amidst dark times—or who may be in a similar state of “joyless survival mode”. Quite moving.
This gorgeous piece on intimacy, via Marlee Grace’s
newsletter
Binge watching:
I finally watched Severance, and I’m still thinking about how good it was. It feels painfully relevant considering my recent work situation. Plus, there’s the fact that I’m convinced mass layoffs are occurring now so that employers can try and wrest back the control they’d incrementally lost to employees taking power back over their lives since 2020, by asking for higher pay, remote work, and other such things so many tech CEOs and execs are Just Not Having. Talk to me about my other theories, please!
Kindred on Hulu. I am a sucker for a good time travel show and/or flick, and this one does not disappoint! Sadly, I was not all that familiar with Octavia Butler’s works prior to this (something I am determined to change), at least outside of modern works that her style has influenced, of which there are many. Suffice to say the novel this show was adapted for is now firmly on my TBR list.
The Last of Us. Part of me does not want to watch another post-apocalyptic show, especially one so epically depressing (please, do not watch if your mental health is not in a good place. Seriously). I don’t want to contribute to a collective wavelength that holds the possibility of pushing us into a timeline that furthers such darkness, either. Kind of hate that I will watch it regardless (but another part of me does not, because I really can’t fully hate anything graced by the presence and star power of Pedro Pascal, none other than the internet’s hot slutty daddy… I’m sorry but not at all sorry). It’s called nuance, okay? Or, you know, just another dizzying display of duality brought to you by the perils and possibilities of modern existence!
Tuning in:
This Shanti Celeste Boiler Room set is one I’ve got on repeat. So, so good.
This podcast episode from The Daily detailing San Francisco as the most empty downtown in America. Yikes. They talked a lot about how 2020—and the subsequent shifts in the tech industry—have changed the landscape of the city (read: wholly gutted formerly-bustling neighborhoods), which didn’t exactly feel like a new analysis, but I found it interesting regardless. I wish there had been some mention of how recent layoffs across the tech industry might affect downtown San Francisco further—expectations of how it may dig the city even deeper into the ghost-town-shaped hole it’s currently in, perhaps?2
This New Yorker article that I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since listening to it on Apple News. It details the extensive and contentious legal battle between young female Iranian director Azadeh Masihzadeh and her teacher, the Oscar-winning director of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, who has been accused of stealing from his students on more than one occasion.
“Until this year, I was a very simple kind of girl.” She said that, when Farhadi first filed his criminal complaint, “I thought I would go to court and accept all the consequences and show how weak I was in front of Farhadi, how he betrayed me. I would be the person who is the victim.” She guessed that Farhadi had made this calculation, too. “But suddenly I said, ‘Why? So people can cry for me? So I can close my eyes and give all the power to him? Because it is the rule that women are weak, I should be weak?’ ”
Definitely got full body chills when I heard the above passage…
This YouTube video from
revealing the ways in which the American government has actively blocked aid to the people of Türkiye and Syria, and continues to do so in the wake of the tragic earthquakes last week. (There have been a few follow-up videos posted on their channel since this one. Fully invite you to enter the rabbit hole.)
Everyday magick:
Been noticing more spiders than usual around the house? Don’t be so quick to blot out the existence of these little eight-eyed and -legged friends! Arachnids are the natural-born storytellers of the arthropod world—they weave intricate webs from their very bodies, after all. And, they are symbols of material abundance coming your way. If you’ve been manifesting, seeing spiders is a potent sign of its arrival in your life.
Creating ritual with:
Despite the fact that I am sitting in a space of a whole lot of uncertainty, as are so many of us at this time in human history, I’m doing okay. I keep doing this thing where I wake up and look around at my life and feel absurdly grateful for everything I’ve been given and have worked so hard for.
Am I aware that there’s a huge tonal shift between writing about the seriousness of any number of the issues I mentioned above, and the strange and precarious duality of holding space for my own sense of gratitude and possibility and even a hard-won joyfulness? Yes. And it’s something I think a lot of us are continuing to struggle with. So much so that staying positive is almost a defense mechanism at this point.
Could we all be annihilated at any moment by whatever extraterrestrial being may be at the helm of those “unidentified aerial phenomena”? Yeah, I guess we could. At this point, I’d be okay with that. (Sounds better than zombified mushroom people, anyway.) I do like to think that the aliens would be more like the beings that feature in Arrival, though.
And so, I am continuing to do my work, while remembering—trying to, at least—that it doesn’t always have to feel like work. That it can be fun and nourishing and life-affirming, that I can ritualize and make of it a special and otherworldly experience (of course, sometimes this won’t be possible, but when I can). And that in those times when it is possible, it can be soul food, and maybe even a little bit silly.
It’s fitting that after asking my Animal Spirit oracle deck what February would hold for me, I pulled the Otter card. Otter energy is the embodiment of mischievousness. They appear to epitomize contentedness in their natural element of water, whether river or sea, and often with other otters, but these behaviors are important lessons in survival for them—helping them to develop social bonds as well as hunting skills. Like rest, play can be productive.
To finding more gratitude, pleasure, and playfulness in our daily lives, whenever and however we can—and to the aliens hopefully being chill,
xx Kimia
I am actively going to continue choosing not to see this as a potential World War III scenario. Let’s veer away from the Doomsday timelines, friends!
What else can we expect from NY Times, though? *clears throat* It’s not as though they’re known for covering all sides of the story…