This is a love letter to all of you who have gotten an astrology reading from me. I love you. Love is an action where we extend ourselves outwards (bell hooks). Love doesn’t just happen in a heteronormal context (and maybe it rarely happens in a heteronormal context). It’s not about consumer culture either—about dates and leisure and consumption. Love is a community of care. Love is work. Love is in the moments and love can happen with strangers too. (I don’t know—maybe I’m just an Aquarius rising.)

I can’t believe that you let me hold you. I’m monstrously impressed that you allow me to walk with you through your pain. I’m grateful that you let me celebrate with you. It takes so much for those of us who expect exclusion to allow someone else to hold space for us. You let me do this for you and to ask questions about the things that you are the most tender about. You tell your stories to me. You let me hear the violence that you survived and about the ways that you survived. You recite your transformations to me. You remember your younger selves with me and you wonder at your futures selves with me.

From you I have learned the following: that we can channel the somatic bodies of our ancestors through fiction, that there is collective debt is also collective power, that the space between an emotional reaction and an emotional response is where we take care of ourselves, that home is not a place but a willingness to find people, that we have the strength to trust others when we a triggered, that our relationships do not belong to the institutions that seek to describe them but to each other, that hope can be salvaged in hopeless situations, that whatever English words a colonizer might describe us with can become a door to something more when we take that word into our own hands, and etc, and etc, and etc.

I would not be an astrologer if you were not willing to teach me. I would not be an astrologer if you didn’t trust me to care about you. I am indebted to you.

Sometimes, we disagree. That’s a given. There are differences between us and differences are always built on conflict. It takes time and work and aim for us to move towards understanding. Sometimes, we misunderstand. You tell me when I don’t hear you. That means a lot to me. It means that you trust me enough to hear you out. It means that you believe me when I say that I want to hear you tell your story a little deeper—when I say that I want you to “tell me more.” “Tell me more” sounds so banal. We both know that what it means is that I think what you just said is important, that there’s a complication there, that there’s something you’ve examined there, that there’s some kind of magic there.

I love you all—including the Taurus placements who do not rush in your storytelling, the Pisces placements who shock me with your sliding associations, the Libra placements who collaborate on spirit, the Virgo placements who are strong enough to persist with criticality instead of ideology, the Scorpio placements who remind me that vulnerability is not a weakness, the Cancer placements who glue others together without self importance, the Capricorn placements who are not afraid of the world ending, the Sagittarius placements with the audacity to play during this late stage capitalism, the Aries placements who teach me that anger is always useful, the Gemini placements who have learned a piece of wisdom from everyone, the Leo placements who are always strong enough to be there for a friend, and the Aquarius placements who treasure the people that no one else does.

Thank you for getting a reading from me. I don’t know how to express that to you. Thank you for processing your grief, your creativity, your trauma, and your magic with me. Thank you for trusting me to believe that your genius can survive capitalism. Thank you for making me into an astrologer. Thank you for feeding me and letting me feed you. I love you.