hellooooo eclipse season!
The partial solar eclipse this year is on July 2nd and we get a partial lunar eclipse on the 16th. Not only that, Mercury stations in Leo on the 8th before regrading back into Cancer. There’s a lot of Cancer-Capricorn stuff in the works this month!
In his book Bunk, Kevin Young writes that “to remember is not (necessarily) to prove, but memory can, in the cultural realm, constitute a powerful antidote to official history, recalling humanity in the face of inhumanity, from slavery to the Shoah,” and goes on the quote Olivers Sacks: “Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of minds.” On this, Young says that memoryf’s “collective quality is all our responsibility, and to claim one's memories above all others is actually to do violence to memory, and its social pact.”
Memory then, and history with it, doesn’t derive its validity from its truthiness but from its importance as a social contract. Memory is being made constantly and history is subjective. It's a pact upon which we agree on the importance of some things that are worth remembering.
What about this time period seems memorable to you? What things do we bury with the violence of a selective memory? What does this historical juncture remind you of?
More and more, identity is something that is performed and not inherited. Because things like gender and nationality are becoming things that we think of as made up, or at least assigned to us at birth, we begin to think of race as the only real thing that we inherit, forgetting that it is as performative as anything else. It isn't okay to be transracial because that is an affront to histories not quite remembered and not quite forgotten.
This Cancer-Capricorn eclipse stuff, Cancer about genetic memory and Capricorn about national identity, is about thinking about how we perform the realness of identity. That realness is often about our racial identities, because gender and class are more often seen as changeable and moving. While gender and class are often discussions about the future, it is through race that we have a discourse about the past.
Cancer
Cancer, this season is about you. It's about who you identify and perform yourself. Because of this, it’s time to get real about representational politics.
Think of all the celebrities and TV moments that have attempted to reflect you back at yourself. Were you yourself when you watched these moments go by? Did you have a sense of co-authorship and who were the script makers for these moments of vicarious visibility? Do you even want to be represented on TV?
We celebrate our moments of representation but we forget that the people who are not represented are the weirdest ones of all. Where did your weirdness go when you started seeing your proxies, teaching you how to behave, scrutinized by others?
Leo
Stop pretending to be strong. Stop pretending to be better off than you actually are, that you don’t need help, and like you’re a big and strong person who has all their affairs in order. The more you pretend to be the person that needs no one, the less interesting you become because you’re hiding all that makes you yourself just under your skin.
It’s not that people want to see you vulnerable or that they want to see you fail. It’s that they want to see your history, not just your present. You want to know your history because you’re a multi-dimensional being with a lot of it.
If you feel that you’re exhausted trying to appear as some kind of person all the time to the people around you, lock yourself in a room and research the hell out of your subconscious by taking a lot of naps.
Virgo
Now is precisely the right time to renegotiate your role within the friendships that support you through the world. Who are you to these people that you’re not related to and how to you show them that you care about them without all of the excess baggage that family can make you wear? What are relationships sans baggage even like?
This may be a time where you need to show up for a friend or hide out for a while, knowing that you just need to ruminate on a few things before you can choose community actively again. Whichever is fine, as long as you’re active in understanding your own impulses.
Libra
Sometimes, our social justice spaces give us a sense of it not being okay to fuck up. We watch and learn rather than say the wrong things and learn. This create a space of hyper normalization, in which normal words are spoken over and over again while others are not brought up at all.
Is that the sense of belonging that you're really looking for in the world? Or are you ready for something a little more durable and real?
Practice abnormal behavior this month in a highly visible way. Reconsider some of the things that you assumed to be already understood because everyone else seems to be in agreement already. Create empathic questions so that you can feel accepted in your original state.
Scorpio
It's back to the drawing board, that theoretical space where everything that you’re thinking about exists at the same time and you don't have to tell a single soul what is on your mind. You’re not ready to present your ideas outwardly yet. There’s just one more idea that a little time in your own thinking space will give life to if you hold on for a little while.
Your past comes up. Do you want to believe your own memories? Who else believes your memories? Do you need your memories to be related to historical traumas to feel real?
Depending on who believes you and who doesn’t, now is the time to find out who is one your team. It’s not just you who must make that decision. Others must choose you for you to choose them.
Sagittarius
What is sex and how do you do it? Can making eye contact with someone be sex? What about yourself in the mirror for an extended amount of time?
You keep all your emotions to yourself and then, when someone is close enough to you, you release it all and stand back, ready to be rejected for having feelings in the first place. Rethink your intimacy model and try to make it something that supports you. It’s not so hard for someone to understand you when you see yourself as understandable.
Give away the key to your cryptic language. Let someone else figure you out for a change. You won’t be boring just because you stay. You know how to fall in love. Now, figure out how to stay in love.
Capricorn
What on earth do you need other people for? There’s changes in the ways you want other people to see you so that you can feel different. Resist being that person for whom there is never any tenderness because there is no neediness. Even when you experience cruelty, you can choose to be vulnerable back.
The person you believe other people to be will decide who you are. If you feel that the public is unfeeling, you will emulate it as self defense. If you feel the public to be cruel, you will choose cruelty.
Choose the people who make you choose the version of yourself that you like best. You’re not invincible. You’re porous and flexible.
Aquarius
What is the emotional history of your employment? How did certain jobs make you feel about yourself and how did others change your self perception completely? In what ways do you underperform and in what ways do you underestimate yourself?
Work should not be a distraction. If it is, then you're choosing the wrong types of work. Work should not be something you already know how to do. If it is, then you're choosing the wrong jobs.
Figure out what your job is but figuring out what you're good at. Find jobs that support your existence and do not diminish it. Figure out the best way of spending your time, ones that make you care for yourself.
Pisces
It's really just time to release something, whether that is a scream, a laugh, or a big project that you're been working on. Show your work because people may not believe that you did it all unless you do. This month, give pride back to yourself by deciding what you are proud of.
Honestly, you’re just a super cool person. This month is about recognizing that and feeling good about yourself. No matter what you do or don't do, why not choose confidence?
No matter what you do, imagine that you look really hot when you do it. Feel good in your body and your style. No one is quite like you and that's a fact worth celebrating.
Aries
It’s time to go home. Where is home? Is it your bedroom, your family’s house, or even your ancestral place two flights and a train ride away?
If you were your great-great-grandparents, what kind of baby would you want yourself to be? Within their version of history, how did they imagine you as their future? If you don’t know the answer, ask this of yourself and your ancestors?
After all of this time, are you living your dream and how connected is that dream to those of your ancestors? How accountable do you stray from your own living history? Whose history do you choose to remember as you place yourself in the present?
Taurus
This month, read! Read books that you read already when you were a kid and notice the themes that you didn't notice back then but were so integral to your foundational imagination. Read books that you read when you were in school and pursued knowledge in the day to day. Read new books about things that you barely remember.
Curiosity is careful for you, because you put all of yourself into an investigation once you are really committed. What are you curious about this year?
You learn through stories and not facts. All of history is just a story. Make sure that, with all the knowledge that you surf through, you have a reason to care about and pick up certain things.
Gemini
What are you even spending your resources on? Not just money but all of the resources available to you, including your talents and your specialities. Are you using them in a way that develops them for the future or just relying on the same, tired muscles that seem to be working currently?
You have so much meaning to give to the world. Sometimes, doing the thing that you're good at means not doing the thing that you could be good at.
You should make sure that you know what you want so that you’re able to take risks to try and get it. Otherwise, you’re just floating through the universe without any kind of anchor.
