How do you put a title on a changing thing?

a update from the 12th

I wake up every morning at 734a.

I nap, sometimes twice a day.

I listen to the crows & wind & hammering of nails.

I think - what am I really afraid of? I make a list.

I take my list of fears and fold it into three. I put the list on the altar of my ancestors - I move the list to the altar of grandmothers - I move the list to the altar of the Morrigan. I take the list off the altar. I soak the list in cold water. The list disintegrates. The ink blurs to nothing. I think “is this a spell?” I pour the melted list of fears onto the roots of the purple rose. I sing.

I wake at 734a and see how the sun rises.

The 12th house in astrology is the blinding point of dawn, when everything is too bright to be seen. The Sun is just at the horizon but the day hasn’t exactly begun. Each day is different. The colors shift, the light shifts, I shift, the birds migrate or come home, the squirrels sleep or gather, the feral cats fight or disappear, the neighborhood is full of music or silence.

I forgot how to do tarot. The cards don’t mean anything! They mean everything. They are a story that is only told in an oracular moment.

An oracular moment. Is every moment oracular? Do my bones know?

I pick a new podcast to listen to at work. The guest says -
Good enough is perfect. Shame as the opposite of belonging. The body as the body is. With no solid ground the storms can last for years.

An oracular moment.

I listen to the crows, the wind, the singing of my neighbors. The 12th is the 3rd to the 10th. The 12th house is the 10th to the 3rd. The 12th is a part of how we shine into the world, our light as bright as can be, blinding, so bright we can’t see ourselves, the way the Sun cannot see their own brilliance.

My sweetheart was born as the star Fomalhaut rose with the Sun, so when we are tipsy at the bar he orders me the oil of the Star Leviathan. When it arrives, I send tendrils of light into the swirly murky fascinating green. It smells of the funk of the ocean. I daub it on my forehead lightly & go to meet the Deep Ones & they swim in the stars in the ocean in my mind.

No one said the 12th house years are light or easy or fun. They are just the Light.

It is a time that is hard to translate.

A dragonfly molts up to 14 times before it is finally whole. I got that from a podcast, a conversation with Sophie Strand. I say that a lot these days.
I’m not molting. Some people molt in the 12th. I am mycelium in the soil. Sometimes I send out a mushroom, for a day or a hour, and then I remember slightly. This is how to do tarot. This is how the language of the stars is translated. This is the movement of energies. These are not my words, they are channeled from the divine through my mouth & fingers, these are prophecies. This is my body, heavy with blood.

I smoked cigarettes for two years and stopped. I smoked weed for ten years and stopped. I am a recovering codependent who has learned about boundaries, needs, accountability, honesty, principals. I am the Light & the Dark.

My guardian pulled the corpses of our burdens out of the walls of memory and transformed them into perfect spheres of brass. This is not a metaphor. This is a real thing. This is a 12th house thing.

Maybe I’ve always been mycelium weaving through the ground. Someone I loved with my entire being once said that I change too much - like the moon. As if that is a bad thing! Maybe I am something else - not a fragile thing, not an explosive thing, some secret third thing (a meme maker). Do you get the joke? Meme is as ancient as human kind. Cave paintings were done by children having fun and then were studied by stuffy old men projecting their own meaning onto the images. Maybe I change too much and that is good and right and proper. Maybe the caves of the ancestors shift each time we enter them because reality is not a stagnant thing. Maybe witches aren’t like other human people. Maybe witches dearest friends are the other than human people - the half blind alley cat, the opossum mother, the black walnut. Maybe neurodivergence isn’t a curse, just a heavy gift. I would like to be able to afford to go to the doctor, though. Once I thought I was bipolar and then I walked into love and he held all the parts of me in his fingers and called me cute and good and not even annoying once and that was like three years ago and it hasn’t changed and maybe that means it’s real and true.

This has gotten personal.

The 12th house is a place of overwhelming light and soft forever darkness. It is a doorway, a threshold, liminality. It’s the place where we come undone, again and again, while the intangibles of reality move through us. It’s a place of molting, mycelium, chaos, the tiniest spores forming rain storms. It’s a place of solitude, or at least only being with those who actually like & love you, which sometimes is solitude. It’s ages 11, 23, 35, 47, 58. The 12th house years almost always happen with a Jupiter return - our father of overblown grace & good luck, showering down so many things. The 12th is the joy of Saturn - our father of masterful pressure & discerning darkness, snapping us into place.

And then like that, the light moves. Our vision clears. The Day is begun.