Thursday: A place with six pools, 4 in the dark and silence ringing from a bowl. Two hot and one cold. One cool, and one a replica womb. The one heavy with minerals. Hours in spirit. Too-delayed eating and then singing. As good of a day as I’ve ever had, aside from thick exhaustion and sleeping on the day bed and sleeping in my bed with the sun on my hand.

Friday: I sing out, good morning blackbirds. I’m low on their favorites, so they get small, shelled seeds. They are grateful but begrudging. Virtual therapy then and my ask to start future-casting—mapping onto my body what’s possible and good so to not slide into known pain cycles or let others lick and raw their way into mine. I sit with a pillow. That’s the therapy, feeling the unfamiliarity of comfort and its cartography in my body. What it feels like to have any comfort and be in a state of soft-pressed ease. Then after picking at the worst task to 95% completing I hit two walls I need others for and call it a day. Walk out to the trees and petal-ed, profane season. Then rest and reading, and rest and rest.

Saturday: Is lost.

Sunday: Not sleeping and then sleeping late and staying in. A walk, the library, we got handed a cat by a neighbor who was trying to walk to lunch but their cat was following them the whole way so we took it back home. This may have been part of Saturday, I don’t know. The child made pumpkin bread while we talked, listened to music, and I cleaned the kitchen. Reading, sleeping, astrology meeting. Then not sleeping, my own revenge bedtime. I don’t think revenge bedtime procrastination is actually that prevalent. I think people with issues going to sleep and waking up are people for whom going to sleep and waking up or being awoken were always incredibly dangerous.

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I think about all the ways to show my child things. How I can make a diagram of how life will pull you over and over to where you are supposed to go, like a drain’s force, and fighting it will only leave you depleted, tired, calcified in a life and character you’ve actually outgrown, a discombobulated wraith of yourself.

How pain teaches better than almost anything, much in the way cutting a branch off forces the tree to push nutrients into unexpected places and grow differently than it would have, becoming a new iteration.

Or how a bad partner will begin to cloud and muddy you, and a good partner will boundary and propagate you.

Or how we adopt personas we believe are actually are, but they aren’t. Just an avatar trying to keep us safe somehow, a skin that can be peeled off, a performance of a defense we confuse as our identity, but it really just prevents truth.

I think of how to show these with timelines and curves, Venn diagrams, bar charts. Simple comic panels that make it all feel-able and digestible, something that can create a visual memory reference that can be felt in the body.

I started making my child a binder of things to know how to do, so that they never ask a woman how to do something without learning how to do it first. I watched a video of a man teaching boys how to grocery shop and his first instruction is to call the wife to ask what kind of milk, not to use their eyeballs and read he milk already at the house and note it before they go. A whole crew of boys who will be so surprised by the divorce papers.

In this binder I’m making are simple recipes, how to clean a bathroom and kitchen, living room or bedroom. How to separate and launder clothes. How to read clothing tags. Now I can say: please clean the bathroom and the process runs itself. Next we will get to knowing when a room needs to be cleaned without having to say something.

Randomly, I put into the binder how to research and buy a washer and dryer and the right kind to buy. The child is many years away from shopping for these. But I think we are both so aware of the window of time we have with each other, no conversations ever feel like they can wait.

There’s always some amount of urgency in our bond. It’s built into our charts. We relish each other in a way of just being fond of enjoying being together. It feels like we don’t want to waste a second on discord or errata. We value each other actively. It always feels like our window is slowly closing. There could never be enough time together in this life.

I attribute it to, in part, my child’s sun and moon seated at the start and finish of Libra, enclosing my Pluto, which is a point of catastrophe in my own chart. My child’s sun and moon en robes it loosely. It’s ease and peace for a planet that is death and cataclysm. That dialect of death Pluto bears is always there.

My best friend and I have this as well. Her Pluto is extremely prominent. We have both spent our lives feeling like death is at our heels, and interacting with it more than once as death situations and near death experiences. We speak regularly about if we die, what the other should do. We can both feel it in the other, even if it is actually far away. We live in proximity.

The other reason I think this comes up between my child and I is that along with our fondness and blatant like of the other, I don’t think we’ve spent that much time incarnated together. While our spirits may have been close in the numinous for many millennia, I don’t think we’ve experienced incarnation together for very long. I only have one inkling of a memory with him when he was my mother, and it’s one of the weakest past life memories I have.

And in an incarnation where I have so much heavy karma with so many, it’s a gift to have a place of light and joy and like and ease. The relationship reiterates what love is when it’s aligned in two people and there isn’t fear or defense or reactivity. It’s joyful, quiet, easy, and respectful. It leaves everyone room and doesn’t crowd or demand. Needs are easy to meet because it’s so valued. There isn’t co-dependence ego. Just the honor of bearing witness to each other and the joy of mutually liking the other person.

Interestingly, I’d say the way I learned how to be loved is by my aforementioned best friend. Before her, I hadn’t known any unconditional love, love without an agenda or ego, being projected upon, consistency, bravery in relationship, lack of reactivity, centering of communication and thoughtful response, and unapologetic fondness and investment. Which, now is funny to think about because now it’s proven that in that environment, that’s exactly who I am as well.I had never had the opportunity or skills until this last decade/ In the early years I was always waiting to see her turn, being negging, center ego, or use passive aggression or blame and lack of accountability, but she never once did or has. I always say half jokingly she’s the best boyfriend I ever had. She raised the bar so high, I’m totally allergic to drama, petulance, inability to communicate and harm.

It’s interesting that these two people, with whom I share profound Plutonian bond, would be the people with whom love comes so easily and freely, especially since Pluto’s infamy comes in part from abducting Persephone and forcing her into the underworld – an origin of the perpetrator/victim narrative. And, it’s interesting that these two are both almost exclusively Air placements. Air, where I myself have only 1 placement, Pluto. I feel like I anchor their chronic spinning or give it shape it can struggle to otherwise shape.