Geminis digest all. The far, seemingly disparate corners of knowing, have space within me. I sometimes feel the daily work is accepting my existence, all these parts of me not fully understanding each other every moment but laying down to bed each night, not always integrated, but recognizing each other like neighboring tribes who do not fight or speak the same language, but rely on the same land. It’s exciting to live on this land. To continually be in awe of my own universe.
Then there’s the goddamn needing to be loved deeply like a Cancer moon.1
Rising up like a Scorpio who can with an exacto knife (that’s not meant to kill, but rather create impact) carve out the essence of the thing deadly fast, ready to present on a platter for all to eat/ digest/ compost with me. Sometimes, by the time you’re eating that piece I’m onto the next thing.
My makeup is made up of a million stars/ reasons/ people and interactions. My chart can only say so much, but in this moment it tells me some things about how I love.
Then there are the ways I love that come from living itself. School starts for kids in NYC tomorrow and it’s making me think of how far I have come in my own journey of loving my kids better now than I used to. There is nothing like loving children freely to fuck with how you love in other contexts. To love them to not be reflections of your own worthiness, but to exist on their own terms and eventually sort of leave you. Having children, messes with the standard mathematics of love that we were always taught. I give you and you give me back the approximately same amount back. We are in equilibrium. That doesn’t exist with children, at least it may not exist for a very long time. It’s a beautiful thing to be in lifelong relationship with the people who birthed you or who you birthed, but that can sometimes be too much, or life takes us to other far away places that we need to be, or sometimes the balance / mathematical equation doesn’t change much even with closeness, time or age anyway.
So why choose love in these contexts with no real guarantees?
When kids are small you get that dopamine hit in other ways for sure, (they have these cheeks that hang and chubby thighs that don’t quit e.g.) and it’s just your job. But soon, if you’re lucky, it can start to feel good to have something like love to give out. This daily choice to generate this resource. To give it freely. To see how it changes things. To experience how it changes you. The things you get back from loving freely here, can be all the way over there in this whole other context. That’s the crazy thing about loving. You think it’s about this one person and your love is like a laser beam bouncing towards your love and back again. The experience of it for me has been less focused and more like chaos. I will witness the love in a park between two strangers or a dog and it’s human, and that love impacts me. I can hear the love an artist felt in a song they made. All those experiences show up in how I love people. It’s like a flowing thing all around us. The person who loved me 10 or 20 years ago is still with me when I choose love. Times collapses with these questions.
Especially when it’s hard to fathom conjuring it up, I think of loving like a choice, that acts less like a directional thing, and more a warm glowing orb that lights up all paths all around you. This orb attracts those who are meant to be in your orbit. It warms you up from the inside like a lamp that runs on a potentially endless supply.
And it’s so great, because the struggling to figure out love is all part of the love! It’s not the perfectionism of the doing it, but the struggle in it that makes you visible to your community. It’s a great question to live in.
The other stuff is harder to hold for very long anyway, it starts eating away at you. It sometimes feels like illness when held for too long. And as I told a friend this week, I’m in this for the long game, the growing old on the porch with my friends end game. I have to survive.
This friend told me, she is too, and she’s going to be on that porch with me.
I told another friend the jist of this Substack in some texts and then said it’s wild even reading what I’m typing, sounds like woo woo shit lol. (yes, I’m a New Yorker through and through)
This wise friend of mine said back honestly often woo woo is the only thing that makes sense.
I got you baby.
So much hearing you right now. Thank you 🙏