Yesterday Jupiter conjoined the North Node in Venus’s fertile soil of Taurus. The North Node has an insatiable quality which creates a kind of hyperactivity around any planet that transits it. Amidst the creation of Templum Aedis and in anticipation of the upcoming Venus retrograde in Leo, Jupiter has been graciously reverberant with me.

These last couple of months I’ve had more clients than ever pass through my consult door wanting to talk about death. Faced with the finality of loved ones lost, these folks are gripping the fabric of something intangible.

I wonder how I, having never lost a close someone in the way that is not a choice but an inevitability, am tasked with this most vital with-nessing. I can really only thank Jupiter.

Jupiter, the steward of my third house and my Sun. Jupiter, my ally at rock bottom. Jupiter who lives in my eighth house, preaching time and again on the generosity of expiration dates.

When the losses I’ve felt permeate the marrow in my bones, Jupiter expands my capacity for grief. References the choices I’ve made to engage the limits of relations. Gestures grandly toward debts I owe to myself. Reminds me of offers I couldn’t replenish, made on the altar of self-sacrifice in relationship. The decisions I surrendered to overextend a limit I could not confront, much less embrace. The sunken costs of figuring it out and the casualty of time. The deficit and expense of grief allocated to uncertain futures.

And Jupiter, in their infinite generosity, extends compassion in the hour of grappling.

All I know is that grief is a priestess of love.
Devastation is a child of hope.
And to these folks who have come to me to assist in solving the problem of limits, I am honest that I have no real solution and I do not believe there is or needs to be one.

I have only a praxis of opening. A formula of kindness. A prescription of time for irrational meanderings.

I will attend the occasion of care. I will don my finest for the gala of mourning. I will do everything I can to make sure the grief is not miscarried but is ushered into this life with unparalleled devotion.

I will appoint you to deaconry in whatever death you are nursing.
I will ask you to participate in the divine intervention of grief-erasure.
I will challenge you to be with yourself and see beyond what you think you could possibly know about how to live in right relationship with limits.
Above all, I will promote patience.

Keeping vigil for our processes demands unfathomable forbearance.

As humans, we notoriously try to rush into decisions and change. We use anything to prove the unbearability of the discomfort. We are rash with intolerance for loss. And interestingly, we often attempt to repel grief before death even knocks, by role-playing our pain for ourselves.

This happens most commonly when a limit needs reinforcing. When we have to surrender but to something entirely different than what we think is our undoing. Grief is not rational. But grief has many allies and even more opportunities.

Because grief carries us firmly and gently to the very core of our own vitality.

Serves us spoonfuls of our own holy water. Fortifies our intimacy with the critical questions that run like electric currents under our life, lighting us up with presence. The times in my life when I have been most happy, most alive are inextricably linked to processes of grief.

Jupiter, sometimes theonymous with Dionysus, will charge head and heart-first, arms thrust open wide, at the limit. Jupiter extends the crown, the chalice, the elixir of life to those who seek liberation from themselves. Jupiter will always court the vessel for death.

For when Jupiter bestows the ecstasy of grief, we are given the task of trusting in our own rebirth.

Today I raise a glass to whatever dolor will lead to your release. If you want to talk about grief, death, love and liberation, my June calendar is open for booking until 10pm PST tomorrow, June 3rd.

Acknowledgements to friends with Jupiterian offerings

Diana Rose Harper's course By Jove, open until June 15th
Maeg Keane on Jupiter and Being Too Much and Dionysian 5th House Sessions
Sabrina Monarch & Karla Palomino's upcoming Dionysian retreat in Crete

ON JUPITER + THE ECSTASY OF GRIEF