TAROTSCOPES | JANUARY 22 - JANUARY 28

XII | THE HANGED MAN

This week starts with a Solar surprise to sensible Saturn. Wednesday, Mercury joins Pluto, making mentions of partnerships prompted by the Venus Star Jan. 8-9th. Tracing the trail, Mercury seduces news from Jupiter who’s screening calls in Scorpio. Friday gets fiery as Mars struts his stuff into Sagittarius. The weekend is chock full of shock and the care to correct it as Venus stuns Neptune and Mercury careens with Uranus and Chiron respectively.

I wish I could say my trip has been like a seamlessly stitched napkin; crisp, clean, folded fresh over a lap awaiting a plate of picture perfect instafood. The reality: I’ve cried over a clogged toilet (email for true story) and given into the grief of leaving a city I love for an affair that, while lovely, has kicked up old behaviors, self doubt and a delicious dose of longing that polished my self-worth to the size of a grain of sand. Thankfully, I called a mentor back east who evoked the magic of time in travel.

So maybe it hasn’t been all sunshine but San Francisco fog lets light leak in extraordinary ways that look just like God having a feeling. Rainbow over the Golden Gate, I tramped down the Castro where there isn’t any lack of ritz. Then I danced for two hours in a gymnasium full of hippies, mostly twice my age, flying in a fit of ecstatic exorcism. The cycle begins, builds, climaxes, collapses, begins again. Dosey-doeing, daring myself like a deer in the headlights to flip upside down in this shamanic trance dance, divine as The Hanged Man who asks, “What happens when you stay?”

What happens when you stay long enough to let something sinister leave you? When you sit still enough to be moved? Or open your eyes wide enough to embrace yourself? Or listen hard enough to hear the pieces soften? What happens when you push yourself hard enough to be pulled into your own becoming? So you can lay down inside your unfolding, like a napkin streaked and stained with life herself, as it should be after a meal so good it was messy.