This is a relatively gentle week, and it arrives at a welcome moment, because it gives us a chance to rest and gather ourselves before Venus retrograde in Scorpio draws us further into the shadow next week. The early days are quiet in the sky, and Thursday brings the biggest event of the week as Pluto stations direct in Aquarius after five months in retrograde. Since Pluto turned retrograde in Aquarius on May 6th, it has acted as a five-month stress test of the technological systems and shared networks that connect us, pulling back the curtain on expansion that had gone unchecked, from AI risks to mass surveillance. As Pluto moves forward again, this season of uncovering systemic flaws comes to a close, which clears the air for stronger boundaries, better oversight, and recalibrated digital policies.

If you have felt a pull toward something you have been avoiding, whether a fear, a grief, an old hurt, or a truth about what you want, this email is for you.

Yesterday we opened our Descent and Return to Love course, and each participant spoke the words out loud, “I choose to descend,” as we began to embody Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, who answered a calling to go down into the underworld where her sister Ereshkigal reigns supreme.

That story is also unfolding in the sky right now, because Inanna is Venus. In the myth, Inanna passes through the seven gates of the underworld, surrendering her crown and her robes one layer at a time, until she stands face to face with her sister Ereshkigal, who hangs her on a hook and leaves her to die in the underworld. Venus is retrograde in Scorpio for the next 40 days, and as she moves through Scorpio and Libra, she travels that same road through every one of our charts, exploring the terrain of emotional intimacy, fear, control, and our relationship to self and other.

Venus in Scorpio is about to descend into the underworld once more. This coming Saturday, October 3, she stations retrograde in the same corner of the sky where she turned around on October 5, 2018, which closes an eight-year circle. Before she goes, I invite you to cast yourself back to October and November of 2018 and open the photos on your phone. Let the faces, rooms, and small moments of that season rise up around you, and notice who you were with, what you were saying yes to, and how you carried yourself when you thought no one was looking.

Meet Prince, a black cat who spent four years on the street. This week he is recovering from a huge abscess in a crate in my office, and he is being such a sweetheart about it. When I moved into the neighborhood in 2020, I was the only cat lady on the block. Now, through the connections I have made, a whole crew of neighbors chips in for the thirty-some cats who share our streets. So when I decided to spend the $700 on his vet bill, I knew our @PorchCatsofLB (Long Beach) would come together with a plan. Little did I know the plan would be a market on October 10th with astrology, a garage sale, and crafts from the artists I have befriended, and that it would land on the New Moon. Now it is going Halloween themed, the perfect stage for a black cat to find his person.

This is a tough week, the kind astrology calls initiatory. The undertone is Eris. Most people have never heard of her, since she's one of the more recently discovered bodies astrologers work with. She's a dwarf planet past Pluto, named for a Greek goddess most describe as the goddess of discord and chaos, though that undersells her. The popular myth has her born of Zeus and Hera's toxic marriage, crashing a wedding she wasn't invited to and tossing a golden apple marked “to the fairest” into a crowd of goddesses, setting off the chain of events that leads to the Trojan War. But an older version has her born of Nyx, goddess of Night, with no father at all, which in myth signals a much older kind of goddess, one born straight from the primordial void everything else comes from. That makes her closer to Joan of Arc or Wonder Woman than to a party crasher, a warrior for truth rather than a troublemaker.

Yesterday, I got back from a seven-day Huachuma intensive, working with San Pedro cactus medicine. For two of the three ceremonial days I was completely convinced I was separate. I attached myself to that story so convincingly I actually wanted to leave. On the third day I asked two dear friends and the main teacher, the keeper of Grandfather, for help. Creating that safety in community let me finally drop into the medicine, and the day that followed was full of love and bliss. Looking back at my own chart, the astrology explains exactly what I lived.

Jupiter and Saturn, the two farthest planets we can see with the naked eye, have just formed a positive, harmonious aspect: a trine, the first of three the pair will make in the next year. Astrologers call them the teaching planets, because between them they carry the two lessons that shape a life. I remember climbing to the top of Signal Hill on December 21, 2020, with half of Long Beach, watching two points of light draw close enough to nearly touch. That same month, I planted a seed of my own and took my first astrology class. Six years later, this trine is asking the same question it did then: what have you been building, and is it finally ready to expand?