Sagittarius rising, Jupiter my chart ruler. I have always identified with the seekers. Early drug and alcohol use were actually quite tempered. I was looking. There was something beyond I hoped to see. Scrawling in notebooks under the influence of psychedelics without a fully formed prefrontal cortex is one way to do it. These days I don’t partake in that manner. One Moscow Mule later, I am done. A joint takes a day and evening. My looking, seeking, has largely been through books, films, and travel in the last few years.

I keep looking for a class, like a class will fix me. Just the right class. Will it be sewing. Will it be playwriting. Will it be cranial sacral therapy—I went to check it out for the first time in my life after hearing a quarter century’s worthy of stories about it from friends and clients. Absorption. In a darkened room with a pleasing scent, I went under. Will I expand in my chosen field, or will I leave the field…I am asking.

There is an openness I’ve noticed, after someone close has died. When my father died, I told myself—for years—You can do whatever you want—like a mantra. Five years later I quit smoking cigarettes. I had been caught in an internal tidal wave and when I emerged, I found things I hadn’t been looking for. Threw away a lot of photos. Severed relationships that no longer made sense to me.

Do these things connect though. As I write them I feel like I am listing disparate events. But I feel the light relationship between them.

A couple weeks ago I took myself off social media. Last week I went back to Hawai’i. I came home and resumed my search for the class, the book, the film, the feeling that will fix me. That will knock something loose in me. That will maybe unfix me.

On this trip, I took the latest projects notebook and sketched out for the umpteenth time a series of events that I imagine writing about. I stared at the ocean. Witnessed multiple family dramas. Swam and floated and snorkeled, rawdogged that boat ride out into the ocean to see turtles. Then I read poetry, and contemplated a poetry class. I watched three films on airplanes.

Transiting Uranus in strong square with natal Mars: “You are likely to experience sudden alterations in your passions, your physical energy or your progress toward your goals in life at this time,” my horoscope app tells me. Through November and then in months beyond. I imagine, on the other side of summer, a version of me who is learning to sew. Who is—maybe—continuing to write the book. Or maybe just staring at a wall.

There are also senior animals I’m trying to keep healthy and alive. A teenager on the cusp of 16, about to start another year of high school. My partner and her quarterly cancer screenings, and my own annoying returns to the radiology department and the endodontist.

I mean to honor my seeker nature. The weird openness in the wake of my mother’s death. I know that on the horizon there is the placement of the headstone on her grave, which feels like another milestone in a fucking bizarre year. Two friends have reminded me that my brain is creating new neural pathways as I work my way through continuing to live when the people that knew me the longest, my primary caregivers, the originators of the internal voices I’ve had to work with my entire life, are gone.

~seeker mode is on~

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