The New Moon in Pisces is early tomorrow morning, but before I begin with one-card draws as advice or inspiration for each of the signs, I wanted to take a moment to suggest recent essays about the life, sacrifice, and protest of Aaron Bushnell in solidarity with the plight of Gazans.
There are moments in my career as a writer where I simply don't have the words, but I also feel very much the imperative to reach for the right words to offer support, critical thinking and dialogue, well wishes, and solidarity. The continued genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government's callous funding, support of, and silence on that genocide is a horror that all of us in the U.S. participate in, whether we want to or not, by virtue of our being American citizen-subjects whose tax money and daily lives—not to mention the requirement to attend to the banal exhaustions of our work and home lives—become “reasonable” excuse for continuing ethnic cleansing, starvation, and death.
I, like so very many, many, many other people, was stunned, moved, and inspired by Aaron Bushnell's self sacrifice in the face of the war on Gaza, his resounding “no” to living under and in unconsenting cohort with such enforced states of violent exceptionalism/exception. Because I don't have great words right now myself, I'd like to direct you to writers who have better captured the spiritual and political import of Bushnell's public death, including Charlotte Shane’s recent essay In the Gold Castle With Aaron, Devin Kate Pope's There Are Many Better Things Than Sliced Bread , and Laleh's None of This Is Fair. If I’m not mistaken, I also think Raechel Anne Jolie will be publishing on similar themes within the next few days, too.
All of these essays contend with the backdrop of our current genocidal moment as it intersects with the question of "how to live" right now, and why we should be moved by an American man who decided that he absolutely could not. All of these essays, and others like them, remind me of how, when Plato was constructing his ideas about a “perfect Republic,” he thought poets should be excluded, because of their potential to destabilize the state through rousing collective passions, essentially anarchist desire. This also reminds me of Simone Weil’s lamentation, in her essay “On the Abolition of All Political Parties,” that modern society has mostly abandoned the wielding of collective passions to political parties, all of them which contain a state-apologist, totalitarianism within them.
Anyways, I’m grateful to the writers above and many more I’ve read this week for destabilizing assumptions about the state, rousing passions not for political figureheads but instead for being with the thorny, aggrieved, and awe-filled questions about human effort and grace in times like these.
Now for the tarot, which you can take as active advice, guidance, or inspiration for either the next two weeks or six months, depending on whether you want to work with the lunar cycle in the short- or long-term. (Really, from a divinatory standpoint, it’s both!)
Pisces Rising: The Moon has turned up for you to remind you of the curious and wondrous ability of the crawfish to swim backwards. There’s something of a regression happening in your life, but you get to decide whether that’s because you’re pulled along by fearsome tides or because you’ve consciously decided to turn around to look at regret or loss with the wisdom of time, age, and distance.