An antidote to fear.
a little thing called love.
I’m happy you’re here. If you’re wondering why you’re not subscribed yet, let me help you with that:
You can listen to a voiceover of the entire letter by clicking the audio version below:
Hey friends, I’m back—as promised.
It’s been raining heavily in Portland for the past week. It feels like months since I’ve seen the sun, and my body and general mood are certainly teetering toward the edge of full-on seasonal depression. It feels easier this way, to blame the weather. The weather service tells me we’re out of the flood watch, but into a high-wind advisory for the next few days. This feels like a metaphor to me—to “secure loose items” and “proceed with caution.” As if we aren’t all white knuckling through the finale of February 2025.
I’ve always been loosely into astrology. Mostly under the pretense that the sun and moon have so much power over our physical environment: the tides, the earth’s tilt, photosynthesis, life sustaining heat—to name a few—and therefore, the other planets must preside power over our existence as well. If you’re in denial about this, I get it. Astrology gets a bad rep. But similarly to spirituality, love, death, sex, or gender—I really believe humans are conditioned to be fearful of things they don’t yet understand. Things that make us uncomfortable. And the idea that mars retrograde could in fact impact my relationships, my work, or my creative output is, well, uncomfortable. But that doesn’t make it any less possible.
On my morning walk today, I listened to my Astrology reading for the week. I do this every Monday. I think it provides a sense of having more information, a sort of blueprint, to some degree, of what I can expect in my week ahead. I almost always have the same takeaways: rest, proceed with caution, take care of yourself and others. Sometimes, there are bigger takeaways: this week brings clarity where you need it most. Or, this week I’ll have a breakthrough in my work or creative projects. What fascinates me most about astrology is not my own, but how it charts against what’s happening on a global scale. For example: 8 years ago, in late February 2017, we had a Venus Retrograde in Aries, moving back into Pisces. If you’re like me, this means nothing to you. But if you listen to the *real deal* Astrologers (I like Chani Nicholas, if you need a rec), they will blow your mind. This week, we are experiencing the exact same Venus Retrograde that we did 8 years ago. 8 years ago, we experienced protests against Trump’s cabinet picks and corruption. We experienced the largest Women’s March in history. We were fed mass misinformation, experienced global protests and demonstrations, and things now (at least to me) feel eerily similar to how this all panned out. Coincidence? I think not. This week, my reading said to expect something big… a similar theme to what I was experiencing 8 years ago around this time. And, not to bury the lead or anything, but by the time I finish this newsletter, that will very much be true.
If you read (or listened to) my letter last week, I applaud you for coming back. It was not optimistic, although I tried to make it so. Instead, it was honest. But this week, I want to focus on something I’ve been intentionally grasping for during what can only be described as global and deeply personal collective trauma: meaning.
As evolved beings, we can make meaning out of almost anything—for better or for worse. But as a hopeless romantic and three water signs (Cancer, Pisces, Scorpio), I find myself always looking for a sign, or a signal that I’m on the right path. Taking the garbage to the curb at the exact right moment to catch the sunset. Deciding to take a different route home and running into a friend on my unusual path. Saying yes to coffee with an acquaintance, that leads to a more abundant community or even an opportunity for work. These are all incredibly positive examples that I whole heartedly believe in. Where this theory/practice/way of maintaining hope always seems to break down, or get much more challenging, is in the darkness. In illness, death, or (I’m foreshadowing here) losing your job, it’s much more difficult (if not impossible) to make meaning out of it. But in the darkness we find something else. Maybe it’s not the sign or meaning that we’re yearning for, but something deeper—like the very center of yourself, when you’re cracked all the way open. Perhaps this part of life—the extremely painful, gut wrenching (and beautiful) suffering, is actually the very thread that connects us all—grief and pain are universal.
At age 32, I have relatively limited experience with death. Me and grief are well acquainted, however. For the majority of my life, at least the first 18 years, I’d experienced death only through the grief of others. My mom has lost quite a few family members, and her grief is palpable in moments you wouldn’t quite expect. She has taught me a lot about loss ands its lack of linearity, simply by expressing her sadness openly, while rarely discussing it. Throughout my childhood I escaped the presence of death by some sweep of faith, when every pet we ever had escaped before it met it’s inevitable fate. The only traumatic pet story I have is when our hamster in my 1st grade classroom escaped from it’s cage, and ran straight out the 3rd story window. I vividly remember the twenty or so other kids in my classroom screaming, as we all raced to the window to see our class pet on the sidewalk down below. I strongly dislike hamsters to this day.
It was my first and second years of college when death caught up to me. My nana first—my mom’s mom, Pati (short for Pat or Patricia). She was a quintessential Irish Catholic grandmother—a single mom to six children, a fiercely loyal friend and family member, and simultaneously covered her couches in plastic while sneaking out for cheeky cigarettes on the back porch. She introduced me to The Sound of Music and Shirley Temple films, and we spent every summer visiting her in Wisconsin. I distinctly remember every detail of her home—the way it smelled, and how I felt being there. In some ways, my memories of her are the only ones truly in focus from my early childhood. The rest feel blurry, and hard to recall. When I got the call of her passing, I was sitting in my very cramped dorm room at the University of Oregon—surrounded by dense pine furniture. I slunk down on the matted burgundy carpet, and wrapped my head around death for the very first time. It was February, and we watched the Super Bowl after her funeral.
The following year, I lost a close friend. I think of Lill often, and speak of her rarely. She was a year older than me, and in High School I wanted to be just like her. This was true our entire friendship. When I was 15, we went to Whistler together with a bunch of other kids from our school. We mostly got drunk and flirted with boys, I can’t recall anything from that trip other than giggling in the back of the bus, admiring her laugh and extremely straight, sandy colored hair. I asked her to straighten mine the same way. I’m still in shock I was allowed to go on this trip, but Lillian was older—and my mom liked her. A year later, when Lill was a senior and heading off to college, we snuck out of my dad’s house on a summer night when it was still light outside. My friend Dani’s boyfriend picked us up, and we went to a party at her house. Her parents were out of town. On the ride home that night, Lill and I stuck our heads out the window on opposite sides of the car, and threw up Coors light and vodka.
When I went to college a year after Lill, I joined the same sorority. Unsurprisingly, Lill was able to make joining a sorority seem extremely laid back, cool, and un-annoying. She had a way of making everything seem this way—she was funny without trying to be, and sort of floated through life like she knew things other people didn’t about the world. And I think she did. When I moved into the house my Sophomore year, I basically lived in a closet opposite Lill’s bedroom, adjoined by a yellow colored bathroom with a large mirror. She would find me perched on my bean bag on the closet floor, studying or scrolling facebook, and lead me to the bathroom to help her decide on an outfit. I always think of her in this yellow bathroom. The bathroom I wasn’t able to go into again after she died months later. I can still picture her reflection in the mirror, and waving goodbye to me at breakfast with her hands full of bagels and a glass of orange juice. It was Spring, and that was the last time I saw her.
I guess the fragility of life is the very thing that allows us to love so deeply. It’s the knowing that things will change, that you will crack open under grief and pain again, we all will, that creates space for gratitude for what you have now. Perhaps love and gratitude are the antidote to fear, in the end.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been scared shitless lately. The genocide, the government, the hatred, the violence (not that I need to name these for you). Fear comes in many forms, in the absence of information—when we don’t have the answers or can’t anticipate what’s going to happen. What if I lose this person? What if I fully lean into love, but I get hurt? What if this person’s differences from me, make them dangerous? When we don’t understand something, it’s easier to be afraid. To close our eyes and look the other way. To pretend it doesn’t exist. But we all know that fear keeps us disconnected—from each other, and from ourselves. I feel the most alive when I’m fully feeling—joy, fear, sadness, excitement. You can’t have joy without pain, it just doesn’t work that way.
I wasn’t exactly sure where this letter was going when I started it 48 hours ago, but the universe provided a pretty solid ending for me. 8 years ago, in February 2017, I was living in a small town on the coast of Australia called Copacabana, and made a huge pivot from my plans with my then boyfriend. I set off on a solo van trip from Sydney to Melbourne, landing first at a small ashram to study Permaculture, and finally on a magical farm in Victoria for a month planting trees, baking bread, and swimming in a large pond everyday (see photos below). It was on this trip that I finally realized I needed something different, and knew I wanted to move home to Portland after being abroad for nearly 3 years.
The planets seem to have something similar in store for me now (literally). A few hours into my Monday, I was laid off from my job that I’ve been at for nearly three years, alongside many incredible colleagues and friends. Naturally, my first feelings were sadness and fear—what will I do next? How will I pay my mortgage? What about my healthcare? But some things I didn’t anticipate feeling: the recently returned sun on my face in the middle of this Wednesday afternoon. Hours spent chatting with old friends from college that I had time to call out of the blue. Driving my parents to the airport to save them an Uber fare. A long walk to the Walgreens down the street because I had the time. I’m not quite ready to make some grandiose meaning out of this experience, and perhaps the only meaning to make is that it’s about time I crack myself wide open again, and start anew. I do know that it was out of my control, as so many things are right now. And if the antidote to fear is love and gratitude, you can find me hugging and calling my friends for the rest of the week.
Sending you all love, even in the darkest of places, from my newly changed perspective.
Until next time,
C
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