Much like many other millennials, I dream of owning a house one day. There’s such a different energy between renting and owning things, especially in terms of the actual place that I live in. I’ve noticed in myself something that I initially labeled as immaturity—and there probably is a component of immaturity in it as well—but I notice a difference in myself when it comes to how I take care of my living space when I’m renting it from a faceless, exploitative corporation, essentially, versus living in a home that has been owned by my family for four generations. There’s a difference when I live in the basement unit of a home that I can tell has been loved and cared for for decades, even by a family that’s not my own, and I can feel the amount of love put into the home, which then makes me want to put more love into the home as well.

There’s almost an undertone of resentment for me when I am tending to my space in some boxy apartment that I don’t care about, I don’t feel emotionally attached to, I don’t love, and I also am being charged way too much to live in. I’m being exploited just to live in the space, so it doesn’t feel as nurturing to take care of that space. It’s done out of sheer necessity, leading me to a militaristic view of the daily drudge of home maintenance. The relationship between me and my dwelling is forever contentious, through no fault of either one of us.

Even though I’ve never been a homeowner, that feeling of ownership does fluctuate based on where I’m living and the energy put into a home—the care, the time, the history, the memories. There’s a difference there.

What are the components of ownership? Legal ownership is about deeds and titles and other notarized pieces of paper. The sensation of ownership is about care and time: being able to inhabit a place & care for that place long enough to feel ownership over it. That makes a difference too, but I also have lived in an apartment for longer than I’ve lived anywhere else and never experienced a sense of ownership in that place. So time & care can’t be the only components.

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When considering the diurnal journey through the Gates of Hades (the 8th and 2nd houses), the 4th house comes right after the deepest part of that journey. The sun emerges from the fertile soil of the 5th house, having bathed in the purest essence of creation, and is ready to begin the path toward a new day. Foundations are set. The clock strikes midnight (ish). The day has already begun at the very second it has ended.

There are beginnings everywhere for those with eyes to see, and there are endings in the 4th house.

There’s an inevitability to this journey, the sun’s rebirth and death every single day, and one of my favorite words for the 4th house is inevitable. It’s the things you cannot change about yourself, no matter how hard you try. There’s a Haruki Murakami quote that sums this up perfectly:

Genes I'd gotten from my father and mother—not that I have any recollection of what she looked like—created this face. I can do my best to not let any emotions show, keep my eyes from revealing anything, bulk up my muscles, but there's not much I can do about my looks. I'm stuck with my father's long, thick eyebrows and the deep lines between them. I could probably kill him if I wanted to—I'm sure strong enough—and I can erase my mother from my memory. But there's no way to erase the DNA they passed down to me. If I wanted to drive that away I'd have to get rid of me. There's an omen contained in that. A mechanism buried inside of me. A mechanism buried inside of you.

My dedication to the 4th house is about uncovering that mechanism inside of me and you, and then figuring out how it works. Everyone’s mechanism is wired uniquely, and we have all stuck our fingers in it to some degree, whether we were aware of it or not. Maybe the result was you got electrocuted, and backed off from investigating that inner mechanism any further. That’s okay. We can go slowly. We have nothing but time.

Time is an aspect of the 4th house which is omnipresent but not often explicitly named—more specifically, the past. The whole of human history is contained in the 4th house, because we are walking summations of genetic expressions passed down from the beginning of time. Astrology in general is about beginnings, but the beginning of the end is found in the 4th house. As soon as you’re born, you begin to die.

Humans began with land, and we return to the land when we die. Cultures are shaped by the flora and fauna available to them, and the architecture of the landscape they live on. What constitutes a people is wholly based on where they began, and what that land necessitated. Our bodies require that we eat, so we turn to the land. The flora and fauna don’t just dictate the terms of existence, they also nourish existence. The amalgamation of these emergent properties becomes a story, and that story becomes layered on top of other stories, and the stories we build our identities, cultures, & societies upon are all based upon the past.

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When we go into the past, we go down into the earth. This is not just a spiritual experience for the dedicated few, but a requirement to access the wholeness of your personhood. I think Rudhyar said this best:

[The fourth house] carries the meaning, above all, of the center of the globe. In the fourth house the person can and should reach the experience of center – the center of his own global, total personality as well as the center of global humanity, of a firmly established and concretely real brotherhood of man. Without such an experience of center, an individual can never demonstrate in its fullness his human stature. He remains a creature of the flat layer of productive soil which constitutes the surface of the Earth, whether he roams upon it like a superior animal or settles in rigid vegetable rootedness to a particular spot called “my home” or “my country.”

The implication here, which I will embrace explicitly, is that there is no greater rootedness than that which occurs within the self, and all imaginary boundaries erected across the surface of the earth do not dictate the conditions of personhood. Rudhyar himself was an immigrant, so I wonder if this experience colored his understanding of the fourth house. But I digress.

The 4th house, and our collective understanding of it, feels more prevalent than ever as the hydra monsters of genocide & anti-immigration continue to grow new heads during the death rattle of the American empire. There is no greater crime than to forcibly remove a people from their land, whether by death or relocation, and there is no greater loss than for an individual to be disconnected from the past. All that we know and have ever experienced has arisen from the past. It is constantly expanding, like our universe. I think your inner universe is doing the same thing, and it’s worth the effort to create a home inside of yourself, to find comfort in your inner universe.

It’s worthwhile to tune into the rhythms and transits of your fourth house and examine how your inner universe shifts and colors itself around these rhythms. When you’re experiencing a beginning or an end, or intentionally creating a foundation in your life for something else to grow on, this inner knowledge can act as an anchor. The fourth house is at the bottom of everything.

Thanks for reading!

If you haven’t already noticed, things are changing around here. This publication is now called House of Origin, and it’s all things 4th house. Stay tuned for more—including a fun new series featuring some of your faves.

While you’re waiting, don’t forget to grab my 4th house guidebook, Homecoming.

I enter a new dwelling and say my hellos, still raw from the goodbyes done prior. This is not the kitchen sink I recognize. These trees don’t know me yet. But I have no desire to go back, even if that were possible. The moment I move out of a place, imagining myself living there again is like trying to shove my feet back into a pair of shoes that no longer fit. Or trying to climb back into the womb.

I enter a new home and wonder what stories will unfold here. Gravity feels different for the first few weeks as I adjust to the shifting of my center. Which memories, fond and frightening alike, will these walls hold? Do they wonder where their precious inhabitants have gone? At the same time, I sense the chapter closing on the old place, now carrying with me the knowledge of what was held there. Former dwellings become marked, in that way: that was where I fell in love. That was where we brought our baby home and survived the newborn phase. That was where I started a business. That was where I lost months to the fog of dissociation. That was where I failed and failed and failed.

Ghosts come from the past. We dig them up based on where they once existed in the present. There are ghosts you leave behind when you move out of a place: the former versions of yourself who could have only existed in that time, in that place. Sometimes I’m driving around my city and I come across many of my own ghosts. They are encapsulated by their own routines and roles and rituals and remain consumed by their realities. I drive by them: the apartment building where I healed from a breakup and had fantastic sex and watched the solar eclipse from the balcony. The stretch of road I only ever experienced from a bus seat, feeling desolate and desperate when I had no car and no job. The restaurant I always chose for dates with prospective sugar daddies because it has this one dessert that is orgasmic. The particular 7-11 where the employees saw me at all hours, in various states of intoxication, and often in drag. The very first place I ever lived when I moved to Portland, and the park across the street where once I took the most transcendent nighttime walk after a huge snowstorm had come through.

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It’s not about the place so much as it is about the person I was when that place was part of my daily reality. It’s about me, in the now, smoking a joint at the same bus stop where as a 22-year-old I used to get up at 5 am and smoke joints and hustle to a job I hated, but now I’m 31 and I’m taking the bus to a friend’s birthday party while my husband & child are at home. It feels like filling in the blanks. I turn to my former selves when I run into them around town, and I cup my hand to their ear and excitedly whisper to them the answers to their questions about the future. Sometimes it’s not excitement but sorrow that leads me as I have to tell them they won’t get what they want or are working for. Sometimes I keep certain things to myself, because the knowledge would be too devastating for them to handle. I understand now why parents lie to their children about reality sometimes.

There’s a particular version of myself I never expected to run into again, who haunts my new neighborhood. I cannot tell her the entire truth. I saw her this morning, as I took a familiar shortcut through the suburbs to get coffee. She’s walking on the sidewalk, headed toward a house where dreams of hers were planted—dreams that were later dashed. I can’t tell her about that, because I need her to keep believing that the life she wants is possible. I need her to keep reaching for that, because even though she doesn’t get what she wants in the end, she gets me here. I brush by her as a neighbor now, and I lack the language to let her know that life ends up exactly how it should—but not how she plans.

Having a domiciled Saturn ruling my 4th house, there are few things I appreciate more deeply than the opportunity to have so many ghosts in the same place. It means I’ve spent time with this land. I’ve aged here, I’ve lost here. I’ve grieved here. I’ve developed oddly intimate relationships with street corners. I’ve been here long enough to notice what’s changed, and what never changes. I’ve laid down foundations here, whether I was intending to or not. I’ve earned all of these ghosts. The reason I can move through space and time in such a layered way is because I remained. I stayed with the land. If there’s one thing Saturn’s got, it’s staying power.

And yet, every time I have to move from one dwelling to another on this land, I get dizzy. The shifting center of gravity gets to me. There’s no escaping the delineation between who you were in one home and who you’re about to become in another. In that way, perhaps we should be treating moving like a birthday, of sorts. A rebirthday.

Life begins again.

Thanks for reading!

If you haven’t already noticed, things are changing around here. This publication is now called House of Origin, and it’s all things 4th house. Stay tuned for more—including a fun new series featuring some of your faves.

I apologize for making you wait.

As it is wont to do, Scorpio season pulled me into my own depths and drew me closer to the dirt. As a 4th houser, your connection to the past and the way it’s always living through you is more immediately evident. Because of this, I’ve always had trouble forecasting. I prefer to look back; to reflect, to ponder, to convene with my former selves and seek their wisdom. So, what’s your 4th house season been like?

As your chart ruler traverses the underworld of your nativity, your quest (should you choose to accept it) is to observe, understand, and then subvert the expectations placed upon you by external reality structures. As you become more yourself, you’ll naturally become more of a disappointment to some people’s ideas of personhood and deservingness. There is often backlash when a person is fully realized, moving about in a world that functions on the disconnection between each individual and their inner world, but much like the sun, Leo rising, once you’re up, you’re up. There is very little point in attempting to stop the momentum of your inward expansion, but at the same time, don’t be surprised if it’s taking longer than expected for the rest of the world to notice.

Even when your inner world contains more discord than harmony, even when your former selves have made mistakes or possess fewer of the qualities you have aspired to and cultivated in yourself, they have their own desires and perspectives you can still learn from. Even if they exist behind the walls of permanently closed chapters. This Scorpio season, astrologically speaking, ushers in a major and permanent closing of a chapter in the form of Pluto’s official egress from Capricorn for the next two and a half centuries. Such is the burden of the Scorpionic, to carry us all on its back as we usher in monumental shifts in reality.

The waters of change are choppy and rough. The separation process between past and future is not always a clean cut. At the moment of birth, death is lurking in the corner, waiting to be called upon, and at the moment of death, a new world is born where the dead no longer exists.

The 4th house is where birth and death converge, and it’s always seemed to me that Scorpio is the most comfortable sign in the 4th house. Scorpio is where the moon is at her lowest, where she finds herself under the dirt, unable to reach to the sun for nurturance. Similarly, the 4th house is the bottom of the chart and always represents darkness and invisibility. Even if you don’t have your moon in Scorpio, the nature of your 4th house allows you to connect deeply to the urge to lay down and rot with the rest of the mushrooms. You don’t need to do anything to be intrinsically dependent upon invisible systems of communication and care; it’s a natural process like any other. Connecting with the mycelial network (the original 4th housers), sometimes, is as simple as dying, as peaceful as drifting off to sleep.

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The Sun, ruler of your ascendant and commander of your chart, traverses your 4th house every year around this time. There is a reliability to this that bolsters your internal foundations and validates your occasionally irrational belief that it’s all going to be okay eventually. However, as the ruler of your 4th house prepares to spend an extended amount of time retrograding in and out of your 1st and 12th houses, the separation between your conscious and subconscious minds may be the place to inhabit, as uncomfortable as it is likely to be. Consider holding these two truths at once:

1. The body and mind are not two separate entities, and

2. There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ brain.

If you were to act as if both of these statements were unequivocally and irrevocably true, what would change for you internally? How would you relate to your inner world and your subconscious mind differently? How would this shift your feelings about venturing into the dream realm as a means of cultivating more self-trust?

You don’t have to become an expert in lucid dreaming, but consider choosing now as the time to embrace a new method of inward exploration that’s rooted in curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to listen to the wisdom of your unlived lives.

Thank you for reading.

My books are open for 4th house readings in January. Book yours here.

In just a few days, the sun will become eclipsed by the moon at 10 degrees Libra, alongside Mercury. While there is certainly much dialogue occurring in the depths of your natal chart, that doesn’t necessarily mean that any agreement is happening.

In the last month, my husband and I begun marriage counseling. It’s something we have intended to begin since before we were married, but kept forgetting and forgetting and forgetting… until some thorns could no longer be ignored.

When I think about the three decans of Libra, I think about a cycle that occurs in all long-term relationships (which I will refer to as “marriage” here for both time and Venus’ sake): first, a thorn appears in the form of an inequality or imbalance somewhere. It’s easy to live with at first, to maintain the peace, but it eventually grows to the point where it must be acknowledged. Certain illusions of peace within the relationship must be shattered, hidden feelings must be brought to light, and both sides must provide their testimonies to each other.

Justice’s horn shatters that peace which conceals inequalities, yet it is only through their recognition and rectification that a lasting peace may be wrought.

Austin Coppock

What occurs next is a testing of bonds. The original vows, the ones we make to begin the marriage, aren’t necessarily directly referenced, but they are present in the minds of both people. The second decan of Libra is ruled by Horkos, the Greek daimon who is the brother of the three Fates. Horkos’ job is to protect oaths, and this part of the relationship cycle is about testing the oaths made between two people, to see how resilient they are. Discussions of failed obligations, unfulfilled promises, and shared responsibility are common here. It can be uncomfortable, but ultimately this part of the cycle concludes when both parties decide to remain committed to their marriage oath: the union continues on.

The third part of this cycle is a delicate balancing act, much like the gyroscope that represents the third decan of Libra. The truth has been laid bare, commitments and re-commitments have been made, grievances have been aired. This is the morning after a bloody battle, in war speak (Venus’ other language). Moving through this part of the cycle is a constant act of calibration, both parties equipped with new awareness and sensitivities to their partners’ inner worlds, which in turn lays the groundwork for new thorns to form and the cycle to begin again.

As the sun passes through this cycle in your 4th house, as it does every year, the cycle I’ve described here becomes exclusively about you and yourself. That is the union that has formed thorns which need naming. The promises you make to yourself are the most fundamental promises, and breaking them requires acknowledgement. It is your own inner balancing act that must be called forth for examination and upkeep.

Justice begins at home. Treating yourself as someone with whom you’ve entered into holy union, in turn, brings you into a more holy union with the world around you. There is deep compassion and care in the act of bringing a conflict or issue to light and moving through it. Even for those who haven’t had much experience in being treated safely in conflict, it is a gift you can always give to yourself to be gentle with yourself when you notice yourself falling short of the promises you’ve made. You can name the thorns in your own side and not blame yourself as you pull them out.

Solar eclipse in Libra

This is not a comfortable eclipse for you, as it not only calls into question how committed you’ve been to yourself, but also the environmental and psychological factors which affect your ability to show up. The antidote to this is never to double down on shame or self-flagellation. Sometimes it’s a better idea to look at the promises you’ve made to yourself and ask if they still need fulfilling. Sometimes versions of ourselves need certain things that we desperately want to give them, but after a while it becomes evident that you’ve reached the same conclusion by taking another path. Don’t become bound to inner narratives and stories you’ve committed to but can no longer happily oblige. There’s no freedom in being bound to a past self’s version of the future.

Thank you for reading.

My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available here.

Check out my other Substack here.

If there ever were a holiday that could be dedicated to Neptune, it’s Halloween.

Neptune has domain over illusions, fantasies, glamour, dissolution of boundaries, and trends themselves, all of which are primary components of Halloween. For many people, October 31st is the day when participation mystique is particularly strong, and we embrace the opportunity to utilize glamour and disguise to embody that which we enjoy, admire, lust after, or are fearful of. This obfuscation of one’s identity lends itself to a certain dissolution of boundaries, whereupon fantasies and all which holds a mystical allure to a person can feel more accessible—or even more tangible—than usual.

Glamour is intimately bound up with the capacity to intuit and portray feelings and images which are universal, cyclically repeating, and fulfill the unconscious dreams and longings of the collective psyche at any given epoch.

Liz Greene, The Astrological Neptune and The Quest for Redemption

While the tradition of dressing up in costumes on a chilly autumn night is well-established, there are certain cultural trends that have affected the choices people make about their Halloween costumes, beginning most noticeably in the 1960s, when Neptune spent nearly the entirety of the decade in Halloween’s very own sun sign, Scorpio. The 1950s and 1960s as a whole brought more pop culture & political figures into its Halloween trends, with references such as Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, Rebel Without A Cause, Star Trek, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and Marilyn Monroe herself immediately becoming solidified in the zeitgeist, destined to be replicated by drunk college students for decades to come.

Prior to this, Halloween costumes were largely a children’s affair, and most costumes were inspired by things of a generally spooky nature, like black cats or ghosts or witches or pumpkins, that could easily conceal one’s identity. There was not as much emphasis on dressing up as a specific character or celebrity or other notable figure—far from the Halloween trends we see today.

The chart for Halloween 1969 has Neptune sitting at 27 degrees Scorpio, an exact trine to where Neptune will be this Halloween, at 27 degrees Pisces. Toward the end of Neptune’s transit through Scorpio, Halloween (and Halloween costumes) steadily became an occasion that adults participated in more, and thus the costumes themselves began to take on a more world-aware, referential, and contemporary nature. For example, the first instance of a face mask imitating a politician’s likeness (Nixon’s, specifically) is documented in 1969, and on Halloween that year, First Daughter Tricia Nixon threw a Halloween party at the White House where one guest was said to be wearing a face mask of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Neptune rules over trends, because that which is popular is often difficult to predict and seems to arise from the whims of an unknowable “decider,” developing seemingly overnight and appearing to come out of nowhere. At the same time, trends also represent collective fantasies, and can indicate how the collective is reacting & responding to whichever transitional world they are currently inhabiting.

We are always in between the death of one world and the birth of another, but sometimes this is especially true, as in the cases of both the late 1960s and the present epoch. The sextile between Pluto in Virgo and Neptune in Scorpio as they both prepared to ingress to new signs and usher in new eras echoes the current skies, where Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Pisces are in the same configuration, hanging out in the waiting room together before they move on to their new signs and leave the world as we currently know it behind.

As the calendars turned over to 1970 and Neptune made its ingress to Sagittarius, the line between reverence and mockery became even more blurred as trends in fashion in general became less concerned with strict adherence to rules and restrictions and more open to reinterpretation or challenging of cultural norms via one’s clothing choices—it’s not a coincidence that bras became less popular as feminism’s second wave swelled. It’s also not a coincidence that Halloween costumes in the 1970s were increasingly inspired by women.

In 1975, the world was blessed and forever changed by the advent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which not only ushered in a whole slew of iconic Halloween costumes to choose from, but also became a counter-cultural phenomenon where many folks to this day continue to express, explore, and experience their gender identity through emulating the characters in the film. According to Liz Greene, the popular culture of the early 1970s was led by a “young, thrill-seeking audience” who were not afraid to openly embrace different gender expressions, and Halloween in particular was the only occasion where some closeted queer and trans people could publicly experiment with a different self-expression, due to the laws which prohibited cross-dressing or masquerading (with an exception for some holidays, like Halloween) in many cities at the time.

Neptune has been in Pisces, another mutable sign ruled by Jupiter, since 2011, and in that time we’ve seen an explosion in celebrity worship and deification, but also an explosion in the mockery and satirical treatments of rich, famous, and exploitative individuals who, for better or worse, capture the attention of the zeitgeist through a certain type of glamour or allure. This is reflected in the way we choose our Halloween costumes, too: one of the most popular Halloween costumes in 2011 was Charlie Sheen, who had behaved erratically in a now-infamous interview in the midst of an ongoing drug addiction that same year and subsequently became a meme.

2011 also heralded the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe era with the release of The Avengers, and suddenly superheroes were back in the zeitgeist in a way they hadn’t been for a long time, blurring the lines between aspirational tales of heroic individualism wrapped up in stories of saving the world and the idolization of the actors who portray them. It’s like meta-idolization, and it’s incredibly Neptunian. Since then, every single Halloween has been dominated by Black Widows and green Hulks and Steve Rogerses and Iron Mans.

Heidi Klum is a celebrity who is known for her extravagant and highly detailed Halloween costumes, and her Jessica Rabbit costume from 2015 is perhaps one of the most iconic celebrity costumes of the last 25 years. Klum’s untimed birth chart has Neptune at 5 degrees Sagittarius, so the irreverent and exploratory nature of trends and fashion a la Neptune in the 70s is baked into her nativity. On Halloween 2015, Saturn was conjunct her natal Neptune by one degree, and she has talked about how long and grueling and Saturnian the process was for her to become Jessica Rabbit. Saturn and Neptune are typically at odds with one another by nature, but in this case, the synchronicity of their two energies resulted in a costume that was at once glamorous, bizarre, and instantly elevated to icon status. How incredibly Neptunian for one woman known for being beautiful and glamorous to disguise herself as another beautiful and glamorous (albeit fictional) woman and end up creating one of the most famous Halloween costumes of all time.

A costume can also be a political statement, and in 2016, the line between celebrity and politics dissolved completely as a scabies sore in human form was elected president, mere days after being one of the most popular Halloween costumes of the year. Neptune was really cooking with that one, and has continued to serve up all kinds of imperialistic and capitalistic glorification with Pluto in Capricorn as a constant companion the entire time. Nightmare blunt rotation, tbh.

As it stands now, we are at the end of an era. Pluto and Neptune (and Uranus) will enter new signs next year and shifting paradigms will make themselves more apparent than ever. The “young, thrill-seeking audience” of the 1970s who broke all the fashion and gender rules is no longer, but five decades later, that audience is young and nihilistic with (seemingly) nothing to lose in the face of global climate collapse, genocide, and late-stage capitalism (bummer).

Perhaps in this next epoch, Halloween costumes will be less about emulating the current culture and become more imaginative, more future-oriented, more evocative of the world we fantasize about living in—you know, one that actually supports life. We get to explore our fantasies through disguise and the dissolution of boundaries that comes with being in disguise. In this way, we can dip our toes into the “transitional world” of Neptune and escape reality in a way that is more hopeful and inventive, rather than simply emulating some corporate IP.

Halloween costumes will always reflect whatever the collective is glamourizing at that point in time. It’s interesting how, after the moon landing in 1969, Halloween costumes throughout the following decade were rife with astronauts and robots and a more middle-class version of futurism, and now, we have officially arrived in the AI technology era and the possibility of personal robot assistants seems more imminent than ever. I predict that Halloween costumes from 2025 onward may include more robots and costumes that either mock or praise artificial intelligence.

But enough about the next era of humanity. Let’s talk about my predictions for Halloween 2024, which is a mere 8 weeks away as I write this.

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My Halloween 2024 trend predictions

Trend: Y2K nostalgia

Nostalgia and Halloween go hand-in-hand and always have, but this year, early 2000s nostalgia has specifically been the focus. CD sales are on the rise for the first time in two decades, despite the ubiquitous nature of streaming services. Low-rise jeans (gross) are coming back into style, as well as Ugg boots and flip phones, and thus I predict this year’s Halloween costumes will continue the tradition of each new generation falling in love with the fashions of their predecessors, for some reason. If you’re dressing up with friends, iconic looks from The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Clueless, or Cheetah Girls can make for a fun and nostalgic group costume.

Trend: Americana, but make it fashion

Yes, we’ll get to Chappell Roan in a minute, but I first wanted to point out that there’s been a distinct upward trend in Americana (specifically Midwestern) and cowboy aesthetics in the last several years and I don’t expect it to slow down any time soon. Imagine the likes of masked gay country crusader Orville Peck, Jeffree Star with his yak meat & guns farm, the undeniably American brilliance of Cowboy Carter… it’s a type of glittering attempt at subverting nationalism and I am here for it. In fact, I anticipate there will be many Beyoncé-inspired looks embracing this aesthetic through the liberal (no pun intended) application of denim and cowboy hats and sequins.

Trend: Chappell Roan

That’s it. Just Chappell Roan. You can pretty much pick any look she’s done in the last 12 months and it’ll be a hit costume, but most specifically, I think the Lil Poundcake look from her Tiny Desk Concert and her Statue of Liberty look are going to be particularly popular this year, for reasons I will get into shortly. Chappell makes for incredible Halloween costume inspiration, as her look is very distinct, with her gigantic red curls and iconic drag looks, so everyone will know what your costume is, but it’ll also be colorful and sparkly and fun and very Midwest Princess. There’s truly a Chappell Roan look for everyone.

Trend: Pink and green

Pink is always in style and undeniably the greatest color ever, but Barbie summer of 2023 brought pink back in a very big way. In 2024, everybody went and found god at the Pink Pony Club, and I think this doubled down on both the Americana and pink trends in a fun and effervescent way. This is also why I singled out the two Chappell looks that I did. On top of that, we are just coming out of brat summer, and I don’t think the brat green trend is going to fully disappear before the end of October. Wicked, which is set to release a few weeks after Halloween, also features an iconic pink and green duo in Glinda and Elphaba, so I anticipate we will see many besties donning those costumes together.

Trend: Iconic duos

With Neptune being ruled by Jupiter in double-bodied Gemini, I suspect there will be an uptick in not only couples’ costumes this year, but duo and group costumes in general. For a triple whammy of an iconic duo PLUS pink & green PLUS y2k nostalgia, you and a friend can go as Cosmo & Wanda (bonus Neptune points if your disguise is one of Cosmo & Wanda’s disguises).

Trend: Femininomenon

2024 has been a huge year for women and femmes in general: they’re dominating the music charts and running for president. Outside of Deadpool & Wolverine, I don’t anticipate to see too many male or masculine-presenting costumes this year.

Trends: Current TV shows & film

Two of the most popular television shows in 2024 so far have been The Bear and House of the Dragon, so the instantly recognizable white-blonde hair of the Targaryens is sure to resurface in a big way. I suspect there will be a lot of Carmy (and Syd) costumes, especially for line cooks who already have this exact wardrobe lying around their house, because it’s simple and easy but still easily recognizable (don’t forget your temporary tattoos to complete the look). I also anticipate we will see some costumes referencing contestants from Love Island and some Gypsy Rose impersonators—pregnant belly and all.
The well-timed remake of Beetlejuice is hitting theatres currently, and the resurrection of Lydia Deetz is sure to inspire many Halloween looks this year. There will be plenty of Deadpool & Wolverine duos, I’m sure, as well as Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn and Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, and creative takes on Dune-inspired costumes. For a fun and easy group costume, you can get two of your friends to do a Challengers-inspired trio with you—as long as there are tennis rackets involved, pretty much everyone will know what you’re referencing.

Trends: Politics & celebrity culture

Politics & celebrity culture aren’t trends, per se, but rather constant themes in Halloween costumes that have a rotating cast of characters. During election years, naturally, there’s always an uptick in Halloween costumes that are inspired by politicians, so I anticipate this year we will see a lot of coconut-related looks, referencing the viral clip of Presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Celebrity couples make for excellent couples’ costumes, and I predict some popular pairings this year will be Sabrina Carpenter and Barry Keoghan, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, and for the couples with a sense of humor, maybe some Bennifer costumes too (she’s glamorous, he’s carrying three trays of Dunkin Donuts lattes… you see the vision). And, while it may be impossible for anyone to parody Jojo Siwa better than Jojo Siwa herself, I anticipate a lot of cheeky costumes inspired by Jojo’s audition to be the first lesbian member of Kiss.

Trends: Internet culture and memes

Again, this isn’t necessarily a trend in and of itself, but is comprised of countless trends and micro-trends and bits of virality that have penetrated the collective consciousness throughout the year. In this realm, I predict there will be costumes referencing the disastrous AI-generated Willy Wonka experience, the Hawk Tuah girl, and Jools Lebron pioneering the art of being very demure and mindful.

Thank you for reading.

What’s your Halloween costume this year? Did you learn anything new about Halloween or Neptune while reading this? I’d love to hear your feedback and any revelations you had.

My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available here.

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Recently, I read an account of one man’s experience at a darkness retreat, where he spent 82 hours in a “cave” designed to insulate its inhabitants from all outdoor light and sound. His description of his experience is surprisingly psychedelic, but one part that stood out to me was how, at one point a couple days into the darkness, he believed that he could “see” the objects in his room around him. He tests his own theory, reaching for the bed where he expected it to be, and realized he had missed by two feet.

This gave me a good chuckle, because I’ve also experienced something similar when confidently navigating my half-awake body to the bathroom in the middle of the night and thinking I can locate the toilet or sink without looking, and realizing that as sure as my body was about where that thing was, when my hand reached out and expected to find it, my hand found only air. The disorientation of that moment is humbling.

Another thing I found quite poignant about this author’s experience of the darkness retreat is how he became able to visualize moments in his life “gelatinous cubes” that he could pick up and rearrange and carry around. Gelatinous cubes is kind of a gross image to conjure, in my opinion, for what I immediately recognized as 4th house work. However, you need not lock yourself in a lightless room for 4 days in order to access this type of internal excavation.

Dearest Gemini rising, the sun is now in your 4th house. This is your 4th house season, and while you may have the gift of sight, you may find that there will be much more value in noticing through sensing, not just seeing, in these next few weeks.

The trails which have been blazing themselves through you (both your physical body and your essence) are nearing their inevitable end, and you will be left without a map, traversing this renewed internal terrain while relying solely on your five senses. Get curious about who you’ve been becoming over the last month, and also over the last two years.

The new moon in your 4th house, on September 3rd, calls not only for inward exploration, but downward excavation. What gelatinous cubes of personal history exist within you when you really get down to the core of yourself—who you are when you’re alone, without distractions or an audience or any expectations placed on how to behave. If you were to spend multiple days in complete darkness, which memories would you least want to confront or circumnavigate as you process? I only ask because these are usually the pain points that need attention the most—but of course, don’t push yourself outside your window of tolerance.

The new moon asks you to get to the bottom of the issue—literally. This is the time for relentlessly pursuing the source of the matter, whatever that matter may be.

What associations do you have with this time of the year? Which memories are invoked by the turning of the light from one extreme to another, this liminal space before the equinox? Remember, rely more on what you sense than what you think when you’re tapping into the current of your memories. Be silent, and hear what your body has to say.

Don’t expect precision with yourself with regard to routines or cultivating your vision right now. A solid bed of self-trust makes it easier to release perfectionism and embrace flow states. Remember that you don’t always have to be in charge.

Thank you for reading.

My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available here.

It’s 2 am on the dot. I’m outside smoking a joint and listening to the sounds of people laughing and talking on a porch nearby. Their noisiness fill me up with a feeling I am struggling to articulate at this moment. I feel heartened by it, warmed up inside, like a moth drawn to the flame of togetherness they seem to kindle so easily. I also feel… immensely separate. Like a thin film separating me from them, this peculiar emotion keeps me at bay.

I can imagine myself in their positions: laughing, loved, probably a little drunk, fully steeped in the blend of energies and the magic of a singular night spent doing some of the greatest things a person can do with their time.

This gives me pause. Is there truly anything better than sitting in a circle and sharing time and space and laughter and stories with other people? Some of my most precious and treasured memories are this, in one form or another.

What underscores this new and strange emotion I’m experiencing is the same old hollow loneliness that’s been my companion since I was a little girl. You know the one: the sensation that at your core, you are deeply and permanently alone. It is a state you inhabit regardless of age or social standing or relationships or accomplishments or any of the other life events that may, for some, confirm a sense of belonging.

The space between where I am, behind this plastic film, and the images I see of myself beyond the barrier, blurred shapes of me-not-me dancing and twirling and laughing and bursting at the seams with life, haunts me. There is something so aspirational about my own self-image that it’s kind of heartbreaking—dare I say pathetic?

When I stopped pretending to be anybody, I didn’t realize that would bring me face-to-face with the sensation of being nobody at all—or rather, feeling like nobody at all. Who or what I am beyond the calculated masks developed over a lifetime of undiagnosed autism was… inconsequential to me, for a while. I figured if I kept digging, kept removing layers of masks, kept shedding the scripts I’d taught myself to survive, that eventually I would just arrive at myself.

The “real” me. The one I was promised underneath the mask. The whole, integrated me. The one who is at peace with all of her parts. Eventually she’ll just show up, if I continue to remove these layers.

Eventually.

Eventually, I stopped trying to remove layers and strip myself raw and force all of these intermingling voices to meld together and obey me. I realized that I was digging for treasure I wouldn’t find. There was no one, true, “real” me, wholly integrated, below the surface of all of these coping mechanisms.

Over time I’ve come to see this as a good thing, but going through it, I just felt like I didn’t exist. That’s all. I didn’t have a self because I was never given the chance to develop a “self” that wasn’t just several protective mechanisms in a trenchcoat.

How do you make friends when you don’t know who you are? I find myself weeping some days (I weep every day but for differing reasons) about the few precious friends I do have who seem very sure of who I am and that they love that person very much. I trust their version of me, and I aspire to it. I do not trust the versions of myself I constantly see represented in my mind.

Having an autistic experience of humans, for me, means I’m constantly swallowing my words to keep my most loving and tender and vulnerable feelings from scaring anybody off. How am I supposed to communicate to strangers that I think they’re beautiful and fascinating and I’m deeply curious about the landscape of their inner world?

The flowers are blooming

The answers are looming

It’s 10:30 am. I’m on the street corner, smoking. There’s so much life everywhere around me. The banging of hammers nearby. People walking their dogs, some of them saying “good morning” as they pass. The laughter of children on a playground at recess. Crows in the street and on the power lines, cawing and gazing suspiciously at me.

I wonder if the crows know how utterly unreal I feel.

I’m not sad about it, I don’t feel depressed. All of this life is so beautiful, heart-wrenchingly so. The world is on fire but here on this street corner on a Thursday morning, the world is just happening. It fills me up with that indescribable feeling again, the one that isn’t quite bitter and isn’t quite sweet and conjures up images of being wrapped in cellophane or rice paper.

Maybe I need to move out of the suburbs. It’s too isolating here. I want so desperately to have the city at my doorstep but I also know that I’m easily overwhelmed by uncontrollable sounds. Could I learn to live with it? For the payoff? These are logistical questions and therefore not very interesting to that cellophane feeling in my skin.

Austin Coppock describes the first decan of Capricorn as a place where “one sinks into the bones of the world.” This is the crux of my birth chart, where there resides my IC, Sun, Mercury, Mars, and chart ruler Venus. I think about this decan a lot and the implications of having so much of my nativity concentrated there. “The figures which roam this decan can root deeply into what soil they find themselves in, yet for this very reason location is critical.”

Location is critical. And at the same time, that old adage always rings true: wherever you go, there you are. I’ve been plagued by the idea that if I could just find the right place to root down in, if I could just stumble upon that geographical confluence of magical forces that makes everything correct, then my life would begin.

I know that my life continues beginning with each breath. I’ve experienced many beginnings to my life and will continue to. But this doesn’t heal the home wound. “When can I put my bags down?” will likely be etched on my tombstone.

Maybe we are on our way

Descending to our graves

And losing tomorrow by choosing today

Maybe there’s a way out

A single revision

For changing is living

And living is love

Would a new location fix me? Maybe. Maybe not. I also don’t think I’m gonna fix myself from where I am currently, geographically. Mostly, I just want to be an active participant in my life. I want more experiences that make me feel like the layer of cellophane between me and the rest of the world has been dissolved—not pierced or punctured, but melted away by the warmth of acceptance.

It’s noon. I’m walking to the coffee shop with my best friend and later I’ll go home to my spouse and child. These are cellophane-free relationships, they nourish me in their flexibility and openness and willingness to let me be who I am and celebrate it. I would never disparage them. But sometimes the contrast, when I walk out into the world, hits me like the soft whomp of a pillow to the face. Sometimes I am staggered by how simultaneously separate and desperately connected I feel to the thrum of humanity.

Maybe a different place would help. It won’t fix everything, but it could help. I’ll still be there, regardless. I don’t know if it will, in the words of Coppock, “set in motion the grossest of terrestrial forces,” but I’ve never know a greater terrestrial force than the restlessness within my soul.

Technically, your 4th house season really began when Venus entered Leo on July 11th, but now with the sun having its own homecoming in the subterranean place, dress rehearsal is over. It’s showtime—but here’s the catch: this time, you perform to an audience of yourself and yourself alone. As much pleasure as can be found in pulling focus, there is an equal and opposite reaction whereupon you may experience the pleasures of separating yourself from the herd and aiming to impress no one but yourself during the next month or so.

The tricky part, however, is remaining in character when things are going your way, when you have actually outdone yourself. Is a victory still victorious if it’s not met with raucous applause? Is there merit to “moving in silence” when you’re celebrating that which has already manifested? Preparing for disappointment may come naturally to some, but have you ever prepared to succeed? The path to 10th house accomplishments is paved with 4th house excavations.

Going underground is interesting when you have a solar 4th house. You are quite literally shining where the sun don’t shine. Many cultures, including ancient Egyptians, believed that the sun ‘dies’ every evening at sunset and is ‘reborn’ every morning at sunrise, traversing to and from the underworld over the course of the night. The sun in the 4th house typically represents midnight, the darkest part of the night sky. But what about when there is no sunset? What happens when there’s midnight sun?

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Leo season, in the northernmost parts of the Northern Hemisphere, coincides with a period of nightlessness in the sky. In the depths of summer, the sun can be seen hanging low in the sky even at midnight, and the lines between sunset and sunrise are not just blurred, but dissolved entirely. Here, the sun is not ‘reborn’ during the summer months because it never slips away into the unseen realm to digest and process and integrate information. Here, one must take their integration into their own hands.

Humans use technologies to simulate night time so that they may still sleep and have their own journey to the underworld every 24 hours, because unlike the sun, humans can’t go very long without doing so. Our bodies need to rest and regenerate while the mind categorizes and processes experiences, but even more than that, the soul needs a break from the unending light of god (the sun) in order to appreciate the intricacies and subtle, felt realities of god.

The notion that Absolute God is something that blinds the eye and causes one to lapse into silence is common to most religions. It is the deus absconditus from which rises the deus revelatus, the God whom one can recognize or at least dimly see through his works. Basically, the mystic can only speak of the deus revelatus who, in whatever ways, reveals Himself, who becomes man’s intimate friend with whom he can enter into a dialogue[.]1

When the sun moves through your 4th house, it’s normal to feel the pull to be with yourself (or god) more intentionally. This does not require self-isolation, but sometimes self-isolation is a natural consequence of this desire to spend more time in your inner world. Sometimes you need to hear your own voice before you can hear the voice of god.

The 4th house rules over all that which is foundational and fundamental--what can be solidly built upon. In this sense, the thing we all have in common is what's underneath our feet--the core of the earth, the center of all that we know and all that we are--and what's inside our chests: a heartbeat. The most fundamental rhythm. If you are alive, you can return to your heartbeat as a means of connecting with the center.

Right now, it may feel like there’s not enough time or space in the day to connect with your inner voice and process everything that’s occurred since Leo season of last year. But luckily for you, my dear Venusian friend, as the midnight sun floods your 4th house and shines a spotlight on your tender and sacred inner world, you do have an ally emerging in the skies to help you make sense of it all: Lucifer, or morning star Venus.

The spotlight, by nature, creates a certain type of competition: only one can occupy that phosphorescent space. And when this competition occurs in your 4th house, it’s between the part of you that craves the center stage and the part of you that understands the value of the mask. Lucifer (in Christian mythology) was said to be in competition with God, and therefore was cast out of heaven. Similarly, Venus is the celestial body which ‘competes’ for the spotlight in the sky, coming right after the Sun and the Moon in terms of brightness.

Under the midnight sun, Venus can never win. She will always be outshined, no matter how well she performs—and yet, she continues to shine. Venus never stops vying for the spotlight. Is this congruent with a belief you’ve internalized about yourself and your desire to be seen? Do you take it as an evident truth that you will be overlooked?

When you embrace the spotlight, who (or what) are you doing it for? And when you embrace the mask, who (or what) are you doing it in spite of?

This 4th house season, I want you to remember that salvation is not guaranteed, and you must be willing to traverse uncharted territory without a guide in order to come back to yourself sometimes. I want you to trust yourself with your own transformation, instead of waiting for the passage of time to usher in rebirths for you. I want you to find not only the right words to say, but the courage and tenderness to say them at the right time, hitting your mark and delivering your lines.

This 4th house season, I want you to be intentional about creating environments for yourself that facilitate the integration of your lived experiences. If that means spending more time alone, then so be it. If that means spending more time in the spotlight and letting others witness all you’re becoming, then so be it. Just make sure you are mindful of the mask—if it begins to slip, it’s time to take it off.

Thank you for reading.

My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available here.

Subscribe now

The sun’s ingress to your 4th house may leave you feeling oddly tender and a little bit hungover, like the way you feel the day after you’ve expressed your true feelings to someone. It may be difficult, at this juncture, to differentiate between the felt experiences of solitude and isolation in the body. The resolution to this dissonance may be found in your most immediate surroundings, so don’t feel like you just need to ride it out. There is always a way to alchemize the confusion.

Nostalgia comes up a lot whenever the 4th house is discussed, and especially so when the moon is involved. The connection between the moon and nostalgia is mostly due to the ever-changing nature of human memory and all of the ways your emotional experience of your past shapes what you remember about it.

The house ruled by the moon in a birth chart is usually a dynamic place, meaning it is constantly shifting & taking new shapes based on its container. Your actual, literal home doesn’t need to constantly be in flux in order for this to be true of your 4th house. Your sense of nostalgia may even be of benefit to you, especially if you’ve ever felt like your connection to your past is actually the thing keeping you in flux.

Self-imposed isolation is about blocking out the noise so you can hear your own ideas, before they get filtered through various biases, worldviews, and attachments to routine and the status quo—sometimes you don’t even know you’ve been defending “the way things are” to yourself until you shut off all the external input. This is especially important when you are learning new things, be it a language, a skill, or a magical path. Solitude is what allows the learning process to also include learning new things about yourself as you go, and also why it’s so important not to be too attached to the way things have always been when you’re trying to wrap your mind around a new idea—about yourself or the world.

In 36 Faces, Austin Coppock describes a “hidden reciprocity” in the first decan of Cancer, reflecting on the 2 of Cups card: “Love and need bleed together here.”1 This is a good opportunity to reflect on the emotions of love and need and shame, paying particular attention to where they overlap for you: Are you ashamed of needing the people you love? What were the earliest lessons you remember learning about the acceptability of your own needs? How does your body react when someone else declares that they need you, in ways big or small? How do you identify and cultivate reciprocity in your relationships? In the words of first decan Cancer sun, Ariana Grande: Tell me how good it feels to be needed.

The 4th house is the “bottom” of the chart, but it sometimes makes more sense to think of it as the “core,” specifically in reference to the core of the earth. For one, when planets are in the 4th house of the sky, they are literally on the other side of the planet. If you traveled in a straight line toward them, you’d have to cross through the center of the earth to get there.

Additionally, the core of the earth is the core of all human life and the one thing we all have in common. Everything that exists on our planet, including ourselves, relies upon the molten heart of our planet. As Dane Rudhyar puts it, heartbeats are the most fundamental rhythm.2 The paradox of going deeper into the 4th house, deeper into yourself and your inner worlds, is that you will inevitably touch the core of all humanity at some point. That’s what makes it so overwhelming and simultaneously so vital for heart work. The key to uniting your inner and outer worlds is, ultimately and always, love.

Unity is at the center of the earth, not in the sky.

Dane Rudhyar

Love is the most fundamental form of sustenance we have, outside of mother’s milk, when we are first born. As we grow older, our needs and the ways we meet them become more complex and sometimes abstract, such as the need for solitude that doesn’t feel like punishment, but rather nourishment.

The new moon at 14 degrees Cancer on July 5th marks a new chapter, a resetting, or a restart in your 4th house. For more historical context clues, reflect on what was happening in your life (with regard to your home life, the experience of solitude in your body, and how you nourish your own need for love) on previous new & full moons in Cancer.

Other dates you can look on & around for your own personal context & narrative:

• January 5, 2015

  • Full moon at 14 Cancer, Sun separating from a conjunction with Pluto in Capricorn

• January 5 1996

  • Full moon at 14 Cancer, Saturn at 19 Pisces

  • If you were very young or not even alive yet in 1996, remember that the 4th house is still very much about our parents, so look to what was occurring in your parents’ lives at this time.

Thank you for reading.

My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available here.
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I feel free. Unspeakably, immeasurably free.

I know that I am not actually free. I am headed home to the house I share with my dad, who was relapsing on meth at that time and thought I didn’t know. This is laughable. Everybody knows. But no one knows what to do about it.

My dad’s addiction is not the point of this story. The point of this story is Lana Del Rey—more specifically, her album Ultraviolence, which is celebrating its tenth birthday today, and the extremely personal relationship I have with it.

I am not a big fan of disclaimers, but for the purposes of this article I would like to take the firm stance that what I’m discussing is the art project and musical masterpiece made by a woman named Elizabeth Grant. I am not actually talking about Elizabeth Grant, nor am I endorsing every single choice she’s ever made.

Feeling connected to the stories told by Lana Del Rey, through Lana Del Rey, is not necessarily about idolizing one particular woman (for me anyway), but rather about accepting the multitudes that will forever clash within ourselves. Lana’s music is an attempt to thwart the fig tree metaphor by living many lives, albeit vicariously, through the music. Which parts of these stories blend with the real life of Elizabeth Grant are inconsequential to me. I’m more concerned with the parts of my own real life that overlap with those of the characters embodied by Lana throughout her entire discography, and this album in particular. Okay, disclaimer over.

Back to me in my Tacoma. At the time, Ultraviolence was only about a month old, but I found myself completely wrapped up in it. Truth be told, I didn’t like every single song right away.

But I did find myself—after the first couple of listens—swept up in the echo-y, emotionally wrought warbles, big stadium drums, steel-stringed guitars, rough around the edges aesthetic that shone through on this new album, building on top of the cinematic, string-heavy, genre-bending sound Lana had established on Born To Die. The influence of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who co-produced Ultraviolence, was not lost on me, as a Black Keys fan at the time (and still to this day).

To put it lightly, I grew obsessed with the immersive dream world of Los Angeles that Lana constructs inside Ultraviolence. Even though she still makes her New York roots known in songs like “Brooklyn Baby,” the stories, themes, and characters Lana plays in this album are very much those of an LA girl, in the land of gods & monsters indeed.

Fun fact: for the longest time, in “Money Power Glory,” I thought she was singing “LA, New York, I’m gonna take them for all that they’ve got”. Turns out she’s just saying “hallelujah.” I’m gonna stick with my version.

Ultraviolence opened wide a narrative that I had been attempting to stick my elbow into until I could eventually squeeze my whole body through, and live there.

A month prior to its release, in May 2014, several things happened to me in quick succession: my cat Zee died unexpectedly, my dad’s relapse worsened and became unignorable, and I had my first foray into sex work. When Zee died, I was driving home from my mom’s house in Northern California, and I arrived at the pet hospital with just barely enough time to say goodbye to him.

After returning home and moping for a few days in a row, as to be expected, my dad decided I needed to get over it and stop mourning because it was “just a cat.” This was how I knew for sure he was on drugs, because my dad is and has always been a cat guy. At the time, he had two cats of his own. I’ve been told that as a Pisces child, he would often return home after playing in the woods with armfuls of feral kittens he had found. This was not my father speaking.

I refused to stop feeling my feelings even as he harassed me about it, and after a day or so of continued arguments over the fact that yes, I was still sad about my freshly dead cat, I left. Or he told me to leave. I don’t remember. I had friends nearby who would’ve been happy to let me crash on their couch as I often did, but this felt too difficult and shameful to bring to them. I still hadn’t told any of my friends explicitly about my dad, even though they all knew what was happening, and admitting it out loud felt too big to handle at the time.

I’m stronger than all my men, except for you

Pretty When You Cry

I left and drove my Tacoma to the only place that felt like freedom to me: Los Angeles. A few weeks before this, I had successfully survived my first real sex work transaction, and it was exactly as seedy as you’d imagine: I found a guy on Craigslist, and we met at a motel that charged by the hour somewhere out in East Los Angeles so he could fuck me for $80 before his shift began. I spent half of that $80 on filling up my gas tank and the other half at Target on whatever I wanted. I remember some leggings and liquid lipstick. I remember a poem I wrote, likely about this very experience, in May 2014:

Maybe I’ll get really thin and stay inside Los Angeles
because I like her gravity.
From further south I hear a voice
too familiar, wailing away things like,
“I used to say I loved New York City,
now I curse myself for thinking that way.”
But I don’t know her, so I don’t ask her
for her hand, or the time, or to text me back,
rather wait on a death wish to gain momentum. 
Maybe I’ll get eaten alive by her churning bowels
or maybe I’ll become the monster. 
I like that. 

On top of the obvious trauma I was in the midst of incurring, I was also grappling with becoming internally devastated about a man. Boring, I know, but it added a certain layer to my experience of Ultraviolence, because at the time, I could attach all of Lana’s yearning for this man who doesn’t give a fuck about her, who treats her like she’s special but then reminds her that she’s simply one of many to him, to my own story about this (admittedly very boring) man.

All those little times you said that I’m your girl
You make me feel like your whole world

Pretty When You Cry

A few days after my 20th birthday, I got a DM from a mutual on Tumblr, and our conversation quickly moved over to texting daily. He was a devastatingly handsome & charming 27-year-old Singaporean from Chicago—flight attendant by day, musician and prolific bisexual lover by night. This man, who I’ll just call Q, was always regaling me with tales of his sexual adventures across the continental 48 states, and we were constantly painting pictures together of all the sucking and fucking and music-making we were going to do when he finally came to visit me in LA (you know where this is going, don’t you?).

I’ll wait for you, babe
It’s all I do, babe
You don’t come through, babe
You never do

Pretty When You Cry

Eventually, though, he became neglectful, even after we had gotten to the point of giving each other pet names and coming dangerously close to “I love you” on several occasions. Mind you, I was 20 years old; of course I had it BAD for Q. Even my friends knew about it. I really felt like he was a perfect potential match for me, as my jet-setting polyamorous lover and artistic collaborator. But he let me down one too many times, including one time when I sat outside LAX all day waiting for a plane that would never arrive, and I had begun the process of pulling away from him.

Hot, hot weather in the summer
High, high, neglectful lover

Shades of Cool

This, combined with the growing pressure from my mom to Do Something With My Life, had already set me up for a certain level of summertime sadness—well before Zee ate our neighbor’s lilies—and with Ultraviolence around the corner, I was about to have a summer soundtrack to go with it. What I wasn’t prepared for, on the other hand, was the wild and brazen and intoxicating levels of freedom I was about to be experiencing as I dove headfirst into drugs and sex work, bolstered by the melodies and fictional fantasies inside this album.

Not a single soul besides me and that man from Craigslist knew what had transpired between us on that overcast morning in May, and I kept it that way.

I knew the ways people would balk at me, even my most open-minded friends, if they heard that story. But on the inside, I was aflame. I was unstoppable. I had just discovered a new superpower, and I knew if I could learn to wield it correctly, it could give me absolutely everything I wanted—and then some.

Watch what you say to me
Careful who you’re talking to
I’m on fire, baby

Sad Girl

There’s many reasons why sex work was intoxicating to me, and some are more obvious than others. Many people who have traveled down this path will tell you that the access to quick money (and lots of it) which comes from sex work can become a drug of its own; a type of hit, where you’re always seeking the next one. I was not immune to this phenomenon; it was everything to me. Especially considering that my dad’s addiction was worsening by the day and I very desperately needed a way to move out of his house. That money was freedom, in its purest, most distilled form.

Life is awesome, I confess
What I do, I do best

Fucked My Way Up To The Top

On top of that, I was finally experiencing the thrill of being desired—lusted after, even. I grew up a fat kid who was always in turmoil about her body, and it’s like as soon as I reached my twenties, I—and everyone else—realized that I was hot. Like, sexy hot. Very, very fuckable. HOT. And very shortly after that, I realized I could monetize my hotness. But this was before OnlyFans existed, so I knew I was gonna have to venture offline for the particular job I had just given myself. This was also pre-SESTA/FOSTA, so it was a lot simpler to find sugar daddies or pay-to-play situations on Craigslist (I have a lot of strong opinions on SESTA/FOSTA, as do most sex workers, but I won’t get into that here).

It never once occurred to me to not fuck for money: I love fucking, and I love money, what more could I ask for? Other forms of sex work available at the time, like camming, were actually less accessible for me because they required me to be in my house, where my dad was. Plus, this way, I got to experience all different types of men and study the different types of power they wielded—whether real or imagined. Through sex work, I received access like I never had before, and in a city like Los Angeles, that power seemed to be the silent thrum underscoring the land, like a beating heart underneath the pavement that only a select few can hear, let alone look upon. I felt as if I could place my hand on the scorching pavement of any LA boulevard and feel the haunted heartbeat of the city, like if Edgar Allen Poe had lived in Laurel Canyon.

Money and sex and drugs all go hand-in-hand in Los Angeles, and I was determined to have my hands full. I can see why Lana was moved to change her whole identity to reflect it. And I can see why it was so alluring to me, a decade ago.

Down on the west coast, I get this feeling like
It all could happen, that’s why I’m leaving
You for the moment

West Coast

Once I had figured out that it was possible to use my hotness to make money while simultaneously exploring my own sexual fantasies, running around the greater Los Angeles metro area in my Tacoma, I felt like maybe my life was actually beginning. The dopamine hit from the wads of cash in my hands was certainly enough to rope me in immediately, and cause me to consider dedicating my life to this “career” I had chosen.

I had this one client who always overpaid me (he was very wealthy and not from this country, and I think American cash bills confused him, which benefitted me) and he always made sure I had an orgasm (perhaps another side effect of being a non-American man), and in my mind, if I could rack up a handful of those types of clients, I would be a successful and desirable (and more importantly, free) woman. And nobody seemed to understand that better than Lana Del Rey. She gave me permission to fuck my way up to the top.

You talk lots about God
Freedom comes from the call
But that’s not what this bitch wants
Not what I want at all

Money Power Glory

Despite all of this newfound and intoxicating power, however, I was still deeply, consistently, overwhelmingly sad. This should not shock you. Luckily for me, however, Ultraviolence kicks off with an extremely cathartic breakup song. I do not remember exactly where I was when I first listened to this album or this song, but I do remember feeling chills cover my entire body as hot tears instantly began to flow down my cheeks.

Shared my body and my mind with you
That’s all over now
I did what I had to do
I found another anyhow

Cruel World

Unbeknownst to me, mere days after Ultraviolence dropped, I was going to be swept up in an entirely new love story with my very best friend at the time, when I offered to be his designated driver for his 21st birthday and he got drunk and kissed me at the end of the night. It sounds way more romantic than it was, I promise you. But the key piece of this was that I did accidentally find a new lover, which made it a lot easier to forget all about Q.

But you haven’t seen my man
You haven’t seen him
He’s got the fire, and he walks with it
He’s got the fire, and he talks with it

Sad Girl

I was vengeful, I was in love, and I was alive with the glory of getting paid for sex. This hot guy whom I’d assumed had placed me in the friend zone permanently was actually deeply in love with me. The façade of obligation between my father and I had melted away, so there was no more pressure to be home for dinner. I spent a lot of time driving around the greater Los Angeles area. I smoked weed and went to Rocky Horror every weekend and snorted cocaine with my friends and had sex with strangers and prowled the streets. I slept in my truck at the beach many nights. I felt unstoppable. I felt free.

Despite how fondly I’m recalling it, we don’t need to pretend that everything was fine with me in the summer of 2014. It clearly wasn’t. But what is summer for, if not to run around and fuck around and escape your problems as you chase that feeling of limitlessness? What is self-destruction if not a form of revenge against those who chose not to be careful with you, a twisted attempt to beat them to the chase?

When I looked back on my old Tumblr entries to write this piece, I was struck by how very angry I felt back then—which was warranted, of course, but my memory of this time doesn’t include the anger and vengefulness I obviously felt back then. I was doing a lot to suppress it, I think, because if I had allowed my anger to spill over onto my dad (the source of my rage), things could escalate in a truly dangerous way. By the end of the summer, he had graduated from selling drugs to selling drugs and guns out of our house. I knew this because he told me; at a certain point he didn’t even have the decency to feel ashamed of it or try to hide it from me anymore.

‘Cause I was filled with poison
But blessed with beauty and rage

Ultraviolence

Right before the 2014 new year, when I turned twenty, I vowed to myself that I would “try everything” that year, including (but not limited to) drugs, so I could set myself up with the proper self-knowledge around specific substances going into this new decade of my life. That was my genuine intent; there was no escapism involved in that resolution. But by July, it was a different story. I certainly had a lot to escape from, and with my new, self-appointed job as someone who fucks for money, I had a convenient influx of cash to keep myself consistently stocked up on my new favorite drug: freedom.

I bet you thought I was going to say cocaine, huh? Well, you’d be close, because cocaine was my new second-favorite drug, and I absolutely had the means to make sure I never ran out of that, either.

White lines, pretty daddy, going skiing
You snort it like a champ, like the winter we’re not in

Florida Kilos

When you’ve got a lot of feelings to escape from, paired with an influx of cash and all the time in the world to spend it, cocaine is your best friend. Or at least it was mine, for a few months. I’m not saying this in a bragging way; it simply was what it was. That’s what made “Florida Kilos” my first favorite song on Ultraviolence: it was more upbeat than the rest of the entire album, even though it comes in dead last on the track list, and it’s a blatant love letter to a man and the drugs Lana helps him cook (and snort), evoking the fantasy of a hot Miami romance. While Lana was willing to risk prison in the name of love, I was certainly willing to risk a lot of things in the name of getting that next hit of freedom.

Sex work is inherently dangerous. In-person sex work is doubly so. In-person sex work through an unregulated platform with zero vetting strategies for potential clients while driving my own personal vehicle to outcalls was incredibly dangerous. One of the hallmarks of addiction (to anything) is risk-taking behaviors in pursuit of one’s substance of choice. My substance of choice was freedom, and I was doing a lot of very risky things to feel that particular high.

People never die in Miami
That’s what they all say
You believe me, don’t you baby?

Florida Kilos

The wrench in my big plan to become a hugely successful slut that summer was the fact that I was in love. This will not be the last time this happens to me. I was in love with my best friend and he was in love with me and we were having the time of our lives spending my slut money through the summer. Looking back, he definitely was not prepared to be the boyfriend of a prostitute and was likely just enjoying the fruits of my labor (literally). I think I sensed this, intuitively, because I spent a lot of my summer hiding the majority of my sex work escapades from him. He would know when I was going on a sugar date, because those usually didn’t involve sex (not on the first date, anyway), but he definitely didn’t know about everything else I was doing. I knew even then that it wasn’t smart to let a boyfriend get in the way of me getting my bag, but still, I was genuinely and deeply in love, and this ate away at me. It’s very confusing for the body to go from making love in the morning with someone you’re balls-deep in New Relationship Energy with, to fucking some stranger in his Malibu apartment that night.

You’re falling hard, I push away, I’m feeling hot to the touch
You say you miss me and I wanna say I miss you so much
But something keeps me really quiet, I’m alive, I’m a lush

West Coast

The separation between my two lives, and the way I got to dance between them on a daily basis, honestly delighted me. On one hand, I had my ‘real’ life, where I had friends and a boyfriend who were doing a great job keeping me distracted from my insane dad back at home; and on the other hand, I had a wholly other life in sex work where I could distract myself from everything and everyone (both hands held an assortment of drugs at all times).

Being a bad bitch on the side
Might not appeal to fools like you

Sad Girl

I loved sex work because I got to be someone else, anyone else. Being anyone other than me was so preferred to the realities of my life, and I was also keenly aware of the temporality of the whole thing: I won’t be this young and fuckable forever. My body won’t bounce back from substance abuse so easily one day. Might as well make the most of it. Lana was writing songs that spoke to my most tangled internal narratives and running a comb through them, making them achingly clear and concise—and beautiful. Thus, this new album grew increasingly more important to me as the hottest months of the year beat on. It started to feel like some sort of narration or commentary on the events of my life as they continued to unfold.

The power of youth is on my mind
Sunsets, small town, I’m out of time

Old Money

There’s no real resolution for the events of 2014. I am still living out some of the consequences of that time. If you’re looking for happy endings, I can at least tell you that my dad is sober now and has been for several years. But things did continue to get worse for me throughout the rest of 2014, and into 2015, until I moved out of California with that same boyfriend who kissed me on his 21st birthday. He ended up being nothing special, either, but he was definitely an important part of that time in my life and I probably wouldn’t have left Los Angeles if I hadn’t been in love with him. Sometimes I wonder if he came into my life just for that reason: to save me from the underbelly of the life I thought I wanted.

Once I relocated to Portland and eventually broke up with him, I went right back into sugaring and other forms of sex work (including OnlyFans) for a few more years before officially retiring from it in 2020. Outside of the rabid vastness of Los Angeles, with her dark corners and abundance of millionaires, being a whore certainly does not hold the some enticing allure, but it did result in more meaningful and long-term connections with a handful of clients I had over the years.

A theme throughout Lana Del Rey’s entire discography (and the experiences of numerous sex workers) is the conflict between money and love. Whether real or imagined, this dichotomy comes up time and time again, and the mythology says: you can be a well-paid whore, or you can be loved, but you cannot have both simultaneously. My friend Alice wrote this incredible piece about Lana and sex work that mentions a more recent song, titled “A&W,” which details the inner mental landscape of someone who’s been selling sex for a long while, perhaps:

It’s not about having someone to love me anymore
This is the experience of being an American whore

Despite how much I felt like Ultraviolence was my own personal soundtrack for many years, I can see my own growth now in the fact that I am the type of person who chooses love. When true love appeared to me again, I did not make the mistake of thinking it was getting in the way of the life I wanted. The choices that followed me choosing love have resulted in the life I actually wanted. I no longer seek to destroy myself before others can get the chance; I no longer want to live separate lives in an attempt to avoid myself.

The sun also rises on those who fail the call
My life, it comprises of losses and wins and fails and falls

Money Power Glory

I thought sex work was my ticket to a life of my own design, but the fundamental relationship I had with it in California was one of escapism and separation from the self. The abusive relationships I had back in 2014, with my father and drugs and money and the city of Los Angeles, felt so achingly beautiful at the time, even when I was mired in the sadness of it all, because I had a place to go, a way to retreat into the music.

Nostalgia gives us an opportunity to plunge the depths of the past with a certain amount of emotional padding—the rose-tinted lenses associated with nostalgia may actually be a protective balm when doing the “4th house work” of peering into your own personal history. I had to be reminded of all the anger and inner turmoil I was experiencing a decade ago; in my mind, I only recall it as a beautiful, albeit tumultuous time.

What Lana Del Rey did for my 20-year-old self with Ultraviolence was give her permission to interact with her shadow, the parts that craved all of this darkness and dissonance and chaos. Ultraviolence terraformed my internal narratives and gave them a backdrop, a way to conceptualize everything outside of my control as a great drama playing out on a stage of my own creation. In a way, its darkness held space for my own, so I could survive a very, very strange time in my life.

Thank you for reading.

I am closing my books for live 4th house readings on June 17th; book yours by the 15th here.

Homecoming: The 4th House and The Art of Returning Home to Yourself

Mini 4th house readings

A planet “rejoicing” in a house simply means the significations of that planet are aligned with the significations of that house. Saturn is said to rejoice in the 12th house because the themes of the 12th house align well with the essential nature of Saturn.

The 12th house is a “dark house” in the natal chart due to its aversion to the ascendant, where we find themes like isolation, the edges of reality, self-undoing, hidden enemies, prisons, hospitals, and a general lack of autonomy. In the time before telescopes, Saturn was at the edge of our visible universe. Due to this, as well as the fact that Saturn takes 30 years to circle the sun, we often find Saturnian significations including things like boundaries, isolation, reality, time(keeping), and all which exists in antiquity.

History, legacy, and the past are often associated with Saturn due to its position as timekeeper of the visible universe. However, the 4th house is also associated with these things. In my book Homecoming, I describe the 4th house-10th house axis as a “time continuum,” where the past and the future co-mingle. Saturn’s connection to time and the past is the basis of my argument for his rejoicing in the 4th.

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My work with the 4th house is an act of devotion to Saturn, who is the ruler of my own 4th house and final dispositor of my chart. Saturn is also my malefic out of sect. I have experienced the harshness of a strong Saturn in a night chart having domain over my foundations. But I’ve also come to appreciate the unique nature of time in the 4th house through working with Saturn in this way.

The 4th house is a black hole in the way that it bends time and devours matter.

In the film Interstellar, a character falls into a black hole and finds themselves inside of a tesseract. The root of the word “tesseract” is the Greek word for the number four. In that same film, the wormhole in the universe that allows this to happen in located right next to (you guessed it) Saturn.

I think of the 4th house like a tesseract of your own invention. If the 4th house were a physical place you could step into, it would resemble a four-dimensional cube containing every moment of your life, both outside of time and containing all of time. If you could walk around in there, where would you go first? When would you go? My 4th house sessions are an attempt at exploring that tesseract with you, going whenever you need to go to communicate with your former & future selves.

The common thread that runs throughout time, and is central to the plot line of Interstellar, is love. A lot of the time we are digging around in the 4th house looking for the answer to a question that can only be answered by love. And most of the time, the ache we feel about digging around in the 4th house is the ache of not having been loved properly when it mattered most.

And the only place to go from there is inward.

So you fall into the tesseract, searching through time for the story, any story, that will prove you worthy of that love. And I’m here, looking at your birth chart, showing you how your worthiness has been the only story all along. Sometimes we just need time.

Thank you for reading.

Homecoming: The 4th House and The Art of Coming Home to Yourself is available now.

For as long as I can remember, my insides have been filled with a cacophony of voices, many of them seemingly at odds with each other, all of them vying for the privilege of driving the car (my brain). Sometimes, one of these voices gets to drive the car—make decisions—for weeks or months at a time. But most of the time, the question of who is in charge has a different answer by the day, sometimes by the hour.

Before I could name it, I knew that all of these voices were me. I could feel that in my body. They were all different versions of me, but even the sum of their parts never felt like it added up to one whole, complete, cohesive me.

In my twenties, when I fell down the rabbit hole of self-improvement and manifestation via an MLM I spent 5 years in, I thought I had found a name for these conflicting voices. I finally felt relief, knowing I could put a finger on what I’d been experiencing for the majority of my life.

I called it “self-sabotage.”

Of course! That’s what it was! I was trying to predict the outcome of a situation because the unknown heaven is scarier than the known hell, so the times when I made choices even I didn’t understand were just me subconsciously sabotaging myself so that I could remain in my loop of predictability and struggle. It was comfortable to me to struggle, and I needed to improve myself so that I was no longer comfortable with struggle. I was meant to become comfortable with ease and success and abundance, not lack or fear or mediocrity.

In short, I simply was my own biggest problem, and I needed to be fixed. It gave me a project. Something to do. It allowed me to tap into self-compassion for the first time in my life by telling myself, “You’re sabotaging to keep yourself safe. It’s natural for you to lean into what’s familiar. You just haven’t experienced this new version of safe yet. Keep going and you’ll get there.”

Just keep going.
Be consistent.
One percent better every day.
The only thing you need in order to succeed is consistency.
Say your affirmations every day, eventually you won’t feel like you’re lying to yourself.
It takes three weeks to form a new habit.
You can change your life with just 6 months of consistency.
The only thing standing in your way is you.
If you can’t be consistent for 90 days, you won’t succeed at anything.
Don’t ever, ever, ever give up.

The “coaching and mentorship” environment I was steeped in set me up perfectly to believe all of my problems and inconsistencies were due to self-sabotage.

Nobody ever stopped to ask me why my brain was seemingly working so hard to foil any “progress” I had made, why I was so “afraid” of success. And I don’t blame them. They weren’t trained professionals. They weren’t therapists. They were just people, maybe a few rungs up the ladder from me, but all of us on the same ladder regardless.

Shortly after I left that MLM, in 2020, I dug deeper into my astrological studies than I ever had before. Shocking turn of events, I know. But prior to 2018, I had never actually seen my own birth chart, only heard tidbits about it from my godmother’s mother, who makes hand-drawn birth charts for all the babies that are born in her family.

The first thing that stands out about my natal chart is the pileup of planets in the 4th house. I knew the 4th house was about family and traditions, which was puzzling to me. I had a family, but had never felt super close to them, and “traditional” is not a word that anyone who knows me would ever use to describe me.

It’s a common complaint I hear from other 4th housers: the information available in books and online provides a very narrow view of the 4th house. It’s mostly about fathers and land and death and core psychological needs. Our foundations. Our ancestry. And that’s all fine and good, but if none of those topics are relevant, then it leaves many folks feeling discouraged and further confused about the significance of their 4th house placements.

Between 2022 and 2024, I consulted with more than 80 people in 4th house-focused natal chart readings. The patterns and observations that emerged from these sessions completely revolutionized my understanding of the 4th house, as well as confirmed many hypotheses I had formed about the 4th house—one in particular being my hypotheses that it’s not only our ancestors who linger in this subterranean space, but our former selves as well, and all of the lives that go unlived over the course of a single human lifetime. Think Sylvia Plath’s fig tree. All of the fallen figs are hanging out in your 4th house.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The 4th house is, I would dare to say, moreso about the past than it is about simply your biological family or your childhood (although childhood is in the past for most of us). And when people are courageous enough to begin 4th house work, they often find that those many versions of themselves are simply there as a type of guide or counsel, much like the way some folks work with their ancestors.

There’s wisdom in your 5-year-old self and your 12-year-old self and your 21-year-old self and all the selves who never came to fruition. They’re there, accessible through the 4th house, to speak to you and offer you their perspectives. Sometimes, they might speak extra loudly. Sometimes, the things they say or the advice they offer can be wrong. Or, such as in my case, all of these selves may feel like they’re at war with one another, each one vying for the chance to drive the car.

Another way to describe this would be internal family systems. This therapy model was coined by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s and is rooted in the idea of the multiplicity of the psyche, which recognizes the existence of various substructures within the psyche, akin to Freud's id, ego, and superego, as well as Jung's archetypes and complexes. Schwartz's theory posits the existence of internal "parts" or "subpersonalities" within each individual, whose interactions shape their inner world.

When I first learned about this therapy model, I immediately felt a sense of familiarity in my body. Like, without even knowing what it was (outside of its name), I understood how and why it worked. I had done plenty of hours of talk therapy throughout my teens and early twenties, and while there were some benefits to those experiences, it never seemed to address the whole of me (later, in my own experiences with IFS therapy, I recognized that there is a huge part of me that intellectualizes and can talk about almost anything at length to avoid addressing anything of true consequence).

Upon further exploration, I’ve noticed several common threads and themes between what I have been calling “4th house work,” which is the work of returning home to yourself and creating a safe inner world, and internal family systems, which is sometimes referred to as “parts work”.

1. Time travel: 4th house work and parts work both require you to visit your past selves, seek their wisdom, and occasionally reparent them. Astrology in general is a study of time, and the 4th house is where you go when you’re referencing your personal past or the legacies that have formed you. In parts work, sometimes your parts can be very young, and they can form as a result of the developmental freeze that occurs at a point of past trauma. Either way, you’re delving deep into the past and engaging with your former selves whenever you engage with either of these modalities.

2. Integration of the self: Through astrology, you can conceptualize your individual placements as the various parts of yourself that express themselves at different times and in different ways, just as you can with your different internal parts. Some choose to make it their goal to integrate their astrological placements by embodying all of their best qualities, and some people choose to do parts work for the purpose of allowing their truest, most compassionate self to take a permanent seat in the driver’s position.

3. Inner worlds: Sometimes, these types of self-exploration can be referred to as depth work, because in all cases, you’re going deep into yourself. You’re returning to yourself, even. There’s something deeply poignant about connecting with your inner child or inner teenager and feeling a sense of homecoming or return. The “home” aspect of that comes from intentionally exploring, developing, and creating your inner worlds, something that is accessible through both 4th house work and parts work.

You don’t have to have a lot of (or any) 4th house placements to do 4th house work or explore IFS therapy. I also don’t think one can fully replace the other, but working with them in tandem could have many benefits.

The concept of self-sabotage isn’t incorrect or wrong. It simply wasn’t helping me the way I thought it was. In reality, there were several parts of myself that simply did not feel safe when I was trying new things and attempting to wire my brain for maximum productivity and constant self-improvement—not to mention, I didn’t even know that I had Autism or ADHD back then. That’s a whole other can of worms, though.

Telling myself that I was subconsciously sabotaging any chance I had at stability wasn’t helping me to trust myself. In fact, it was leading me in the opposite direction. How can I trust myself to make the right decisions or handle the demands of my life when the story I’ve accepted about myself is that my brain will automatically attempt to ruin anything I do? How does that promote cohesion between the conflicting voices, my parts, and lead me closer to my most authentic expression?

Learning about my natal chart and exploring the 4th house (thank you to all the brave and powerful souls who have allowed me to be the light in the basement for them) has helped me trust myself more by controlling the things I actually do have control over, and not trying to take responsibility anywhere it’s not asked of me.

Many things about your life are predetermined, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have free will. Exploring your 4th house allows you to identify the inevitable, those parts of you which cannot change—like your family of origin or the stories that shaped your identity or the things that happened to you as a child—and focus your energy on the things that can be changed.

When doing parts work, you also must confront the things about your life that are unchangeable, and address the parts of you who are determined to make decisions on your behalf. It’s not about fixing anything or silencing anyone, but creating a safe place within yourself for all of those parts to feel heard and cared for. An inner sanctum, a private world, a cerebral fortress.

The things about me that are unchangeable are also the foundations upon which my life has unfolded—even if some of those foundations are shaky or traumatic. The parts of me that exist within, my many selves, are there to protect me—even if I don’t always agree with their methods.

I love myself, and I love my life. Therefore, I embrace the many conflicting voices within me that all want to drive the car. I offer them love and compassion and patience and discipline. I explain to some of them that they aren’t old enough to drive, but that doesn’t mean their voices won’t be heard.

Explore your 4th house with me

Thank you for reading. My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available now.

The Rise of Chappell Roan

Chappell is a Pisces sun, Sagittarius moon, and Libra rising, with her chart ruler, Venus, residing in Capricorn, her 4th house. In other words, Chappell is what I affectionately call a 4th houser: anyone with a high concentration of 4th house placements and/or their chart ruler in the 4th house of their natal chart—or really, anyone who feels a strong connection to their own 4th house. We have this information thanks to Chappell herself, who shared a list of her placements on her TikTok, which was then loosely rectified based on the house division in the original image she posted. I’m a whole sign girlie, so this is the chart I’ll be using for the purposes of this piece, with the estimated birth time:

Though the degrees of the angles here won’t be exact, we can quickly observe that her chart ruler Venus, in addition to being in her 4th house, is also very close to her IC, or Imum Coeli. Pallas Augustine describes the IC as a place of belonging, which is going to be an important theme in the story of Chappell Roan’s success.

Another notable aspect of Chappell’s chart is her moon-Pluto conjunction in Sagittarius, her third house. This moon, which rules her Midheaven and thus influences her public reputation, tells a story of subversion and transformation that has ultimately led to her burgeoning fame. More on that later.

While growing up in rural Missouri, Chappell was exposed to a very conservative Christian culture—the middle of the United States has garnered the nickname “The Bible Belt” for good reason—and experienced a lot of strife and depression during her teenage years, especially in her home life. “I didn’t have the best relationship with my parents,” Chappell says of this period. “I would lie to them about where I was and what I was doing. It really damaged the trust between us.”

Chappell’s first EP, School Nights, was released on September 22nd, 2017, and through its mature lyrics and dark, moody arrangements, it’s pretty obvious that young Chappell was Going Through Some Things. “I was thinking about death a lot around this time. I was depressed and confused about a lot of things,” said Chappell. These five songs explore themes like: fearing death, feeling alone in the world, having unsatisfying sex with guys, the boredom of being in a non-toxic relationship, telling a partner you love them when you don’t, and just a general sense of malaise and agony that seems far too heavy a burden for someone so young to bear. Her transits for the date of this release tell a similar story:

When School Nights was released, there was a stellium of planets in Chappell’s 12th house. The 12th house is a place in the natal chart that speaks of isolation and self-undoing, so it makes sense to see these themes reflected so heavily in this EP. The 12th house is also where Saturn rejoices, and this is where things get interesting.

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Though Saturn at the time of her EP’s release was in the final decan of Sagittarius, a safe distance from Chappell’s moon-Pluto conjunction at 7 degrees Sagittarius, the influence of this malefic planet is all over School Nights—and the beginnings of Chappell’s period of self-discovery, or homecoming, as I call it.

If we assume that Chappell was writing and recording the songs on School Nights in the 2-3 years immediately preceding its release, then she would have been experiencing transit Saturn conjunct her Sagittarius moon during a large chunk of the process. Saturn transits to your natal moon are times that are typically marked by “loneliness, feeling unsupported, struggling to manage extra pressure or responsibilities, and wondering how much longer you can manage with the weight of a current situation,” according to Kelly Surtees. While a conjunction is a particularly potent aspect, there’s also the opening square, where Saturn is 3 signs ahead of your moon; the opposition (6 signs away), and the closing square (3 signs behind your moon). These transits all take place over a single Saturn cycle, which lasts 28-30 years.

Saturn is the planetary ruler of Chappell’s 4th house—also known as her L4. While Saturn was in Sagittarius, it was sitting exactly one sign behind her 4th house, Capricorn. In derivative houses, the 3rd house can be conceptualized as the 12th house of the 4th house. The layering of house meanings in this way is what makes derivative houses so much fun, but I digress. This “12th house aspect” doubles down on the Saturnian significations of this time period for Chappell: if the 4th house is where you come home to yourself, and the 12th house is where you’re unable to see yourself clearly, then School Nights exemplifies a period of teenage isolation and wanting to know one’s self deeply, but lacking the proper awareness or tools to do so.

In the months leading up to the release of School Nights, Chappell traveled (along with her parents) back and forth from Missouri to New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville in order to support her honing her musical craft. While this certainly gave her a leg up, it also resulted in an accelerated loss of innocence for Chappell, which is another 12th house theme: “I didn’t know the consequences of how much I had to sacrifice. I didn’t do my senior year. I didn’t go to prom. I didn’t go to graduation. I missed a lot of what would have been the end of my childhood to do this job.”

The swift transition from adolescence to adulthood continued for Chappell when she moved to Los Angeles by herself at the beginning of 2018. She’s been quoted numerous times discussing the difficulty she had expressing her authentic self in the Midwest: “I felt so out of place in my hometown. I wish it was better. I wish I had better things to say. But mentally, I had a really tough time.” For Chappell, moving to Los Angeles seemed like a natural next step in her music career, but astrologically speaking, the next 5 years would be a period of huge 4th house activations for her, underscoring the intense personal revolution she was about to experience.

2018-2019: The Underground Years

In my years of research and practice within the 4th house, the theme of “homecoming,” or coming home to oneself, has emerged loud and clear. Anyone can do this work (not just 4th housers), and it’s important to know that it’s not necessarily about a physical place called “home,” but rather the feeling of home and how each of us can cultivate that feeling inside of ourselves. In Chappell Roan’s journey thus far, her move to Los Angeles opened up a world of possibility and expression for her, allowing her to come home to herself—but it wasn’t always a cozy process.

“LA is difficult for anyone who moves here for the first year especially. I had a difficult time making friends. LA is hard. It's expensive. I wanted to go home 1000 times,” said Chappell about her initiation to life in Southern California. Though she initially went on tour with Declan McKenna in early 2018 and seemed to be gathering momentum, Chappell’s Instagram went completely dark for over 18 months after she arrived in California. This period is what I refer to as Chappell’s underground years.

On the day of her final post, April 2, 2018, Mars and Saturn were forming an exact conjunction in Chappell’s 4th house. The confluence of these super-powered malefic energies (Saturn is at home in Capricorn and Mars is exalted in Capricorn), alongside Pluto transiting her natal Venus at the same time, sheds some light on the heaviness and darkness of that time.

In the process of homecoming, most people experience a period of self-exile, or self-imposed isolation, that allows them to retreat even further into themselves. The 12th house, where Saturn rejoices, signifies isolation and exile, but the difference with the 4th house is the amount of agency and self-determination you have. 12th house isolation is usually experienced against your will, but 4th house self-isolation is done as an act of self-protection, protest, or as a means of getting closer to yourself.

Getting comfortable with solitude is a core tenet of 4th house work, so while I can’t pretend to know what Chappell was going through during her underground years, the choice to remove herself from social media can absolutely be seen as a form of retreat or self-exile. On top of that, Saturn was about to form a closing square to her natal Saturn, ushering in a period of distinctly Saturnian experiences that directly impacted Chappell’s inner world—delay, deprivation, isolation, limits, boundaries, and harsh realities.

Though Chappell often speaks of her time in Los Angeles as a time that opened up her world, that outcome seems to be hard-fought. “I feel allowed to be who I want to be here. That changed everything,” she says, citing her experiences as a young adult in West Hollywood, being welcomed with open arms by the drag community and openly exploring her queerness for the first time. “I just felt overwhelmed with complete love and acceptance, and from then on I started writing songs as the real me.”

This is a fitting thing to say for someone experiencing a personal homecoming, but we can also see this reflected in the first post Chappell made when she did eventually return to social media, on December 13th, 2019:

A note from Chappell reads, “Hi! I’ve been gone for a while because I needed time to gather myself so I can create things I love,” in her own purple handwriting, surrounded by a border of hand-drawn pink and purple hearts. It seems that Chappell was able to do some valuable inner work during her time of self-exile and was now preparing to re-introduce herself to the world. In other words, Chappell’s homecoming had begun. And, as the world was about to discover, she had also been hard at work creating music with a refreshingly authentic, pop-forward sound.

When Chappell made her first Instagram post after more than a year and a half of radio silence, she was having her Venus return in Capricorn, which just so happened to be conjunct Saturn. This is a stark contrast to the astrology of Chappell’s exit from the public eye, which had Mars conjunct Saturn. Jupiter, the ruler of Chappell’s natal sun, is also in her 4th house in this new chart, emphasizing how much Chappell was truly coming into her truest expression from a place of genuine self-trust.

In the spring of 2020, Chappell released her first new single in years, “Pink Pony Club,” heralding the beginning of her new, glittery, pop-princess era, which was more of a rebirth than a rebrand. However, Saturn was not done having their say, because the pandemic was fresh on the scene and a shimmering club banger was not what the masses needed. Just a month later, Chappell was dropped from her label and forced to take on her music career as a fully independent artist, which also meant making a literal homecoming to her birthplace of Willard, Missouri, where she juggled several odd jobs while chipping away at her biggest project yet: her debut album.

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2020-2021: Saturnian Trials & Errors

It’s fitting that Chappell’s next single, “California,” which is rife with 4th house themes, came out when Chappell had actually returned to her hometown. The lyrics in this song perfectly reflect the astrology of the time, as well: Saturn had finally ingressed to Aquarius (Chappell’s 5th house), which reflected her re-emergence into the music scene after her period of self-exile, but at the time of the song’s release, Saturn was retrograde and on the precipice of returning to Capricorn. To me, this is deeply symbolic of the yearning to return to a familiar place, especially when things become difficult, which they certainly had become. On top of losing her label’s support, Chappell was also dumped by a long-time partner during this period. I would imagine that at this time, it was pretty difficult for Chappell to feel like she was making any forward progress in her dreams.

Come get me out of California
No leaves are brown
I miss the seasons in Missouri
My dying town
Thought I'd be cool in California
I'd make you proud
To think I almost had it going
But I let you down

It was also during this literal homecoming that Chappell received a bipolar diagnosis, which shed a lot of light on her struggles throughout her teenage years and provided her with a path forward to treat her symptoms. Another theme of the 12th house is mental illness and the subconscious mind, and since Saturn rejoices in the 12th house, we can call this a malefic win, of sorts.

According to her Wikipedia page, Chappell did not formally release any singles in the entirety of 2021. While this may seem like an omen of doom for her career, from an astrological perspective it makes a lot of sense. The tender and fertile ground of her 4th and 5th houses was being tilled and fertilized and properly watered as Jupiter and Saturn both made their ways through Aquarius. Remember, Saturn rules Chappell’s 4th house and Jupiter rules her sun, so her core identity and the needs associated with that identity were undergoing intense excavations. The thing about 4th house stuff—internal revolutions and the like—is that during the most intense periods of transformation, it often seems to everyone else like nothing at all is happening. However, once you emerge on the other side and bring yourself back out into the world, the changes are extremely apparent. And, as the world was about to see in the following years, Chappell had undergone some pretty magical internal revolutions, and she was ready to let her freak flag fly.

2022-Present: The Homecoming of a Midwest Princess

In contrast to the quietness of Chappell’s 2021, she released a total of four new singles throughout 2022, which revealed a more pop-infused sound, as well as Chappell’s penchant for “tender, nostalgic” lyricism and musical style. In fact, the past seems to be a cornerstone of Chappell’s modern sound: she has stated that she takes inspiration directly from Madonna, Lady Gaga, Lana del Rey, Cyndi Lauper, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Stevie Nicks, and Lorde, just to name a few.

The other notable 4th house occurrence for Chappell in 2022 was moving back to LA to begin working on her album in earnest, after spending her time back in Missouri depressed, working at a drive through while writing snippets of songs in her notes app. “It felt like I needed to get out of Missouri to finish the rest of the songs that needed to be written,” she says of the decision to move back to Los Angeles. By March of 2022, Chappell signed a publishing deal and was able to begin working on her album with her favorite cowriter and producer, Dan Nigro.

“Naked in Manhattan,” Chappell’s first single of 2022, was released on the day of an exact Venus-Mars conjunction in Capricorn, a mere week before another Venus return for Chappell. This is a fitting transit to mark the next chapter in her homecoming story: first, the Mars-Saturn conjunction in her 4th, then the Venus-Saturn conjunction, and now Venus-Mars. However, this time, the transits seem to represent a more wholly integrated Chappell, having begun to bring her truest self-expression (Venus ruling her 1st house) to the world (Mars ruling her 7th house).

Throughout the rest of 2022, Chappell was busy, releasing three more singles while opening for Olivia Rodrigo and Fletcher on their respective tours. As Saturn continued marching through her 5th house, Chappell was on a roll, as she also released full music videos for each of her singles. It was clear that her underground years had begun to produce fruit, and as she embraced more of her most authentic, queer, glittery, girly expression, Chappell herself was truly breaking through the soil.

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On top of seeking to create a space where queerness and silliness and joy reign supreme with her live performances, Chappell goes to great lengths in every aspect of her work to honor and take inspiration from her roots and her own personal past. As a matter of fact, in the trailer for her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, she says in a voiceover, “Where I grew up, here, is in me no matter what. However I wanna portray myself as Chappell, I will forever be from Willard, Missouri.”

In the mini-documentary that follows, the first episode (aptly titled “Homecoming”) opens with Chappell wading in a creek, catching frogs and reflecting aloud on the peace and tranquility of her hometown in comparison to Los Angeles. The next scene is Chappell digging through a storage unit and unearthing relics of her past, such as childhood baptism photos and a pink electric guitar. The 4th house is all over Chappell’s narration in this documentary: she discusses how she felt that her first album had to honor the place she was from, “no matter how I feel about it. It’s always gonna be a part of me.”

When it comes to the 4th house and our most foundational influences in life, I always conjure up the imagery of a rubber band. If you put a thumbtack on a surface and place the rubber band around it, then everything the rubber band can do and become is immediately about the location of that thumbtack.

The rubber band can stretch itself to its limits in an attempt to get away from the thumbtack, but it will snap back in an instant if that force is relinquished. The rubber band can adapt to being stretched to its capacity, over time, and sometimes this is necessary. Sometimes that type of pressure is what’s required. But the thumbtack is what roots the rubber band and provides it with a central point of origin.

This isn’t to say that we are all doomed to become exactly like our parents or live in our hometowns forever or repeat the mistakes of our former selves or anything like that. This is to further illustrate the 4th house as the ultimate point of reference for each individual life. Chappell recognized that she needed to leave her hometown in order to stretch her capacity and discover new versions of herself, but the stark contrast between her colorful, queer identity and her rural Christian roots is precisely what makes her journey and her vision so fascinating. I’m sure to many folks, she represents the outcome of being that rubber band and getting stretched to the point of snapping back and giving up, understanding why many people do end up remaining where they’re from, and honoring their unlived lives vicariously through her.

In fact, Chappell wanted to honor her roots so much that she ended up naming her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which wouldn’t be released until September 2023, six years to the day after School Nights was released.

What’s truly beautiful about Chappell’s transits for this album release is the relative emptiness of her 4th house; the only planet occupying Capricorn at the time was Pluto. This is another serendipitous parallel to the release date for School Nights, because Pluto was also the only planet in Capricorn that day. And where was Saturn, ruler of the 4th house and harbinger of each of Chappell’s personal and artistic revolutions? Over in Pisces, conjunct her sun. Venus, the ruler of Chappell’s entire chart, is perched in Leo, her 11th house, doubling down on the solar themes for this album. Not only do we see a Chappell Roan who knows herself, she also seems to trust deeply in herself—and in her ability to make damn good art.

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess isn’t entirely autobiographical and it’s not entirely fiction, either; it’s a stylized journey through Chappell’s self-discovery and initiation into her own queerness. Outside of the 4th house themes we’ve already covered, like honoring her roots and hometown, Chappell also has a lot of lyrics that reference specific places, like Manhattan or Tennessee or California or a fictional nightclub that may or may not be based on The Abbey. She also evokes a sense of nostalgia on many different levels, whether it’s reminiscing on Mean Girls and a specific type of teenage freedom or through stylistic choices in her music that transport you to another time.

Nostalgia is all about a yearning for the past—whether that yearning is healthy or not. In the case of Chappell’s music from 2022 to now, you can’t help but feel that twinge when you listen. Whether it’s the synth-y, club-ready beats on “Naked in Manhattan,” or a Mazzy Star-inspired ballad like “Casual,” or a straight-up EDM banger that sounds like it came right out of 1991, such as “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” it’s sometimes hard to remember what decade you’re in as you experience Chappell’s music. And that’s intentional.

All of Chappell Roan’s music this far seems to be an homage to her younger self as much as it is an homage to her pop idols. “I feel like I’m honoring the five-year-old version of myself who wanted to dress up like that,” says Chappell of her over-the-top, drag-inspired aesthetic on stage and in her music videos. She’s also spoken about her experiences with inner child therapy and how much it has helped her to connect to her artistry in a more innocent and silly way. Chappell asks the question, “What did little me want?” and then creates from the answers she receives. To me, that is one of the most potent questions you can ask when you’re doing inner child work—which, coincidentally, overlaps a lot with 4th house work and internal family systems.

Chappell Roan is one of my favorite examples in recent history of what it looks like to truly move through a 4th house season and embrace solitude as a means of coming home to yourself. With her chart ruler in her 4th house, I reckon that Chappell will continue to create music that is simultaneously modern and nostalgic. I also would guess that as she approaches her Saturn return in her 7th house, she may begin writing more explicitly about her experiences with dating and relationships as a full-fledged queer adult woman.

Everything she creates seems to come from within a vibrant and detailed and exciting inner world—but of course, nobody else but Chappell will ever know exactly what that inner world looks, sounds, and feels like. The luxury of interacting with a 4th houser’s art, in my opinion, is the small glimpses it allows you into their inner realm. They’re always pulling from the past as they’re consciously creating the future. And we are all so lucky to experience Chappell Roan.

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Thank you for reading. My 4th house guidebook, Homecoming, is available here.

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Romantic attachments have never been all that mysterious to me. It’s friendship I’ve had to figure out. It feels like a code I must decipher, a language I cannot yet speak—not fluently, anyway.

Of course, I’ve had friends. I have friends.  I’ve lost friendships and I’ve built friendships and the friendships I maintain today are incredibly precious to me. Not precious like a gem but precious like a newborn puppy: fresh, tender, fumbling. Feet too big for the body.

I do still feel stumbly when approaching the possibility of a friendship. I feel as nervous as one would when imagining the first connection with a new lover. I want to Do Well and Be Good; I want to impress them with my openness and my humor and my ability to love. I also desperately, viscerally need my friendships to be a place where no masking is required. And for some reason, these desires have always seemed at odds to me.

And then there are The Fears. I’ve had friends who were assumed to be permanent disappear from my life overnight with no explanation—some of my friends with therapists have told me this is called abandonment. I’ve been jolted into the realization that an entire friendship I had entered was predicated on my own pretending, spurred on by my own loneliness, and that this person was an enemy hiding in plain sight. And if I’m pretending around you, we aren’t really friends. But the point is, I stopped trusting myself to even find good friends, despite this burning desire to be a good friend.

Friendship is something I think about all the time. I turn it over and over in my head like a Rubik’s cube. It’s a puzzle to me. Though I’ve stopped wondering what I have to offer anymore, I still become confused at the question of what others would want to offer me—or more specifically, the idea that anyone would want to offer me anything at all. Worthiness wounding runs deep. I’m working on it.

I have a place to put my romantic love; that is a riddle I have solved. But this platonic love that startles me with its grip around my heart is vagrant, wandering, searching for a home. Many homes.

There is a type of “falling in love” that happens when a friendship is born, and somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that nobody could fall in platonic love with me. But I don’t want to carry that kind of energy around and place it at other people’s feet so they can prove me wrong. I don’t want to be the lost puppy who gets taken in out of pity. I want to be celebrated. I want to be thought of in spontaneous moments. I want to be a vital part of something, anything, for someone else. But mostly I just want to feel safe to put my bags down and unpack all of this Love.

I have had many days that did not feel like gifts. I’ve lived through days that felt like burdens. There have been many days that I would have rather skipped or just not woken up for. The idea that every day is a gift sounded like something only really comfortable people living really easy lives would say. Then, something changed.

What changed was that I experienced a mother’s love for the first time, and suddenly I understood this seemingly trite mantra in a way I never had before. Every day I remained pregnant was a gift: one more day cooking safely in the oven. Even when my son came 6 weeks early, suddenly every day was a gift because I got to be with him and hold him and smell him and he was alive and so was I. I got 42 extra days with him and each one of them was the greatest day of my life.

Today, as I was sitting in my car during my lunch break at work, my grief finally overflowed. I broke down crying. There are too many parents who will never know another day with their children. The images of shell-shocked children trembling from acts of egregious violence are burned into my mind. I put my arm around my son’s tiny shoulders every day and they’re so delicate, so small and soft and the perfect size to be cradled. Lately, all I can think about is those children in Palestine and their quivering shoulders, the arms that can never wrap around them again. I think about children ripped to shreds in my own country by guns that shouldn’t even exist, let alone be placed in the hands of a person. I wrap my arms around my son’s tiny body and feel the pain of so many mothers carving holes in my stomach, an unfathomable pain that reverberates so loudly across the collective these days that it’s hard for me to hear anything else.

There’s no right or wrong way to grieve.

But you have to grieve.

You can do it publicly or in solitude. You can throw yourself headfirst into it or you can take it in bite-sized pieces. You can allow grief to destroy you and you can allow it to make you whole again. But you have to grieve.

I could go into detail about the reasons why I believe the society I live in has no practices in place for healthy grieving, but other, smarter people have done that already. I want to skip to the part everyone gets to eventually, which is that we’ve been conditioned to grieve in a particular way (or not at all) and that way is more conducive to maintaining the status quo than it is conducive to actual resolution and acceptance. At the core of it all is the fact that we cannot resolve, nor can we accept the conditions of the present moment, and to make grieving culturally acceptable would mean confronting the horrors of the present moment—and even our participation in them.

That’s why you have to grieve. All the reasons it would be more convenient for us all to ignore the gnawing sensation of loss in the air are the same reasons why we must allow ourselves to grieve.

Every day is a gift, and I see that now. I’m only able to recognize that because I’ve opened myself up to grief. There is grief inherently within love, and when it comes to a mother’s love, that grief is colored by the knowledge that there are so many things which can keep you from tucking your babies safely into bed for another night. Togetherness is so tenuous, and it becomes more obvious as the needs of your children change and thus alter the very nature of your relationship. Each morning is an initiation. Each night is a small death. And every day is a gift.

As an astrologer, I couldn’t help but to think about the 4th house and the themes it contains, such as heritage and foundations and family, the entire time I was devouring this show over the past 2 months (yes, I was late—I’ve been busy). The theme of legacy is obviously very prevalent in Succession, and ultimately we see our main characters lose or give up their “birthright,” but the legacy of their choices echoes hollowly when we see each of the 3 competing Roy siblings for the final time. Roman is alone in a crowded room, accompanied by a substance of choice; Shiv is resigned to her fate as a wife to a figurehead; and Kendall is… empty.

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Legacy is often discussed as a 10th house topic in terms of the legacies we aim to leave, but it is just as much a 4th house topic in terms of the legacies we cannot escape. Jeremy Strong had this to say about Kendall and his father’s legacy: “I remember going to the writers' room […] and seeing all the note cards on the wall. And at the very top was this question of: can you escape legacy? Does it define you? And by escaping it, are you still defined by it?” And that’s the rub: even in escaping or differentiating yourself from a legacy you didn’t choose, your path is still defined by that differentiation. In aiming for the opposite of something, that which you oppose is always going to be a point of reference.

Kendall tried many times to escape his legacy, before attempting to embrace it, and in both approaches, his father was the center of his universe. Logan was the reference point in the 4th house that cannot be ignored or treated as a non-factor when it is, in fact, THE factor. “The funeral oration about, ‘My God, I hope that it's in me, his life force and his vigor and his terrible energy’-I was gonna say that Kendall doesn't possess it, but I think by the end we see that he has become a version of his father. There is a ruthlessness in him,” said Strong about his character’s aspiration to become his father—or, at times, become the very opposite. Both are attempts at individuating from the 4th house, a process we all must go through.

“He's trying to individuate, I think, in a certain way, but he has never been able to escape the tractor beam of his father. I wanted for him so badly to […] just leave it all. But he couldn't do that.”

In the case of this fictional character, the true differentiation point doesn’t get to occur until both his father and his company are yanked from his grasp. In the final scenes of Succession, we have seen exactly how Kendall has become like his father, in all his terrible energy, but we also see the difference between them: Logan was a patriarch and corporate giant, and Kendall can’t be either one. This is a devastating expression of the journey of individuating from 4th house influences, but an astute one.

The influences in your 4th house, for better or for worse, are a fixed point. They are not going to change. Your personal histories and the lineages you sprang from are out of your control. You do not get to choose who or what molds you at your most malleable, and you alone are tasked with continuing forward with these forces in tow. Making peace with your 4th house and the planets who occupy it means loosening your grasp on resentment for that which you cannot change and choosing responsibility for what you can change and the parts of your legacy you can exercise control over. The stories instilled in you and repeated to you don’t have to be the same stories you go on to create. Getting cozy with your 4th house means understanding each of the energies in it are allies, guiding and encouraging you as you figure out how to come home to yourself. Their legacy doesn’t need to be the same legacy you leave, but you have been shaped by their legacy regardless. The 4th house contains that which is inescapable, even if you do manage to escape from it—or in Kendall’s case, even if you’re abandoned by it.

My beloved 4th house offering, RELIC, is retiring. You can book a reading with me (at a discount) any time between now and May 31st at 11:59 pm PST.

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this Saturn return is occurring in my 5th house of children, creativity, and pleasure. my entire life, as soon as I learned about Saturn returns, I knew I would become a mother during mine. before I knew about astrology, before I had ever looked at my birth chart, I felt an affinity towards Saturn that I couldn’t explain. when I was 15 (Saturn opposition), I started writing poems about the moon. what I’m getting at is: it’s always been there. even when we aren’t conscious of the astrology that’s happening, it’s still happening. 

my son was born 6 weeks earlier than anticipated, which threw off all of the chart predictions I had made for him, but also meant he came out with a natal chart eerily similar to mine. when I anticipated a Pisces or Aries sun with a strong Jupiter influence, what I got was an Aquarius sun with the same Saturnian overtones and 4th house emphasis as me. and now here we are, a year later, and these two momentous milestones are happening concurrently. there’s no way I could have planned this, because nobody ever expects that their pregnancy will be cut short, but every time I think about today, I am humbled and brought to my knees with the synchronicity of it all. 

every cliché they tell you about having children is true. you will never be fully prepared. you will experience a love beyond words and beyond worlds. babies do arrive exactly when they’re meant to. you will lose sleep but you won’t remember that part; you’ll remember the ocean of oxytocin and the small, quiet moments that you wish you could rip a hole in eternity just to revisit over and over again. and you will have many moments of fretting, internally or externally, that you are failing your child in some way.

the birth of your first child will split your existence into two phases: before and after. you will be pushed to the edges of your comfort zone (and often far beyond it). I’ve said before how early parenting is an extremely Saturnian experience no matter how old you are when it happens to you, and this is part of it. becoming a parent to a child is taking yourself to the edges of your reality thus far. it can feel isolating, and your own needs are overshadowed by another’s. if you’re the birthing parent, you may feel like a foreigner in your new body with its new rings, large and slow-moving. 

with your saturn return, life is similarly split into a before and an after. before saturn entered aquarius, my life looked drastically different than it does now. at the start of my saturn return, I was extremely alone and extremely directionless. I was surviving and life was beautiful despite it all, but I was very much untethered. I had nothing and nobody to keep my feet on the earth. nothing to keep me here. I had been intentionally single since December 2016, but realized that I had been keeping all forms of intimacy at arm’s length in a way that was becoming damaging. nobody could get close to me besides a couple of dear friends. I was Saturn, in a way: floating on the outskirts of everything, surrounded by barriers, observing my own life from a detached and distant perspective. 

then, something happened. in the late summer of 2020, I fell in love. I wasn’t looking to fall in love, but I had cracked open the door just a smidge with the thought, “perhaps I could try dating in earnest again.” 

it only took one date. 

the thing about me is when I fall in love, I do it with my entire being. I have never had a casual relationship in my entire life. once I’m in love, I want to blend my life with this other person’s life and build something of value together. in this case, I fell in love and knew immediately that this was the person I was going to marry and have babies with. and when I am certain of something, I waste no time solidifying my intentions. so, in 2021, we blended our lives together even further by moving in together, becoming pregnant, and getting married. it was the easiest series of decisions I’ve ever made. 

the other thing that happened during my saturn return is that I gave my life over to astrology and never looked back. prior to 2018, I was just a casual astrology fan, and prior to 2020 I had never actually opened an astrology book or gotten a professional reading. one day, in a fit of frustration about my employer, I built a website and started offering tarot readings. I have been reading tarot cards for myself since I was 12 and had never actually given a paid reading to anyone before that point, but I was at the end of my rope with not having control over my income, so I leapt. and thank god I did, because little did I know that an incredibly difficult and disabling pregnancy was in the cards for me, and the ability to make money from home became a necessity for my little family. now, I am fully self-employed, both as an astrologer and as a freelance accessibility services provider for astrologers. but most importantly, I wake up every day and am filled with gratitude that I get to decide what to do with my time and who I work with. my Saturn return is, in a way, a story of my world becoming (seemingly) incredibly narrow and cold and unsupportive and the way I finally got sick of it and forged my own pathways and foundations out of sheer determination and exasperation. 

so, here we are. three short years later and where I was untethered, I now find only roots. I relish in these new identities, wife and mother and astrologer and business owner, and I relish in the ways Saturn has hardened me. I don’t have any concrete list of lessons from my Saturn return, but one shift that’s already apparent is that I have accepted that I will never move as quickly as I would like to, ever, and I am free to enjoy the view while I’m on the way. I no longer want to rush through life; I want to go slow. like Saturn.

when the sun enters the 4th house, it’s nearing midnight, pitch black. but that doesn’t mean every body is still, or that everything is silent. the bodies (planets) of your 4th house are not meek or silent or still: they will be heard.

the 4th house is like a russian doll: inside every doll, another doll, and inside every big truth, another underlying truth, a piece of the fabric of your reality.

the 4th house is a looking glass into the past. whenever we are uncovering buried things, excavating bones, digging up truths, we are gazing into the past. in the 4th house, we are asking the question, “who and what formed you?” and then looking to history to give us the answers—your own personal history, and also the histories that coalesced together to create your life, as it is right now. 

the 4th house contains your default settings. when we are in the 4th house, metaphorically speaking, we are being who we are when nobody else is around. the reactions that happen before rational thought kicks in, those deep-seated ways of being that were cemented in our brains before we even have a chance to reject them? those are results of the conditioning we experience in the earliest parts of our lives. our first 4th house profection occurs when we are only 3, aka when our brains are at their most malleable. 

there are dolls within dolls within dolls inside your 4th house that all individually have something they can illuminate in the dark: perhaps it’s a pattern of thought that has been sabotaging your most earnest efforts, unbeknownst even to you. perhaps it’s an opportunity for closure around an event that occurred in the past. perhaps it’s one nugget of perspective that shifts your entire viewpoint on a storyline or ongoing conflict within your family. or, perhaps your 4th house is trying to tell you something about what or who truly supports & sustains you as you’re building your legacy. 

the 4th house is a portal through time. here, you emerge through time and time emerges through you. the older we get, the more of the past there is to excavate and examine and rotate through a kaleidoscope of experiences.

I’m re-launching my 4th house offering, Relic, and I want to invite you to a session with me if…

• you’ve got any of the following in your natal chart: 

  • 3 or more planets in the 4th house

  • ruler of the ascendant in the 4th house

  • 4th house ruler conjunct any other planets

• you’re in, about to begin, or just finished a 4th house profection (27, 39, 51, 63, 75)

• you’ve been experiencing or are about to experience significant transits to your 4th house inhabitant(s) and/or 4th house ruler

• you want to get more familiar with the 4th house in general through a teaching lens of your own chart & life experiences

• you are seeking context on a recent or upcoming life experience involving your family, your conditioning, your foundations, your living situation, or your own internal world

if that’s you, let’s meet at midnight.

book a session

Something about doing astrology lights me up inside and makes me feel like I have a purpose.

There’s nothing like the feeling when, at the end of a reading, my client is satisfied and awestruck and grateful and feels like they have something to take with them from the experience. I love knowing they got clarity on an issue that had been weighing on their mind. I love hearing that they learned something new, whether about themselves or astrology in general. I gobble up the feedback like a starving child. I am a slut for praise, it’s true, but it’s more than just being told that I did a good job. There’s a light of understanding on their face, a look of comprehension and wonder, and I know that I translated for them exactly what needed to be translated from the stars. Nothing more and nothing less.

I get a thrill inside when I’m prepping a chart for a reading and I begin to see the pieces fall together: the pattern I’ve been searching for. The puzzle piece. The story I’ve been aiming to find, the story that the planets (both natally and by transit or progression) are trying to tell. Sometimes I get so awestruck at these discoveries that I stop to do a little dance. I’m not kidding: it’s so exciting to me that I have to pause to release the physical excitement I’m feeling or else I can’t keep going. Sometimes, a technique reveals something that makes so much sense that I throw my hands in the air with a hearty and gleeful “what the fuck,” and I fall in love with astrology all over again. Because truly, what the fuck?

How can something be so beautiful, so perfect, so achingly accurate, so complex and yet so simple, so mysterious and revealing and so fun all at the same time? And it’s my fucking job? Pinch me.

The math of it all tickles my brain and actually improves my mental health, I’m pretty sure. Getting lost in numbers and equations and revelations was a pastime of mine as a high school calculus student. I haven’t felt a rush like that since I became a professional astrologer. Math was my drug of choice then, but astrology (and cannabis) is my drug of choice now.

More than anything, though, what I love about astrology is humans. Humans make it magical.

The stars do not predict or dictate; they reflect. Humans are responsible for assigning meaning to and finding the patterns in the stars. The practice and the prevalence of astrology comes from the legacies of human beings built upon the legacies of other human beings. Astrology is astronomy and anthropology and  polytheism and geometry and philosophy and political science, all at once. Astrology is all the legacies of all the humans who have contributed to it by pointing out the synchronicities between celestial arrangements and earthly happenings.

When my mom was in school for her Associate’s degree, she took a psychology class and I remember her explaining to me the concept “correlation is not causation.” I did not anticipate that decades later, that concept would inform my astrological practice the way it does. Correlation is not causation, but it doesn’t mean correlation has no value or nothing to teach us. That's where astrology comes in. If celestial arrangements always correlate to certain earthly events, it doesn’t mean one is causing the other to happen. but there’s a relationship there that cannot be denied or overlooked. That correlation can indeed be used to predict future events, even though we know celestial arrangements aren’t the cause of these events.

Humans are meaning-making, pattern-seeking creatures. This is just what we do. And I get to do it amongst some of the most incredible humans I’ve ever met. Astrologers are my people. There’s so many perspectives, so many lived experiences, so many areas of expertise that my fellow astrologers bring to this field of study and make it into such a rich, breathing, living tapestry of time. Some of my closest friendships are with astrologers. We speak each other’s language. We sign up for each other’s workshops. We subscribe to each other’s newsletters. We engage each other in debate. Sometimes we don’t like each other, but the fact remains that I haven’t felt kinship like this since Community got canceled, and I need that in my life. Astrology gives me that and then some.

Pre-Saturn return, if you would have told me that I would forsake all traditional employment for doing astrology (and providing services to astrologers), I honestly… would’ve believed you. I mean, is it that much of a surprise? Look at me. This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with my life—that, and having babies. How rare and precious it is to be called to something that you can also support your life with. I will never take it for granted.