4 Magic Things
Lots of dynamics and shifts going on personally with Neptune and Saturn moving toward conjunct in Aries (among other astro-moves!) over here at our house. How about you?! I’m getting a slow start on writing this year. Today I bring you four magic things I love, to start the year with simple appreciation. To keep it completely Venus in Gemini (the title of this blog) over here, they are not related at all hahahahaha. BTW, none of these people asked me to write about their things! It came from my ebullient fandom of them all.
Dreaming Head !!!!! This is the website of the new creative studio my beloved Kyle has launched! Witnessing my partner take ownership of his work life with this blessing / prayer / invocation / offering aka business is one of the deep joys of my life. It takes so much life force and courage and gathering of resources on all levels to bring a new business into the world, and I have watched and supported him in doing this through a lot of 2025, and now I get to share it with you. I will probably say more about this soon because it is all so meaningful to me on many levels, but for now, enjoy the magic of Dreaming Head Creative Studio! (That link is my favorite part of the site.) And share with anyone who is interested!
Receiving bodywork from Tod Overstreet. This light beam in human form is helping me with my hip journey SO. MUCH. I feel one of the magic qualities of a great bodyworker is the ability to listen. Listen on many levels. And Tod does that so gracefully. His space is in an old mission apartment and it is filled with plants and books—every object feels like somehow it contributes to the healing. When I walk in the space it opens up a new capacity for me to listen to myself, my body, just by being there. It’s as if his presence and his space says: just this for now. Listen to this moment, be here in this moment, and the more you do so, the more your healing reverberates into the past and future and spatially out from the center. It’s really not a words thing, which is why it’s hard to get the words right. But hopefully you can catch my drift! Go see him if you are around here.
Reading Naomi Krupitsky’s The Family. This is a novel and it’s about a mafia family in New York through the early/mid 1900s. I started to read this book because Naomi is a friend, and I finished this book joyfully and quickly because it is incredible. There are writers who show me it just does not matter what the subject of the writing is, I would follow this compassionate and fierce consciousness anywhere. Naomi is that writer. The emotional truths of all of these characters are so relieving to read. Which I understand is a strange thing to say about a mafia novel, but it’s so true. Another magic trick she does in this book is intimately track the internal experience of being a child and growing into adolescence and adulthood. A wildly impressive and again — somehow relieving — feat. Read it, I say!
Reading Gianna Toboni’s The Volunteer. Again, I started reading this book because Gianna is a new friend and I finished it because it is also incredible. It traces one person’s journey on death row, which would be plenty. But it’s a journalistic feat that is so much bigger than that. As someone who spent many years visiting people in prison, I have a hint of a sense of the heartbreak she must have lived with while writing this book. And as someone who has spent years tracking the intimate details of the horrors of the US prison system, I can say I learned so many new things. It’s a painful book. It’s also beautiful, important, connective. The love she imbues in the detailing, in the not turning away from any of the horror of this world, feels healing. The thing that haunts me in the most terrible, beautiful way, is her interviewing of chaplains and ex-wardens who have become anti-death penalty advocates not because of the killing of the people itself. But because of how badly it fucks up the people doing the killing. It leaves them traumatized for the rest of their lives. And even the chaplains, not doing the killing, but sitting by while it’s happening, feel complicit in a way that ends up traumatizing them. I can’t get over that. It’s like so many of us are over here fighting about whether it’s moral or not for the state to kill someone, meanwhile, unavoidably, a human being has to do it. Many humans, in fact, have to be involved. You should read this book because it will re-center your own and everyone else’s humanity.
There’s plenty more I could say about each of these magic things but I’ll leave it at that for now. I will know more about my astrology readings calendar very soon, for now there are a few spots in January. I hope to see you there, or elsewhere, soon, and I’m bowing in gratitude for your presence here with me. Thank you! Leaving you with my favorite image from Kyle’s new website:
