Astrology for the Present
I was a grad student in my mid-20s when I discovered Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder. I was in Berkeley in the winter in the rain, and this jaunty little book of poetry with its black cover, handwritten chalk font, and sunny strip of bright pink was the perfect mix of rawness and twee optimism for that moment in my life.
The title poem is about death–as you would expect–but it is also about a light up skull keychain, David Foster Wallace, and depression. It fades out in the end into something like a rallying cry:
“If a nation
can fall asleep
it can wake up not
exactly angry but a little dizzy
with pleasant hunger.”
Collectively in the US, we have been talking about “joy” a lot lately, like we talked about “hope” and “change” in 2008. Come on All You Ghosts is not about joy. Zapruder isn’t afraid to say that “the sea seems more / than a little angry.” But there is a hope to this work that I’ve been hungry for, and it doesn’t make me feel like my mouth is stuffed full of rock candy.
It reminds me of something I heard author and marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson ask on the radio recently: “What if we get it right? What if we are getting it right right now?”
Right now.
For the last couple months, I’ve been doing a daily horoscope column on Threads and Instagram for people with Leo ascendants. I was talking with a colleague recently about horoscope writing, and she said that she can’t do daily horoscopes every day. She has to batch them all at once over a weekend.
It’s the opposite for me. I need to wake up in the morning and feel into the energy of the moment. When I try to predict how things will feel, I get into my head too much. I get too theoretical and lose track of my heart.
I envy the astrologers who are able to calmly stand in front of a chart and talk about the weather like a meteorologist inside a news studio. Often, I feel like a weather reporter standing on the beach in front of a hurricane, talking about the rain.
Astrology tends to attract people who are future-oriented. We believe that if we can just prepare thoroughly enough for what’s coming, we’ll know the right thing to do and say at all times. It creates this dynamic where we are always living five steps ahead. Always aspiring, always improving, never arrived. Stuck in the idealism of an impossible future, frustrated whenever we’re forced to deal with life as-is.
What if the hope–or even the joy–we need isn’t waiting for us in a future that never becomes the present? What if this is the moment we can step into, not perfection, but “books made of blue sky” or “terrible marvels?”
I don’t think it’s an accident that mythology and folklore is full of warnings for people who consult oracles. It isn’t because we’re helpless, bound by fates we can’t control. It’s because no amount of work in the present can control the future. This is the only moment we can touch.
If we live in the present, we won’t get it right. We will find ourselves staring in open-mouthed confusion, utterly unprepared. But that is why we’re here, to dance with the moment instead of marking out the perfect choreography of all the things we will do… tomorrow.
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