What’s currently locked in yr creative cupboard? How many possibilities latently wait? Wait for what?
Some creatives collect supplies and tools, others use them up.
It’s the difference between collecting the books and actually reading them.
It’s the gap between thinking about writing the thing, and actually writing the thing.
For the next few days, nutrify your practice. Consult sources, dip into the supplies you’ve been saving for a perfect moment, and work with them now. Not to deplete your stores. Depletion is temporarily abated for this bound.
Think dissemination, think sharing your bounty.
Exercise your power to flood the world with your presence, whether in ink, pixel, or whatever else it is you read this report for.
Flood this comments section with WIPs.
Revel in the process, not the product.
As I spend my days in the CAELi stacks, books will beckon me. I’ve had some of these books for years, and never really read them. Now it’s difficult not to. They live in a happy place, and yearn to be cited, pages to be turned, to breathe new life into them.
Every line I read adds new dimensions to my understanding of astrology, not just how to do (or not do!) it, but also the social contexts it survived throughout the years, and even the recent past, which is fading into a recognizable view.
In teaching labs at CAELi and finding fresh material to share with colleagues, we energize and synergize together, and our minds are saturated with insights, iterations, and we push back against the sources to see how they flex under practical pressure.
We play with them and see where they break, where their disagreements point to deeper cultural rifts and perspectives. (Come for the astrology, stay for the anthropology!)
Each source leads to three or more new sources, and piles of texts form pyramids on the work tables. I have to constantly excavate myself out of them to get home each day, and start over again the next.
Each guest on Within Orb reveals texts that extend the research warren into new mazes of potential; I’ve had so many listeners write me in joking anger at how badly my podcast breaks their budget with all the new-to-them books they buy.
Sorry, not sorry!
But the budget-conscious listener will avail themselves of a more cost-effective membership to CAELi, and request digital scans of things that can be scanned, or hop into a lab where many texts can be shared in a teaching context.
Starting this week, a flush of visitors will come through, as if the collection itself has convened a summer festival of learning and feasting upon their nutrient-dense aphorisms and teachings. From Camm Cassidy’s Fixed Star Summer Camp, to Demetra George’s students gathering for a Time Lord Summit, to our third astrologer in residence, Thea Anderson, who will be working on a super rad project to be announced in more detail after it is more fully formed. There’s a lot going on!
So many talented practitioners will be engaging collectively with the printed lineage of our field and bringing it forward. I’m already excited about the ways our brains are about to stretch. And all the book babies that will emerge from this fertile month.
Astrology publications are my cheese. New ones get made in community, like this. My creative magic is creating the conditions of possibility for more to join the pantheon.
What’s yours?
Next year, this cover image will become even more apt, as Jupiter will be present with the Sun when it enters this bound. Consider this a rich preview.
See you again on Monday, July 28 at 1:10 pm PDT, the day the 100th episode of Within Orb appears. Getting into triple digits, wow! You can listen in before getting your bite-sized chunk over here.
This is exciting, important work you do, Jenn. Thank you. (I confess: I am an avid and inveterate tsundoku creator . . . Shhhh!)