💅 Digging in
On the release to gain a new set of tools
I have decided to file my nails off.
I have long been a long nail girlie. I like having almond-shaped nails up to an inch in length, sometimes sharp, but usually curved to a gentle point. I keep them strong with a BioGel overlay, a thin piece of soft gel that hardens under UV light, then shellaced to high heavens, glossy pigmented brights. I have tried to be demure, but anytime I choose a colour even remotely close to ‘nude,’ I feel like I may as well not have bothered. What’s the point? If I’m getting Barbie nails, I’m getting motherfucking Barbie nails.
Back when I was a young thing, blogging in my early twenties, I’d create nail art tutorials. I quit a childhood nail biting habit and having them pretty and polished and finely shaped was the only thing that kept me from running my nails ragged to the quick. It’s long been one of my “high maintenance to be low maintenance” habits — if I have my nails done and my hair highlighted, I am ready to run.
But lately, I have been hearing a different kind of calling. A calling that says, this is a period for digging in. For going short. For getting practical. For plunging my hands in the earth and hammering out words on a keyboard. I feel myself entering a period of focus and craftsmanship. I feel the wind-up and I want to be ready to catch it.
Maybe this is a natural outcome of following the Eight of Pentacles down the rabbit hole this year. It is my theme card for the year and at the end of every month, I have intentionally started journaling in conversation with it — what have I learned about the card THIS month? How does it continue to unveil its secrets in my life? This is my favourite part about reading tarot, the fact that I can never know the cards’ stories in full, only catch glimpses as they whisper fragments with every encounter.
I spent the morning out in the garden, doing the first sweep to start readying the beds for spring. The daffodils are already out, having burst their sunny faces in just the last day or two. I can’t help but marvel at how industrious they’ve been, cold and rainy and grey as it’s been lately. This was the darkest winter on record for 60 years, my neighbour told me over the fence, and I believe it. Everyone is slightly sallow and on a day like this, we’ve all staggering out into the light, basking in the warmth, feeling the glow radiate through our skin.
I just saw my naturopath and she said my vitamin D is improved, but still low. Everyone’s is at its lowest these days, after months scraping by on the little sun we’ve had. Soon we’ll all be much happier houseplants, able to move and grow and play in the lengthening days. It makes me feel softly towards everyone right now. Everyone is carrying too much stuff with precious few resources to manage it.
All the women I talk to are talking about anger, are feeling irritable and enraged and exhausted. Aries feels strong right now — between these eclipses, Mercury in retrograde and all the planets transitioning out of Pisces, the energy feels overcharged, like having had a few too many cups of coffee. Everything feels much more urgent and desperate, a need expressed as simply that — pure need. Aries, the toddler. Aries, so pure in its unguarded desire.
Maybe I just feel kindly towards this energy because I’m an Aries moon. I’m an Aries moon going Through It right now, relishing in this series of eclipses1 that started in the autumn, dancing directly overtop my natal nodes. My nodal return. It’ll be this way for almost another year — the nodes switch signs every 18 months.
Being an Aries moon has its perks. Emotions come on quick, often with tears 🥲, but suddenly they are THERE and then, they are done. There’s very little grudge holding. Just the urgency of impulse, bursting forward like a tulip or daffodil spearing a sad old leaf.
I tried to make my impact minimal in the garden, clearing away only the pale flower carcasses from the dark beds of leaf litter or old sticks jutting out akimbo, casting harsh straight-lined shadows. I am letting the leaves compost a little more — this is my first year of shoving our bounty of leaves on the flower beds and I’m hoping it’s helped give the soil more nutrients, kept the beds a little warmer through the winter. I don’t want to work in there too early because the insects are still sleeping, enjoying their cozy little bug homes.
I wiped the dust off my little red bike and took a spin down a local trail. I’ve been going to yoga classes at a spin studio these days, and it reminded me how much I love to go fast-fast on a bike. Spinning has scared me somehow — I assume it will be too sweaty, too shouty, too intense for me. But maybe I’ll try that sometime soon. Maybe this is what Aries season is ushering in for me, too.
The larger world can feel very lonely these days. It’s hard to hold this much suffering for so long. The specific acts of suffering, tremendous and unthinkable, and the closer-in ones too. An unexpected layoff. A heartbreaking diagnosis. The yearning ache of grief. A few too many meetings. A bone-deep tired.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote a letter in 2001, Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times, saying:
One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.…It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts — adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
It’s all too much to take in. So to become right-sized, to return to my humble form, to take in the simple pleasure of being a body perched on a bike. Of seeing the sun. Of being able to choose the length of my nails. Of choosing to tidy my flower beds, but not by too much. It is not an honour I can take lightly. It’s too precious and too nourishing. It’s not nothing, it’s a radical act of being here, with what actually is. It makes me able to continue my own work, the work within arms’ reach.
My intention is not to push our suffering out of my mind, but to bring it alongside me, tucked in close. I carry it in my breast pocket as I browse the fresh carrots at the grocery store. A precious grieving for the state of things, a precious rage. I want to show these horrors that I’m not scared of them. That I would rather choose to love the world and its despair. I would rather choose to be here with all of it at once.
Boy, that solar eclipse was a doozy, huh? I was nearly on the path of totality, at about 99%, and watched it from my backyard, borrowing our neighbours’ solar glasses over the fence. It left me feeling very unsettled, the light change and quieting of the world around me too eerie. Fundamentally shifting some sense of security I didn’t even realize I carry. It’s fine now, I was just surprised, and I’m glad this one is in the rearview, frankly. Did you notice anything about your own response to the eclipse?
I read this while biting my nails lolol <3