It’s a rainy April afternoon. dramatic pause for the expected “Doesn’t it always rain in London?”
I’m drinking a weak Scandinavian coffee typing away at my MacBook in the IKEA restaurant among a few other people fed up with working from home, and seniors.
A character song from something I’m not familiar with, but I know it’s Takashi Kondo singing, plays out of my phone by my side. Funny coincidence that the cover shows the ikemen in the rain.
I feel like a character in a film as I watch a lone robin fly by. No cluttered desk full of papers with notes in every direction because for the love of the goddess can’t you keep paper at hand during work calls?!
You’ll be reading this as the sun enters Taurus, one of the two signs ruled by Venus, the feminine expression as the other one is Libra. And I thought it was curious how the sign of harmony and beauty is the masculine one, as our society in the West has made the masculine be rather dry.
Even if I live in a city dotted with beautiful neoclassical buildings designed by Wren and his workshop. But just recently I was mesmerised by a man talking about mathematics (but really he was talking about magic) on a podcast, so I feel like our society got it wrong with the puritanical views of minimalism as a deprivation rather than elegance and spaciousness.
Beauty was always the attribute of big-g god that appealed to me the most as a Catholic. My entire view of divinity is von Balthasar’s to this very day.
The “frequency of love” does not speak to me. Perhaps I’m just not ascended enough 🤷🏼♀️ but that’s a whole other conversation.
Over the Easter weekend, I took part in a workshop series run by Colleen Lindberg, which I turned into a retreat. On the 3rd day, she encouraged us to contemplate our “Soul contract” for this lifetime.
Astrology is one tangible way to look at this, but it only mirrors things that are inside of us anyway. I have a Libra 12th house, Taurus as the 7th, and Venus herself in my 2nd house of Values (the topic of this week’s podcast conversation with Sarah Mac, incidentally).
It turned out that IG does not allow anymore to paste longer captions and edit them down with their word count, so I was left wondering why I couldn’t just paste what I wrote from the heart. So I rewrote it in app and kept it for this newsletter, trusting I would get the inspiration for a way to tie it all together.
“For the past year I have grappled with the tension between the ideal of what I believed I needed to be based on what other people in my industry do (📸 if you didn’t know), and the things that I am passionate about sharing.
I didn’t see myself as a spiritual thought leader, or rather I didn’t give myself permission to, because I was attached to the outcome of getting my business off the ground.
I wasn’t interested in doing the things I saw as necessary to grow my podcast and Substack to the level I perceived would be necessary to monetise them so that I could make them my business, because that was not what I wanted.
They’re part of my mission precisely because it’s an act of resistance for me not to monetise everything. For other people, their teaching and spiritual healing is their mission. Together we build the new paradigm because we all had different lessons and roles to play.
What I was missing, though, as busy as I was trying to square a circle when the right hole was behind me all along, was that I am a spiritual teacher and thought leader as a photographer.
What many people don’t understand about art, but then you read books like Big Magic or The Creative Act it seems obvious, is that art is a way to make spiritual truths concrete.
As a portrait photographer I co-create that vision with my subject, but even “still life”can be mediated, because a photo is a symbolic representation of something.
Of an energy.
And I know that photography runs in my blood because it’s a way in which I look at the world that other people don’t have. They have their own, and neither is better or worse.
I don’t see spirits, or channel messages from the Akashic records, but I channel spiritual truths through seeing the world and mediating it through a technology that creates art.
I posted 4 of these photos on Substack for a contest whose topic was Lost and Found. They’s from a series that I started while walking around Camden with (past client) Grace titled Memento Mori as a nod to the Medieval artistic tradition of religious imagery showing the two sides of human existence, juxtaposing life and death, often in a quite gruesome way.
The conditioning tells me I should be showing you portraits and all the cool things I actually sell, but any pro photographer can show you a good photo that they sell. If you’re looking for pretty pictures you’re spoiled for choices unless maybe if you live somewhere really remote.
But I’m here if you want to create something deeper and more meaningful, to tell a more compelling story about yourself than B-roll reels folding laundry. Because that’s what photography is about, and that’s what I am about as a photographer and as a person.
My soul contract, as Colleen called it in yesterday’s transmission. I see the deeper layer behind the mundane, and join the dots to make the picture seen by everyone else.”
It strikes me to re-read it now as I write the rest of this essay like a witchy Carrie Bradshaw if Carrie Bradshaw liked weak Scandinavian coffee. Yesterday I had the pleasure to have a conversation on difficult, but much needed, topics of healing and decolonisation of our magical practices with a wonderful Bruja I can’t wait to introduce when the podcast episode drops.
And a lot of what we talked about was the magic of the mundane. The fairly universal folk tradition of magic in the home. How she’s teaching her children to clean their space as energetic maintenance and not the hated chore we’d have rather not done when we were kids.
I quoted the one line in Italian Folk Magic that I can actually relate to, which is about how Zen monks clean to keep themselves grounded but Italian women clean to meditate.
I’ve develop a deeper appreciation of keeping my home tidy now my ex has been out of it for over a year. When we lived together, he treated me as the de facto housekeeper while also claiming that he supported my career.
A career where I’d be further ahead if I hadn’t spent the first 2 years in business having to handle not being able to give 100% to the business because of him. And yes, I’m well aware that I chose how to spend my time and energy to an extent, but it doesn't feel much like a choice when if you sit back nothing happens.
A lot of conscious coupling discourse is about how we create the experience of our partners by being too controlling and emasculating them, instead of leaning back into our feminine and receiving.
But that only works if the partner in question is a man, not a boy in need of a mum to do everything for him (although if that’s your kink, by all means, lean into it. The same for if you want to serve a master. BDSM dynamics create the receivership in a different way).
I recently had a realisation, linked to what I said earlier about the idea of the divine as the frequency of love being something I cannot connect to.
My chart weighted is mostly Earth and Water. I have two planets in Fire signs, and without the asteroids I’m fully devoid of Air. But, somehow, I managed to turn my Capricorn stellium into a masculine energy. Leaning back and receiving have been alien concepts.
I had some brief times where that was easier, because Catholicism made it so, but even then I always had a lingering mistrust and need to prove that I was worthy. I did all I could to be good, cutting off pretty much everything about myself that makes me, me.
Spirituality was another item to tick off my to-do list.
Because, at the end of the day, I cannot lean back and let the Universe hold me in the way all the Spirituality industry talks about. Because that requires me to believe in its ultimate goodness, and I don’t. I just can’t.
Good and evil are man-made concepts. If the mystical experience is that duality is an illusion of the material world, then non-duality is all that there is. Neutral. Neither good or bad, loving or unloving.
The frequencies we talk about with emotions and being high vibe to manifest are steeped in the fact we came to Earth to play with specific constraints. And we assign arbitrary moral meanings to it, but if this divorce taught me anything it’s that sometimes the hardest shit is the gift.
I had to break my silence to arrange the exchange of the financial statements with my ex, and his response was as childish as he was in the past. And I felt gratitude literally in my body, mere hours after I was talking to Colleen about how I didn't know how to truly connect to that feeling anymore.
I felt gratitude that I was soon to be fully free of him forever. I felt gratitude for the version of me that asserted herself and went through the pain and the hassle so that I could thrive.
As I’m the version going through more pain and more hassle so that a future me can thrive (I’m at IKEA because I sold them back his coffee table, if you’re wondering. And if you didn’t know that they buy back their own furniture if in sellable condition, you’re welcome).
I talk a lot about embodiment, because I believe it is the deeper lesson of this life for me. I’m shedding layers of conditioning that made the spiritual superior to the material, our body a problem to overcome to prove our devotion to big-g god while also being told it was a gift from him.
This Taurus season will mark a Jupiter return from me (it’s not a clear cut 12y cycle, but it also feels right that it should happen in a 12th house profection). And I realise how wrong I had it when I first found out, and had hopes around what it’d mean.
Planet of luck, prosperity, and expansion? In Taurus? Yes, please. Nevermind I was born under a retrograde, my net worth will be back in the black despite two degrees I don’t actually use professionally.
The reality 4 days away from the conjunction with Uranus is that this past year, which came right after the (suspiciously well-timed for my life falling apart) Eclipse cycle on that axis, was a year of exponential growth.
The conditioned response to it would be to self-deprecatingly state something like “sadly it’s not yet showing as a 0 balance on my student loans”. I have observed it in the people around me, as recently as last week in Jody Shield’s Manifestation challenge.
The narrative among the people who did not see their material circumstances shift like plenty of people in the 3K strong group was to treat any energetic shits as lesser than, as they sought validation that they were not the only people for whom “it didn’t work”.
But I would not have learnt my lesson if I said that, because that’d be effectively attaching my worth to the money I have.
And the thing about fully embodying my most Venusian self is not so much about the abundance that is outside of me.
It’s that we live on a fucking rock suspended in an infinite black canvas filled with shiny rocks that make beautiful sights;
the rock has oceans and mountains and forests and fields of flowers and animals, deserts, butterflies, you name it;
our ancestors created beautiful things from pyramids to great walls, cities and temples;
and there were 1 in 400 trillion chances of each of us being born but here we are, on the Internet, talking about our lives.
Let that sink in.
Before you go:
✨ If you missed it, you should queue up the episode with
, especially if you are an artist or creative for your profession.✨ If you’re a woman and would like to spend a girlfriends’ night in with me and other Venusian girlies, grab your free ticket for my online event on May 17th. Doors open 7pm UK. Find the details here.
✨ When I talked about monetising the podcast and this newsletter I meant bringing in sponsors. As I said, it is my heart’s desire not to compromise its message to meet commercial demands, but if you enjoy it and would like to support it you can tip me or make a pledge towards paid content here on Substack. Or even just share it with people who’d enjoy it so that it can grow :)