I do not believe in time
I do believe in water
—Dionne Brand
My only resolution for 2022 was to think less. It was peculiar for me, the planner, the Virgo Moon who delights in categorizing and twisting the words in my mind into new shapes, but that’s why I liked it. It was unnatural for me to put that particular tool down for long but I knew that any habit or skill compulsively used becomes a burden and a shackle all the same. I was spending more time by the ocean, in the forest, with someone who actually took breaths between their thoughts and let an answer find them while lying in bed for awhile. All my alarm bells went off— boredom, fear, dissatisfaction— but all I was doing was sitting still.
Spending years at a Buddhist monastery, where silence is exalted, has proven to me, medicine-like, how vital this repose is. Every month, we would have a week-long sesshin, silent retreat, that all residents would attend alongside the dozens of guests who had come to sit with us in a big room that always smelled of incense. We would come together while not making eye contact nor speaking and melt our energy into the same void. Just sitting is somehow easier when shared, even when there is no communication as we understand it. During the rest of the month, we meditated a few hours a day but it all felt like preparation or maintenance in between the descents into silence. Sesshin, as another resident told me before my first one, “is where the magic happens”.
Get just what you need
Just what
Want more than you need
Follow the lead
Near as far from a balm as the cut
—“Sequential Circuits,” Panda Bear
Last night, I had a dream about a monster you could see through. Though black, spindly and sharp, like a lightning-bolt, his body flickered like static on a grandparent’s tv, both there, then not. To become solid, he had to absorb people. I saw him do it to a woman in a business skirt on a linoleum floor, then enter an elevator full of people. I was never afraid; it was clear to me that I was a spectator only and he couldn’t see me.
Somewhere in my sesshin education, I learned there’s a difference between thinking about meditating— checking if you’re breathing, consciously directing your mind to feel your hands, checking in or trying to remove the thoughts— and meditating. Is this sacrophagous creature perhaps a metaphor for zazen, the japanese word for just sitting, the letting go of thoughts and small mind to let some bigger, darker creature lead your show, at least for a little bit?
One of my favorite zen chants, “The Precious Mirror Samadhi,” ends with the exhortation to “function secretly, like a fool, like an idiot” and for so long I didn’t like it. Over time, though, I learned what an important lesson it is to truly let your head empty. You can’t force it, I’ve learned a million times, but you can tend to the inner castle to invite awareness of the mystery. Some of my most profound sesshin moments have been when I’ve truly felt dumb— no idea how my practice was going or the quality of my meditation— and so my mind couldn’t step in to cut the leash.
Pisces rules my 8th house, so it’s natural the vast expanse of the last sign, and its ruler, Jupiter, often give me the heebie-jeebies. There’s been time in sesshin, about halfway through, when the usual chatter settles and deeper stillness settles. A voice will pop up telling me best not to push it too early; what if you go too far? Of course the only point against touching that farther expanse was that I did not know it yet, or my mind didn’t. But why does this mind only imagine terrors and nasty surprises past its tiny bubble of control, rather than a greater freedom or ease?
The word sesshin translates to “touching the heart mind”. It is only relatively recently that the mind was seen as a contained entity separate from the rest of the world— our secret room where the illusion of control reigns— rather than where heaven and earth meet. To enter silence, to let the continual chatter of our thoughts pass away again and again, allows us to go at the speed of the universe, the shifting stars, our physical body; all are united in this quiet.
Take me to the river
Won't you let me see your soul
I know you
All along the way
We can stop where we wanna go
I know you
—“Self Hypnosis in 3 Days,” Wand
I cannot offer you a week of silence but I can offer you the stars. Your own way to them, right where you are. So far, yet so close, moving in the same queenly orbit as our days, months, years.
I am grateful for the focus on flow, ease, and divine trust that this Jupiter in Pisces transit has given us. Now I wish to offer that to you throughout 2023. No matter what your life looks like, how much time you may or may not have, the stars, your breath, the spirit, are always there, accessible and waiting.
Welcome to Fit into the Flow: a cyclic, holistic way to move through 2023.
Logistically it looks like this: regular meetings to discuss what the astrology of the next year has in store with you. We get into major themes and larger cycles coming up but will also dive into the nitty-gritty. One of the major reasons I want to offer this is that I am excited about timing techniques I’ve been practicing for the last year but can’t fit all that I want into just one session!
More specifically, I want to help you engage in the distinct flavor of each month of 2023 using the Medieval Islamicate technique of continuous profections to isolate when certain topics will be emphasized as well as when peak months, months of destiny and months of joy arise. The research I’ve been doing with clients so far has proven the astonishing accuracy of this technique and I’m so excited to share it with you. I want to luxuriate in the details with you, getting to know each month not just for what may happen but what it will feel like.
Big thanks to Dr. Ali Olomi's work on this technique. It is because of his scholarship I can even offer this.
I also love how well this technique lends itself to a celestial co-creation of your fate. Perhaps you want to move in the next year. We can pinpoint when real estate and the home is a major theme and see which planet(s) is involved and maybe begin rituals, petitions, or remediation to help bring the cosmos in alignment with your plans.
But I also want to bring in what Jupiter in Pisces has taught me— that our will has limits. That there is agency in letting go. Some days, weeks, months, may be tiresome, hectic, accident-prone or slowed-down. Perhaps a certain star or planet or deity wants to work with you. I can help you make contact as well as help invite synchronicities and the ability to notice them.
Because astrology shouldn’t just teach us how to act, but how to listen. Some transits are good for hiding out and waiting. Some are good for crying your eyes out. All is allowed within this space.
To accommodate people’s financial diversity, I am offering different-sized bundles, with the initial intake costing $250 and follow-ups clocking in at $150, a 25% discount of my one-off predictive readings:
Bi-yearly: 1 90-minute session in January, 1 60-minute follow-up in June
Seasonal: 1 90-minute session in January, 3 60-minute follow-ups in April, July and October
Bi-monthly: 1 90-minute session in January, 5 60-minute follow-ups in March, May, July, September, and November
The actual dates for theses sessions are flexible. When you sign up, you will be prompted to schedule your first January appointment and then I will email you a few weeks prior to the next cycle with a link to sign up for your next consult.
Currently payment is only taken prior to each appointment. If you would rather pay a different way, contact me at chloe.margherita@gmail.com.
As an artist myself, I love working with other artists and by artists I mean pretty much everyone—those who think arranging outfits and playlists; watching sunsets and going on meandering walks; drawing every day and writing what spirit compels you to— are all vital to living. Same goes for magicians and mystics. All of these titles are essentially creative acts that also require deep listening and flow.
I want help those who want a more cyclical view of time, who believe every moment and state is a sacred body to move through.
In the words of the Uusi oracle card I drew for this reading, you carry the vibrancy of life from its deepest sleep to its most epic becoming— visionary, mediumistic, collaborative.
You contain the magic. I want to help you see the magic that comes when the self flows into the whole and it’s not just “you” behind the wheel. These readings are meant to be fluid, filling whatever container of intentions with which you come in. But they are also meant to leave room for the divine.
With that in mind, this reading bundle isn’t for everyone.
Fit into the Flow is not a good fit for:
“grindset” mentality capitalists
those who believe only personal agency controls our life
those who don’t believe we are active co-creators of our becoming
materialists, sun cult worshippers and those satisfied with the status quo
Want to see if this offering and my practice is a good fit?
To help figure out if this program is a good match, I am offering 15-minute complimentary chats where you can tell me about your goals, intuitions, feelings for 2023 and ask any questions you may have about working with me in this way.
If you are ready to take the plunge, then buy now:
And if you have any questions, feel free to comment below or contact me at chloe.margherita@gmail.com.
As always, you can also book a one-off year-ahead 2023 reading if a January check-in is more your style:
And with that, I leave you with a poem, a final thought on all I’ve been trying to say over and over:
Snowdrops
Robert Walser
I’ve just been writing a letter in which I announced that I had finished a novel with or without pain and distress, that the considerable manuscript was lying in my drawer ready to go, with the title already in position and packing-paper at hand, for the work to be wrapped and sent in. Furthermore, I have purchased a new hat which for the present I shall wear only on Sundays, or when a visitor comes to me.
Recently a parson visited me. I found it nice and most proper that he did not look at all like a professional one. The parson told me of a lyrically gifted teacher. I intend to go before long on foot through the spring country to this person who instructs the village school children and writes verse as well. I find it beautiful and natural that a teacher should concern himself with higher things and have experiences of the more profound sort. Yet on account of his profession he has to deal with something serious: with souls! Here I think of the wonderful “Life of the Merry Schoolmaster, Mari Wuz, of Auenthal, a Kind of Idyll,” by Jean Paul, a book, or booklet, that I have read with delight I know not how often and will probably read again and again. The main point is that now the spring is just beginning again. So here and there I’ll succeed in writing a pleasant-sounding line of springtime verse. It is wonderful that now one need not think at all of heating. Thick winter-coats will soon have outplayed their role. Everybody will be glad if he can stand around and go about uncoated. Thank God there are still things about which everyone is united and agrees nicely with one another.
I have seen snowdrops; in gardens and on the cart of a peasant woman who was driving to market. I wanted to buy a bouquet from her, but thought it not right for a robust man like me to ask for so tender a thing. They are sweet, these first shy announcers of something beloved by all the world. Everyone loves the thought that it will become spring.
It is all a folk-play, and the entry costs not a penny. Nature, the sky above us, is conducting no mean politics, when it presents beauty to all, without discrimination, and nothing old and defective, but fresh and most tasty. Little snowdrops, of what do you speak? They speak still of winter, but also already of spring; they speak of the past, but also saucily and merrily of the new. They speak of the cold but also of something warmer; they speak of snow and at the same time of green, of burgeoning growth. They speak of this and that; they say: Still in the shadows and on the hills lies a fair quantity of snow, but where the sun reaches, it has already melted away. Yet all sorts of hoar-frost may still come this way. April is not to be trusted. But what we wish will nevertheless win out. The warmth will assert itself everywhere.
Just wait. The good will come. Goodness is always closer to us than we think. Patience brings roses. This old, good saying occurred to me when recently I saw snowdrops.
—Translated by Tom Whalen & Trudi Anderegg
Until next week,
Chloe