making ourselves a garden: lesbian litanies, jupiter in taurus, and my age of pleasure manifesto ✧:* *･ﾟ✧
new music, new moon in taurus, and botanical baddie whimsy
hi friends 🐛🌱
congrats on making it to another beautiful season and welcome back to the newsletter of my digital garden of musings! <3
I hope this message finds you warm, curled up in a sunbeam, and indulging in a fresh and abundant spring –or close to that as possible. Spring always fills me with optimism in the world again, much in the way a mosaic of seeds inside a kiwi assemble like grains of sand contouring a beach. I’m wishing all the grads reading this a happy transition into post-graduate life, which was funnily also the first topic I covered in this newsletter almost a year ago (happy almost birthday to the newsletter!)
I’d like to offer this moment together to pause and get yourself a fun drink (or a glass of water bc have you hydrated enough today?) My girly drink of choice is a peach-rose smoothie with boba -thank you bee for putting me tf onn.
🎶 Now playing: Come Back As a Flower // KAINA 🎶
Lesbian Litanies (& homecoming show announcement!) 🥁
I originally wanted to publish this newsletter around lesbian visibility week in April to match my playlist feature for the Lover Girl Media Club segment of my newsletter, but life comes at you fast LOL so instead I’m so happy to extend the offering of my latest feature with Voicemail Poems for the Winter 2023 issue, a performance piece titled Lesbian Litany in the Key of Love by Keisha Cole available on their website (which features the piece in the voicemail I left if you’re more of an auditory person) as well as mine. I wrote it so deeply in love if you wanna have a warm mushy read. Hopefully, you’ll be singing along by the end.
But also, I extend one of my favorite poems of all time, Dreaming of Lesbos by Tatianna de la Tierra, a Colombian lesbian poet, editor, and activist who, rest in peace, left behind such a beautiful legacy in queer visibility. She grew up in Homestead, just south of Miami, Florida, and went on to study at Miami Dade College, then the University of Florida, leading a highly criticized career as a writer for her unapologetic lack of censorship in eroticism and encouragement for others to speak freely about sexuality, sex, and the human body. This poem is sure to appeal to all the Venusian, indulgent, desires we have this Taurus season through its lush landscape and plunge into beautifully vivid, somatic, visuals of romance and beauty.
Speaking of somatic experiences of indulgence and Dade County pride, I’m also excited to announce that your favorite pretty brown femme independent artist has her debut hometown show this month with garage sessions Miami!! [cue the harp and the horns and the cherubs!!! 🎻🎺] If you wanna catch my first show in Miami the show is Saturday, May 27th at 9 pm (venue addy is 1850 NW 7 AVE, more info on my Instagram 👀). Say hi if you see me!! I’ll likely be singing Jungle Flame and Heatwave for the first time live <333
The Astro Forecast with Astro Hottie Gaby
Venus finally joined Mars in cancer earlier this month with a glass of water and it feels like a heated blanket. The sunburn has finally been coated in a layer of aloe. The leaves have lifted from their slumber in vibrancy at the elation to be greeting with longer, balmy days. As Mars prepares to move into fiery Leo, recall the themes of your Leo-ruled house to see where in life you need to take more charge in.
Additionally, on May 16th, Jupiter ingressed into Taurus (happy Jupiter return to the Taurean Jupiter-born babies!), which can bring some delicious development or slowness in the house ruled by Taurus in your chart. With the sun, Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, AND the north node all in Taurus (dream blunt rotation?) we’re bound to see a renaissance in the arts, more slowness, and an expansion of fortunate opportunities in our material world through patience and persistence. Oh and of course, focal points on pleasure, all things lavish, and splendor in the gardening we do of our inner and outer worlds. If you’ve had an extra itch to treat yourself, give in (as responsibly as you can). you deserve it! herbalists rejoice! shopaholics beware! As it goes without saying, because of Jupiter’s traits of excess, remember reckless abundance can lead to overflow -it can get messy if you allow it to.
But again, we are truly in a moment of longing for decadence collectively as is mirrored in the world around us, from Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE world-building and afro-futuristic opulence being brought to us through her tour to recent musical releases in the R&B sphere such as Victoria Monét’s collaboration with Jamaican dancehall giant Buju Banton on Party Girls to Janelle Monáe’s reggae beat propelled sensual anthem Lipstick Lover (I mean their upcoming project is literally called Age of Pleasure LIKE CMONN clap for the astrologers they prob got on their team).
The Pleasure Principle / My Age of Pleasure Manifesto
When I speak about indulgence, as I do often as a spiritual hedonist, I am always going about it from an angle of centering pleasure as a foundation for all rather than a superficial pursuit of pleasantries in avoidance of confrontation/pain. I think that’s really important to clarify. Pleasure as a birthright demands that all people should have their needs met, from healthcare to housing to life itself beyond survival. Pleasure activism as a call to action, in my eyes, serves as a building block to creating the world(s) we wish to see and the repaving and reworking of all that does not belong. By this definition, Jupiter in Taurus as a pleasure activist and sensual explorer, a justice seeker when working with Pluto in Aquarius.
Pluto and Jupiter square each other on May 17th, which alludes to societal transformations and empowerment for the collective; power to the people. Because Uranus is also in Taurus and present, we find optimism blooming in the strides towards equity and economies in the direction of mutual aid. Uranus is a planet known for disrupting unstable foundations, which in Taurus, alludes to change in the ways we work with the Earth’s resources and the disruption of oppressive, inequitable systems. Pleasure in this astrological framework, expansive in response to Jupiter and retributive in response to Pluto and Uranus, is all about the collective right to nourishment and nurture. Before we have luxury, we all must have nourishment. Without all of us fed, there is no point.
Therefore, when I call myself a spiritual hedonist and write about pleasure, it is rooted in my joy sourcing in everything, especially the mundane, the fruity, the earthy, and the natural. The optimism I find in the collective prioritization of pleasure is rooted in the hopes that we all find ourselves gentle at our core and cognizant of the beauty in everything that surrounds us.
The Lover Girl Media Club 💌
It’s no secret to some that I have an ungodly amount of playlists that I’ve never deleted since the acquisition of my Spotify in 2013. So in an effort to put more of my little projects out in the world slowly, I’ll be posting new playlists on here! Every month I make a compilation of all the new songs I found or tunes that re-enter my rotation for the month. In a late celebration of lesbian visibility week, here is a playlist compiling my favorite BIPOC lesbian and sapphic artists, because truly a day without lesbians is a day without sunshine.
As for reading, I’ve been nose-deep in 100 Sonetos de Amor/100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda which I profoundly recommend for all the lovers of love and of the world. While I’m not always a fan of Stephen Tapscott’s translations, the bilingual (Spanish-english) baddies are sure to indulge in the intersections of biophilia and Neruda’s art of sweet talking his wife, Matilde Urrutia, in nearly all 100 sonnets!! (give this man THEE munch award of the century).
I tend to indulge in a lot of eco-poetry, with my favorite poets including Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Natalie Diaz, and of course Neruda himself. This is my book of the month (though I’ve been slowly reading it for over a year) because I feel it really encapsulates the beauty of spring in both its appreciation of lush darkness as a primordial beacon towards the light. I am finally at the last few sonnets of the night chapter (as the book divided all 100 of Neruda’s sonnets into four sections of the day matching the setting of his poems: Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night), and in my heart, there’s a deep settled peace and longing to experience these poems for the first time again. Isn’t it so beautiful to hear people talk about that which they love with all the fervor in their heart? Isn’t this earth ever so generous in always giving us life and light and security in knowing we will always be taken care of?
In times like these, we owe it to ourselves to be gentle and slow. I hope my queer people, especially my sapphics and lgbtq+ Floridians on here, feel safety and rapture in the freedom and beauty it is to just be. Pride month and beyond. And I hope everyone has a lovely rest of this Taurus season. Dance! Eat! It’s a gorgeous planet we live in and no one can take that away. We are all part of the wonder.
Yours in resistance and rapture
Love, Neptunemuse ✨🌺