Moonkissd by Jessica

I received my first rejection letter from a magazine for an article I’d felt pretty jazzed about, which was exceptionally disappointing because it was the kind of rare piece that just wrote itself. The cat died that same day. It wasn’t one of my better days. I had noticed the planets of Strife and Trouble hanging around my chart, Saturn and Mars respectively, sitting there smugly squaring the ruler of my sixth house (Neptune) of small animals, and work. But I didn’t blame them. I didn’t even want to. Instead I contemplated the cycle of life, how I didn’t expect Skippy to be recycled into the earth so quickly, but there it was, and there was nothing I or anyone could do about it. Her death became a profound teaching on being with the now. Compared to human deaths, where we tend to medicate, grasp, and fight against death thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, when the cat died, she was gone - literally. The vultures found her before we did. Likewise, I’ve been startlingly sane about this, my first official rejection letter (there have been others, but this is the first one in e-paper). I’ve decided this rejection joins me with the ranks of other artists. Real artists. Professional artists who once lined their office walls with tens of hundreds of rejection letters. I guess you could say my view of reality has changed and matured with age; I’ve become conditioned to rolling with the punches of life and seeing the reality of a situation through a more impersonal lens. (more…)

Loading up the van with backpacks the size of small people, I helped my family make their way to Yosemite. As fun as they made it sound, those midget troopers lugging around an extra person on their backs, they were clearly gearing up for an adventure of a lifetime and said such. I, on the other hand, wanted a facial. I reminded them to think of my dewy pores covered in chamomile and orange blossoms while they faced their fear of death on a slab of granite. Suckers. I was looking forward to the alone time, the solitude, the slowing down after a month of Gemini madness where one’s only choice in life seems to be respond, adapt, respond. Following on the heels of inconstancy, I craved constancy, a long, drawn out and prolonged pause, to deeply assimilate my recent life experiences, read: a whirl of happenings, with the need to restore my inner self and spend time with the gentler sex, my woman friends. If anyone were to ask me during the past month what I most desired it would be: “I need ALONE TIME!” Isn’t this every Cancer’s battle cry? (more…)