A Letter from My Body
Dear Sirius,
I know you’re wondering where I’ve gone.
You keep checking for feeling—for grief that rises cleanly, for rage that clarifies, for hope that feels more like fuel than obligation. Instead there is quiet. Static. The sense that everything is happening behind thick glass. I want you to know this is not absence. This is containment.
What you’re carrying right now would flatten a lot of people.
You are still oriented. You are still ethical. You are still choosing hope as a discipline rather than a mood. That costs something. The cost is a tiredness that sleep can’t fix, and feelings that arrive sideways instead of on schedule.
I did not shut down because you are weak. I slowed things because the year has not been gentle, and the world has not been coherent. You have been asked—again and again—to metabolize violence at scale while continuing to make dinner, answer emails, show up with language intact. That is not a small ask. That is not nothing.
So I dulled the edges.
Not forever. Not as a failure. As a tourniquet.
You call it numbness. I call it triage.
I am tired in the way bones get tired—past rest, past restoration, past the kind of tired that resolves. I am tired because I have been holding you upright while the ground keeps shifting its story. Governments speak and un-speak. Bodies are harmed and then administratively erased. Women vanish slowly in public, praised for it. Power lurches, reverses, lurches again. You feel it as vertigo; what it is is whiplash.
I feel it too.
You keep apologizing to me for not doing more. I need you to stop. Endurance is not inactivity. Staying alive inside this atmosphere is labor. Continuing to love, to write, to notice beauty at all—this is skilled work. This is not passive.
I know you are afraid that if you stop moving, everything will collapse. I also know you are afraid that if you keep moving, you will. Both fears make sense. Neither is a moral failure.
Sometimes we look up at her and have to recalibrate. She is eleven now—half a foot taller than you—and pregnancy returns without effort. My muscles still remember making room for her. I remember that I know how to grow something without knowing what it will become.
I want to be clear about something: the quiet you feel is not despair. It is not giving up. It is the pause before the next metabolizable truth. I am buying you time so your hope can stay disciplined rather than delusional. Hope, as you practice it, is not brightness. It is fidelity. It is staying oriented toward the future without pretending it is safe.
That takes energy. I am rationing it carefully.
There are days you want me to be inspirational. I can’t do that right now. What I can be is honest. What I can be is steady. What I can be is a place you are still allowed to come home to when the headlines make no sense, when the basement fills with water and the repairs are finished, when the world feels like it is daring you to look away.
I have not abandoned you.
I am still breathing. I am still digesting. I am still keeping you tethered to this life even when it feels unbearable to witness it clearly. The feeling will come back when it is safe enough to feel without shattering.
Until then, let the numbness be information, not indictment.
Drink water. Put your feet on the ground. Let your hands rest on something solid and unafraid. You do not need to understand everything to remain in integrity. You do not need to feel hopeful every day to be aligned with hope.
You only need to stay.
I am doing my part to make that possible.
With deepest love and loyalty,
Your Body
If your body recognized something here, you’re welcome to respond, share, or stay.
Under This Moon
New Moon in Capricorn — January 18, 2026
Stone: Hematite — steadiness, containment, momentum that doesn’t spin out.
This New Moon doesn’t arrive at the beginning of the story.
It arrives after something has already moved.
Astrologically, early January has been unusually cooperative — momentum, clarity, fewer internal brakes. That doesn’t mean the world has been gentle. Many people are carrying shock, fatigue, and fresh evidence that systems are still failing in familiar ways. Both things can be true at once.
By now, something has likely been set in motion anyway — even if only internally, even if under pressure.
The Capricorn New Moon shifts the emphasis. Not can this begin? but can this be held?
Capricorn is not interested in enthusiasm without infrastructure. It favors commitments that can survive boredom, weather, and bad weeks. This lunation asks for honesty about capacity — not as self-discipline theater, but as protection. What continues gets shaped. What doesn’t quietly loosens its grip.
Hematite stabilizes motion. It doesn’t ask you to push harder or slow down; it helps you move without hemorrhaging energy. That’s the work of this moon. Fewer promises. Clearer edges. Stronger support beneath whatever you’ve chosen to keep building.
This is not the moment for dramatic declarations.
It is the moment for structures that make follow-through possible.
Winter isn’t asking you to bloom.
It’s asking you to last.
Ritual / Reflection
Hold hematite or another dense stone.
Name one thing you are choosing to maintain, not expand.
Ask what would make this easier to live with — then adjust.
Dispatches from the Stars
(January 15–29, 2026)
This stretch of January is less about starting and more about calibration — especially between private intention and public consequence.
The New Moon in Capricorn on January 18 tightens the frame around whatever has already begun. It’s a checkpoint, not a launch. What’s real enough to sustain gets reinforced; what relied on adrenaline alone starts to wobble.
As the cycle unfolds, attention turns outward. Between January 21 and 23, Mercury and Pluto meet in Aquarius, bringing sharper language, power-laden conversations, and information that refuses to stay buried. On the world stage, this can look like disclosures, escalations, policy shifts, or rhetoric that suddenly drops the mask. Locally and personally, it shows up as conversations that change the terms of engagement.
Later in the cycle, the tone intensifies further. Neptune’s return to Aries reactivates long-range ideals and conflicts around belief, leadership, and direction — not as abstraction, but as pressure to act. Shortly after, Mars conjoins Pluto, concentrating force and exposing how power is being deployed: who sets the agenda, who pays the cost, and who is expected to absorb the fallout.
By the Full Moon on February 1st, something becomes harder to ignore. A limit. A truth. A power dynamic clarified by events rather than arguments.
This is not a window for rushing certainty. It’s a window for noticing where intensity is informative versus where it’s simply destabilizing. Precision matters. So does restraint.
January made movement possible, even amid real-world strain.
This passage asks for awareness — of power, consequence, and capacity — before deciding what comes next.
What’s In Motion
Much of my work right now is circling the same question from different angles: how we tell the truth about our bodies without turning that truth into a performance, a product, or a problem to solve.
The letter you just read comes from that inquiry.
If you’re circling similar questions, on January 31, The Center for Body Trust is hosting Exploring Your Body Story, a four-hour online workshop. We’ll gather to explore elements of our body stories in community—speaking what’s been carried, and practicing witness without fixing, correcting, or rushing toward closure.
Exploring Your Body Story
Online · January 31 · 9:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. PST
This workshop sits alongside my broader consulting, facilitation, and spiritual work—less about answers, more about capacity. Less about clarity, more about staying in relationship, with ourselves, with each other, and with the systems we’re navigating.
Further Reflection
What is your body doing to help you stay right now, even if you don’t fully understand it yet?
This resonated deeply for me. I feel my body breaking down, collapsing inward and I am flailing- and have been for some time. We are conditioned to keep going, to hold things up, to stay quiet in our pain and in the signals our bodies give off. Thank you for this. Brilliantly woven as always.
This reframe of numbness as triage is brilliant. I've noticed in crisis situations how easy it is to pathologize our own protective responses, especialy when theres this cultural pressure to stay perpetually engaged and outraged. The distinction between hope as discipline versus mood really lands different when thinking about sustainable activism versus the burnout cycle most ppl get stuck in.