The Breaking Zodiac Wheel - House 9
A Memoir Series by Carissa Jean Mares
The Ninth House of Big Ideas, Publishing, Travel, Philosophy, and Astrology
Home to: Your Sun and sense of self. Enjoy this burden, this gift, this exaltation. It is yours and you love it and you want to feel special and you really do believe that all your ideas are wonderful and deserving of love and respect. Much to the cackling and licking of the lips of your inner critic and perpetual self-doubt.
In the Sign of Aries. You are the eldest daughter of a pastor. You are bold, first, and tough — but scared. Stating your sun sign will get you ignored on queer dating apps and shunned by professional astrologers. What a complicated and hilarious thing to be. Your sense of self is wrapped up in a mixture of emotions, but you relate most to your favorite dog on the planet. He is a rescue. He vibrates when he’s scared and bites out of fear even though he knows he’s safe. His name is Nacho and you are both always so excited to see each other and hold each other and nuzzle each other and understand each other. Why can’t everyone be the same way?
In Michigan, my dreams fill up with fallen out teeth and my waking life is full of a deadly anxiety that curls up my fists and brings them to my own face. It is time for a change. Do we want to be somewhere that is magical or close to family?
Lukie pokes his head through a door and smiles like a child. What if we didn’t have to choose?
It is what should be a lazy part of August, seeping into September. Lukie and I have traveled to the Bay Area to commemorate the anniversary of his grandmother’s passing. The space that used to be hers now an emptiness at the table. No weathered yet steady hands to pass slices of fruit around, no one to tell the 49ers to pick up their feet when sprinting to the end zone. Just a century of memories.
Fortunata Manzano was loving, strong and lived to pretty much 100. We all believe she would have lasted for many more years if the isolation of a pandemic hadn’t been the bookend to the spring and winter of her life.
In her house, I am shaking off the crumbs of trauma from surviving our time in Michigan. We still live there, but I am so incredibly thankful to be back on the west coast, kissing the sands of the sea and letting the fog float through my hair.
Our plan for this glorious break is to see family, friends, and then drive up to Portland for a wedding. But I always forget that being around family, even if it isn’t mine, is still stressful. I don’t know how to be around another familial unit, even if it needs nothing from me. I shake like a chihuahua in the corner, concerned that my space is being taken up, always on alert for strangers.
In the year 2022, Jupiter will start performing a very personal tango with my natal Sun. Going in and out of being conjunct and circling back and moving forward. I’ve never been good at dancing in tandem with another, I both want to lead and don’t know how. Same as it ever was.
While lying on my back, trying to envision tight muscles loosening so they won’t creep to become a headache, I get an email from our landlord in Michigan. My body remains lifeless, a deep and intense unwillingness to deal with anything erupts from within me. This trip to California has already been fraught with the hemming and hawing of relatives wondering what our next decisions will be, I do not know what more I can carry.
We moved to Michigan because I had been offered a job that quickly took the shape of a Trojan horse, but explaining why it wasn’t working would take too much effort and always puts me in a defensive position. I hate having to explain to older generations why it’s inappropriate for a boss to tell me he refuses to believe anything I say. That the men in the office get privileges the women certainly don’t, that raises are more frequently awarded to those who share the same religion as the CEO, and that women who choose to start a family will see bonuses that others who can’t or won’t will not. That all it would take is one person to sue and the whole thing would burn down like a paper house. “But the health insurance,” they will wail from the rafters.
A bud trying to burst out of the ground first takes the shape of our current landlord giving us 60-day notice to a $300 per month rent increase. The blossoming takes the form of our friends telling us about a rental unit in Woodacre that’s about to open up for the same rate. If we’re paying Bay Area prices, we should at least be in the Bay Area. (Ann Arbor whispers in my ear, “there’s nothing for you here, anyway. Get out while you can.”)
We learn of this morsel of freedom by meeting Bill and Amanda for beer and chicken sandwiches in the Richmond District. My body cannot contain how I feel when I am around them, they each make me feel so alive and seen and whole and loved.
Lukie used to live with them in a house in North Portland where he was nursing the hangover of his own relationship with someone who looked at him and only found things she wanted to tear apart. Bill and Amanda pieced him back together and held him and let him walk their dog and fed him and watched him bloom back into a carefree man of whimsy. And once again, they are offering such a reprieve.
For the rest of the trip, Lukie and I begin to joke that we’re moving to the Bay. Relatives light up at this. It gives me something to talk about other than my failure of fumbling to make it in the media and tech world. It feels like home.
By the start of 2023, Jupiter has meandered its way back into conjunction with my natal sun. We’re almost caught up. The journey is strange and large and confusing. Sometimes it resonates and I feel the world expand and open up to me. And other times it is closed off and awful and I begin to wonder if maybe I’m reading my birth chart wrong, or missing something, or if my ideas are not ones that need expansion. The fear that I really am all rotten begins to take hold of me. Reaching out for a handhold, I casually flip to see what Chani is up to these days.
The brand has disintegrated into something gimmicky and overly simple. Easy enough to roast the sun sign generalizations, but I am always amazed at the number of comments responding with “exactly!” and “so true!”
The bay and hills of California hold Lukie’s living ancestors like the tiled walls hold Jennifer’s spices and tinctures. Being so close to family has always triggered a gag reflex for me, but I am learning that his is one to trust. They provide a love, a space, a patience that I was not afforded in childhood.
This doesn’t mean they escaped the heaviness of life. But it does mean that they handled the ebbs and flows with better timing than my pastor father who insisted on cracking his knuckles to suffocate anything that appeared to disagree with him.
I am perpetually thankful for Lukie’s sister. She and I have a conversation on the back patio, overlooking Grandma’s Garden, discussing the needs of an industry that she can harness but wants to consume me whole. She talks to me from her perch down below, holding her coffee in one hand. I absolutely adore her and her husband. She is an Aries, he is a Leo, what in me is there not to love about them?
By the end of our stay, as we load everything into the rental car to drive up to Portland, we are already scheming. What if I didn’t have to feel trapped? What if there was a way out that led to a bright and honeyed future? I understand now why there was a rush towards these hills of gold, and I desperately hope to strike my own.