Grieving Scorpio Season

Scorpio’s gift is scraping the grey dead skin from your back and shoulders.

Hand stained with morning pages ink.

Every phoenix needs ashes from which to rise. Every lotus flower needs the dense and cloudy mud. During this Scorpio season - past now with an eclipse, new moon, and Mars cazimi – I hope you’ve found ample metamorphic fuel. And I pray you haven’t.

Lately I’ve been working in the funeral business, the natal promise of my Scorpio sun in full effect. Here at the Mortal Portal™ I’m a sweet-faced, lazy toll worker with a high-vis vest and one headphone in. I toss treats to Cerberus as Death makes her daily rounds, though I’m never prepared for her to linger at my desk.

Less than two hours after the 10.28 lunar eclipse I received the news that my grandmother, Billie June Hooker, had died. My father’s side of the family has long been marked by estrangement, with peeling strips of velcro where steel chain links might have been. Dressed in trepidation and a neckline to suit southern tastes, I met more of my grandmother and her twelve siblings in the ornate wood of the Methodist church. I laid a rose over her casket and felt years of contorted love distilled in the gesture.

Stood in the middle of my living room, time rushing by without cause. Swaddled tightly in three blankets with room only for air. Blank watching my hunger growing deeper, sharper. The great sit of grief - 1 minute, 3 hours, or 13 days - is time to wait beside the gate and honor those who walk through.

Scorpio’s water is a bayou, stagnant and teeming. Scorpio’s gift is scraping the grey dead skin from your back and shoulders. Scorpio’s heart holds the depths of loss, a love only seen in the jet-black reflection of an undertaker’s shades.