So Rachel Pollack is not well and I don’t know the latest. I don’t know if she’s “here” or “there” or neither.

I never met her in person but had a couple of readings from her over the years (actually one reading and one Celtic Cross lesson). I think this was in… 2013. She hadn’t advertised Celtic Cross lessons but I wanted to know how *she* did this particular layout.

And I first heard of Pollack from my astrology teacher so many years ago (2003?) and at some point I started using the cards as much as the charts, and sitting here writing to you I don’t think I can yet describe her influence upon me. I need to sit with it more.  Her influence is all wrapped up with other people from that formative time, my astrology teacher, old friends who are no longer in my life, those years…

Suffice to say that I loved her so much that when my first book, the Saturn book, was on the verge of coming out and I was asked to find people to blurb it, I asked my editor to ask Rachel even though she wasn’t an astrologer. In fact, she was the first person I thought of. I felt that if Rachel thought my book was worthy of approving then… it must be okay. (By the way, she is a mega Leo.) I even mention her in my second book… although I forgot that fact until just now.

Flash forward to 2022: not that she needed my blurb (being so famous and so beloved, etc) but I was asked by this same editor to blurb Rachel’s latest book, but this request came in when Mars was retrograde, and I was immersed in my first semester of psychoanalytic training and deeply stressed, trying to re-enter the world, post-covid, and yet on Zoom (and trying to re-enter world in a larger sense, not just covid related, after decades of self-employment/solitude), and once school was out, I forgot all about the request until I saw the news of her dying and regretted not taking the time. But I had none.

Here’s the thing though:  It wasn’t at all about whether or not I was needed, but that was how I interpreted it. We Cancerians can be so all or nothing. Or maybe it’s we Moon Pluto people. I felt it didn’t matter. That I didn’t matter. But that wasn’t the point at all. I was being asked to be part of something larger than myself but, at the time, I couldn’t see it. I was so deeeeeeep into my studies and stressed. It was all new. I had tunnel vision. But I also see that I didn’t value myself at all.

It’s funny. This issue of value. In astrology, Venus is all about value, among other things. I get so frustrated with Zoom at school because it’s hybrid and the tech isn’t perfect. And after each class we have to write these summaries of the readings/homework and class dynamic and my teacher wrote back to me that she looks forward to the day when I can be there in person. “You have so much to offer,” she wrote. She was showing me my value.

Moral of the story: it’s never too late (Saturn). It’s never too late for a Venus lesson and we have a Venus retrograde coming up this year. So get ready…

As always, my questions: who are you and why are you here?

In either case, one of the greats is leaving us soon.

To be continued…
xo

PS (edited to add):

And I see it from even another angle as I go about tidying and making a cup of decaf and getting things in order for class today. It wasn’t (only) that I was de-valuing myself. It was that I wasn’t being ambitious. I wasn’t thinking: oh I need to have my name on THIS BOOK by THIS FAMOUS AUTHOR. On the contrary, I was thinking only of my studies, my homework, I was standing at the foot of a mountain, as a student, a passionate underling on a potential future path. I could see nothing else but psychoanalysis.  I was immersed in that world on every level including much emotional intensity.

This too TO BE CONTINUED…

To book a Reading, you know what to do xo