This weekend, I escaped to an old house in a small mountain village near the Italian border. I wanted to walk off the intensity of August, welcome the new season, write and let my mind wander. One of my hosts waited for me near the bus stop and greeted me with a hug.

The house I’m staying in was built in 1619. For the last ten years, it’s been a pension for artists, a place where writers go for residencies, where books, dissertations or essay collections finally get written. To be honest, I have never done all that much writing here but that’s because I am just very slow. Still, every time I come here I feel the house imbues me with a kind of peace that eventually leads to something. A story, a poem. Parts of a novel.

This time, I’m thinking about this newsletter format, the weird ideas kicking around at the back of my mind. The planets – how they are interpreted in astrology – have always been a part of my writing here. But lately, I found myself wanting to introduce them, almost as you would introduce a friend at a party: ‘This is my buddy Mars, he can be a real dick sometimes, but boy does he get shit done. Back there in the corner is Saturn. He’s depressed and a bit shy. Ah, here comes Venus. You’ll like her, I promise.’

In the kind of modern psychological astrology I practice, each planet is seen as a part of our psyche, similar to how Carl Gustav Jung understood archetypes. To become a whole person, then, involves befriending each planet’s energies and integrating both its light and its shadow. It’s a move beyond binaries: No planet, and thus no part of our self, is wholly good or bad; each planet carries within it a whole spectrum of creative and destructive tendencies. And when I say ‘planets’ I am of course including the Sun and the Moon and maybe-planet Pluto. I speak about them symbolically, mythically, as gods and goddesses ruling over their domains. Of course, it’s also useful to think about them as astronomical objects, so I’ll switch the language depending on what I’m trying to get across.

Modern astrology is very different from the kind the ancient Greeks (and before them, the Sumerians and Babylonians) practiced. Whereas a birth chart was once used to decree a person’s definitive fate, birth charts today are seen as yet another incentive for relentless self-improvement, a path to our ‘full potential’, if only we could hack it. Despite these seemingly opposing views, I think there is a throughline, a principle that has held for thousands of years: our birth chart is a map for locating our fiercest struggles while also showing the talents we take for granted. And both our struggles and our talents are symbolized by planets.

Of course, one could simply name a burden or a gift and leave the planets out of it. But I have found, in the birth chart readings I’ve done, that speaking about the mythology of the planets creates a deep resonance for people. It’s an immediate physical and psychological experience of a larger context, a subtle knowing that, maybe, we are always in relationship with greater powers within and without.

I’ll be introducing my first planetary friend, Saturn, in the next newsletter. He really is no fun at parties and generally prefers to leave early. Still, I can’t wait for you to meet him.

Obviously, I’ll be looking at all the planets through the lens of creativity, reflecting on the sweet and bitter teachings of each power when it comes to making art. The deeper we get into this year, the less I know. But I do know this: I’ll continue to create. Not just to produce something. But to remember that I am human, to share, to fail and to remember, once again, that this is just how the cookie crumbles.