Bruise Violet
Dear Friend,
Pressing on a bruise reminds you that you are fragile but you are alive.
This time of year is beauty and melancholy.
The sweetness of Venus and the speed of Mercury disintegrate the border between ripeness and rot, freshness and decay.
Bruises, like the last blooms of the season, recall death and violence but also containment and healing.
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The mutable borders of late Virgo season make it a time for ghosts.
What does it mean to be haunted?
I often feel haunted by stories that live with me, and touch me, with their lingering presence.
I have written about haunting as a deviant strategy in storytelling.
%I —lauraellenjoyce.co.uk
Haunting
There are endless places to discover in the haunted house. Opening a new door leads to a different outcome, or even a different story. In some rooms, objects are picked up and replaced, imbued with new meanings the second time around.
But what if you want to write more directly about ghosts in your work? Muriel Leung has written a short handbook for writing ghosts with three basic rules:
Rule #1: Ghosts Never Stay Still
Rule #2: Let Ghosts Desire
Rule #3: Let Ghosts Become Heroes in the Afterlife
Seeing Life Through the Eyes of the Dead: A Short Handbook for Writing Ghosts ‹ Literary Hub
Despite writing a novel about ghosts, I do not profess to be a ghost expert. But I do know that every April, my family gathers at multiple cemeteries across New York and New Jersey to pay their res…
Her guide helps us to think about human characters as well as their ghostly counterparts.
Yet given their opportunity to yearn, fail, and try again, every human and ghost must reckon with the ways in which their desires exacerbate existing tensions across not only the world of the living but the many levels of a spiritual plane.
For more inspiration, why not listen to this haunted ambient mix that opens with a field recording that accidentally captures the sound of a ghost.
/extaudio/b/1/6/d/b000-7b11-4e7e-9e1d-85ffedbb1566)
Grey Frequency - Haunted Ambient Mix / 20th December 2020 by CAMP | Mixcloud
Deep listening ambient, lo-fi drone, haunted electronica and field recordings. All sounds selected, edited and mixed by Grey Frequency. || http://greyfrequency.bandcamp.com || @GreyFrequency || Broadcast on 20th December 2020 at CAMP || http://listen.camp
The spirit trills close to the microphone.
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Virgo III is Bruise Violet.
As with Blackberrying, Venus is the co-ruler, but this time she rules with Mercury instead of Saturn, so there is a very different feeling.
Kening Zhu’s illustration feels like inhaling the last rose of the season; its perfume rich and heady.
For Sarah Corbett, of Rowan and Sage, rose is a Venusian plant that is attuned to grief and sorrow just as much as soothing and love.
I find rose to be a tried and true ally for grief of all kinds. It has this wonderful ability to soften the heart and wrap us in its soothing embrace, almost cushioning the fall or pain associated with loss.
– Sarah Corbett, Rose Monograph, Rowan and Sage.
There is a strangely fleeting sense of beauty to be found here; fruit on the cusp of decay, flowers in their last bloom, the sweet pain of the bruise.
Other writers have given names to this decan that evoke mortality. Austin Coppock calls it ‘the Sarcophagus’, and T. Susan Chang calls it ‘Return to Enfleshment’.
For Coppock, this decan ‘makes clear the value of every irreplaceable moment’ and ‘reveals the importance of things as they are—arising and receding—and deserving of love and attention’.
If you would like to pay attention to this moment, join us for Atmospheres. We will meet tomorrow at noon BST to drink rose tea and write about luxury, decadence, and fleeting beauty.
🜁🜃🜂🜄
🍄 Fruit
Hungry Ghosts
What can the hungry ghosts of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel can tell us about art and love?
To speak of what cannot be spoken about, and to treat it tenderly and with compassion, even if that thing causes shame, that is what art, what writing can do.
Ten of Pentacles
The Ten of Pentacles is a card about homecoming, and the realm between life and death.
This card feels like a hopeful and homely card to pull - it gives a sense of things being in their rightful place - but the ten gives a sense of the next transition to be to something else, another stage of life. For some of us, that transition is into the realm beyond life, and the spectre of death haunts this card and decan.
Virgo III - Bruise Violet
Mutable earth: roses, funerary plants, secrets.
The sweetness of Venus, with the fast movement of Mercury, speeds up the border between ripeness and rot, and between freshness and decay.
🦠 Spores
I am continuing my series of Story Constellations, and now the whole of Virgo is available to read.
Virgo: Unearthing
𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium
Alice Sparkly Kat changed my perception of what rest can be in their essay ‘How to Rest’.
From Olivia Cronk’s emails, I am sharing Kelly Hayes’s guide to ‘Mapping Community Defense and Care in Our Neighbourhood’. This is designed specifically to support those organising against the military occupation on Chicago, but it is a practical guide for all kinds of community organisation.
Mid Theory Collective are running two reading groups this autumn. They are reading Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada.
I wish you a week of soft ghosts, homecoming, and rest.
Love, LJ
this is microdosing ceremony, a letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
explore creative rabbit holes on my website.
🜁🜃🜂🜄