New Moon: Ordeal by illness

It's Friday. Hello.

I have covid.

And as some majority of people who've had covid (and lived) are aware, this illness saps energy in a profound way. I haven't had to ration my mental and emotional tasks to the same extent as physical tasks, but I am still trying to be cautious as my body continues to fight the virus, and there's no telling when I might decide I need to stop writing and simply sleep. So for the most part, this is a placeholder post, not the post I really meant to write.

I will have extensive thoughts some other time on what this week has been like. But in summary, it's become a terrible yet sacred pause, a cry from my body to focus on itself to the exclusion of all else — no matter what is in the news, no matter what I want to prepare for on the horizon, no matter what I would rather be doing, no matter what I've felt responsible for.

It is an ordeal. I do not know if it is one that I "needed," but here it is before me. I hail the vaccine who has protected me from worse harm, and I hail the plants who have inspired the drugs I've taken to manage inflammation, and I hail the plants I have directly ingested to help myself further: yarrow, mint, ginger. And yesterday, in a quiet moment, I stood at my altar and prayed to one face of my god, which is his face as Apollōn: lord of medicine and plague alike. To Apollōn I pray, take this disease away.

This week I had meant to begin a new twelve-post series that would last through the course of the next year: a post concerning something about or adjacent to each sign of the zodiac and/or the sign's ruling planet. Today in writing of ordeal for the New Moon[1], I was going to engage with Aries and violence — to engage with Mars, Ares, classical gods of war. But it seems those gods don't have my attention now, and the apocalyptic horseman riding past my household is not red but white.

Let what I was going to write today be an open mystery. Fill in the zodiacal and planetary associations as you will. I will return to this series in May for Taurus, and hopefully I'll be well enough a week from today to offer a regular Friday post for the First Quarter, on lambing season.

The great rest continues.

[1] Lunar timing is in a strange phase again relative to this newsletter.