June Digest—Notes from the Field
What I'm working on & reading, Why I might lose it if one more person uses the term "capacity" & and the game-changing astrology of July.
It’s a hot Tuesday afternoon in June, my friend Arjun asks me to go to the beach. I tell him I’d absolutely love to, but alas, I’ve been burdened with an entrepreneurial spirit that won’t allow me to rest on weekdays. It’s summertime and I’ve once again taken on too much. A familiar place. Next life, I vow to come back as a house cat.
The older I get, and the shorter my attention span mysteriously becomes, the more I’m trying to honour my commitments and side quests both. So when something won’t seem to fit or I keep putting it off, the question I keep asking is: how do I make this fun? Simple, yes. Trivial, sure - but if I can’t make it interesting or at least a little playful, I have discovered I simply won’t do it. And while I’m focusing on some larger projects right now, I think a small monthly snippet of the different parts of my brain might satiate the hankering to write and publish.
Each digest will feature: what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about, what I’m loving (books, recipes, places, people), and the astrology behind the dates I’ve got my eye on. Which brings me to the first…
What I’m Working On…
I just launched my summer residency with Another Studios. I’m setting up in their studio for all of August to work on a small batch of commissions, and their 6,000 sq ft space is an actual dream come true. So I’m looking for a handful of collectors who want custom medium-to-large-scale work. If that’s you, let’s get to work!
I arrived here via the “making things fun” quest. In my years of trial and error, I’ve realized what is in fact, not fun, and that I am not a typical studio artist. Being holed up in a windowless studio by myself in the middle of the city is my version of a slow death. I’ve other things to think about. What i LOVE is: connecting with people with a piece they’ll keep for a lifetime, telling a story through the work, and making it in a beautiful space. The residency is all three.
The second thing is an astrology app I’m designing, built specifically around transits and the cycles of life. I’ll show you the moment I finish articulating it (It’s complex, even for me as an astrologer to articulate). It’s an idea I’ve had for years, something I used to make by hand for my consultations, which took forever. At the risk of being as annoying as everybody was about NFTs (myself included), i am having a lot of fun with Claude & Replit. I feel creative in a way I haven’t felt in 10+ years and it feels exciting to be here.
And lastly, I’ll be in the Neo Noir show on July 3rd at Leisure Centre. I love this city, and I appreciate anyone who makes a big moment in it, so I’m excited for this event. I’d love to see you there.
One Book I’m Loving…
I’ve been reading Bill Gurley’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love”. The idea I keep turning over is his case for curiosity over passion. Not because passion is wrong, but because it has a tendency to burn out.
He argues that curiosity is a more durable form of passion, and I’d tend to agree. Follow a path because there is a genuine thread to pull. As I move into a new chapter of my own work, I’m noticing which threads those are, and they’re not always the ones I expected.
One Thing I’m Thinking About…
The thing on my mind the last few months has been the misuse of the word capacity. It’s one of those therapy words my whole generation adopted at once, and I’m as guilty as anyone for using it the past. But somewhere along the way it stopped meaning anything and started meaning everything. It’s become a polite clinical word for “no,” but I fear we’ve got it backwards.
My aversion is this: people use it as a metaphor for a vessel with a fixed volume. Something you must protect from overflowing at all cost. And if it does overflow? Ruin. Catastrophe. The air escapes. All that’s left of you is a cartoon balloon-human deflated on the sidewalk.
As an artist, I believe in the full and complete immersion of the self. This might sound extreme, but the feeling I’m chasing when I make work, and in life, is the total obliteration of the self. I want to go all the way into something. And when I look back, the times I’ve made my best work, or grown the most as a human, squeezed the most juice out of life, were exactly the times I gave myself wholly over to a process, body and mind and soul, until there was a complete erasure of self. I’d never have gotten there by protecting my “capacity.” In that way, capacity isn’t a thing to protect. It’s a thing to stretch.
I think we’ve gotten the whole orientation backwards, partly because modern life is built for comfort. “Protecting the peace” and having “boundaries” now means never being inconvenienced, bothered, or burdened. But what is a life without it’s beautiful burdens? The great burdens of love, relationships, a calling, a responsibility, these are the things that make life worth living.
As a society, we’ve overcorrected from our parents “just go out and get some sunshine” generation. We’ve become so delicate with ourselves that cancelling on a friends birthday or special event because we lack “capacity” feels normal, when that is a complete misuse of the word, and the opposite of what life is actually about. Showing up. Surrender. Immersion. Being spent all the way down. And THEN resting. Recouping. Refilling. (And to be clear: if you’re genuinely sick, grieving, or in the thick of something hard, this isn’t aimed at you, rest IS the work) But the ultimate goal shouldn’t be to protect your capacity. I think it’s to grow it. That is the real manifestation work. The stretching is the thing that expands you, and it teaches your nervous system to be able to hold more. It comes to know resilience, because it can remember being resilient.
Think of the caterpillar. To become anything else, it goes into the chrysalis and dissolves, completely into liquid. There’s no version of the story where it keeps its legs and arms and grows wings anyway. The whole self has to go. We want it the other way. We want to transform with the legs intact. “Capacity” is the language we use to stay familiar, to stay safe, to emerge improved without ever having to dissolve. But what the butterfly requires is the willingness to dissolve. To give itself fully.
& Lastly…. The astrology I am watching & my favourite dates coming up…
The first half of June has chef's kiss astrology. Venus and Jupiter are both in Cancer, Jupiter exalted there. Personally, I'm excited for the end of June, when Jupiter enters Leo and I begin my Jupiter return (a once-every-twelve-years glow up moment, hollaaaaa at me). The last time it was here I had my first art show 🥹.
But the thing I'm really looking forward to watching is something the astrologer Rick Levine walked through in his NORWAC lecture in May. Building through late July is a genuinely rare alignment: across the back half of the month, all the outer planets (sans Saturn) move into a (mostly) favourable pattern, a grand sextile around July 20. I know astrologers always say things are “rare”, but to be clear, this neverrrr happens. Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter all at 4° of their respective signs, all creating aspects to eachother. Close to a year's worth of astrology in a single week.
What makes it striking as well is who called it. The French astrologer André Barbault, a famous astrologer who famously called out the 2020 pandemic (verbatim…in 2011…) wrote about this window a long time ago before he passed. By his read, 2020 to 2022 was one of the deepest lows of the modern era, and 2026 is the climb out of it. He called this the most beautiful configuration of the century and described what's coming as a splendid relaunch of civilization. Whether or not you take that literally, it is striking.
My own takeaway: something forming around this time will have a profound effect on humanity at large. We're halfway there already, robotics, AI, longevity research, the whole shape of things is changing. I don't know what's going to happen, and anyone who tells you they do is lying. But it will be impactful. I've got July 19th marked off. If you've got something you want to launch in this window, it shows a lot of promise as well.
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That’s all I’ve got for now. A nice little ramble, longer than intended, which is on brand. Thank you for reading. If any of the July business has you curious about your own chart, my consultation books are open.
Big Love, Mega 🐛🦋