The Guitar, Alchemy, The Star, Neptune, and Listening Again
I ate something warm and let my body settle. That felt like the right beginning.
Today, January 25, I pulled Alchemy (the Tarot card) for the day. Not transformation-by-force, not improvement, not hustle, but the quieter kind: listening until the right proportions reveal themselves. The kind that happens when you stop pushing ingredients around and let them speak.
For more than three years, The Star (another Tarot card) has been my companion, the card that returns to me most often. I don’t read it as hope in the motivational sense. I read it as orientation. A fixed point. A reminder that there is a signal even when the field is noisy, even when visibility is low.
This weekend I returned to some of my large electro‑acoustic works after a long pause. I didn’t try to finish anything. I simply listened. What surprised me wasn’t what was missing, but how much was already there. Structure. Titles. Internal logic. What remains to be added is not content, but undertone: atmospheres, low currents, quiet supports.
I also picked up the guitar again. Not casually, not for distraction, but seriously. Slowly. With attention. Cold hands, imperfect conditions, no performance agenda. Just tone, field, response. I don’t think in scales or systems when I play. I think in environments. In tension and release. In what a sound does to the space it enters.
Tomorrow, January 26, Neptune moves firmly into Aries, for the first time in our lives in a way that will matter long‑term, staying to be studied until 2039. I’m not interested in grand predictions. I’m interested in lived shifts: how imagination changes when it has to act, how sensitivity behaves when it’s asked to lead rather than dissolve.
For me, this moment isn’t dramatic. It’s clarifying.
Less fog. More edges. More responsibility for one’s own fire.
Alchemy doesn’t announce itself. The Star doesn’t shout. And creative work doesn’t always advance by addition. Sometimes it advances by returning, listening again, hearing what the work has been patiently waiting to say.
That’s where I am today.
[image: Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Guitarra, 1916]]
Contact Us | Maps & Readings | Sessions | On Being a Polymath | Entries | Who I Am