June for me is a month of recovery. A recovery that is necessary in the wake of May’s energy. This is because last month’s energy was something beyond what I had experienced in a long time, and this confession doesn’t come lightly since I was born a Plutonic and I am used to unexpected and strong doses of life’s intensity. Due to my karmic Pluto in Scorpio Rx in the 1st house placement, life had demonstrated to me several times that this is going to be an incarnation of extremes, of symbolic deaths and rebirths, and having to understand some of the deepest emotions. However, sometimes a certain period comes along which simply turns up the Plutonic heat up a notch. Like a square aspect of transiting Pluto in Aquarius to my natal Pluto in Scorpio, during Taurus season, for example…

For perspective, transiting Pluto in Aquarius is at the moment of my writing this article at 3’19 degrees in my 4th house; my IC (imum coeli or the bottom of the sky), the root of my chart is placed at 1’37 Aquarius. As a factual recap, the month of May of 2025 debuted with selling my small one-room flat and my moving into a 2-bedroom rented apartment in a safer part of Bucharest. A decision I didn’t easily make as I had to let go of the financial security of owning my place, but I gained the physical safety of knowing that at least, in this rental I will no longer be threatened with violent abuse by my neighbours, like I had been in my previous location.

Escaping into a safer neighbourhood was something coming for two years now and as difficult as it had been to decide on this move, I pushed myself into making it because of self-preservation. The heavy-heartedness, however, came along with me. Just as I was getting accustomed to this new place and thinking it was better that I was somehow closer to my parent’s place and could visit them more often, on the 8th of May my father died.

In his book ‘Pluto and the Evolutionary Journey of the Soul/ Vol. 1’ Jeffrey Wolf Green describes Pluto’s transit through the 4th house in the following words :

“…this process will serve as an excellent time to examine the impact of the individual’s early environmental situation as reflected through the parents, and for those who are parents, how they themselves have emotionally responded to their own children, family and spouse (…) It will now be necessary to change or eliminate all forms of emotional dependency and security that are linked to external situations. These dependencies and securities are in some way limiting further growth (…) This evolutionary time frame and experience can be very difficult because many people will feel as if the very foundations of their lives are being threatened and removed. Such an experience must occur so that the individual is more or less left with only his or her self to look at, to examine, and to depend on (…) For some people this process will be enforced through the loss of a job or career, a family member or someone close to them, emotional confrontations of an intense magnitude with family members or even the loss of the individual’s own life.” (p. 322-323).

Dad was cremated on the 10th of May and I found myself walking back from the Crematorium into a straight line back into the new flat I had just shortly inhabited. I crawled into bed like a slug and rested there for the next hours, feeling numbed out of my mind. I couldn’t cry. My body held on to the pain. It was familiar. It was a family thing to hold onto pain. I was simply being loyal.

What weighed heavily on my heart was the fact that on the morning of my father’s death, I visited grandpa’s grave – situated near my new place – and I placed a coin on top of it. I offered flowers and asked grandpa (my father’s father) to help my family out. Hours later, around midnight my mother called to tell me that dad had given up the ghost. I immediately thought of grandpa letting me know that he listened to my prayer…although I’m not sure, that was the resolution I had asked for, but I am in no position at this point in my life to have semantic arguments with ghosts. Grandpa helped. And this helping hand from beyond the veil lingers in my heart, as a life mystery left for me to unravel. I am not afraid of ghosts, but I am mortified of living a soulless life. So the problem I had to cope with now was: How do I continue to live on, when all I can feel is just how dead I am on the inside?

Dad’s departure happened right in-between Romania’s presidential elections, a period of two weeks of tumult as the population was faced with a pro-West candidate and a pro-Russian candidate. To say that the air in Bucharest was electric during those days, was an understatement. As the pressures kept pilling up on me, around the 19th of May – and after the results of the elections proved to be hopeful and progressive rather than medieval and destructive, I realised just how completely chewed up my nervous system had been. My body has started uncontrollably shaking after I took my morning shower and my hands were clenching without the possibility of relaxing them quickly. Only with controlled breathing was I able to physically ‘unclench’ and relax my body in roughly 20 minutes (which felt like an eternity).

In the final days of May, I was running from one doctor appointment to another to find some treatment for my nervous system’s temporary collapse and I was lucky enough to find the support I needed in a psychiatrist, neurologist and family doctor. The treatment my psychiatrist put me on helped smooth out my over-sensitivity to sounds and helped me feel more relaxed in my body. I somehow knew this wasn’t enough and that I had to do a bit more to get the pain through my body moving and to release it somehow. I started doing yoga and gentle stretches daily, while eating a consistent breakfast of porridge with honey and fruits and making sure I am drinking enough water each day.

I took at least 10,000 steps, and installed a tracker app on my phone to keep me to it. Each day this tracker would gentle nudge me to ‘get moving’ and then reward me by saying ‘you are getting better’, which felt like the kindest thing I could hear all day and exactly the opposite of how I was feeling. At night I worked, since work keeps me stable and optimistic and then I would watch a movie projected on the blank wall of my bedroom to take my mind off things. I would cry in the most public and inappropriate places, always surrounded by strangers and never near my mother or sister, the last two remaining members of my close family. It’s sad to write this but my relationship to them is not at all close, to say the least. I try, nonetheless.

In ‘The Book of Pluto: Finding Wisdom in Darkness with Astrology’, astrologer Steven Forrest reflects on what happens to the human psyche once Pluto pays a visit to the root of the root of the birth chart, the IC or Nadir:

“Psychological insights, bravely won, must penetrate down into core assumptions about yourself, and then be expressed publicly.” (p.263). He goes on to add that with this transit : “Your navigational error, if you succumb to it, would be to live the life of a ghost, with your fire, intensity and vision removed from your biographical life while you went through the motions of existence. And regardlessof outward appearances, at the psychological level you would live the life of a hearthless, homeless person (…) With Pluto in the fourth house, you heal yourself by becoming conscious of your woundedness…for you it starts with realizing the extent to which your ability to find, recognize and claim ‘your people’ has been distorted.” (p. 83)

Remarkably, the intensity I was doing my best to smooth out or diminish in my waking life, appeared once again projected through the movies that I gravitated towards in that month. One after the other, I saw four movies that were incredibly good but each in their own way, were also intense and haunting.

First of all, I saw ‘Sex, lies and videotape’ after I listened to antiheroines‘ insightful analysis on YouTube, about the disappearance of horny movies and the important role of emotional intimacy in making films feel erotic. I just loved this movie and if I was previously a fan of James Spader’s and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s chemistry in ‘Secretary‘, the unlikely attraction which existed between him and Andi MacDowell in Stephen Soderbergh’s film was much more subtle and sexy somehow.

Seeing as I was in a vulnerable state of chaotic sadness, physical pain and nervous irritation, I couldn’t believe that this movie made me feel something tender-hearted again. As if a whole new mindset was available to me, through psychological sensuality.

A couple of days later, the film player I used to watch the film above recommended another European movie called ’99 Moons’. This movie was filmed after the pandemic and had actors I had never seen before, so it was right up my alley. Heavily medicated, still broken-hearted but satisfied that I had completed my day’s work, I sat on my little couch to watch this movie which begins with one of the most random, brutal and unexpected sex scenes I had seen so far. I won’t get into details but I’ll just say it involved: a parking lot, a ski mask, something aggressively oral happening and two consenting adults, one of whom breaks down crying after their intense coupling. And it’s not whom you expect.

The curious thing is that ’99 Moons’ is a love story and the characters grow on you with so much ease that you feel shattered when you watch the surprising ending to the movie. I loved it because you get to see a completely different gender dynamic between two heterosexual characters, than you get to see in other erotic-themed movies. And the sex scenes are not at all vanilla or missionary, rather the opposite as most of them are female-led and unique but they always add to the story and the sensual intimacy between two people who simply were burning for each other across the years. This movie made me feel like it was worth bringing back to life, a part of me that once felt excited about sex and sexual pleasure…a part I had buried in April of 2021.

Just some nights into my treatment, and I was now continuously sad but I felt somehow horny as well, like the upper part of the body broke off from my lower region. I had to appreciate however that both systems, although apart, were trying to keep me alive and away from the darker thoughts…those thoughts I had of joining my relatives, of seeing my dad’s dead and peaceful face as flowers were thrown over him, thoughts which sounded a lot like: ‘What’s the fucking point in living anymore? He seems so calm, he no longer feels pain…I wish I could feel that’. The creeping feeling that everything was falling apart around me and I wanted to just stop breathing, so that maybe then the pressure will lift and my body will stop hurting so much in every little corner.

It felt like Freud’s concepts of how Thanatos nourishes Eros, which I first became aware of in college, it was as if they were finally being integrated skin-deep within my physicality. It was Pluto’s energy creating this cellular revolution through the way in which I was interpreting the events that happened in May of 2025 and the stories I was watching and unsuccessfully trying to escape into. The only thing these movies did was to push back upon myself the duty to live in my body and to continue to live on, no matter how painful the experience of living would get.

I remembered this feeling. It was kind of how I felt after watching a couple of years ago ‘Normal people’, just that that experience was devoid of the pain of thinking constantly in the background of my mind: “Dad is gone and I’m never going to be able to speak to him, and I knew that the last time I talked to him in January, after I argued with mom, that it would’ve been our last moment together, because I told him this and he just sadly starred at me…he didn’t say anything.”

A part of me, the child-part felt guilty for abandoning dad, while the rational part of me was aware that it felt like the force of karma worked through me, as I had done to dad what he had done to me when I was small and sick: abandoned me.

Armed with this sad mix of thoughts, I went to the cinema this time to watch an old Romanian movie with a curious title “Glissando”. A movie about a man obsessed with the portrait of a woman. Halfway through the movie, the plot dissolves into two streams, two alternate realities and the characters simply float into random and beautifully-shot sequences of events in their lives. It is a movie about love, memories and obsessions and it was gorgeous to behold and spoke volumes to me about taking it easy and just riding the wave of feelings produced by all the events of the month of May. I couldn’t control what was happening, but I could control my reactions to all these things. In that at least, I had some power left.

I guess that the intensity of May was lived inside of my body between these two extremes of deep sadness – that I was trying my best to run away from – and into erotic creativity – a sensual healing I was hoping to find some sort of solace. It helped that May in Bucharest is incredibly fragrant, as all the roses and jasmine bushes blossom, and the linden trees unleash their aromas while the market boom with cherries and strawberries and honey melons. It gets warmer each night and clothes become looser and thinner and days become longer and slower.

In the background of this, I was tuning in and out of consciousness repressing feelings of sadness, shame and guilt. I slept throughout the day and was awake at night. Nature was so beautiful while my inner world was at war with itself and this contrast struck me. As if by magic, when I noticed the contradiction, the world around me seem to calm me down.

The last film I saw was also probably the most difficult to watch, due to the topic. I saw Denis Villeneuve’s “Incendies” on a random whim. I wasn’t even sure how I got to watch it… All I know is that since I moved into this new flat there have been some mysterious Middle-Eastern influences that I am still trying to shake off, which have been haunting me: from finding out that the previous tenants were Arabs, to randomly stumbling upon an Arabian perfume that I couldn’t stop thinking of, to listening to Habibi Spice on YouTube because his soothing voice helped with my nervous system regulation.

And then Incendies came along and I watched it and my jaw dropped and it helped me release a lot, because I cried my heart out. A week after, as I was walking through one of the largest literature events in Bucharest, Bookfest 2025, I felt drawn to a French-Arab publishing house and then saw the book “Incendies” written by Wajdi Mouawad – full circle moment.

There are some other fascinating things about this new place I moved into, such as finding out from my mother that the shopping complex right in front of my window used to be a communist bread store in which my grandma (my father’s mother) used to work in and that it had a kindergarten attached to it, where I had briefly been to as a child. So without consulting anyone and after months of searching, I had unconsciously placed myself in May of 2025 in front of an energetic zone imprinted with memories from the 80s, when I was a toddler, and dad and grandma were alive and bread was rationed and we lived under a different political regime.

In that moment of realization, I suddenly felt immensely peaceful! I understood that although things aren’t working out as I would like them too, they are working out exactly how the planets are dictating, among which Pluto is the loudest since it has begun the process of changing my soul. I know that if I just stick with the wave of chaotic emotions, memories and symbols, I will eventually get a beautiful and shocking realization as to why things are happening how they are happening. Spirit will deliver meaning and all I need to do is ride the flow of feelings and intuition and pay attention to my environment.

And when the healing realizations begun and I was feeling a combination of illuminating thoughts and the mood-regulating treatment working, peace returned and my curiosity sparked again. During a particular difficult night, as I was wresting in bed trying not to cry again, I stumbled upon this video which although it sounds cheesy to admit, did a magical spell on my capacity to let go of fighting the intensity and simply giving in to it and accepting it:

I don’t know why I wrote this post, except that it felt cathartic to do it. I think it’s meant to be some symbolic and blow-by-blow account of how Pluto in Aquarius is influencing my inner world at the moment, as I’m struggling to make sense and interpret this energy. I’m hoping it may help someone at some point in time, who might find themselves in similar circumstances. As tough as a Pluto transit can be, especially in electrifying Aquarius, it can also offer rest, re-education and renewal. I think this article may also be a list of recommendations, because despite the sad which create the backbone of this article, the films & resources are pretty good and you may want to give them a try. Let me know what you uncover.

With universal love,

Lexi