I don’t know how else to deal with big things, except by writing about them.

I’m sitting on a chair and talking. And as I talk something shifts in my mind. I understand. There is a logical thread now linking two disparate memories. All of a sudden a flood of warm sensations washes over my body and it feels like my frontal lobe & then my whole brain softens. I just had a breakthrough in my therapist’s office. And my body reacted to it by making me feel warm. It is this warmth I seek now, as guidance that healing is taking place & parts of me, like tectonic plates, instead of being pulled apart by hot, gushing lava, are sutured back together. A female Frankenstein, but on the inside. By making sense of the difficult experiences in my life, I release a pleasing warmth in my body, an emotional nectar that heals wounds which have been buried so deep inside of me, they seem almost invisible. However what is invisible can also be stealthily powerful in affecting our lives in mysterious ways, leading us towards self-undoing and self-harm. The warmth is then a sign that the light of my inner Sun sign is still alive, and that I am real and still alive.

For the past two months, I have been on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication while also undergoing therapy. I started going to art classes while also exercising my body to improve my mental mindset. Slowly things were getting better and lighter until tragedy struck in a swift moment. There is a line in Arcade Fire’s song ‘In the backseat’ that is so heartbreakingly beautiful in the way in which it describes family-related loss and grief: My family tree’s / Losing all it’s leaves. This line stayed with me since high-school when I first heard it, but it’s only in March of this year that I got to feel the full impact of these words. March is my birth month. A month in which nature comes back to life in the Northern hemisphere, where I live. A month in which we celebrate Ostara or the Spring Equinox and the beginning of a new astrological year, as the Sun shines through the 0 degrees in the constellation of Aries (the first sign of the zodiac).

In March of 2017 I lost my grandma. I also turned 30 and passed my PhD. I was having my Saturn return. And now as Saturn is approaching a conjunction to my natal Sun in Pisces, and I turned 37 years old my father is receiving treatment for cancer and I am no longer able to talk to my parents. I don’t yet know his clear diagnostic but the word ‘metastasis’ has been passed around from doctor to doctor since he fell in the bathtub in February of this year and wasn’t able to get back up. My dad can’t move anymore and there is something sick inside of him that is spreading from organ to organ, binding his insides into a map of darkness. It’s as if one by one parts of him are deciding to shut down and welcome the night. He is tired, and every cell in his body is expressing this at the moment.

Dad didn’t have an easy life, but neither did he make the best of it. He complied and existed. He showed up and was stoically present while also abusing his body to the extremes. This body is now giving in and we are left to witness the cellular spectacle. If anything, dad is now showing me how much I need to love my own body, and to respect it. As my karmic teacher and through this disease, dad is showing me through the power of a negative example how not to live. He is teaching me indirectly that I should combine work with rest (he almost never took time off, except at weekends), that I should eat well (his diet was atrocious), that I should stay away from toxins (he smoked and drank most of his life) and most importantly, that I should move and stretch and feel my body (he is the most passive man I know). My body and my emotions matter, and as I am strongly feeling these statements I witness how my father’s body and emotions are ending him.

I wrote about my dad in my book ‘Fatherhood and Love: The Social Construction of Masculine Emotions’, as our difficult relationship is what inspired my interest in how fathers express their love for their children. My dad is not an expressive man. Born with a Sun in Libra, Moon in Capricorn and Leo Ascendant, he is the kind of man who would rather tell dirty jokes as he is being wheeled into a hospital bed by nursing staff than tell his daughters that he loves them. He is actually suspicious of me and the affection I show him. He endures, dissociates and remains silent through it all. He is implacable like a wall when all I am trying to do is to relate to him, to talk to him. I can understand that a part of him has never been fully expressed or developped as he grew up surrounded by women, missing a father and the warmth of brotherhood from other men in his life. So he became a wall, a stranger on ‘foreign feminine’ territory.

This wall is something I came across many times in all of my relationships with the men I loved and from whom to this day, I have not received any clear confirmation that they may have loved me at some point. The main issue that I wanted to explore in my PhD research and in the book that emerged out of it was: Is storge love something we only feel or also something that we primarily do? I was born into a part of the world in which it was customary to show love rather than put it into words, and in Romania the way people show love or do love is mainly by using food, gifts and money to make you feel cared for. Paradoxically, this same philosophy could be found in the South Node/North Node placements of my parents, with both of them being born in the 1960s and having a South Node in Sagittarius (action) which represents their comfort zones versus their North Node in Gemini (communication) which represents their uncomfortable growth zones.

Needless to say, I grew up in a household in which screaming matches were a thing rather than calm, considerate communication – there were moments of peace and understanding, but they were not the norm. So I learned to repress my anger in an effort to detach from these fearful mom and dad behaviours which I was witnessing daily. And exactly this repressed anger has been triggered since the North Node of the Moon switched into Aries and began a difficult nodal return in my chart. To add to the karmic unfolding I am also having a transit of Saturn to my Mercury and Sun. This means that the angry matches I grew up witnessing in my childhood are now showing up in my personal relationships, forcing me to feel and process my anger but also to feel shame for witnessing a part of my Self ‘acting like my own parents’. The paradox being: that for years, I have been so afraid of becoming like them, and now I simply cannot help becoming like them. And anger and shame are difficult feelings to go through each day.

Now I don’t know if the anxiety and sadness I have been feeling since the year began (and for which I sought professional help) was actually premonitory in some way. Was my body telling me that grief would enter my life and therefore I should prepare for it? My intuition has been at an all time high this year and my sensitivity to things in my environment has been exaggerated. I developed misophonia and am easily triggered by loud and unknown sounds which disturb my activities. I spent most of 2024 with my ears protected by large, high-quality headphones which would block environmental sounds as it was the only way I could go within and find peace.

For the first time in a long while it felt awkward to follow my intuition, perhaps as Saturn in Pisces is currently ‘freezing’ the organic link I had to my intuition, bringing up a lot of self-doubt. I must admit that being on medication was keeping me calm and balanced, so I could help my parents through these trying times. But in the summer of this year, I released a job and my medication after finding out my therapist was just using me for money. Moreover, when my help was misconstrued as cold self-interest rather than one of the few ways in which my parents allowed me to show love to them, something snapped inside of me and I had to introduce a boundary between us. There simply is no other way for me to cope and to keep experiencing a healing warmth when all the energy I give is being used against me. So I am now my own ‘warmth motor’ and creating, writing, reading and divinating is helping me feel at home in the world again.

As I am living at the moment inside my boundaried existence, I also keep wondering if something inside of my own body, some sort of genetic code awakening was out of sorts because the gene pool from which I come was getting sicker and sicker? Are we telepathically & empathically linked to our parents as much as we are genetically conditioned and biologically connected to them? When the source organism gets sick (the parent) does the derivative (the child) also begin to experience physical symptoms as they both are preparing for an inevitable separation? As our relatives depart, does something depart inside of us too? Could this be why people who have lost a lot of family members develop psychological disorders?

I can’t help but wonder. But on a spiritual level, I feel that I am slowly releasing a karmic counterpart, and I see dad’s illness as a relief from the sadness of his life. He doesn’t really enjoy being here, in this incarnation, and as afraid as I see that he now is to depart from it, I believe the departure in itself is not shocking or scary, but a blessing for him. I just don’t want him to suffer too much. Despite this, I made the conscious decision to separate myself from my family, raising a boundary between me and them for a while, as I am piecing myself into what I hope is a stronger person. Being so attached to them, unfortunately prolonged a lot of my own co-dependency tendencies and suffering, and it feels better to just focus on my own healing, as they are dealing with their own.

Whichever outcome, I am spiritually preparing for many possibilities, trying to make peace with whatever the Universe wants to manifest. But the whole experience has been revelatory since it reminded me that feeling broken or at least broken apart by life’s shocks and experiences, is a way to help put your Self back together again in a new way. Once the pieces of your authentic Self fall into place you get to experience a deep sense of warmth. It’s as if your solar light, your Sun sign as we know it in astrology, gets to be expressed again at full light and in full energy, helping you feel again at home in your mind and body. After an ordeal and as you process it you begin exuding a comforting light for those who may also struggle to be themselves and make healthy choices during trying times. Like a lighthouse in a bleak storm, you are the centre guiding others to their destinations.

With universal love,

Lexi