I’m wearing a long teal skirt with gold coins hanging from my hips and a red bralette, belly-dancing in my studio to Kollo Lena by Zeyne. I’m pissed. She sings in Arabic, the look in our eyes tells all that we hold. I just read a zionist’s comment on one of my threads and hot water filled my chest, dripped down into my stomach, cooking, burning. A violence. It reminded me of dancing. I obey reminders from my body. Hades doesn’t like me sending back his gifts. My earrings graze my neck every time I turn. She sings, we are the ones who were raised inside the fire. I sing this again and again and again. I remember a dream where someone set me on fire and watched me beg. They called it dancing. My skin grew back softer. Less cold.

I think, rage is the natural response to genocide but it’s unsustainable. I think, the body rages every time it births life. The floor presses back through the balls of my feet. We sing, we are the ones who sang out loud. That’s how I started writing for Watermelon Sisters, a woman-led Palestinian non-profit meeting essential needs with dignity in Gaza. That’s where I read the comment, on Threads. Rage is why I created The Erotic Revolutionary’s Manifesto. It’s why I fundraise for Abdul and Ola’s family. Today, this ancient ancestor calls me to the battlefield one more time. My shoulders stay still while the rest of me refuses to. We sing, lifted our voices, strong and higher.

I confess to myself, I don't trust women who’ve never desired revenge. I move my hips in the same infinity shape over and over. I don't trust anyone who doesn’t rage when they see something sacred become desecrated. Rage and revenge are unwavering lovers. They don’t exist in the same universe as doubt. Dancing is the same. My stomach coils and uncoils. I’m looking for someone. Medusa. She sings, we wave toward the sky, we rise again. I close my eyes. My arms are snakes. Right hip left hip right hip left. My fingers are tongues. The rhythm settles low in my stomach and stays there. I see her face. It stops just short of screaming. She looks confused, like she just remembered her life, before. We sing, and we are many. I understand. I open my eyes. I’m sweating. I throw myself into my chair in front of my desk to write, They say we can never go back to before the trauma. But Medusa just remembered herself before the monster.

I write a philosophical guide and practical worksheet to help you go back for yourself—Before the Monster. All proceeds are donated to animal rescues in Lebanon and Gaza searching for and saving surviving pets, giving them the chance to return to the lives that were interrupted.

eros, always,
նայիրի

To work with me one-on-one, book an erotic natal chart reading or an erotic mentoring session. For deeper transformation, enroll in my 3-month mentorship where I walk alongside your unfolding through 12 personalized voice notes devoted to your desires, relationships, creativity, and erotic truth.

I’m sitting on a damp towel, toes in the cold sand, watching the ocean move at sunset. I took the metro and then walked through neighborhoods I know too well. Old instincts kicked in like good friends—walk fast, look pissed and if an angry man should cross your path, become insane. Long Beach is my least favorite place and the place I loved most—second to the tie between Altadena and San Francisco. That’s what happens when a city breaks your heart. It gets complicated. Even now, I’ve sat in one spot for too long for safety. I get up and grab my flip flops. I lived a couple blocks from here for five years, but the path was through Hades. By the time I moved, there was a stabbing a murder a robbery a trauma almost every day of the week. I was a five-minute walk from the water who met my need for an intimate, transformative relationship like no one else. I was suffering but I was in love. There’s nothing like living near the ocean, no matter who else does. Ask any animist.

I start walking the shoreline away from the docks. I think about the last time I was here, at the top of the ramp. I didn’t get too close. I wanted my leaving to matter less than it did. It broke my heart. I’d decided to move back home to Altadena, a city that was so alive. We’d lived around the corner from a pet store where I got my first bunny over 30 years ago. I’d asked, but what about this? She replied, we’ll meet at a different shore. I came back to this one today because I never said a proper goodbye. I’m no good at them. I don’t understand time. A goodbye feels like it just happened. I walk past a couple and their two kids. The girls don’t want to leave. The adults are thinking about traffic. They’ve already left. Growing up is a scam. We’re all time-traveling children.

I see an empty water bottle and pick it up. I used to come here to clean up, to gather new moon water, to rage, to pray. Ancient water deserves reverence. I never told her that Altadena burnt down, that I watched my old neighborhood become nothing in real time, that the pets didn’t get out in time. She knew. I thought if I went back to the shoreline, I wouldn’t leave. I’d never grieved a city before. I didn’t know how to grieve two.

I stare at the water gathering at my ankles. Where do I get to stay?

eros, always,
նայիրի

To work with me one-on-one, book an erotic natal chart reading or an erotic mentoring session. For deeper transformation, enroll in my 3-month mentorship where I walk alongside your unfolding through 12 personalized voice notes devoted to your desires, relationships, creativity, and erotic truth.

I’m at my favorite bar in my corner spot waiting for dessert wine and dates stuffed with goat cheese. It’s dark and sounds of couples on dates fill every inch of the room. On a slouchy couch, one pair keeps getting closer as they speak, to hear each other over the noise. Another leans in for a cheers and stays close well after toasts are consecrated. I think these two might let it build until the kiss is so beautiful, we all leave them alone. The journal, where I practice writing with my left hand, sits on the dark table with my pen. I put my pen next to the fork. Sometimes it goes next to the knife. I’ve done three pages of each letter, A through G. Tonight, I’m putting them together to create words. ABCDEFG has more options than you think.

Face. Deaf. Bed. Beg. Fade.

In the dim light, my handwriting is almost passable. It’s an illusion only if I believe it. I don’t.

I open to a blank page and feel the strange weight of a pen between my backup fingers. My right hand twitches. I write, A deaf bed, face faded. Bed beg. Deaf face bed. Beg beg beg. My wine is here first. I let it sit with me for a little while, untouched. Bade comes from beg. I start writing my next wobbly B and think, I bade her farewell is I begged her goodbye. It’s so violent, to die to someone before you’re dead. Desire for return is seeded in every goodbye. I remember, in a dream, someone told me they were preparing me for a good death. I can’t help but think a goodbye is a wish to resurrect. Every good death has an afterlife. Every good death has a new life.

I write, Hades accepts begging at his altar because it’s a symptom of surrender. It takes longer than I’d like it to, but I promised myself I’d finish writing the whole thing before taking another sip. I turn the stem slowly between my fingers and watch the wine circle the glass into a blood red moon. I appreciate that wine requires relationship before taste.

I write, Begging is confession. It believes in a merciful god, one whose power resonates with the annihilating influence found in sorrow. Beg’s etymology is prayer. To beg is to pray, to say this is alive, please let me keep it. Never do you know what you want more than when you’re on your knees whispering, please, fingers sitting side by side like soft knives. Begging is human. It expects sorrow to matter to someone other than the beggar. I’m having a long sip so I can feel the slight burn and taste running after each other while listening to a couple one table over. She’s mad because he said he wanted to come but he really didn’t want to. He regrets telling her. Neither begs. I write, True erotic lovers resonate with third things. Third things are proof of love.

To beg is to reach for god. To mean it with your chest, with blood in your teeth. I take my last sip. I write with my left hand, Begging is erotic. It doesn’t work. Begging, I mean. Not with humans. It’s godly. I write, Hermes rules the hands and nothing turns Mercury on like curiosity. I stop the waitress and say, “I’d love some more but I’m begging you, something sweeter?” She offers two and I say, “I’m so curious what you’d choose.” She nods.

eros, always,
նայիրի

To work with me one-on-one, book an erotic natal chart reading or an erotic mentoring session. For deeper transformation, enroll in my 3-month mentorship where I walk alongside your unfolding through 12 personalized voice notes devoted to your desires, relationships, creativity, and erotic truth.

I’m looking at my Picasso-inspired bomber jacket. I won it in an eBay auction seven years ago. I thought I’d wear it for special occasions, but it’s become my uniform. The colors are so vivid. Leaving it behind in my dark closet feels mean. I put it on the back of my pink desk chair and reach for my skinny jeans. I will not return to a boot cut until it seduces me. Last time I wore this jacket, someone told me bright colors are now trending. I smiled and asked, “Who created the trend?” She didn’t know. I’ve noticed my favorite things always suffer this fate: becoming beloved. It’s usually right when I’m moving on.

I’m getting dressed to go to the antique shop. I want to find a watch I like and I’m looking for milk glass chalices. I collect milk glass and I need two more before the set is complete. I use them as goblets at my altar and as wine glasses. Red wine tastes better in them.

I started buying milk glass in my 20s. I decided to buy decorations for when I had my own place. Everyone thought my taste would change by the time I moved out of my parent’s house, but milk glass looks like white chocolate. Delicious. I bought my coffee table 15 years ago from a woman out in Bakersfield who refurnished tables and listed them on Craigslist. It’s got a French postcard painted on it. It survived 2 garages, 50 requests from my mom to get rid of it and 3 moves. A promise to travel that I still see every day. I’ve always had such a strange relationship with time.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

This is part nine of an in-depth analysis of Eros in each of the twelve houses. To eroticize all areas of your life, read each essay. Even if your Pluto placement isn’t in the ninth house, the following lyric essay explores how to eroticize philosophy, spirituality, meaning-making, travel, truth-seeking, and your relationship to creative transformation. And consider the house where you have Scorpio as that area of your life is also ruled by Eros.

Eros speaks through taboo desire, erotic love, obsession, projection, power exchange, rebirth, and the instinct to merge—to name a few of its tantric dialects among infinity. Your Pluto placement, by house, is where your eroticism becomes a uniquely tailored portal into your most erotic, magnetic, whole Self. Pluto rules transformation’s creative and destructive poles. The creative threshold is crossed when you choose the change that would otherwise become destructive.

Read more

Raindrop is exactly where he wants to be. He’s squinting in joy as he bathes in sunlight at the window in my studio. I wish Moonbeam felt just as happy hanging out in here. He walked by yesterday and stretched to get up there but then left. It’s too crowded for both of them. He eats next to me at my desk every day, but he leaves right after. I look back at my laptop. If I move on, everything stays the same after I flip through the usual dead ends in my mind—cat beds, treats, catnip. So, I stay. I take a deep breath and stay sad he doesn’t feel cozy. Then, my mind flashes on a memory in Long Beach, both cats curled up next to me on a blanket, beside my space heater.

I didn’t have central air by the beach, so a thin grey heater followed us around my apartment when it was cold. I get up to get the blanket first. I can’t believe I still have it. It’s been washed so many times, its fluff is now flat. It’s the one I bought the day my neighbor called me to say he found a kitten that “looked pretty fucked up” under the hood of a car he was working on. He’d caught him but then let him go when I didn’t pick up his first call. I remember pinching the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes and quieting the carnage of words my mind conjured. I said, “Ohh wow oh my gosh! I definitely want the cat and I’m on my way so please, find him and I’ll help look when I get there. Thank you so much!” I sounded like candy. I hung up, ran my feet into my beach slippers and lunged for my cat carrier. I sprinted to my car with my key in insert position and then drove toward the auto shop where he worked, while yelling into the godforsaken voice-to-text on my phone to get directions.

I get there and see my neighbor. He’s smiling. I’m not. I stare daggers and say, “Find him.” I’m pss-pss-ing in the fourth backyard I’ve wandered into before he runs over to me holding this poor raggedy looking kitten like a trophy. He puts him in the carrier, I sprint to my car, set it down gently on the passenger side, and drive in baby talk to the emergency vet like a bat on his way back to hell.

It’s the first year of covid, the summer of 2020. I have about $20 and the gas light just turned on so I have a max of 5 miles before I need to spend that $20. I drop him off with the front desk and go to my car to wait for their call. I pick up and listen as the vet says, “Payment is due before surgery.” His lower lip is hanging off his face. I say, “It’s not my cat. I found him and I’m going to fundraise whatever the cost is. Please. You have my word.” She pauses and then says, “Okay just this once, because you’re doing this as a good samaritan, but you’ll need to have the payment in 5 hours.” I get the estimate and drive home while calling friends, asking if they’d donate. I even send them the photo my neighbor sent me.

I post about it to my IG. By the end of five hours, people send me a total of $600. On my way to pick him up, I buy a blanket and a little enclosed tent bed since he likes small spaces, like a crab looking for a shell. He’s still like that.

I close the door to a small, enclosed hallway back at my place and open the top of the carrier. I have dish gloves on to my elbows. I’d just spent three hours watching YouTube videos on how to domesticate a feral cat. He’s smol, not even one whole pound at 7 weeks old, hiding his stitched face in the corner. I say, “Hi little teeny tiny.” He tries moving closer to the corner he’s smushed into. I pick him up and he lets out a high-pitched “OW!” He never did develop the M. My friend calls it a quarter of a meow. I set him on the floor where I’d laid a banket. I take off the gloves and pet the little moonbeam on his back, a strip of white fur. He waddles, drunk on pain meds as he smells and screams at everything before coming back over to me. I pick him up and hold him against my chest telling him everything is going to be so much better than okay, that he happened to hit the cat lottery, that his name was Moonbeam.

I set the space heater next to me and go to plug it in. I check the outlet behind my art area for an available plug and see my bright pink curtain tucked between the outlet and the exposed prongs of a plug hanging halfway out. The curtain is bunched all around it like a bonfire awaiting its guests. I grab the fabric. It’s hot like fresh laundry. What sweet tinder it would’ve been. I don’t ever look back there. It’s the modem and router outlet that exists only when the wi-fi gods start acting funny. I would’ve never seen it. My mouth drops open. It would’ve eventually caught fire. This isn’t the only time a soft desire has protected life.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

Safety note: Space heaters should never be left unattended, especially close to blankets. Mine is only on while I’m sitting at my desk and is unplugged when I leave the room.

I come out of my hair stylist’s suite at the mall and start walking. I can call a Lyft but I’ve been sitting for 6 hours so I need to walk until silence seeps in. I have my harley’s on because they’re heavy and I like that. I stop when a woman says, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” My hair is fluorescent pink. I tell her, “You absolutely can,” and pull out my stylist’s card. I like animating life where I see it.

I get to the record shop and walk inside to see what’s new. I don’t own a record player. I want one but it’s on what I call the graveyard list, aka later. Later doesn’t exist. It’s where the present moment goes to die. I also have an if only list. It keeps my deathbed regrets. These are altars I built for Hades a long time ago.

The street right outside is where my friends and I used to spend our weekends in our 20's. I smell charcoal and sweet smoke. Girlhood, before the underworld got involved. I think of the first dream I remember having. I’m being chased by my evil twin all around my school’s playground. We’re both wearing my personal uniform at the time, pink everything and white knee-high socks. I was terrified for weeks. I’ve walked through this dream hundreds of times. My latest interpretation is that bitch knew exactly who she was.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I light my green Spica candle and recite her prayer before reaching for my stack of journals. I open the one I read every day and start somewhere new. I remember opening my soft Winnie the Pooh journal for the first time. I was 11 and I was grading my day. A generous A+++. I remember locking it and thinking, I can’t believe it’s not against the rules, to write whatever I want to. I still feel that way.

This one has my manifesto, notes on the Gnostic God, and remediation for my Pluto transit. I wrote, “When coal becomes diamond, the change is structural, not decorative.” I stare into the flame, a talisman made using astrological magic by Sphere and Sundry. Spica is a fixed star associated with the successful cultivation of one’s gifts. It’s conjunct my Venus. I think, thank God you gifted yourself eroticism. Enjoying change changed my life.

I flip a few pages and read, “A mythmaker’s emotions have dramatic lighting.” I think Spica makes it beautiful. I pick up my Honeycomb Astrological Almanac. It’s time to cast electional charts for projects, choosing the quality of time they most desire to enter the world. Every moment is alive but I ask myself, to which god is my sculpture devoted? I flip to the end of the month and look at every day, searching for the moment I believe it belongs to. I always feel relief after I’ve chosen an exact electional chart. Almost like time gifts you with ease for having prayed at its altar.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I move my eye mask to make sure it’s morning. Raindrop somehow hears me because he’s already one inch from my face. I say, well boomchakalaka and kiss his little nose. I move my comforter after saying his favorite word: “hungry?” It’s his cue to his food bowl. I recite the intro to Regulators by Warren G as I walk to the kitchen. I’ve started using earbuds much to my cats’ disapproval. All they see is a giant, shaking ass first thing in the morning. They listen to me try to resolve how far I can take the word yikes as I open a can of cat food. Yikeseroonification is still meaningful. Yikeseroonificationed even. I cut up their chicken hearts, sprinkle them on their food, and set their plates down. I pour coffee beans into the grinder without touching the bag to it. Some days, I pour just behind it, to the left. It pisses me off because it’ll land on the only drop of water on the counter. I can’t stand something being sticky. Stickitydoodadey.

I remember a guy I once dated tried putting my third finger in a small side of ranch dressing because he was a dick but also because I use only my thumb and index finger when eating with my hands. I do make exceptions for sandwiches and whatever else desires more but if my middle finger should become sticky over a measly french fry, I’m finding a wet wipe.

I open the fridge for my vanilla creamer and I lock heart eyes with my mom’s hummus and muhammara. I pick up Moonbeam and wear him like a scarf as I dance and sing, I’M FAVORED BY GOD! Moonbeam, sheeshified, looks at me as if to say, “You are an undignified heathen.” These appetizers are delicacies in tupperware. My mom makes everything from scratch and reinvents recipes in her mind in seconds. I always tell her, no one makes it like this! She always says the secret ingredient is love.

I keep a white milk glass cauldron carrying a rose quartz globe next to my stove. Everything is an altar.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I open my studio curtains to a morning that reminds me of my poetry walks through Altadena's foggy hills. I used to write on the move. I roll my chair from my writing desk to my art table, turn over my pink-sand hourglass and set it just past my mat. I have 30 minutes to understand the shape of a thorn and sculpt the final blueprint I’ll use for 7 larger thorns. I move the cold clay between my fingers to warm it up. A thorn looks like a wave at the bottom and comes to a fragile, sharp hook. The first one I made looks like a tiny witch's hat. There aren’t many good photos of thorns online. Most people aren’t taking pictures of the part of a rose that says, absolutely not.

The second one looks like a wrinkled triangle. The third one is growing a sharper spine. I make a bigger one so the mistake is more obvious. Then I work my way down. Number five is promising but it’s the sixth one that says yes to itself.

I line them up on my writing desk to study them. I thought a thorn needed to be long, but it doesn’t. It needs to be sharp. I thought it needed to be thin. It’s actually quite thick where it meets the stem. I thought its sharpness couldn’t be round. It is. Its integrity is in its form. A thorn has the same logos as a rose. It looks exactly like what it is. I prick my finger. One just requires audacity.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I turn the kitchen faucet on for a few seconds to fill up my silicone cup with a finger’s width of water. I add a generous heap of Elmer’s glue to keep the plaster workable. I eyeball it. This is the last time. The sculpture is now 16 pounds. I’ve been doing this for two years. Plaster and I fell out of love months ago. It decides when we’re done. Asks for space to dry. Returns hard. I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t you switch to a less demonic medium to complete it? Well, dear reader, I tried. It cracks. It’s greedy. Plaster eats through time, dries fast with no regard for my feelings, into a form as stubborn as bone. I want a bone smooth finish. It won’t allow refinement. No amount of sanding got me there. I refused to start over with something new. I suspected the sculpture needed the version of me plaster was tormenting into existence. I needed to know for certain whether the obstacle was the plaster or me.

This is my very last unforgiving lover. I outgrew that bad habit a long time ago, but it snuck in through the back into my studio. I mix the glue-water and remember a couple months ago when I tried joint compound again. I shake my head. A year ago, it cracked when I tested it. All this time and I’d already met my next soul mate. I just need to add a few thick mounds as a base, and the plaster is finally a kind of stubborn I know what to do with, a kind of stubborn more compatible with its role. Then, never again.

I say a prayer to the self that’ll take over once I walk over to my sculpture. Please remember you have other ideas you’re obsessed with making! Finish the damn sculpture! I’m monogamous. The prayer is to the wrong god. I sprinkle in some plaster, mix, sprinkle, mix, until the consistency is like pancake batter and all the evil little granules trying to ruin my day are metabolized.

I walk over to my studio and stare at this huge being I’ve loved for so long. I’ve already mapped what’s next but something strange happens after you plan art. Art laughs. I can’t help but cackle at the absurdity. I stop to do a little dance and remember this is how my first painting was, back in 2012. I labored at it 8 hours a day for over 2 months. The only reason it was finally framed was because it was due for an exhibition. That thing is thick with acrylic paint. Thick. I restarted it every day because it was the first time I ever painted. I learned by failing. This is the first time I’ve ever sculpted. No, I couldn’t have chosen a medium I’ve mastered. I only enjoy art that apotheosizes me into the artist who completes it. Once I’ve made it, I’ve mastered the medium and the concept that required it. This is how I seduce father time. I remember a conspiracy theorist on TikTok claiming the day is now 16 hours long and no one knows it. I might believe him. I take a deep breath as the wet plaster changes too fast to be trusted. I promised myself I’d finish this in the next 10 days. Now that I know it tolerates joint compound, I can get there with just my left hand. It’ll be soft enough to change. Soft enough to sand without starting a war.

I take some plaster with my finger and look at it. I don’t know why. It doesn’t care. It’s calcifying. I just need to build up one area before moving on. I slap it on. Pat it in. I smile. I’m almost impressed with myself. Almost seduced Saturn.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I looked into Raindrop’s big dark eyes and talked to him until I felt the moment he believed me. He blinked slow and I blinked slow. He head-butted my hand before putting his little chin on his little paw. I told him again that he’s the best decision I’ve ever made. People have been trying to describe this quality in me for years. A childhood friend of mine once said, why do you talk like you’re in a movie? A man I once dated said, you always look like you’re about to cry. Another said, you’re too authentic to be charming. A guy who was flirting with me said, why are you looking at me like you’re actually looking? Remembering these funhouse mirrors feels like a shadow home. I pet Raindrop’s soft forehead and say, you’re so cute couldn’t be cuter you tried it was too hard! I laugh. This is his longest nickname. He’s very cute. I have to find creative ways to express how much I love him or else I’ll go on a kissing spree when he’s trying to nap.

Those are my favorite pieces of feedback. They’re confessions and insights. Of all of them, the one about crying is so beautiful. To be seen as soft, willing. Most people reserve that look for crying. I don’t. I made presence the stuff of fantasies. I love it here. Being alive doesn’t have to hurt. Besides, I’m a double Scorpio. Tears are cued by blackout curtains. I walk to my writing desk and unlock my phone to a comment where Doja says to Elon on twitter: “Frog build looking bitch. Barrel chested ewok u look like u eat sand...Face look like it was drawn from memory.” I laugh so hard I cry.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I reach for the black moleskine where I analyze my synastry with the event chart of the American dollar. I can’t write in it, but I can glue in images without disturbing my injured hand. I open the worn pages and read, Everything you create must originate from your own erotic necessity or it fragments your field. Your south node rejects income that bypasses self-recognition. I desire enough money to fulfill every fundraiser that reaches me. I remember the day I cried looking at the thousands of families on Operation Olive Branch’s spreadsheet, matching donors to Palestinians trying to escape Gaza while they still could. I told my friend I would never forgive myself. The same list is empty today.

I stare at the chart like I’m an open locket. All the stars say the same thing: if you allow the world to see you, you can rival the death machine. I pick up the garnet pomegranate earrings my mom brought me from Armenia. She dreamt of her paternal grandmother before she had me. She said she immediately knew she was going to have a little girl. I shut the journal, put the earrings back on my altar. I close my eyes and remember: Jungian astrology says I inherited my maternal great-grandmother’s moon. I’ve always felt a call to answer a prayer spoken before I was born. I imagine the last moment she saw her mother begging a Turkish neighbor to hide her. I wake with rage. I pick up my phone. I open the voice memo app, I click record. I start speaking as if someone’s life depends on it. We get the god we believe in and I don’t know anything more holy than an Armenian daughter. I end the recording. I tear out an image of a girl and a bloody angel wing. I cover it in gold.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I offer synastry readings between your natal chart and the natal chart of the American dollar to reveal your erotic relationship with money—what it desires from you, what magnetizes it to you, and how to seduce it. Book a private session.

I was enchanting my windows before bed. A ritual of one year. I live near an airport and each one has a different sound. Arrival sounds like a long exhale. Departure like war. Weather determines which side, my Lyft driver explained once. I don’t know anything about planes. I do know what a repeated alarm from God sounds like. I desire to find home.

I walked to my sleep altar, a selenite moon at the center. I remember my moon is in the 9th house of foreign lands. Jungian astrology says it’s the area my mom was preoccupied with when I was a kid. Most of our family lives in Sweden. My mom’s need to connect with family abroad is my emotional inheritance. Home is elsewhere.

I think war and genocide are inherited, too. You keep surviving severance. When I was a kid, my best friend visited my city when my family and I left to Sweden. Our parents went to school together in Beirut. It would be another year until I saw her. I was devastated.

I light a baby pink candle and scry by fire. I dream of a city with a bright blue lake, a bridge of gold, a bright god sitting at the end whispering, not yet. I wake up and send Abdul $350 so he doesn’t have to move his tent to an even more dangerous area. I send him a screenshot. He says, By God, you are my family, originally written in Arabic. A language my culture is steeped in. They say language informs what reality you belong to.

Home is so many places.

I say to Abdul, more is coming, for food. Synchronicity is strange. It feels a lot like a new world being kind enough to be born through meaning rather than loss.

eros, always,
նայիրի

Thank you to everyone who has purchased a manifesto or donated so far. I’m grateful. Today, I’m continuing to raise funds for food for Abdul’s family. If you’ve been meaning to help, every Erotic Revolutionary Manifesto purchased and every donation goes directly toward feeding the people I wrote about. They need $200 for food this week. They are hungry.

I was staring at the coffee pot as I was pouring my first cup when I saw a message come in from Abdul. I left space for cream and put the rest of the day’s brew back. The rent is due, he says. His wife Ola is sick, she needs medicine. They’re hungry, he says. I add my vanilla oat creamer, mix it in, taste test it. I kneel to give my cat Raindrop three kisses on his perfect forehead. I walk to my writing desk, put my sweet coffee on my warmer. I open his message and type, I will have your rent and Ola’s medication cost to you today. I promise. I put the phone down to take a sip of my coffee. He says, Don’t work too hard. Please, if you feel pressured, speak up. I write, It’s important to me to feel pressured for the right things, for things that are worthwhile. Non-negotiability is my favorite way to create worlds. I open the attachment to photos of the medical bills, new photos of Sidra and Omar. I scroll up to the photos of the rent-free area he considered moving to before I promised him he could stay. That was over a month ago. I fundraised the rent then, too. I see the unexploded missile.

I remember last summer when Omar was so small. His eyes were wide open. Some babies are born curious. Others are born watching. I take a long sip and set my mug down. I lean back in my chair and let my gaze fall to my hand. I begin the spell. $350 for rent, $250 for medicine, that’s 14 erotic revolutionary’s manifestos and a few more donations. It’s doable. It is. In Beirut, my mom tells me she’d run downstairs with her family when bombs sounded too close by to risk staying inside. She tells me, once they knew it wasn’t close enough to be dangerous, they’d go back upstairs to celebrate over coffee. She still lives like this. She copes through kef, the Arabic word for relishing life. I close my eyes before they shoot open. Kefir. I walk to my kitchen to consecrate the promise.

eros, always,
նայիրի

If you’d like to help Abdul’s family directly, you can donate here.

If you’d like to support this fundraiser through my work, you can purchase the Erotic Revolutionary’s Manifesto here. All proceeds go toward Abdul’s rent and Ola’s medication.

My dad was on my couch halfway through a sip of coffee when I walked over to him with 400 pages in my hands. At first, he smiled at them, hand to his face like he’d been daydreaming. Then, understanding crossed over his face. His eyes sharpened into shock. WHAT? YOU WROTE THIS? He points at my hands.

He’s deaf, made so by years of loud carpentry work. You can only draw from a well for so long before you scrape the bottom. His parents took him out of elementary school in the third grade to put him in the family business. Years later, when they sold it, we were in California, after my family fled isrl’s bombs in Lebanon. The money was meant to follow. It never came.

My dad is a historian, a poet. He has made me many a bookshelf, but he has always been more interested in what went on them. When he was 12, he read all the books his local barber shop had on their bookshelf. He laughed, They sent me away the last time I went there saying they had no more left for me. I’d read all of them. My dad sounds suspiciously just like Matilda who sounds suspiciously like me.

I wrote on a post-it instead of yelling:

He replied with a kind but polished wish for success. And then, he softened as he looked at me: You will succeed because your soul is beautiful. In Armenian, it’s closer to: Your essence is luminous, precious, and beautiful so it carries the same destiny. We lose so much to the english language.

Yes, dear reader, I used my injured hand to talk to my dad. Some things are always worth suffering for.

We talked about his favorite book, Զարթօնք, by Armenian novelist, Malkhas. He spoke, I wrote. It translates to Awakening. It’s a series of three books set during the Armenian national liberation movement. He asked me to read it.

I’m reading the language my dad read when he could still hear. Before war, displacement and betrayal. Before he stopped reading. When life was young and bold. When the dreams I inherited were still being dreamed.

eros, always,
նայիրի

I work privately with people seeking erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentoring and natal chart readings are available.

I hurt my hand and can’t use it for the next few months. Writing is how I’ve metabolized and structured my life every day for the past 20 years. Without consent, a Pluto transit has taken what I can’t lose and still stay myself. Because it feels painful and destructive, my erotic potential is equally dense. I finally eroticized this death. I licked the flames as they licked me. I said, yes. I tasted God. My stomach is full.

At first, I tried resting my hand for a few days and allowed myself to grieve the ecstatic privacy and freedom of writing the truth at dawn while the world still belonged to shadows and steam and the first sip of coffee. It still hurt so I wore a pink compression glove and got back to my projects. It ached by the end of the morning, so I stopped taking notes while studying. When I feel seen by a book, I write down the line, verbatim. It’s how I engage with a text. I grieved the conversations I was having with my favorite writers. It still hurt. I created a soft moon rose radio lyric essay by voice but ended up using my hand to edit it and create the melodies. Then, I reduced my journaling time to a few sentences in the mornings just to jot down inspirations.

I bought a brace and did hand strengthening exercises. I thought this would finally be enough. I typed essays with my left hand. I even wore a sling to make using my hand less tempting. It still hurts. I’ve been bargaining my way out of a total descent. I need to completely stop using it to let the muscles rest and recover. Like Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, I’m descending through the seven gates of hell, stripped slowly, ceremonially, of each sacred object of power.

To heal, I need to surrender to healing as fate. This is always the first step when it comes to erotic coping: name the new devotion and let it root so life can reorganize itself around a new truth. I first shook my fist at the gods, then at myself. Then, I mapped hell.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. —Carl Jung

Transiting Pluto is squaring my Pluto-rising in Scorpio from my 4th house of rest, privacy, and home. My body, identity, and erotic power are now sites of transformative descent. I knew this and still, I was pissed. I’m still pissed. I’m my closest friend and lover. Writing and being in love are one and the same in my world—a deeply necessary alchemical process. It feels like the worst kind of breakup. Someone you thought would never leave.

Writing became too essential a route to selfhood. It was the cauldron where experience transformed into meaning, where I met my most mundane and magical selves. An underworld God confiscated it. I’m typing one letter at a time with my left hand, using voice to text and learning how to write with my non-dominant hand. Now that I know how naked I’m meant to be with Hades, I can hang from a bloody hook like Inanna or I can sit in his lap, petting the void’s melancholic beasts. I can have whatever I desire now. I’m where life comes from. The question is, what?

For 16 years, my consciousness eroticized itself through transformation on the page as Pluto transited my third house of writing. Now I’m being forced to metabolize reality through presence itself. The 4th house is the substrate beneath identity, the psychic soil from which selfhood grows. Pluto wants root-level reorganization, to alter the conditions under which I experience myself at all: my primitive emotional patterning, my oldest loyalties. It might be less profound if it were Pluto square Pluto alone, but it’s square my ascendant, too. It’s dark mother fate and one of her own ancient children.

Pluto transiting the third gave me power through articulation, interpretation, cognition, and authorship. I eroticized my intellect into an alchemical instrument. My writing on the erotic became transformative psychologically and economically. It’s only done and sent once it’s changed me, once it’s already a success. I am my ideal audience now. It culminated in visibility and success. Pluto rewards mastery after total immersion. Its etymology is ‘riches.’

Now it’s time to go back for the self that existed before she learned to relate to herself through inscription.

Once upon a time, I was in a pre-verbal relationship to selfhood. I was a diffuse presence, a sensory receptivity, an atmospheric identity otherwise known as my 12th house Venus in Libra. I was the taste of my three specialty microwaved s’mores on a hot June afternoon under the AC on top of a soft tweed couch. I was the white noise summoning summer break when time was mine again. I was the marshmallow I let harden a bit for optimal crunch to goo ratio. I was the mist on an early morning car ride home after a family vacation when I knew time loved 3 am best, when I saw enough stars to know magic was realer than anything else. I talked to God all of the time. I was one with the backrooms. I was a 12th house animist.

Before I started writing in my teens, I was present to an imaginal landscape, the mundane passed through its magical sieve, capturing symbolic essence. Life was as soft and slow as the body. I was a secret.

Pluto is asking me to go back to being legible to myself before the sentence forms. It’s returning me to the psychic atmosphere Venus made native long before writing became the architecture of my life. The 4th and 12th houses absorb meaning through receptiveness. This transit is rebirthing safety, intimacy, and psychic belonging, and my 12th house Venus contains the original template my psyche held before writing. Long before language carried coherence, meaning, intimacy, and self-recognition, I experienced life atmospherically through spirituality, beauty, diffuse presence, immersion, imagination, enchantment, and symbolic feeling.

I surrender to my desire to return to the mist, where rest is erotic, art moves through my left hand, and presence becomes transformation before language ever describes it. I celebrate becoming so fluent in transformation that even when my creative instrument is revoked, erotic creation still reorganizes itself around desire instead of extinguishing.

There will be new series, new portals, new texts. I’m not disappearing from the page. Ancient Mesopotamians watched Venus disappear as the evening star on the horizon and return as the morning star days later, recognizing in her Inanna’s terrifying truth that even what’s most radiant must sometimes descend into death. I’m returning to Venus.

eros, always,
Nairy

Bookings are open for erotic natal chart readings and mentoring.

I’m often asked how to live an erotic life with a disability. Because each body writes its own singular mythology, I’ll tell you how I eroticized my own instead. I don’t use the word disability. Words time-capsuled in myth sit closer to truths I see myself in. Ancient cultures name me a seer with the mind of an eclipse and the heart of rapture. My soul is old enough to recognize its language in the mouths of the elder gods.

I was born cross-eyed. I have an eye condition called Strabismus. I don’t see in 3D. I almost always use my left eye to see and experience chronic pain and headaches. My brain receives an image from each of my eyes separately and prioritizes one while working twice as hard to omit input from the other, enough to manage double vision.

My EEGs have stumped experts accusing me of hard drugs. My erotic intimacy with the present moment labels me neurodivergent. I eroticized neurodivergence by becoming self-employed and suffering through the learning curves required because my mind doesn’t experience time, focus or energy in normative ways. I studied my erotic flow state and built the structure of my life around my deepest desires instead of forcing myself to perform aliveness on command. I decided to be myself for a living.

I find eroticism to be the most iconic way to unmask.

I recently read Strabismus and neurodivergence are correlated. Science is usually eons behind poetry. In ancient cosmologies, an injured eye marked a threshold between worlds. Tiresias, in The Odyssey, becomes prophetic through blindness. Odin, in the Prose Edda, trades an eye for forbidden knowledge. The Graeae, in the myth of Perseus and the Gorgons, guard forbidden knowledge through a shared eye. Horus, in the Contendings of Horus and Set, loses and restores an eye through divine conflict, transforming damaged sight into sacred vision. Argus Panoptes, in the myth of Io and Hera, perceives the world through a body covered in eyes that never fully sleep. Balor, in the myth of The Battle of Mag Tuired, possesses a destructive supernatural eye whose gaze transforms whatever it touches. And, cyclopes in Greek mythology are one-eyed beings associated with unbridled power, savage brutality or divine craftsmanship, and otherworldly perception. Known as primordial artisans, they craft weapons for the gods.

In fairy tales, the theme continues. One-Eye and Three-Eyes, in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, are sisters whose unusual numbers of eyes mark them as uncanny, otherworldly figures defined through altered perception itself. The Snow Queen alters perception through a shard of enchanted glass lodged in the eye.

One eye turned elsewhere, double vision, blindness, trance sight, perception split between worlds—my vision was mythologized as contact with the underworld the moment I was born a Scorpio rising at Pluto’s degree the week of an eclipse in Scorpio. My parents fled bombs in Beirut weeks before, as my mom was 9 months pregnant. I almost died at birth. Umbilical cord wrapped around my throat like a noose, I met Hades before I took my first breath. Saturn, the planet of restriction is also in my first house of the physical body. Something surrendered to heighten inner vision. The south node made sure of it. My parents smuggled a pint-sized prophet out of a warzone. Their bedroom was bombed just a couple of weeks later.

Unable to make eye contact with anyone, despite a surgery a year after I was born, I wore prisms in my glasses that centered my eyes cosmetically. No one but my family, and one friend, saw me without my glasses. I told no one. I had my second surgery at 15, on summer break, where they removed my eyes and cut the muscles in order to stretch them back and stich them in place. I woke with only the whites of my eyes showing. My mom tried to hide what she saw but I felt the familiar tug of surrender at my heels. My surgeon didn’t tell my mom nor I that I’d need to do eye exercises for a month to bring my eyes to center. She didn’t say I needed vision therapy either. Some people are purists and see only one tool. These folks are closest to the archetype of poverty. I wish for her exactly who she is. If that’s a hex, she’s a hex. One of my favorite spells is putting a name on a mirror cause, what’s wrong babe?

Two surgeries later and my eyes aren’t crossed but, I don’t have binocular vision. I use 2D cues, like shapes, colors and motion, to perceive space. When sleepless, my right eye wanders and I have a harder time blocking out its input. I don’t drive though I did for most of my adult life until finally deciding the suffering outweighed the desire. I count each step on every staircase. Because they all look the same, I’m not sure if I’m seeing double. My eyes are very sensitive to light so I wear sunglasses wherever I am. I feel where something is with my hands before I trust where I see it. I can see an inch to my right by switching eyes instead of moving my head. This is most helpful when I’m sculpting and want to stay in the light I’m in instead of finding a new position.

I see colors. I see long, dark shadows. Unlived souls lock eyes with me. I nod. It took me a long time to accept that most people are too afraid of their dark to go back for themselves. That anyone back there is in enemy territory. I often avoid eye contact with strangers because it stirs demons who haven’t been seen in years. Their keeper forgot who they were a long time ago and the curse is cast every moment the ego collects memories. That’s how magic works. Repetition and certainty.

I’ll never forget the moment someone reached out to me after I shared some vision therapy homework on IG. She said she’d lost her 3D vision after a car accident, that she cried every day at how flat the world looked, that she couldn’t pour milk into a bowl, that she spilled everything. It stands out to me because one day, in my mid 30s, a doctor placed a prism in front of my right eye and I saw as people see. I burst out into tears. The world, in that little exam room, was so very alive. Vision therapists haven’t been able to replicate it since, and I try to remember the moment only as often as necessary to keep the memory in that sweet spot between reality and a memory of a memory.

Maybe one day, it’ll align with the right doctor. Neither the first nor second surgeon told my parents about vision therapy so when I found out about it at a routine eye exam in my 30s, I was referred to a university to work with students during their lab hours. They worked specifically with Strabismus but, every patient there was a child. They had no expertise with adults. I was given a poor prognosis for having waited so long. I decided to stop going, to wait until I could afford working with a specialist—someone up for a challenge.

I believe I was meant to turn inward toward symbols before ordinary consensus reality, to find and thrive in a different depth of vision. And then, to bring it forward. The left eye is linked to lunar perception, emotional depth, intuition, dream-sight, sensitivity and receptive vision. As a Cancer moon eclipsing my own sun, Apollo’s realm dulled while a moonfed inner eye took on more saturation. My inner life is a cosmology I can see in full dimension.

Some days, I feel grief for the world I can’t see, the ache in my eyes and the strange sensation of viewing the world from the left side of my face. Most days, I think it’s pretty amazing that I unknowingly did vision therapy on myself when I read books as a kid. I’m told it should be very difficult to track words on a page and trying to read should result in dizziness or nausea. I suffered through it young, because I loved reading. Narrators felt as perceptive as I did. They knew so much about everyone in the stories, quietly. My intuition felt at home. I spent several hours a day reading and then, writing. I remember having a hard time, but I made it non-negotiable. Desire creates worlds.

I eroticized being a cyclops by becoming masterful with my inner eye. I edge every insight to its deeper truths, and I don’t stop gazing at the place where I found it. I transform all of the time. I’m doing it right now. The amount of privacy I feel comfortable with is in exact opposition to sending this essay out but I will. I choose the change I desire every day. I surrender to the vast, erotic unknown as a way of life. I’ve made peace with the idea Joseph Pearce talks about in The Crack in a Cosmic Egg, that the insight making mechanism is that which is universal, not the insights themselves. I find new psychic land to stand on. I create inner and outer ecologies that allow me to make eye contact with new identities that were always mine. I become what I fall in love with and envy. There’s no limit to transformation when you recognize what you desire, when you know you can become it, when becoming it feels enlivening. This path has led me to an erotic animist spirituality where everything is alive.

With one eye, I read authors who challenge me. I write as often as I can. I make art that allows my inner life entry into the world. I call the artifacts I create moonfed because they’re my mirrors. Even a seer wants to be seen. I’m a high femme cyclops, feathered lashes fanning my saturated visions. I choose divine, erotic craftsmanship over savage brutality but as Tupac said, don’t push me. Turns out the weapon I’ve been crafting for the gods was me. I sever reality with new life.

I use color to its fullest expression. I gift myself saturation wherever it feels good to do. Enter neon pink hair, my lovecore home, my love of vivid paints and gold leaf, my refusal of beige living.

To be clear, I find neurotypical norms inhumane. When I had my EEG done, years ago, I was scared I’d be found out for being an alien, for something being terribly wrong. One of the first sketches I did as a kid said in big, bold letters, What’s the point in being different when everyone is the same? I showed everyone and no one had an answer for me. I wasn’t surprised when my boss called me a liar and accused me of being on drugs. I wasn’t surprised to see that in most measures, I was several standard deviations away from the mean. Compared to a “normative population,” I shouldn’t be able to function. That’s all I heard from the man who I thought would fire me. You shouldn’t be able to be *waves haphazardly at me.* What aren’t you telling me? I was surprised he wasn’t curious enough to find out. Was it because I was an employee getting the report for free? Was it because I was a woman? A middle eastern person? I still don’t know. I do know I was sent away, in irritation, to my desk with the interpretation section of the report left blank. I still believe the report was speaking in a language he couldn’t read. I’m sure his EEG was normal.

Eroticism is a divergence from the norms. Being present to a world of desire and depth, often avoided until death, is a divergence. The norms are inhumane. I became myth instead.

eros, always,
Nairy

Questions for my advice column can be submitted by paid subscribers.

I work privately with people interested in erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentorships and natal chart readings are open.

In relationship astrology, or synastry, Pluto contacts are either creative or destructive because raw erotic potential feels chaotic to those who desire to stay the same, all-consuming to those who aren’t sovereign, and deeply desired to those who resonate with transformative love. Romantic relationships featuring Plutonic synastry represent the pressure of fate catalyzing individuation through love. Identity is meant to change irreversibly through the bond. True lovers take you to hell to show you what’s burning.

All Pluto contacts are erotic in synastry but the loudest are:

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This is part eight of an in-depth analysis of Eros in each of the twelve houses. To eroticize all areas of your life, read each essay. Even if your Pluto placement isn’t in the eighth house, the following lyric essay explores how to eroticize intimacy, shared resources, vulnerability and transformative power. And consider the house where you have Scorpio as that area of your life is also ruled by Eros.

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