✺ Astro Me — The Body Was Speaking First | Surgery, Astrology & Remembering the Body
- Kiing Curry
- Jul 1
- 24 min read
Updated: Jul 1
How do you build enough relationship that your body doesn’t have to scream before you believe it?
Altard U & Astro Me
Embodied Astrology, Ancestral Veneration & Lived Cosmology
Altard U & Astro Me is a crossroads where the self, ancestors, and cosmos are held in relationship.
This is astrology returned to the body—beyond tropes, beyond surface meaning—toward lived practice, ancestral memory, and grounded spiritual rhythm.
The stars are not spectacle here; they are relational guides for embodied living.
✺ Astro Me — The Body Was Speaking First | Surgery, Astrology & Remembering the Body
On Surgery, Astrology, and Learning to Remember What My Body Already Knew
June 28 marks one year since my emergency appendectomy.
When it first happened, I understood it as an emergency.
Then I understood it as recovery.
Then I understood it as regulation.
Today, one year later, I think I understand it differently.
Not because I suddenly found an answer.
Because I finally found another map.
And before anybody starts clutching their birth chart or rolling their eyes because I said astrology, slow down.
This isn’t about prediction.
I am not interested in whether astrology “predicts” surgeries.
Honestly, I think that’s one of the least interesting conversations we can have.
I wasn’t looking for the future.
I was looking for a map that could help me remember what my body already knew before I had the language to hear it.
Those are two completely different questions.
⸻
A few days ago I pulled my transits from June 28, 2025.
Then I pulled my progressions.
Then I went further back.
May of 2011.
The year I had emergency intestinal surgery.
The same season I miscarried.
The same season I was working for a nonprofit that had me doing the work of two people while making less than forty thousand dollars a year with no health insurance after earning my MFA. ( I was in the middle of producing my first festival along with doing the full event management and design for said festival as well)
Read that sentence again.
Because that’s the body we’re talking about.
Not an abstract birth chart.
Not a personality test.
My body.
A body that had already been taught for years that surviving meant overriding itself.
A body that was trying to carry more than it had ever agreed to carry.
A body that kept speaking in ways I had been trained not to hear.
⸻
When I started comparing those two moments—2011 and 2025—I wasn’t looking for matching planets.
I wasn’t expecting Mars to be in the exact same place or Saturn to magically explain everything.
What I was looking for was communication.
Was there a similar landscape?
A similar pressure?
A similar interruption?
Was my body trying to tell me the same story fourteen years apart?
Screaming.
Because that’s exactly what I found.
Not the same astrology.
The same conversation.
⸻
The first thing I noticed wasn’t actually the planets.
It was the progression itself.
In 2011 my progressed Sun was moving through late Pisces.
My progressed Ascendant had already entered Virgo.
By 2025 my progressed Sun had moved into Taurus.
My progressed Ascendant was still in Virgo.
That stopped me.
Because the developmental conversation around my body hadn’t disappeared.
It had matured.
Virgo hadn’t been asking me to become organized.
Virgo had been asking me to become observant.
To pay attention.
To discern.
To notice the small changes before they became emergencies.
To build a relationship with the body I actually lived inside.
And the body answered through the place Virgo has long been associated with.
Digestion.
Metabolism.
The intestines.
The ordinary daily work of taking something in, deciding what nourishes, and releasing what does not.
I had emergency intestinal surgery in 2011.
An emergency appendectomy in 2025.
Different organs.
The same conversation.
That isn’t proof that astrology caused anything.
It’s what made the map interesting.
Because my body and the chart appeared to be documenting the same developmental question in two different languages.
⸻
Then I looked closer at 2011.
Late Pisces.
Virgo rising.
And suddenly my life made sense in a way it never had before.
Pisces wasn’t asking me to disappear.
I was already disappearing.
Into work.
Into survival.
Into other people’s expectations.
Into relationships that kept extracting more than they returned.
Into a life where everyone else’s needs had become more important than the body’s carrying them.
Virgo wasn’t offering me a cure.
Virgo was asking a quieter question.
Can you become curious enough to notice what your body has been trying to metabolize all along?
…
Holy shit.
Because that wasn’t just my chart.
That was my life.
I had an advanced degree.
No insurance.
A salary that couldn’t sustain me.
A nervous system I didn’t yet understand.
Autism.
OCD.
PDA.
None of those words existed for me yet.
All I knew was that something felt profoundly wrong.
And instead of listening to my body…
I did what so many of us have been taught to do.
I went back to work.
II. THE BODY WAS NEVER THE PROBLEM
I think one of the biggest lies we’ve been told is that the body suddenly “fails.”
Like one day you’re fine.
Then…
Boom.
Emergency surgery.
Cancer.
Burnout.
Panic attacks.
High blood pressure.
Heart attack.
Insert whatever diagnosis people are currently pretending arrived out of nowhere.
Nah.
My body wasn’t failing.
My body had been filing complaints for years.
I just wasn’t fluent enough to read them.
⸻
Looking back at 2011 now, I don’t actually see a surgery.
I see an ecology.
I see a progressed Sun moving through late Pisces while my progressed Ascendant quietly asked Virgo questions my life wasn’t yet equipped to answer.
How do you discern what belongs to you?
What are you taking in every day?
What are you trying to digest?
What has your body been trying—and failing—to release?
Those weren’t abstract astrological symbols.
They were living inside my body.
Inside my intestines.
Inside my nervous system.
Inside the ordinary rhythms of a life that had completely lost its relationship with itself.
I see an autistic person who didn’t know they were autistic.
An OCD brain trying to create certainty inside systems that could never offer it.
PDA screaming every single day while I kept overriding it because I thought survival meant pushing through.
⸻
And baby…
My personal life wasn’t doing any better.
I was in Washington, D.C. dealing with two dusty Negroes back to back.
I’m laughing now because if I don’t laugh, I’ll scream.
The first one was college educated.
Brilliant in a lot of ways.
Deeply disillusioned.
He was also the person I miscarried with.
When I got pregnant, I watched panic move across his body.
Not concern.
Relief.
Relief when I miscarried.
That relationship ended not long after.
Then, because trauma has a funny way of convincing us that the opposite of one extreme must be healthier, I swung all the way in the other direction.
I started dating a street pharmacist.
And before anybody starts clutching pearls…
No.
This wasn’t some glamorous weed fairy.
The cannabis was terrible.
We were literally rolling spliffs because the flower wasn’t good enough to stand on its own.
What mattered wasn’t the quality.
It was that my body had stumbled onto one of the only things giving me even a tiny bit of regulation before I had language for why it helped.
Neither one of these men was on the lease.
Both of them somehow lived in my apartment full-time.
Read that sentence again.
Neither.
One.
Paid.
Rent.
Meanwhile, I’m working the job of two people.
Trying to keep a relationship alive.
Trying to keep myself alive.
Trying to survive inside a nervous system I didn’t yet understand.
So when I look back at 2011 now, I don’t see isolated bad decisions.
I see a body trying to survive inside an ecology where every single system around it was extracting more than it was giving back.
An MFA hanging on the wall.
No health insurance.
Being underpaid.
Being exhausted.
Believing if I just worked hard enough somebody would eventually notice.
Spoiler alert.
They didn’t.
⸻
Around that same time I miscarried.
I’ve been thinking about that differently too.
Not because astrology explains miscarriages.
Not because I suddenly think there was one singular reason.
Bodies are more complicated than that.
Mine certainly was.
I had emergency intestinal surgery.
I was vomiting.
I was inflamed.
There was a lot happening.
But I can’t ignore what my life looked like.
I couldn’t fully care for myself.
Nobody around me was asking what my body needed.
But they were going to make sure that my body was there comfort.
Hell…
I wasn’t asking what my body needed.
Because nobody had ever taught me that was even a question I was allowed to ask.
⸻
Instead the question was always:
How much more can you do?
How much more can you carry?
How much more can you produce?
How much more can you ignore?
Colonial capitalism doesn’t ask bodies how they’re doing.
It asks bodies what they’re worth.
Those are completely different conversations.
⸻
Looking back, I honestly don’t think my body was in any position to receive.
Not because it wasn’t capable.
Because it wasn’t being resourced.
There is a difference.
Receiving isn’t just opening.
Receiving requires safety.
Receiving requires nourishment.
Receiving requires somewhere for what arrives to actually live.
My life had none of those conditions.
And when I look back at that progressed chart now, I don’t see fate.
I see context.
A Sun dissolving through Pisces.
An Ascendant in Virgo asking questions about health, digestion, daily life, and discernment that I wasn’t yet capable of answering.
Not because I was unwilling.
Because I had never been taught to trust my own observations.
⸻
I went back to work after that first surgery.
Read that sentence one more time.
I.
Went.
Back.
To.
Work.
Not because I had healed.
Because I thought that’s what responsible adults did.
Because that’s what the system taught me.
Because that’s what my parents taught me.
Because that’s what America teaches all of us.
Keep going.
Keep producing.
Keep smiling.
Keep proving.
Keep dying quietly if necessary.
Just don’t inconvenience productivity.
⸻
The wild part?
I don’t even blame twenty-seven-year-old me.
I didn’t know.
I couldn’t know.
I didn’t yet have the language.
Autism.
OCD.
PDA.
Embodiment.
Regulation.
None of those frameworks existed for me.
I only knew something inside me kept screaming.
And because I couldn’t hear what it was saying…
I assumed I needed to work harder.
⸻
Now, one year after my appendectomy, I’m realizing something that honestly made me stop reading the chart.
My body and astrology were both documenting the same conditions.
One through symbols.
One through tissue.
One through planets.
One through pressure.
Both were asking the exact same question.
What has this body been trying to metabolize for years that no one has stopped long enough to notice?
And the truth is…
In 2011…
I couldn’t answer it.
Not because I was weak.
Because I had never been taught that my body was allowed to have an opinion.
III. MY BODY TOLD ME MONTHS BEFORE MY DOCTORS DID
When my appendix decided it had had enough in June of 2025, I honestly thought I was just having another emergency.
Pain.
Hospital.
Surgery.
Recovery.
The end.
Except…
It wasn’t the end.
It wasn’t even the beginning.
The beginning happened months earlier.
⸻
Here’s the part that keeps making me laugh.
Not because it’s funny.
Because it’s so unbelievably obvious now.
My appendix didn’t surprise my body.
It surprised me.
Those are two completely different things.
⸻
By January of 2025 something had already shifted.
I knew it.
Not intellectually.
Embodied.
By that point I’d already spent several years unmasking.
I’d quit drinking.
I’d shaved my head.
I’d finally begun understanding my autism.
I’d recognized my OCD.
I’d started building an actual relationship with my body instead of treating it like something I had to drag behind my brain.
I wasn’t fully fluent yet.
But we were finally speaking to one another.
And then…
something changed.
⸻
I had finally settled into a consistent walking practice.
Nothing fancy.
Just moving.
Showing up.
Listening.
Then my energy disappeared.
Not motivation.
Energy.
Those are different.
I wanted to walk.
My body couldn’t.
It felt like somebody had quietly unplugged me.
That wasn’t normal for me anymore.
Something had shifted.
I couldn’t explain it.
But I could absolutely feel it.
Looking back now, I realize something else had shifted too.
By 2025 my progressed Sun had moved into Taurus.
The developmental conversation had changed.
Virgo had spent years teaching me how to observe.
Now Taurus was asking a different question.
Now that you’re finally listening…
how are you going to nourish the body that’s been trying to speak to you this whole time?
That question reached far beyond food.
It reached into rest.
Resources.
Touch.
Rhythm.
Safety.
Movement.
The ordinary practices that make a body feel like somewhere you can actually live.
⸻
Then food started changing.
Tomatoes.
One of my favorite foods.
Suddenly my body wanted absolutely nothing to do with them.
Other foods started doing strange things too.
That sent me down the rabbit hole of histamine intolerance and blocked histamine pathways.
I changed my diet.
Experimented.
Paid attention.
Listened.
Some of those changes helped a little.
Nothing solved what was actually happening.
Because the problem wasn’t tomatoes.
The problem was that something inside my body had already changed.
⸻
Then there was my weight.
This part still pisses me off.
For almost two years my body hovered around 275 to 280 pounds.
Stuck.
Not fluctuating.
Not responding.
Just…
holding.
Holding inflammation.
Holding fluid.
Holding pressure.
Nobody thought that was strange.
Not one doctor stopped and asked,
“Why has this body stopped releasing?”
Not one person became curious.
Instead it became another number.
Another BMI conversation.
Another reminder that fat bodies apparently aren’t allowed to have mysteries.
We’re only allowed to have blame.
⸻
Then my appendix came out.
And almost immediately…
my body started releasing.
Fluid.
Inflammation.
Weight.
Movement returned.
Energy slowly returned.
Within the first couple of months after surgery, my body began letting go of what it had been holding onto for so long.
Looking back now, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I think my body had been trying to release for months.
It simply couldn’t.
And suddenly the astrology landed differently too.
Not because Taurus predicted my surgery.
Because the surgery became part of learning the Taurus lesson.
Not comfort.
Relationship.
Not indulgence.
Embodiment.
Not accumulating more.
Learning how to sustain what was already here.
⸻
That realization changed everything for me.
Because I wasn’t wrong.
My body wasn’t lying.
My body wasn’t overreacting.
My body had been communicating months before anyone could point to an organ on a scan.
And that’s exactly why I keep saying embodiment is about becoming relational.
I didn’t know my appendix was coming out.
I couldn’t have told you that.
But I absolutely knew something inside me had shifted.
I trusted that knowing.
Even when I couldn’t explain it.
That is a completely different relationship with my body than the one I had in 2011.
Back then my body was speaking a language I couldn’t hear.
By 2025…
I still wasn’t fluent.
⸻
After surgery I bought a sacroiliac belt.
Honestly?
I thought it was just going to help stabilize my pelvis while everything healed.
The belt along with my lumbar fanny pack, instead, they taught me something I wasn’t expecting.
When I put that belt on, it wasn’t just support.
It was information.
My body suddenly knew where force could go again.
I could feel pressure organizing itself instead of scattering in every direction.
I don’t know how else to explain it.
My body sighed before my mind did.
⸻
Looking back now, I think that’s when the pressure valve finally started making sense.
Not as a metaphor.
Biomechanically.
My body wasn’t asking me to become calm.
It was asking me to move pressure somewhere.
Those are completely different things.
⸻
That’s also why I keep coming back to kettlebells.
People assume I lift because I want to get stronger.
Sure.
I do.
Have you seen these swing low sweet chariots?
I’m trying to get these hoes back up where they belong.
I’m only half joking.
But strength isn’t actually why I keep returning.
It’s because kettlebells do something to my nervous system that walking and jogging don’t always do.
A kettlebell doesn’t let me disappear into my thoughts.
It demands my body.
My breath.
My feet.
My hips.
My core.
My attention.
Load.
Brace.
Hinge.
Drive.
Release.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The movement itself becomes a pressure valve.
Not because pressure disappears.
Because it finally remembers where to go.
⸻
For the last couple of years I kept saying I had to “put my OCD brain to work.”
Now I think I had it backwards.
I have to put my body to work.
Because when my body is actually engaged—
lifting.
Cooking.
Making jewelry.
Editing video.
Building workshops.
Tending plants.
Washing my hair.
Laughing until I cry.
Writing essays.
Sometimes eating.
Sometimes saying absolutely nothing.
Sometimes simply sitting outside paying attention…
The pressure moves.
My OCD doesn’t magically disappear.
It just no longer has to spend all day trying to complete movements my body never got the chance to finish.
⸻
I don’t think we’ve been forced into our brains.
I think we’ve been forced into cognition without embodiment.
That’s different.
Thinking isn’t the problem.
Disembodied thinking is.
We’ve built a world where people sit in front of computers for eight, ten, twelve hours a day and then wonder why our bodies keep screaming.
We feed ourselves.
We feed our calendars.
We feed algorithms.
We feed capitalism.
We feed everybody except the actual movement our bodies have been asking for.
No wonder pressure keeps relocating.
No wonder so many of us feel trapped inside our own heads.
Maybe our heads were never supposed to carry all of this by themselves.
⸻
One year after surgery, I finally understand something my body has been trying to teach me for decades.
Pressure doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
If it isn’t metabolized…
it relocates.
Movement is how pressure remembers where to go.
The question isn’t whether pressure exists.
The question is whether I’ve built enough relationship with my body that pressure has somewhere to go before it has to become rupture.
That, more than anything, feels like the real anniversary.
Not surviving surgery.
Learning the language my body had been speaking long before I knew how to listen.
Decolonizing the Palate
Food was part of this too.
Not as a separate category.
As another place where my body had been trying to refuse assimilation.
When my energy dropped in January 2025, food was one of the first places the signal sharpened. Foods I had loved, especially tomatoes, suddenly became impossible. That sent me into histamine research, blocker language, elimination lists, and all the online tracking that promises clarity if you can just identify the right trigger.
Some of it was useful.
Most of it was incomplete.
Because so much of that language treats the body like an isolated chemical event instead of a life that has been metabolizing history, stress, race, family, food access, neurodivergence, and assimilation all at once.
My body was not only reacting to tomatoes.
My body was reacting to an entire inherited ecology.
I had been raised inside standardized eating. Standardized groceries. Standardized meals. Standardized ideas of what food was supposed to be.
Monoculutre Culture.
My parents were trying to survive through proximity to whiteness, and food was part of that survival strategy. Eat this way. Behave this way. Think this way. Move this way. Become easier to place.
But my body was never easy to place.
My weight fluctuated early.
My digestion spoke early.
My nervous system spoke early.
What looked like a body failing to regulate was also a body being asked to metabolize an ecology that was not built for it.
The standardized palate does not produce standardized bodies.
It produces inflamed bodies.
Uneasy bodies.
Bodies that lean into fullness because embodiment was refused.
Bodies that start showing symptoms in childhood and then get blamed for the symptoms instead of the conditions that produced them.
That is why I Eat Tings matters here.
It is not food content.
It is part of the same return.
Beans.
Greens.
Okra.
Roots.
Fermentation.
Bitters.
Herbs.
Broths.
Seafood.
Vegetables.
Smoke.
Sour.
Texture.
Time.
These were not aesthetic choices.
They were my body recognizing a wider ecology than the one I had inherited.
Decolonizing my palate has meant asking what my body can finally digest when it is no longer being force-fed assimilation.
IV. LEARNING TO REMEMBER
When I first started looking back at my astrology, I caught myself laughing.
Because I realized I’d made the same assumption everybody else makes.
I thought I was looking for answers.
I wasn’t.
I was looking for memory.
That changed everything.
⸻
People keep asking astrology to tell them what’s going to happen next.
I wanted to know what had already happened.
Not to my career.
Not to my relationships.
To my body.
When I looked at the transits.
When I looked at the progressions.
When I placed 2011 beside 2025…
I wasn’t looking for prediction.
I was looking for another language.
Another map.
Another way of describing the exact same landscape.
And that’s exactly what I found.
Not matching planets.
Matching developmental questions.
⸻
In 2011 my progressed Sun was moving through late Pisces.
My progressed Ascendant had already entered Virgo.
Fourteen years later, my progressed Sun had moved into Taurus.
My progressed Ascendant was still in Virgo.
That continuity stopped me.
Because it meant the conversation hadn’t reset.
It had matured.
I had spent years thinking the body suddenly erupted in 2025.
The chart suggested something much quieter.
My body had been living inside the same developmental conversation for over a decade.
The language simply changed.
⸻
Looking back now, Pisces makes perfect sense.
Not because it explains my life.
Because it describes the conditions I was already living.
I was dissolving.
Working beyond my capacity.
Giving more than I had.
Trying to survive inside systems that kept demanding another piece of me.
My boundaries weren’t simply weak.
They had become impossible to locate.
Meanwhile, Virgo had quietly entered the conversation.
Not asking me to become perfect.
Not asking me to organize my closet.
Asking me to become observant.
To notice.
To discern.
To pay attention to the ordinary conversations my body was already trying to have.
Virgo is often associated with digestion.
That landed in my chest when I saw it.
Because both of my emergency surgeries involved my digestive system.
First my intestines.
Then my appendix.
Again, I don’t think astrology caused either surgery.
That’s not the point.
The point is that the map and my body were documenting the same terrain.
One through symbols.
One through organs.
Both asking the same question.
What has this body been trying to metabolize that it has never been given the conditions to process?
⸻
Then 2025 arrived.
My progressed Sun had entered Taurus.
People love reducing Taurus to comfort.
Luxury.
Food.
Soft blankets.
Cute candles.
I laughed.
Because that isn’t the Taurus my body met.
The Taurus I met asked something much more demanding.
How do you nourish a body you’ve only ever expected to survive?
Not after the emergency.
Before it.
How do you build enough relationship that your body doesn’t have to scream before you believe it?
That question rearranged everything.
Because I realized my appendix wasn’t the beginning of the story.
It was part of a much longer conversation.
Virgo had spent years teaching me to observe.
Taurus was asking me what I intended to do with what I’d learned.
⸻
Then I looked at the year I’m writing this.
My 2026 Solar Return carries a Taurus Moon.
That almost made me cry.
Because this isn’t the year of rupture.
It’s the year of tending.
The year of consistency.
The year of returning.
The year of asking what nourishment looks like after survival has stopped being the only goal.
Not nourishment as consumption.
Nourishment as relationship.
The body isn’t asking me to rescue it anymore.
It’s asking me to stay with it.
To keep listening after the crisis ends.
That feels like a completely different life.
⸻
Then I noticed something else.
My progressed Midheaven had moved from Taurus into Gemini.
And suddenly the entire arc made sense.
Pisces dissolved me.
Virgo taught me to observe.
Taurus taught me to return to my body.
Gemini asked me to translate what I found.
Essays.
Workshops.
Field notes.
The Embodiment Diagram.
The Six Waters.
The Cosmos.
Not because astrology gave me something new to say.
Because it offered another language for something my body had already been saying for years.
⸻
That’s the distinction I want to protect.
I’m not asking astrology to replace medicine.
I’m not asking medicine to replace embodiment.
I’m not asking either one to become a religion.
I’m asking what becomes possible when we allow different maps to illuminate the same landscape.
My scans showed an inflamed appendix.
My body showed me months of exhaustion, food changes, inflammation, and stalled metabolism before anyone found the organ responsible.
The progressions showed a developmental movement from dissolution, to discernment, to embodiment.
None of those maps cancel one another out.
Together, they tell a story that none of them could tell alone.
⸻
Earlier this month I wrote that I was the pressure valve between my grandmother and my mother.
Gemini.
Aries.
Cancer.
Air.
Fire.
Water.
At the time I thought I was mostly writing about lineage.
Now I think I was writing about my body too.
Pressure doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
My grandmother carried.
My mother contained.
For years I thought my work was carrying too.
Now I think my work is different.
My work is helping pressure circulate before it becomes rupture.
Sometimes that looks like an essay.
Sometimes a workshop.
Sometimes a conversation.
Sometimes a meal.
Sometimes a kettlebell.
Sometimes laughter.
Sometimes tears.
Sometimes finally saying no.
Sometimes telling the truth.
⸻
Maybe that’s what the pressure valve actually is.
Not a single release.
A relationship.
A daily practice.
A willingness to keep asking my body,
“What are you trying to move today?”
And then trusting the answer enough to let it.
⸻
As I prepared this essay for publication, the Capricorn Full Moon of June 2026 arrived as another point of culmination.
My natal Neptune sits at the beginning of Capricorn in the Sixth House—the place where work, care, daily practice, and embodied stewardship continually meet one another. It felt less like an ending than another observatory opening onto the same landscape.
One question kept returning:
Looking back across 2011, 2025, and now 2026, I realize this has been the same conversation unfolding through different seasons of my life. The work isn’t simply surviving rupture anymore. It’s building daily rhythms that allow becoming to continue.
⸻
One year ago my appendix came out.
Today I understand something I couldn’t have understood then.
The lesson was learning to stop waiting for my body to scream before I believed what it had been whispering all along.
I wasn’t looking for the future.
I was looking for a map that could help me remember what my body already knew before I had the language to hear it.
Turns out…
my body had been trying to finish the sentence the whole damn time.
V. WE ARE NOT WAITING FOR RUPTURE ANYMORE
I’ve been thinking a lot about my father lately.
Not with nostalgia.
Not with forgiveness.
With curiosity.
Because one of the things astrology has helped me do is stop asking,
“Who was right?”
and start asking,
“What was each body trying to survive?”
My father is a Taurus.
For most of my life I only understood that through stereotypes.
Stubborn.
Hardheaded.
Set in his ways.
Now I think I was asking the wrong question.
Because when I look back through the lens of my own body, I don’t actually see stubbornness first.
I see someone who never learned how to trust his body over the systems surrounding it.
He trusted football.
He trusted work.
He trusted authority.
He trusted productivity.
He trusted that if he kept doing exactly what the system demanded, eventually it would give something back.
It never did.
⸻
He loved football.
He lifted weights.
His body knew resistance.
His body knew force.
His body knew movement.
Then football ended.
The movement ended.
The resistance ended.
The body didn’t.
He kept eating like a football player.
He kept working in front of a computer.
He kept expecting the same rewards from a system that had already shown him exactly what it thought he was worth.
His body kept talking.
He simply never learned another language besides pushing through.
Looking back now, I don’t think that’s just my father’s story.
I think that’s one of the central stories of the Baby Boomer generation.
Trust the institution.
Trust the employer.
Trust the doctor.
Trust the pastor.
Trust the school.
Trust the government.
Trust the system.
Trust everybody before you trust yourself.
And if your own body tells you something different…
assume your body is wrong.
That lesson didn’t stay with them.
They handed it to their children too.
Including me.
⸻
I’ve been thinking about my mother too.
She taught me tending.
She really did.
She taught me how to care for people.
How to notice.
How to anticipate.
How to remember.
How to show up.
What she couldn’t teach me was how to include myself in that tending.
She taught me the performance of tending.
Not the deep healing tending I’m still learning now.
She carried herself.
She carried my father.
She carried our family.
She carried things that didn’t belong to her because no one had ever shown her another way.
Eventually…
there was nowhere left for the pressure to go.
So it stayed.
Inside her body.
Inside our home.
Inside our relationship.
Pressure doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
⸻
Then there’s my grandmother.
The woman whose birthday always opens Gemini season for me.
The woman who taught me more than she’ll probably ever know.
She carried too.
Responsibility.
Family.
Faith.
Food.
Memory.
People.
She carried.
And carried.
And carried.
Sometimes I wonder…
Who attended the tender?
Who made sure the person feeding everyone else also got fed?
Who noticed the woman carrying everybody else?
Who asked what her body needed?
I don’t know the answer.
I wish I did.
⸻
Then I look at my own life.
And I realize something has shifted.
I don’t think my work is carrying anymore.
I don’t think my work is proving anything anymore.
I don’t think my work is surviving anymore.
I think my work is circulation.
Movement.
Relationship.
Curiosity.
Returning.
Because that’s what my body has been teaching me all along.
Pressure doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
If it isn’t metabolized…
it relocates.
Sometimes into another part of the body.
Sometimes into another relationship.
Sometimes into another generation.
Sometimes into an entire family.
Until somebody finally asks,
“What is all of this trying to become?”
⸻
For a long time I thought my OCD was the enemy.
Now I think it was trying to solve a problem my body had been living inside for decades.
I kept saying I had to put my OCD brain to work.
Now I know I have to put my body to work too.
Because movement is how pressure remembers where to go.
Sometimes that’s kettlebells.
Sometimes that’s cooking.
Sometimes that’s writing.
Sometimes that’s laughing so hard I can’t breathe.
Sometimes it’s crying.
Sometimes it’s saying no.
Sometimes it’s sitting quietly long enough to hear what my body has been trying to tell me all day.
Movement isn’t one thing.
Movement is relationship.
And relationship isn’t something we arrive at once.
It’s something we remember over and over again.
⸻
Maybe that’s why I’ve built the Cosmos the way I have.
The Six Waters.
The Embodiment Diagram.
The workshops.
The Hom(e)ies.
The essays.
The videos.
The jewelry.
The cooking.
The field notes.
None of them exist because I wanted to make content.
They exist because I was trying to build somewhere for pressure to go.
Somewhere curiosity could replace certainty.
Somewhere bodies could stop apologizing for speaking.
Somewhere we could remember how to return to ourselves over and over again.
Because that’s what I think healing has become for me.
Not fixing the body.
Not mastering astrology.
Not outrunning rupture.
Learning to stay in relationship long before rupture becomes the only language my body has left.
⸻
A year ago I thought I survived surgery.
Today I think something much quieter happened.
I stopped waiting for my body to scream before I believed it.
That doesn’t mean I’ll never get sick again.
It doesn’t mean I’ll never need another surgery.
It doesn’t mean I’ve figured my body out.
It means we’ve started having a relationship.
Relationships aren’t built through certainty.
They’re built through curiosity.
Through attention.
Through listening.
Through movement.
Through nourishment.
Through returning.
Maybe that’s what healing has been all along.
Not fixing the body.
Learning its language before it has to shout.
Because pressure doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
Movement is how pressure remembers where to go.
And the Cosmos, at its heart, has always been about remembering how to return to yourself over and over again.
We’re not waiting for rupture anymore.
Cosmos Watershed | |
Companion | ✺ The Body Electric — Movement Is How Pressure Remembers Where to Go ✺ Astro Me | The Life That Was Interrupted |
Origin | Emerged directly from reflecting on the first anniversary of an emergency appendectomy and mapping surgery, astrology, kettlebells, OCD, and movement into one embodied framework. |
Expansion | Introduces biomechanical cognition, pressure as circulation, and movement as the body’s completion of unfinished processes. Establishes the conceptual bridge toward Embodiment Diagram Version 2. |
Application | Offers a framework for understanding movement practices, kettlebells, cooking, art-making, gardening, writing, laughter, and rest as different forms of embodied pressure release rather than productivity or exercise alone. |
Lineage | Connects father’s football and weightlifting, mother’s containment, grandmother’s carrying, Kiing’s regulation through movement, and the evolution of the Six Waters into an ecology of circulation. |
Counter Currents | Colonial productivity, sedentary technology culture, disembodied cognition, wellness culture that treats exercise as performance, medical reductionism, forced stillness, and endless accumulation without release. |
✺ Astro Me — The Body Was Speaking First | Surgery, Astrology & Remembering the Body
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