09/22/2026
I hope when you're reading this, you feel that you are wrapped in the most atmospheric of fall mornings. The kind where the air is cool and the world feels like it's held its entirely at ease. I'm imagining you with something warm in your hands (I'll be drinking from my pumpkin mug), a candle burning, maybe ASMR drifting softly through your space (link below- I love thinking of us all listening to it together!). And I'm imagining you settling into a story that feels like autumn.
I've just begun The Woman In White. It set in the fading light of a Victorian autumn, where a young drawing teacher arrives at an estate as the season turns. The walls are lined with portraits that seem to watch. The gardens are overgrown. And as she begins to sketch, she discovers something moving beneath the surface—a ghost caught between worlds, revealed through her art. It's a story about beauty and loss, about how what we draw (what we create, what we pay attention to) can pull us into communion with things we didn't know we were longing for. The entire book breathes autumn. It is autumn—that liminal space where the veil thins, where we stand between seasons, between the seen and unseen.
And this week, we stand at that threshold together.
Today, the Fall Equinox arrives. The moment when the sun crosses the celestial equator and day and night hold equal hours. Perfect balance. The cosmos pauses. And we're invited to pause with it.
But this equinox doesn't come alone. Soon after, the Aries full moon rises—an initiatory moon. She's asking: What requires your fire, your courage, your yes? Aries is the energy of "I am." She asks us to step fully into that declaration—to claim yourself, to know yourself, to inhabit all of who you are. Including this body. Especially this body.
And then, days later, Venus turns retrograde. Venus—the planet of beauty, value, justice, relationships, ALL relationships. She asks us to look at the relationships we have with the people we love, certainly, but also the relationships we have with the things that shape our daily lives—how we spend our money, where we give our time, our relationship with our work, our roles, and ultimately, our relationship with our own heart, mind and body.
I've had and heard so many conversations recently with a tone of real harshness toward the body. A feeling that it isn't responding the way we think it should—that it doesn't look the way we want it to, move the way we want it to, have the energy we want it to have, or change as quickly as we'd like.
We can become frustrated with its shape, its weight, its aging, its limitations, its symptoms, its desires, even the ways it asks us to slow down. There can be such a deep disconnection between the body we have and the body we think we should have. And at this threshold, the equinox is calling us to notice: where have we abandoned our own bodies? Where are we telling ourselves the body is the problem?
This is what Venus is asking us to undertake during this retrograde. To turn our attention toward the body with curiosity and care, to listen for what it is communicating before we decide what needs to change. The work is in the subtle alchemy of acknowledging the body and tending to it from there.
Your body is not something to transcend or overcome. It is the very doorway through which you come to know yourself at the most intimate level.
There is a tenderness in learning to be with the body we actually have. To care for it. To listen when it speaks. To allow it to change. To recognize that this body has carried us through every chapter of our lives and is still carrying us now.
And so we arrive at this threshold: the Equinox, the Aries Full Moon, and Venus turning retrograde, each in their own way bringing us into deeper relationship with what it means to inhabit a life, a body, a self. There is something sacred about these particular days—the equal light and dark, the fierce declaration of the Aries moon, the turning inward of Venus. A moment to ask what is true beneath all the noise of what we think we should be.
Maybe this season, we let the body become a place of knowing again. Listen beneath the criticism, beneath the expectations, beneath the endless measuring. To remember that there is deep, hard-won wisdom here. There is a self here. There is a life here.
And as the wheel turns toward autumn, may we meet ourselves with enough presence to hear what is being asked of us—and enough tenderness to let the answer unfold.
Sending Autumn Blessings,
Joy
