Scorpio Season

November is a challenging month, isn’t it? Almost as much so as February. I know a lot of people who claim Thanksgiving as their favorite holiday, but I know just as many more who have a complicated relationship with it. Sure, it doesn’t have the gift-giving and commercial-ization of Christmas and it’s a time to get together with family…but it’s also a tradition deeply rooted in racism and colonization…and, well, it’s a time to get together with family.

It’s raining right now, storming in fact, so hard that my astraphobic dog is raging at the sky. (Poor baby. Send him strength). And there’s something very November about that, to me.

When I lived in NY, November wasn’t yet snowing, but it had also lost the last warmth of October. It was bleak and sleeting, and I turned to favorite books to reread, to baked goods and fine whiskey, to television shows with colder, darker palettes. It’s the storm before the holidays, before the New Year shouts at us to revitalize, reimagine, reinvent (I’m exhausted just thinking about it).

And yet, according to The Wheel of the Year, November is the new year. Samhain (or Halloween) is the beginning of our next cycle, and how interesting that nothing about this month feels active. November has a very “only one bed” energy (forgive me, I’ve got romance novels on the brain, always), in that it’s about holding still long enough to get close to what might already be brewing inside of you.

I’m not going to allow that New Year, New You pressure to invade my November. I’m going to hold close what I already have, revisit old beloveds (The Scorpio Races, The Winter of Mixed Drinks), and talk with friends experiencing their own November, in however it finds them.