Hello you,
The ground was opened. The air’s been trembling. And if you’ve been feeling slowed, honeyed, provoked, pulled downward into yourself — well, let yourself fully embrace the rest of the experience. There’s purpose here.
The brightest and most beautiful planet in the night sky, the Goddess of Love — Venus — has been retrograde since October 3. Initially in Scorpio. Currently in Libra. And throughout the past five weeks, she’s been in a tense and complicated conversation with Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld who darkens the edges of our Solar System. Pluto is currently in Aquarius.
When Venus and Pluto meet in this way, they become insistent that you bring your values, your relationships, how you meet beauty, intimacy, and intensity, on a provocative shadow walk with them. The goal? To alchemize. To purify. To return to the light living from a more evolved understanding of yourself. Are you thinking about the past five weeks?
I’d really like you to think back to the end of this August. You might find something that was initiated then. Your values, how you experience beauty, your love life, the way you offer yourself intimately (or don’t), your finances, how you move through life’s most intense moments… even your vulnerability… maybe especially vulnerability. These are all places to feel your way through right now. And we’re currently moving toward the final phase of this energy… my opinion is that it’s important to look back over a cosmic tide of this magnitude once you’ve been swimming in it for a while. Then you’re able to understand what it means for you, and your lived experience. That’s where the value lies.
Even as Venus moved back from Scorpio into Libra during her retrograde journey, she’s maintained that arduous connection to Pluto throughout. This intimate, yet provocative combination wants you to do something cathartic… even, perhaps, regenerative.
Now, you’ve probably heard the version of Venus retrograde where your ex texts or you run into each other. Where in some way or another someone from the past shows up. Yes. Sometimes that happens.
But I’ve been sitting with a more fascinating question: what if what returns isn’t a person at all… but a hunger? What if being reminded of the ex is simply supposed to point you toward a pattern that wants changing? What if the return is a way you used to want. A creativity that went underground. A beauty that you won’t allow yourself to touch anymore. A part of your erotic life you folded away and told yourself was finished.
The question isn’t, Do I want it back? It’s, Who am I in the presence of what I desire now? Because you’re not the same person who wanted it the first time. And that’s the whole point of the retrograde — meeting what returns with who you’ve become.
I’ve been dreaming with Persephone through all of this. You may know Persephone… she’s the daughter who was abducted and carried into the Underworld by Hades (Pluto). But I haven’t so much been thinking of the girl who was taken — but of the queen who returned. She tasted something sweet in the underworld, despite every terrible thing, and that taste changed the shape of her. She didn’t come back as the one who originally descended against her will. She came back and reigned.
Return, but different.
And here’s the part of the story I keep going back to… after everything had been taken from her, after her world had become underworld, there was suddenly sweetness in her mouth. She’d been given pomegranate seeds. Here was something pleasurable. Delicious. By some miracle, after all she’d been through, something reached her. Something in her responded. That means she was still alive. To me, she encountered Eros — the burgeoning desire to still be reached by life and answer it.
Persephone was released from the Underworld, but because she’d eaten the sweet seeds of the pomegranate, she had to return. Cyclically.
But when she returns she doesn’t come back as the girl who left. She returns having become someone who belongs to both worlds. Wholeness doesn’t mean getting the old self back intact. It means becoming capable of integrating what was above and what was found below. Desire after descent has knowledge now. Depth. Choice. Appetite that has encountered consequence. Vulnerability that has encountered power.
The end of the Retrograde is very close… both Venus and Mercury start moving forward again within hours of each other on Friday November 13. That means you have until December 15 to understand what this intensely provocative season wants you to return to or from… but in a new fashion. You’ve been inhabiting the underworld, and now, as you reach back up toward the light, a resolution of these past many weeks will be in your grasp. Make sure you enter that stream of understanding for the full regeneration that’s possible.
I made you something you’ll find just below to accompany your walk out of the Venus Retrograde shadow… something that will help you have your own encounter with something sweet in the darkness. The Taste of Return, a five-minute ritual. Something dark and sweet on your tongue, a cover over your head, a descent into whatever has gone quiet in you… and then you taste again on the way back up. I hope you also return — but different…
This one’s for everyone — yes, men too. Eros belongs to all of us.
Go find something delicious. Open to the return. 🌑🍎
Yours,
Michelle
and the discovery that sometimes what returns is you.
A Taste of Return
Venus Retrograde Ritual
For the End of this Venus Retrograde Journey
Venus is in the final day of her retrograde (October 3 – November 13, 2026) having moved back from Scorpio into Libra. On direct motion, she’ll move back into Scorpio again, tracing the same contours three full times over just a few weeks. We have until December 15 to fulfil the promise of this year’s internal journey. This is a season for introspection and return: for finding out what you still want — how you want it differently, and who you are in the presence of it.
In the old myth, Persephone is taken away from bright innocence into the underworld, and what awakens her there is a taste. Sweetness reaches her in the dark, and something in her answers… despite everything. That taste becomes both her aliveness and her tether — she will ascend, and she will also return, changed by what she has tasted.
Sometimes what returns is you.
This ritual takes five minutes. And the beauty of your attention…
You’ll need:
- Something gorgeous and sweet that you genuinely want to taste, held in a small, beautiful bowl. Pomegranate seeds, a few blackberries, a couple squares of dark chocolate, a date, a cookie, or a glass of wine to sip — or both — whatever calls to you. Choose what you desire. Desire is your guide.
- A piece of dark cloth large enough to cover your head and shoulders. A scarf, a shirt, a towel, some magnificent, embroidered thing you brought back from your travels. Any cloth you use in daily life or keep on your altar can become your Venus Retrograde threshold.
- A candle and matches or a lighter
- A journal, pad, or slip of paper and pen
- and five unhurried minutes.
The ritual:
Stand or sit comfortably, with your items placed beautifully around you.
Choose. Hold the delight you want to taste. Let it be wanted.
Taste. Take half of what you’ve chosen and TASTE IT — slowly enough to notice the instant pleasure bursting in your mouth. Chew slowly. Sip fully. Let it fill your whole mouth. Savor. Let the sweetness open you.
Save a bit. Save a few sips, and set a few seeds, one square, a berry or two aside, in the bowl beside the unlit candle. It waits for you on the other side.
Light the candle. With that taste of sweetness laughing on your tongue, light the candle, and watch the flame for a moment.
As you gaze at the flame, ask:
What in me still tastes alive?
Hold the question deeply, gently.
As you gaze at the flame, ask:
What in me has been hidden and wants to feel the fire of life again?
Hold the question deeply, gently.
Cover. Place the cloth over your head. Let the visible world soften and fall away… Light shifts… Sound shifts… You are gently enclosed inside your own presence. You have crossed the threshold from light to dark, right where you are. Magic.
Descend. Go down into Self — into whatever has gone quiet, waiting, ripening in the dark… the buried, the unfinished, the long-unfelt, the long-untasted. Let whatever comes, come… a sensation, a memory, an urge to move, a longing, tears, sweet stillness.
Hold this:
What in my life is asking to be tasted — again, or for the first time?
(Some descents bring a different question with them: What have I desired so deeply that letting it into my life changed the landscape? If that one rises in you, follow it — it knows the way.)
Encounter. Stay a breath longer in the dark, with whatever you have found. Meet it. See it — Feel it, in the quiet, at last.
Lift. When you’re ready, lift the covering slowly. Return gently to the visible world.
Taste again. Eat the bite you saved. Drink the wine. The same sweetness now stands on both sides of the threshold — and you may taste it as someone new. Returned — but different.
Write down your revelations. Take your journal, your pad, your slip of paper, and commit in writing what you’ve discovered. Uncovered. Perhaps recovered.
Return to life. Within the next day, give what came to you one small embodied expression in the living world. Buy the flowers. Begin the page. Put on the music. Take the walk. Say yes to the thing. Reach for the person you love.
We descend for more life. We return – but different.
And sometimes what returns is you.
— with love, Michelle
Second, this Full Moon in Sagittarius at the critical 29th degree seems to be highlighting relationships pretty “loudly.” With this fiery Moon in opposition to Venus, the planet of all things “love” and the ways of being that go with it, there’s an immediate understanding that this lunar event impacts us where we relate to others. Add to that a square to Chiron, our friendly karmic relationship indicator, as well as a trine to Juno, who wears the crown of symbolizing relationship from a karmic commitment perspective, and we have a relationship karmic cocktail. Juno, amazingly, is also at that 29th degree – of Libra in her case – which just happens to be the sign of, you guessed it, relationship. That critical 29th degree carries the energy of taking a new direction, sometimes in a completely unexpected way that belies our past ruminations and carefully laid plans. (And don’t get me wrong, I’m thinking positive here!) Degree 29 can carry a fated quality to it, and sometimes has us feeling a bit out of control. So there can be questions around our commitments, or, and better, opportunities to refresh them!
Fourthly (and I’m about to get political) I like to think of Sagittarius as being “the citizen of the world.” That’s the phrase that Banzhaf & Haebler use in the book Key Words for Astrology as the by-line for Sagittarius. “The citizen of the world.” That’s always stuck in my mind. In the past 30 days we’ve been sandwiched between two culminating points – two Full Moons in the sign Sagittarius – highlighting who we are as citizens of the world. And with the deadliest mass shooting in the history of our country just behind us, we are left pondering – at least I hope we are – how we go about being better citizens of our world. Perhaps that’s the reason we’ve had two Sagittarius Full Moons in a row… so that we must use this emotionally charged energy to become wiser citizens of the world – to become righteous about gun control despite previous blocks preventing that effort, to become higher minded around, and more tolerant of, those who have different lifestyles. The 15-hour gun control filibuster on the the Senate floor this past Thursday, led by Senator Chris Murphy, is a perfect example of Sagittarius energy “having enough” and “stump thumping” to make a point of justice. And sadly, the horrific actions of the shooter are also an example of the lowest possible vibration of Sagittarius at work – being so self-righteous and filled with the fervor of your cause that you take life, feeling somehow justified in your actions. The shooting and the filibuster occurred between 2 Sagittarius Full Moons, the second one at the critical 29th degree – meaning we’ve reached a critical turning point, and while we may not follow any plans we’ve previously put in place, and we may be feeling overwhelmed – we know we must go in a new direction. Fate is in play here, and that new direction must have greater meaning and a higher purpose, and point us toward freedom and justice – for everyone – as we move forward. All Sagittarian qualities. (An interesting point: the 1:58 AM chart for the Orlando shooting, when the first gunfire was heard, has THE SAME DEGREE – 29 degrees Sagittarius – on the MC – the most elevated point in the chart, which is the angle that shows how we see that moment in the greater world. Blows my mind.)
