Notes on Reawakening
Weaving Desire into Reality
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The Collective Tarot for April 2026
Notes on Reawakening: Weaving Desire into Reality
Read Time, 8 Minutes
BOOKISH BEAUTIES
Towards the end of April, our online book club for paid subscribers will gather to explore Chloé Cooper Jones’ Easy Beauty. Don’t forget to grab your copy. Specific date/time is forthcoming. Be on the lookout for an email with meeting details.
Dear Aesthete,
April is here; all of time bows to her at the threshold of spring and everything else.
I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a
full moon and-
but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the
frogs are singing.“April” by Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Mary understood the mood. It’s APRIL. Not much to say when there is a whole lot more to feel. Speaking of Mary Oliver, have you seen this trailer yet?
Hearing Lucy Dacus and Helena Bonhman Carter read Mary Oliver is the medicine I never knew I needed. Shoutout to PBS. This one’s gonna be GEWD.
April is for Unfurling the Body
My three favorite words: farfalla, desahogarse, and proprioception.
Farfalla means butterfly in Italian. Going on four years of studying the language on/off, it’s my newest favorite word in the big picture of life so far; it’s been so since late 2023, I think it’s here to stay. For a moment I thought abbiocco would dethrone farfalla but no.
In Spanish, desahogarse/me has been my fave reflexive verb of choice since childhood. That word feels like it’s always been with me. Long before I knew what a reflexive verb was. Translated literally, it means to un-drown oneself. Call a friend not because you need to vent (what a blegh term, makes me want to keep everything bottled up) but because you need to un-drown yourself. Journal not to let it all out but to come back to shore, to breathe again.
In English, proprioception is a fun term. I learned it from a pole dance teacher! Simply put, it’s the body’s ability to sense itself in space. Your first person sense of your meat-suit moving through present time and space. It’s one of our many senses as humans. Did you know we have way more than five?!
I love how these words sound as I say them aloud and the way it feels to engage all my vocal muscles in making them happen. As I’ve just begun to build a personal reading curriculum around the somatic nervous system, words like butterfly, undrowning, and sensing my body in space have been top of mind. There’s something thematic running through all three words, though I can’t yet fully verbalize it. Something about transformation, breathe, a lightness of being, the body as a structure that intakes sensory data (ie. memory)…tbd.
For years, important teachers in my personal life from the spheres of pilates, yoga, pole dance, therapy, tarot, lunar living, and in my professional life of studying integrative esthetics, lymphatic drainage, manual sculpting, fascial release — they have all referenced the soma at one point or another. It’s taken me long enough but I’m finally turning my attention to somatics in earnest. Until recently I’ve been content to let the term remain abstract in theory but now I’d like to integrate a deeper understanding of my own somatic nervous system into day-to-day living and observe how that applied knowledge reveals itself to be relevant in other experiences down the road.
Starting with cursory/novice reading I came across a delightful interview: 15 Minutes with Nicolette De Saint-Amour on Gravity, Freudian Shortcomings and Somatic Practices. The article itself is less than a ten minute read. Highly recommend for anyone curious to start developing an embodied understanding of somatic movement in their own life.
De Saint-Amour is a lecturer of somatics at San Diego State University’s department of music and dance. She has been one of my favorite somatic practitioners to learn from casually/parasocially via her instagram shares. The linked interview is between her and Project Pilates founder Maëlle Thomas-Traoré. Two quotes from the above interview stood out — emphasis my own:
We’re always relating to gravity and what good posture is has become more clear to me. I think for many people, the idea of good posture is to maintain some kind of rigid form, but in essence, it's learning to be dynamic. I think this has really come through in terms of my sense of self awareness, my habits of use and also how I can also access a greater kind of quality of strength. That’s how I'm able to use myself in a way that feels more meaningful.
I would say Body and Mature Behavior, which was one of Feldenkrais' earliest texts. It's a letter to Sigmund Freud, saying, in a way, that his thoughts were a bit short. He only looked at the mind of a person, but he didn't consider the body. In order to change a person, you have to consider both.
I was intrigued and excited to read this because it all connects to our collective card for April which I channeled for us back around the new moon in Pisces. Way before happening upon this interview!
Let’s dig in.
April Showers Bring…
What is healing you this month from the scars of winter and the shock of early spring? Or better said — what will you allow to heal you? What will you allow to enliven you? Can your guard come down and a fresh start unfold? These are the inquiries our collective card is making. Lean in so you can hear better.