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If erotic living hinges on presence, we need to talk about what to do with the hydras that live here. To be here is to slay every single one of them and then come back to do it again and again.
To start, get present around positive emotions and experiences. Yes, we skip those, too. If you’ve been around a while, you’ve heard me say that microdosing presence and embodiment is one of the most devotional routes to living erotically. It’s the mark of someone who’s truly trying to integrate this new lived value. Microdose being here and then return to your usual state. If you do this often enough, the sunlight of your consciousness will grow psyche from the dark earth of your shadow. You will have successfully seeded your value for presence which is the quality of time necessary for erotic living (and loving). Starting with positive emotions and experiences is helpful but the psyche is a whole and at the tail end of joy is often unresolved grief. I say this to prepare you, not to scare you. There is a reason we leave the present moment.
But, you can’t be eroticized or changed or created by Eros as a lifestyle if you are not here to meet them. Remember, erotic living is based on the act of making peace with being born at all times. Presence is collaborating with the divine, with Eros.
The good news is that you won’t need to try to cold turkey your way into a new way of being because, as you microdose presence, you’ll naturally notice yourself being here more often and for longer stretches of time. You’ll find yourself making decisions that impact your life, as a whole, from a spacious sense of absolute novelty. This is a true and priceless gift of being present.
Let yourself be romanced by the idea of slow transformation. It’s often the only sustainable way. What comes to mind are the many psychedelic experiences had by folx every year that are never integrated. Instead, take on the attitude of a sacred, slow devotee while your ego expands to include more of your personality in a way that has lasting power. When any new state of being, or insight, is first born into your consciousness, it temporarily takes over as the only thing. rendering every moment after it a remembering of the initial holistic and embodied understanding. This is why it stops feeling potent. It’s up to you to birth the rest of the story. Otherwise, insight becomes memory.
Getting present can be grueling and it may remind you of the exact reason you don’t stay here. It can even take you back to the moments when you decided you weren’t going to show your real face to this world and so, didn’t want to interact with its real face, either. The pain of coming back here can send you away again and on another wild goose chase, wondering why things feel so empty and hoping the ephemeral “later” is better than now, somehow. The thing about time is that you can’t experience anything but right now. The future never comes. You are the future that happens. Staying here in small increments of time and starting to feel your emotions, and their requests, all the way through—this is how you slay each hydra. You pay reverence to what’s been cast to the dark. It’s the light of consciousness that finally frees Hercules from cutting one head only to see two sprout in its place.
You might think, ‘surely something will inspire me to stay here and enjoy myself someday?? I’d rather not get all messy! Something might make it easier?’ But what happens instead is, as we get older, the required inspiration for change, toward presence, toward life, becomes more and more demanding because our lack of presence has calcified us into some pretty miserable circumstances that feel immovable. It feels like, ‘who made these choices that got me here anyway?!’
One example of this hardening of terrible life circumstances can be seen in those who are certain that their partner must be Mr. or Mrs. Absolutely Perfect in order to magically transform all the ways their anti-erotic consciousness has created their lifeless structures and systems. Another is those who double down on their way of lifelessness and insist that the world cannot meet their needs so why bother showing up to it. These folks are bitter about it. They reek of resentment. They are somewhere else entirely.
When you let yourself go away for so long, the road back looks so endless, you want to blame anyone else for it. Don’t do that. There is still so much time to live. To stay with. To slowly become one with. Don’t wait for God to smile upon you. Inspire them.
Once upon a time, in a color-saturated land studded with spontaneous laughter and the feeling of adventure that was going to a neighbor’s house to play, life moved slow. We were really here and we didn’t think about what was coming next though we were very excited to find out. A sense of novelty slowed time down. The now was infinite.
When we aren’t present, life flashes by like a churning river never stepped into. You know it’s there, you check maybe, or you see it in your dreams in an evil twin figure, a wild beast, an animal. Sometimes it’s even chasing you. But you’re always too committed to being anywhere but here. Here hurts. Here was pain so it was left. Why come back here? Because it’s the only road home. To being fully alive. All else leads to regret.
To be here is to contend with any untended pain and stay with it long enough for it to change. It’s being brave in the face of not knowing how long that will take or where the road of presence will take you. It’s being brave in the face of knowing some people won’t be supportive of you and worse, some people will try to cut you down. Often, it’s the people you least expect.
The ones who make a lifestyle out of avoiding the deeper call to an erotic life will see you as Lilith herself, especially if you’re a woman. Your capacity to dare to be here and expect life to be good to you just because eats through the rust around fixed anti-erotic identities. These are the people that didn’t tend what hurt. These are the ones who became it instead. Your reverence for the unknown, which is the same thing as the present moment, will feel threatening to folks who don’t believe they can survive here.
When someone becomes what traumatized them, when their untended pain turns into personality, their cure is seen as death-giving. And, it is. Your own presence inspires other people’s ghosts to want to inhabit their bodies again which requires them to be reborn. Your presence inspires a state in others which has historically caused them only pain. The erotic person is a dangerous one indeed.
For women in specific, presence immediately triggers destructive urges in patriarchal men and women. The story of Lilith isn’t forgotten and is alive and well in women who’ve got Stockholm’s Syndrome for the patriarchy. When you get present, you’ll often rub people the wrong way. You’ll look like you’ve drank from the fountain of youth. Like a sorcerer. A siren. A witch. Unhinged. Hungry and expectant of joy. Intimate with the knowledge of how you like it. Unashamed. Some might even think you might be an easy target, what with the childlike wonder. However, the most powerful in any room is the one who is actually in the room. A child is often the most noticed person in any room. Their consciousness is raw presence. They are one of the most triggering groups among us.
When you’re really here, you are an ancient child. You’ll sniff out those who want to harvest what you’ve found, whether they mean to or not. You’ll sense those whose left hand knows not what their right hand is doing and, you’ll protect yourself because you don’t expect people to be anything but who they really are. Because you won’t need them to be anything but that.
Living in a way that values presence takes you down many paths. One of them is to your own personal authenticity and uniqueness. You get to be here as you and you get to know how much life is available to your conscious personality. You won’t try to source it from others anymore. You’ll be able to differentiate between those who want to feed on your consciousness and the ones who have stepped into their own river of life. You’ll access the potency of your actual emotions.
Anger never changed anything for me but the river of my soft rage changed everything. The difference is anger was a reaction and my soft rage is a present and embodied response. This SubStack is called soft moon rising for so many reasons but one is, my Cancer moon is square Pluto. They rise together. You might call them, soft rage rising.
There is nothing as transformative as female rage. It washes away those who might mistakenly believe it’s easily quelled by placation, empty apologies or false promises. It washes away your need for these placeholders, too. It even washes away people-pleasing, which is anti-erotic enmeshment. Rage shows all of these for what they are: shams that pretend at life. Rage screams, the dark is not empty. Modern psychology frowns at this sort of thing. Something something regulate your feelings. Listen to me when I say, if you are met with a relentless life-thief, fucking rage. Do not go out like a light. Sometimes, you have to bite back to stay here. To defend your very life-force. Your erotic identity. Do not let a single soul on this earth send you away again. Snarl if you have to. You have to know when this is right, for you. This takes a sacred discernment that intuits when to show your teeth. Sometimes, you need to know that you can be a home for this dark feminine that’s been pacing the fringes of your dreams, waking or asleep. For me, she is a wolf. It can simply be a look in my eyes that clinches a person’s most arrogant demons’ windpipe between my fingernails and whispers into their gaping mouth, ‘you have woken the old testament god.’ My stare has inspired grown men to rage. I often wonder if my eyes are primal because they were crossed until age 15. No one was able to make actual eye contact with me until almost my 16th birthday.
For you, rage might be Kali herself.
And always, every single day, laugh as hard as the pain is. Laughter is the embodied antidote to rage, to the pain. Find a reason to experience the other end of the spectrum. Find a way to belly laugh, cry and cough up your own spit from laughing so hard. This is big medicine.
You might find yourself alone for a while. You might not fit into pervious connections without sensing the requirement for you to dim down. You might see that friends find discussing your changes too intense, reserving their erotic energy for their romantic relationships. You might sense that they don’t believe your new presence and treat you like you’re just being quirky. They may keep silently rejecting you in hopes you’ll stop. Your people might not be able to join you, because they might find the change in you to be too disruptive to shared power dynamics. If you stay here long enough though, through the law of resonance, you’ll find people like you. (Or, you’ll inspire your friends to, at the least, adapt.) It will be inevitable. Have practices in the meantime that give you a salve for loneliness. Namely, those around creativity and desire.
Create based on one or two unlived values that your presence has slowly brought into your line of sight. Make these fun and simple at first. (This is intuitive art making around a value, not your next art exhibit). It can be a collage (don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, it’s similar to sandplay in that you’re unconsciously constructing a dream), painting (this can be as simple as a color that represents your value or two coming together to symbolize integration), mixed media (glue two things together) and it can be allowing yourself to fully feel your value, temporarily, and see what gets created by this time spent in your conscious mind.
If you find it difficult to get into this, remember it’s a muscle and needs some time before it feels easier. But, your ego will stop letting it feel grueling. You won’t notice it at first because you might want it all to feel super fun immediately but, your psyche will slowly start to justify the effort spent and give you back a positive association with the values your creating, literally and psychologically, and, with creativity.
I know there are tons of value lists out there but it’s quite angsty and overwhelming to look at them, choose all of your values and then organize them by importance. Choose the first couple that occur to you. The ones you feel tugged toward in your body.
You might think, ‘well I already actively value these ones that came up.’ Do you? If your life was audited by someone who couldn’t listen to you speak and only saw how you spent your day to day, would they notice that those are your values? What would lead them to believe that? Say they didn’t know what you were thinking, what you were daydreaming about and why you were saving those TikToks?
Your values are what you live. The rest are dormant at best.
Values-based artmaking not only keeps you erotic and focused on orbiting your own sun, it shows Venus, the planet that hooks our projections in love, that being present and being interested in yourself, and your creativity, feels good to you. You’ll then be seeding your relational patterns with a reflection of yourself that you’re consciously curating. This beats having unconscious values projected outwards only to land on others who are shadowy resonances. Projection is part of the psyche’s anatomy but, that doesn’t mean you can’t reabsorb essential parts of yourself.
For example, if you wish you were assertive, you’ll attract those who are also shadowy about assertiveness—boundary breakers, extreme egoists, the sun card reversed.
If you wish you were creative, you’ll attract struggling artists, geniuses with no capacity for devotion, those lost to their daimon, the fool reversed.
If you wish you could be yourself, you’ll attract those who don’t care about anyone but themselves, the emperor reversed.
In each of these examples, the part of you that isn’t being lived out consciously gets to meet its qualitative match in someone else’s consciousness. Someone who has translated your darkness into their light without any care for true integration. This is one of the ways romantic relationships are mirrors. The psyche will find a way for you to relate to it, one way or another. Sometimes, you meet hell on earth because your values are with Hades in the dark.
Before leaving this topic, I want to say that all other erotic instructions will be built on presence. And that creativity, in all its forms, is the soul of Eros. Eros is the creative instinct in you and the cosmos. This can be psychological creativity (inner work to birth new psychic land) but being physically creative is something I truly and wholeheartedly know and believe to be important for every person.
There is no swapping presence for another value. It is essential. Find what works for you and move slow. Some people find short, guided meditations to be just the right fit. Others need time in nature. Do what works for you without overdoing it. In essence, take a walk home so you actually get there.
And, layer in creativity according to the values and desires that come up. More on this next time.
If you’d like to know and live into your own deliciously nuanced path to erotic presence and erotic living in their full totality, get your Eros, Always reading. The path to presence and Eros is Scorpio and Pluto in your natal chart, their aspects and, your transits from Pluto. It’s uncanny how nuanced your specific guidance is. This reading comes with an interview where I get to know you before diving into your chart and coming back with ploutous—the Greek word for riches, the etymology of Pluto. My hope for you is to deeply feel the possibility of erotic living right at your fingertips and soon, lived in your whole life. We get this insanely erotic opportunity at life. What a gift to find out how to be here, how to be fully alive.
love you,
Nairy