Hello, lovely,
I'll start with the sky, because the sky has been busy.
Venus has been retrograde since the fourth of October, and this weekend she reached the halfway point of her journey. She turns direct on the fifteenth of November. If you've felt the first half, you'll know what I mean.
This one is personal for me. On Saturday, my birthday, Venus passed directly between the Earth and the Sun. It's the deepest point of any Venus retrograde, the moment astrologers call the Venus star point, and it happened in the first degree of Scorpio, exactly where my own Sun sits. It also closed an eight-year cycle. Every eight years Venus traces a five-pointed star across the sky, and this one began in October 2018, also in Scorpio, also days from my birthday. So the sky drew a star and closed it right on top of me, on the day I was born. I've spent this week looking back over those eight years, and it explained a great deal. That's a story for another letter.
And the sky wasn't finished. That same evening, Mercury turned retrograde. Then I came across a post pointing out that the date itself, 24/10/26, is a Pythagorean triple: 24² + 10² = 26². It's the last date like it this century. A Pythagorean triple is three whole numbers that fit together perfectly to make a right-angled triangle, the shape builders have used for thousands of years to set a true, square corner. And Pythagoras himself was as much a mystic as a mathematician. He believed numbers were the language the universe speaks in. So on the day the sky drew its star over me, even the calendar lined up into something perfectly square and true. A foundation. And that made sense to me, because what I've realised is that I've been laying the foundation of my new era, brick by brick, all year. Maybe I learned that watching my dad, a bricklayer, when I was tiny. You don't build anything that lasts in a day. You lay it one brick at a time, and you make sure the corner is true. And today, as this letter reaches you, there's a full moon in Taurus, with the Sun sitting right beside my own birth Sun in Scorpio. I've had a lot of birthdays. I've never had one quite like this.
Venus retrograde gets sold as the "exes come back" transit, and yes, that happened, for me and I suspect for some of you. But that's the surface of it. Venus rules what we love, what we value, and what we're willing to accept in exchange for being loved. When she goes backwards, she doesn't bring new love. She brings the receipts. Every place you've been underpaid, under-loved or under-valued, by other people or by yourself, comes up for review. Old relationships resurface not so you can restart them, but so you can see them clearly with the eyes you have now. The question underneath the whole transit is quiet and very hard: what are you worth, and what have you been accepting instead?
With Mercury retrograde now too, that's two reviews running at once. Not a time for new plans. A time for finishing old ones.
The nine months In the last letter I wrote about hanging on. The year had felt like a gestation, nine months of carrying something heavy without being able to see what it was, and September was the closing out. We just had to get to October. October was the one, the new beginning, the start.
I'll be honest with you about what I expected. I expected rainbows. Spring was here, the nine months were done, and surely now the universe would lift the rest of it off me and I could simply walk into the new chapter.
What I hadn't counted on was one final letting go. The universe wasn't going to lift anything. I was going to have to earn the start. And what I really hadn't counted on was how far it would take me to get there.
The path Some weeks ago, in meditation, my guides showed me a path. A gravel path between two rows of very tall trees, the kind that lean in without ever quite meeting, so the light comes through in strips. There were guides at the entrance and guides at the far end. They were kind, and they were clear. We'll walk you to the start, they said, and we'll be waiting at the other end. But this part you walk alone.
I started walking. And as I walked I became aware of a cloak on my back, clipped at both shoulders, and it was heavy. It was heavy with everything I had been dragging behind me this year: money I owed from an old life, arguments that should have been over, a legal matter I didn't choose, a few men who kept saying they'd turn up and didn't, and underneath all of that, older things, ways of being that had served me once and had long stopped serving me.
I didn't look back at the cloak. I just kept walking, and it kept getting heavier. That's how it works, I think. You don't notice the weight until the path is long enough.
The moment Here is the part I want to tell you properly, because it's the part that matters.
There was a point on that path where I had nothing left. Not tired, not discouraged, but empty. The thought in my head was, I just don't have the energy anymore. I can't carry this another step.
And then the Six of Swords started showing up. Again, and again, and again. If you read cards, you'll know it: the boat crossing to calmer water, carrying you away from the rough sea towards a quieter shore.
And my guides said, "Get in the boat, Sarah."
So I did. And again, I thought, well, this will be easier.
Except mine didn't glide. My boat took on water the whole way, and I bailed, because bailing was the only thing I knew how to do. The heavier the boat got, the harder I bailed. And right before the shore, it went over. I was in the water, and I genuinely thought, this is it. I've got nothing left. I'm going to go under, and this cloak is the thing that's going to drag me down.
And at that exact moment, not a second before, something said: then let it go.
I thought I knew what letting go meant. I've done the rituals. I've burned the paper with the names on it. I've done the clearings. But that was all surface. Venus and my guides were teaching me what letting go really means. This wasn't handing it over to the universe and hoping. This was me choosing, finally, to let it all go.
And in that moment, I felt the gravel path under my foot again. As I stood up out of the water, I realised the cloak had unclipped. And I watched it sink, slowly, all the way down to the bottom of the ocean.
Within days, and I'm not exaggerating, the things that had been hanging over me for months resolved. Not all in my favour. One I lost, and found I didn't mind, because losing it closed it. The money came from a place I'd forgotten I had. The last of the old bills went out the door. The messages stopped. And the physical sensation was this: I had been wearing a racing harness, cinched so tight across my chest that I'd stopped noticing I couldn't breathe, and one button released every strap at once.
Henry Ward Beecher wrote that liberty is the soul's right to breathe. I had just found my liberty. And believe me when I tell you, yours is coming too.
That's what I want you to hear if you're in the water right now. Your footing is closer than it feels. It is usually closest at the exact moment you're sure it isn't there. And letting go isn't something that happens to you. It's a choice. Sometimes it's the last one left, and it's the one that sets you free.
What arrived after The afternoon after the cloak fell, my book arrived. Of course it did.
Here's what I've come to understand about that. Officially, my book was released on the first of October. But it was only out there in the ether. It was real and it wasn't, the way so much of what I'd been calling in this year was. All the good, new things were floating around me, close enough to feel but not quite solid. Meanwhile, the old things were very solid indeed. A legal dispute. Bills that had to be paid. A body asking for attention.
In that threshold moment, the moment I let go, the two swapped places. The old things dissolved. They became memories, light as air. And the new things came down out of the ether and took solid form. My book became a paperback I could hold in my hands. The gatherings with women I'd been wanting to do for so long started booking themselves in. My health began to shift. That, I think, is what a liminal moment really is. You can't carry the solid weight of the old life across the threshold and catch the new one at the same time. Your hands have to be empty first.
Odes to Trauma: The Journey from Mud to Lotus, printed and bound, with a spine and a lotus on the cover rising out of dark water. Some of you already have the ebook, and thank you. This is the other thing: a small, beautiful print run, and the way it came about is the universe's doing as much as mine.
The woman who printed it is called Maddie. I met her when I was eighteen. She's in one of the chapters. We lost touch for the best part of thirty years, found each other again this year, and it turned out she works for a book printer. So the book that holds that chapter was printed by a woman who lived it alongside me. I can't think of better hands for it to have passed through.
Odes to Trauma: The Journey from Mud to Lotus by Sarah Walker
Signed copies, posted from Martinborough.
The book is now in the Muddy Lotus shop, and as a new release it's $30 for a limited time instead of $35, plus $8 postage anywhere in New Zealand. There aren't many copies, and every one is signed by hand. If you'd like yours inscribed to someone, just add their name in the order notes.
Get your signed copy
Or visit www.muddylotus.guru/shop
The turning point So that was the first half of Venus retrograde. The clearing. Old men, old jobs, old people, old patterns, old ways of being. Gone, and not with a fight, just put down on the path like a cloak that had finally been unclipped.
The second half, from now until Venus turns direct, asks a different question. Not what are you putting down, but what are you going to stand for? What gets to be in your life now that there's room?
I don't have a tidy answer, and I don't think you're supposed to in the second half of a retrograde. But I know where I'm starting. It's with me, the sun, and finally, calm water.
The pool Because on my birthday, the pool in my little village opened for the summer. I'd been craving sun for weeks, the kind of craving that's in the body, not the mind. So I went and lay in it, and then I got in the water.
And here's what I noticed. For the first time all year, I was in water and I wasn't bailing. I wasn't trying to get anywhere. I let it hold me up. I gave in to the weightlessness and let my body float, and it was the exact opposite of drowning. The same element, the same body. The difference was that I'd stopped fighting it.
I want to be honest about why that mattered so much. It has been a hard year on my body, not just my heart. A run of health things, one after another, the kind that don't make for good stories but quietly take their toll. And I have Saturn in Cancer in my chart, which I call Big Daddy. Saturn is the taskmaster, and in Cancer, the sign of nurture, he sits right on top of the soft part. Having him there is a bit like having David Goggins living in your head. Get up. Keep going. Nobody's coming. It has got me off the floor more times than I can count, and I'm grateful for it. But it has never once told me to rest.
So this is the new work, in this new chapter: moving from David Goggins to Abraham Hicks and Brené Brown. Learning to nurture myself. To be gentle with a body that has carried far more than its share. To treat it the way I'd treat a friend who'd had the year I've had, rather than the way a drill sergeant treats a recruit. It is very much a work in progress. I'm not good at it yet. But I floated in the sun on my birthday and let the water carry me, and I think that counts as a start.
Part of that means I'm stepping away from one-to-one readings until after Christmas. Readers need time out too. This year my sessions had grown into two-hour deep dives, and holding someone's whole story for that long, alongside a full-time day job, isn't something I can do well right now. So I'm giving myself a liminal season. The space between one way of working and the next, where nothing has to be decided yet and I can simply float. The woman holding the cards needs to be floating too.
Rosé & Readings But I'm not stepping away from you. Instead, I'm doing something I've wanted to do for a long time: Rosé & Readings, small gatherings for women in someone's home. You gather five women you love, pour the wine, and I come to you. We begin with a guided meditation, then a light language healing while you all lie back and receive it. Each woman gets a twenty-minute reading, and I read a chapter from the book. Two and a half hours, $60 each, and the host comes free.
The first ones filled within a day of me mentioning them, so if you'd like to host one before Christmas, reply to this email and we'll find you a date. Lunchtime or evening, anywhere in the Wairarapa and the Wellington region.
And a practice, if you'd like one. Write down what you've put down this month. Just the list. Then underneath, write one thing you'll let take up the space. Only one. The retrograde will show you the rest.
One more thing. There's something exciting coming in November: the first ever Muddy Lotus merch. If you want a hint, it starts with "hood" and ends with "ie." You'll hear it here first.
Whatever you're carrying this long weekend, you're allowed to put it down. The guides at the far end of the path aren't going anywhere.
From my blooming heart to yours,
Sarah
P.S. If you know someone who's in the water right now, forward this. That's how Muddy Lotus has always found the people it's for.