Around me, everything is luminously green. I’m in my dad’s back yard in the Virginia burbs, enjoying a perfect spring day. A skein of birdsong provides a lulling backdrop for my thoughts. It’s as constant and changeable as the patterns of light coming through the leaves.

After nine years, I’ve left my home in Quito. I’ve left behind the thin pure air, the brilliant blocky sunlight, the moody mountains, and the small, kind, formal people. I’ve left the red tile roofs, the roads curving steeply upwards, and the intricate gold-leaf churches. I’ve said goodbye to the women in embroidered blouses, the ferocious lightning storms that fill the valley, and the tall Virgin who looks down from her bread-loaf-shaped hill.

All these goodbyes are still echoing in my psyche. Was there enough of Quito? No, there’s never enough. There were many sides of Quito that I never got to know, and may never know.

I’ve temporarily returned to the land of my birth, the land where my family lives, the land where I came out. I definitely have an ambivalent relationship with the US. There are many people I love here, lots of lesbians, plenty of progressive people working for change. But my lover and I will be moving on, settling down on a different continent.

For now, here I am, in this land of high ideals and equally high paranoia. This is the country where they have ten thousand nuclear warheads stashed away just in case they need them. This clearly isn’t enough, since they are working on plans to create “Bombplex”, an assembly line which can turn out 125 nuclear warheads every year. This plan seems like a bid to get rid of whatever traces of human civilization are left over after climate change does its thing.

As I look around me at this lush green scene, it’s hard to get my mind around the idea of nuclear winter. And strangely, I’m thinking more about the people who will work in that factory. Assembly-line work turns people into robots anyway, but how much worse will it be for those folks? How does that feel, making those little metal parts which could put the final stop to all human dreams and possibilities? Would you be able to keep thinking, while you were doing that? Would you be able to keep feeling?

My dad, who is 87, just came out to enjoy his lunch in the back yard. He takes a chair and sits facing a rosebush covered with brilliant hot pink blooms, as if he’s watching a concert of color. He eats a sandwich, and he points out a rabbit that’s hunched over in the grass. I don’t think I would have seen it without him. He’s the native here, in this world, and he constantly points out to me how much people feel, how much they think, how much they care.

We all need to seek out these earthy places, because June is not an earthy month. We will all need to ground ourselves, whether we do this through digging in the soil, throwing pots, or touching the people we love. June will be another fiery month. At the new moon on June 14, there will be five planets in fire signs, so passions will continue to run strong, and there will be a great potential for transformation.

I think things could definitely change for the better here in the US. I’m feeling a bit optimistic, even though I’m writing this the day after the Democratic congress wimped out on the war funding issue.

But at the new moon in June, Jupiter will be placed right at the US ascendent. This could mean some sort of major educational or diplomatic effort. It could mean a scientific breakthrough which substantially improves people’s lives. Or it could be that the Dems, with the pressure of the people behind them, make some definite move to rid us of the Bush administration.

I admit, from this juncture, it seems rather unlikely. But it’s not a good month for Bush, with the Neptune/Saturn opposition right on top of his Venus. He’s definitely going to be doing some squirming. Why not be optimistic, and hope for impeachment?

All of us will be dealing with some uncertainty in June. The Neptune/Saturn opposition doesn’t move everything to a fixed, understandable place. It tends to blur boundaries, to create confusion and ambivalence. It’s a time when ideals are tested against realities, and vice versa. People will be confronted by the things they’ve said and believed.

And in the middle of the month, just one day after the new moon, Mercury goes retrograde at 11 degrees of Cancer. This takes us back into the past, and puts us in touch with all the loose strands, all the unfinished business, all the buried secrets. This could be pretty illuminating. Will the truth about voting fraud be revealed, in time to save democracy before the next election? Will rightist politicians endure embarrassing revelations about their true emotional attachments?

The Gemini sun will help, by putting the focus on communication. Everybody will want to know what’s going on. Although the media will try to divert everybody by coming up with lots of irrelevant celebrity gossip, the real news will come through.

For myself, I will probably spend the last half of June awash in nostalgia, hyper-aware of everything I’ve left behind. But Mercury retrograde in Cancer will help me do that emotional work, the work of fully feeling the past. This is always a necessary step before one can move on. We have to feel the world we live in, the word of nature as well as all our precious human connections. If we don’t feel all this, we lose the instinct to protect it.

The rabbit is still over there, enjoying the sunshine as she munches grass. My dad has gone back inside to check out the political pundits on TV. And soon, it will be time for your roving lesbian astrologer to move on to another part of the world. There will be new feelings, new connections, and the slow growth of new roots.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com