The Archer
Enjoying the fleeting transcendence of Sagittarius season...
My neighbor strings lights across the top of his garage every December - the giant, imitation flame kind that glow with the goodwill of primary Crayola colors and can be spotted many blocks away. He doesn’t have a strategy, as far as I can tell - he just zig-zags them from hooks in his gutter lip to the ones above our other neighbor's garage across until he runs out of slack and plugs one floppy tail into his flip-capped outlet. The final result isn’t elegant or impressive, it’s just glittery fun. The kids that live in the adjacent townhouses all come out to ride their bikes and skates and scooters beneath a twinkling, convex ceiling, hollering at each other, gassed by the illumination even though they’re all too cool to believe in Santa. The light-stringer himself often sits in a folding chair in his garage, drinking beer and watching the mayhem unfold hour after hour, evening after evening. I should clarify that no one else can see his lights - they are only visible to the 4 houses connected by a shared cul de sac, and thus serve no purpose but to entertain a few measly humans for a couple weeks in our drippy, put-upon Seattle winter. I see the contentment in my neighbor’s face once he finishes his yearly, tedious ladder work and, because I am an enormous nerd, I wonder about his natal chart as he soaks up his DIY, jewel-toned attraction and its acolytes. Which zodiac sign would live in the present moment so thoroughly, just as unconcerned with the trials of the past and they are with the consequences of the future? Who the hell thinks it’s worth it to risk electrocution on a ladder in the rain so that a couple snot-nosed kids and their bored, depressed mom can zone-out on teeny plastic flames for a few minutes a day? Sagittarius. Sagittarius thinks it is worth it.
Eternal optimism, guileless curiosity, and brash physicality are the hallmarks of people born under Jupiter. The astrological 9th house, domain and natural home of this happy-go-lucky centaur, covers everything in our lives pertaining to philosophy, exploration, spirituality, and growth. Jupiter is the Roman equivalent of Zeus, the Greek god of luck, growth, and awesomeness (at least that’s what Zeus would say), which tends to infuse December children with an unshakeable notion that everything will work out for them, regardless of intent or circumstance. Mentally, they live at the apex of their own personification - a creature of mythological power pulling an arrow to its tautest limit and reveling in the potential release.
Events like the one my neighbor generously machinates pepper a month of holiday celebrations in the west and feel quintessentially Sagittarian. Thanks to modern business culture, a large portion of the working world treats it as a fuck-off month and slows productivity to the glacial rates of an American high school senior class. This gives us the time to arduously apply electrified strings to strange corners of our homes and yards; a fleeting, youthful joy which we will tear down again in 30 days. (Except for that one house down the block. You know the one. They leave their lights up until Easter, perhaps in some sort of ritualized observance of Jesus’ birth to death. You’d think Jesus would keep the squirrels from chewing them.) December has become Jupiter on steroids; it eats a lot, drinks a lot, speaks loudly, and breaks things - all in the name of transitory glee. Pies get made, beasts get roasted, and like all wiley fire signs we travel, travel, travel, zipping from work parties to family homes and bar crawls like meth-addled carolers. Moving to move, laughing to laugh, and living only in the moment, Sagittarius season feels like permission to turn ourselves into the myths we stopped believing long ago.
Various holiday seasons from my youth can only be recalled under the influence of some hallucinogenic or other, probably because it was obvious even to 12 year old me that while December is touted by our institutions as a time of unmitigated joy, it more often stimulates repressed misery. My parents were always miserable due to money, or rather lack thereof, and I was always miserable because of their misery. Christmas, with its transparently foolish mythos, questionable system of valuation, and naked wealth deification was simply a yearly reminder to feel guilty for existing; for being a drain on my parent’s meager resources and needing things like clothes and books in order to present as normal to the rest of the neighborhood. It was also a way to see my mother’s brow furrow up close as we sat uncomfortably around a big plant and quietly reprimanded my father for buying, well, anything. I was usually sick leading up to and during Christmas, as well - the number of puke buckets and towels coming out of my room could have made for a sufficient advent calendar substitution, if we were the sort who tracked such things. Instead, my parents were the sort for whom a dram of Jack Daniels was just as respectable a cough medicine as Dimetapp, and a couple more drams made for a useful cork when their child kept sloshing up her guts in front of company like a wobbly bottle. I remember being parked amidst some blankets in a corner by the tree, and the whiskey in my belly turned the jewel tone lights into living fractals that blinked knowingly at me from an increasingly murky, evergreen nebulae. Sneaking a bit more whiskey and training my eyes on the tree instead of whatever domestic dispute that was unfolding in the kitchen ensured that my body would become fuzzy and non-corporeal, and the way to hold on to happiness was to fixate on the eight points of light illuminating the fingers of our majestic noble fir. Purple, red, green, blue, and yellow jewels would stretch and compress and stretch again in my addled brain, sparkly little shards of fun that remained in my mind’s eye even after my lids shuttered and I fell away to troubled sleep. Is it any wonder that holiday gatherings in our modern era are essentially slow-motion drinking games? Too many of us discovered that soothing, poisonous coping method in childhood, and we willingly embrace those old, tried and true methods again as the season of misery chugs along; a train we either board, or flatten ourselves beneath.
My dad, that hapless buyer of gifts we could not afford, was a Sagittarius. He was very good at long form storytelling and very bad at quips and jokes, tripping up at the simplest of punchlines. He was lanky, lithe, and moved with liquidity under an open sky, but could unwittingly demolish any object or piece of furniture once it reached the radius of his physical self. He was a terrible parent in many ways - unreliable, drunk, immature, and irresponsible, he was fired from more jobs than I’ve worked my entire adult life, and though he could not remember to pay any utility bill on time, he invariably re-stocked the fifth of peppermint schnapps in the glove compartment of our Cavalier well before the previous bottle had emptied. My father, like many Sagittarii, lived for brief moments of joy and transcendence, the rest of the logical timeline be damned. Driving drunk was more fun than driving sober, so he would leave the long-term consequences of his decision in the rearview mirror - things that didn’t merit any consideration unless they were fast enough to catch up to him. And for Sagittarius, they may never catch up; this Jupiter-ruled sign feels secure in their karma, even when they have no reason to expect such a pass. The mere possibility of ecstasy is enough to lure a Sagittarius to the side of questionable life choices, not because they are stupid, but because brief transcendence to a Sagittarius is still superior to the eternal, boring status quo.
In a textbook example of daddy-issue bullshit, I ended up retaining some Sagittarian influence in my life when I married one. My husband is mostly nothing like my father - he doesn’t drink, is steadily employed, and is an uncanny multi-tasker, thanks to the years he spent as the primary caregiver to our children, but there are a few key situations wherein his Jupiter comes out. For instance, it is impossible for him to remain unscathed in any room with furniture. Even within scarcely furnished landscapes, he will find a way to bruise/bump/crash/impale himself upon any decor that isn’t nailed down and covered in safety padding. Once, at a debaucherous, high school era house party he passed out drunk and managed to knock over a lamp on the other side of the room, at least 20 feet away from where he had been standing. I have learned over the years that no size or style of bed frame is sleek enough to avoid impact with the same toe, on the same foot of his, at least once or twice a day, resulting in a cacophony of curse words and a baby toe that has become so mutilated over the years that the nail grows up instead of out, like a stalagmite; his sock lint fulfilling the role of stubborn subterranean moss. One of his most irritating characteristics is a virulent, unflagging optimism in the face of overwhelmingly pessimistic odds, and constant verbal assurance that everything will probably be okay, which is particularly interesting coming from an anthropomorphized walking wound.
The weird part is, whenever a Sagittarius is involved, that optimism isn’t unfounded. Archers do manage to squeak through some pretty impossible odds and come out better on the other side, as though Sagittarius comes equipped with a portable deus ex machina that swoops in to save them in every situation. Perhaps that’s the real meaning behind his bow and arrow - the ability to evade consequences and unfortunate outcomes. Sagittarius is the wise-ass companion who remains unscathed in every movie while his more risk-averse best friend faces all the heat, and as fun as they are, regular people must never forget it. If you see a Sagittarius in the wild doing something naughty and deeply tempting, please remember- they can get away with it. You cannot. Faced with a Sagittarian in a joy-seeking frenzy, the rest of the zodiac is often left gape-mouthed and wondering, “Who are these people and how do they make their way through the world? How are they not all in prison?”
One of my good friends, who happens to be a fellow oracle and occult worker, is also a Sagittarius, and an effervescent example of the strength in mutability. She moved to America with very little after years doing single tarot card pulls at the subway in Chile, and managed to scrape together a functional living with readings and markets while living in an 6 x 5 walk-in closet that some Capitol Hill lurker decided to rent out as a ‘room’. Not once since I have known her has she ever bemoaned her situation as harrowing or less than ideal - not when she had to scramble for rent money, not when the consulate moved to revoke her visa, and not when she found herself chucked in King County jail one evening on racist, trumped up charges. In fact, when I spoke to her the next day, she had gathered the contact information from several other inmates who wanted to book readings with her. Apparently, to pass the time, she used someone’s dog-eared deck of playing cards to tell fortunes, but was released before she got to everyone in the tank, and the latecomers would be damned if they were going to miss out.
Had it been me, a cynical, murderous Scorpio, I would have spent the night either curled up in a corner of my own black fugue state, then I would have made it my mission to rip out the trachea of every human I came in contact with at that jail. But my centaur friend, ever the philosophical ray of light, simply waltzed out with her things in a plastic bag and moved on with her life, convinced that the universe will provide her with the next steps, one way or the other - no grudges were held, no life outlook was altered. If anything, she returned to her apartment with renewed vigor and determination and continued taking magic courses, texting me notes on new age documentaries, and translating mystical texts from English to Spanish. There is no event malefic enough, no circumstance depressing enough to quell the ember beneath her ribs, because it burns brightly in all humans born under the sign of the archer. Theirs is a fire that seeks enlightenment, pleasure, and knowledge for no other reason than that they are there to be discovered, making them a singular, unique force in the zodiac.
The holidays always end. The victorious sun always returns, and the days will begin to lengthen again. The debauchery insulated by dark, starry nights will give way to celebrity cleanses and the pre-dawn thumping of snooze buttons from which we were given a short, merciful reprieve. Suddenly, the consequences that Sagittarii used to be so good at outrunning show up in the life-sized form of extra pounds, gastric upset, anemic bank accounts and hangovers - the inevitable result of fleeting good times. My husband will attempt something like a fitness routine, which usually involves banging around and bruising himself on the furniture, then increasing the pounds on his free weights as an excuse to eat more leftovers. He will confidently tell me about carb loading while plowing into a tin of cookies with our daughter, herself a ravenous Sagittarius moon. His toe will remain mutilated unless he makes an appointment with a podiatrist in the new year, which he will put off for another eleven months until I mention it again over a tin of peanut butter cookies in December of 2024. I already know that he will eat them in the kitchen, getting crumbs in his beard, while I lean into him and lovingly brush my unimpaired foot on top of his. And I know that our neighbors lights will be visible from the window above our sink, cross hatching the shared driveway like some mad, electrified game of Cat’s Cradle.
The consequence of his own good times finally caught up to my father in late November of 2022, many years after I had abandoned our relationship, but only a few days before the M.E. showed up to give his prone body the professional courtesy of a swift kick. I loved him as a child in spite of his shortcomings, or maybe because of them…because he was child-like himself, because he spent money he didn’t have for the sheer fun of it and got drunk for the fleeting transcendence that alcohol could bring him. The adult I eventually became had to reconcile my eternally jovial, Sagittarius parent with the inevitable reality that no one can hold an arrow like that forever - pulled taut and quivering with waning strength. It has to be let go. He was undoubtedly drunk when he died, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been cooling out on Christmas lights much like the ones my neighbor strings up, watching the fractals vibrate entertainingly as his heart squeezed out a final, two-step beat. I suspect it was saying, “Worth it. Worth it. Worth it.”