“Home” has been a contentious concept for me for my entire life. My early childhood experiences include repeated parental separation, domestic unsafety, multiple foster homes, multiple elementary schools, legal orphanhood, and forced transfer of custody. After nine years of immense misfittery paired with stable housing (thanks to my grandparents), my 15 years of “adulthood” have since featured twenty-one different “homes” across three states and two countries. Many of those were explicitly impermanent, but most of them were scented with the hope of being in place long enough to feel rooted.

 

Interestingly, throughout all of the moving about, all of the instability, all of the events that have since become colorfully fascinating fodder for therapeutic exploration, I’ve somehow always, always had something — someone — reminding me:

 

The other night, in the hazy gloam between waking and sleeping, the prayer that began this missive emerged from the streetlamp darkness. It emerged on the heels of a new addition to my spiritual practice, one tied to ancestry and Earth. It emerged as Jupiter in Taurus presses towards an exact trine with my natal Uranus, so very close to my Ascendant — the planet of rooted, trusting, abundant expansion generatively interacting with the part of my chart — the part of me — that speaks of epigenetic transmutation and electrifying ancestral emergence.

 

Back in 2018, I wrote a series of 7 articles for Hauswitch, a series called “on home.” This morning, I went to check if those articles are still up — they are — and laughed when I saw that the anniversary of the first one’s publication is May 31st, exactly five years ago. So much has changed since then, but this questioning & questing around “home” remains.

 

A key difference between then and now?

 

Now I know Who is behind that constant reminder of “it’s going to be okay” :

 

Jupiter.

In early autumn 2018, the podcast Bliss & Grit introduced me to the concept of basic trust. Basic trust is a concept that comes from the teachings of A.H. Almaas, and upon learning about it, I immediately knew it was an inherently Jupiterian idea. As I understand it, basic trust is a bone-deep state of being wherein one genuinely trusts the supportiveness, safety, & benevolence of life; the more basic trust one has, the easier it is to expand into spiritual growth, particularly when surrendering egoic mechanisms is required.

 

For a nervous system trained by trauma and a mind constantly aware of the panoply of injustices & unsafetys in the world, basic trust can feel like thee most idiotic thing to strive for, to cultivate, to intentionally feel into. Hypervigilance runs contrary to basic trust, to what can feel like an entitled restfulness only accessible to those who are not required to scramble and scrape for survival.

 

And yet.

 

What propels the continuance of scrambling and scraping, of seeking McGyver solutions in harrowing circumstances, of becoming resilient & brilliant despite malnourished contexts, if not, on some level, the existence of even the smallest portion of basic trust, of an awareness that provision is present?

 

 

And no matter how small the shard, it’s a gift from Jupiter.

For me, basic trust has become a kind of home. What I’ve sought in attempting to finally find a permanent location —  a space and place where I belong, where I am responsible, where I am held and hold in turn, where my nervous system can fully relax into co-regulation with the flora & fauna who live near me, where I get to paint the walls and make as many holes for hanging art as I want without worrying about a security deposit, where the genius loci become my long-term pals, where I can name not only all the native birds but stick around long enough to hear how slight variations in song are passed down from generation to generation — is, beneath everything, a seeking for firmer, deeper, broader trust in life itself.

 

Put another way,

 

 

And on a profound level, engaging with, relating with, connecting with Jupiter has been a crucial part of adjusting my perception, the tectonic plates of my worldview groaning in relief as the pressure to achieve transforms into an opening of supported surrender.

 

Jupiter literally protects the inner planets — Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury — from accidental pummeling by wayward space rocks, giving the asteroids an inclusive belt for all their diverse sizes, shapes, & colors. Jupiter pulls the center of the solar system’s gravity out of the Sun and into the gap between the Sun and Mercury. Jupiter, kept in check by Saturn, Uranus, & Neptune, is a buoyant ball of gas spinning faster than any other planet in our family, a striped jester of cosmic hilarity whose gravitas takes us out of self-centered navel gazing.

 

 

Yet again I’ve written more than I set out to, and could easily thicken this letter with even more, but out of respect for your inbox & my to-do list, I’ll stop here with a gentle reminder:

 

BY JOVE!, my experiential relational astrology class/Offering remains re-opened until June 15th. If nosing towards an embodied, well-considered basic-trust type engagement with Jupiter is something you’re interested in, this might just be the Offering for you.

 

To health in all its myriad forms,

Diana