The BlanK Page
Tuesday 30th of December, 2025
It was a “just because” gift from my Faerie friend that started this whole existential drama. A miniature watercolour set, accompanied by a tiny ribbon-bound book of virgin paper. It arrived with love folded into its pages during a beautiful day of shared freedom, along with encouraging wishes that inspiration might return like a migratory bird finally remembering the route home. Instead, my self-consciousness starts squawkling like a lonesome galah.
Now that Fox is safely over in New Zealand and I’ve got the place to myself, (save for my cuddle buddy Jake the Cat of course) I decide to devote the day to my new little instruments and an old pleasure I once practiced as naturally as breathing. Doodling. Sketching. Scrying. The kind of wandering mark-making that used to loosen the knots in my mind without asking permission first.
But before starting any creative mess comes the cleansing ritual. A few hours disappear into cleaning- resetting the space, resetting the psyche, sweeping crumbs and dust bunnies from the corners of both apartment and consciousness. Eventually everything gleams with readiness. The table is clear. The coffee is hot. The light is right.
And yet, I don’t begin.
I simply sit there, staring at the blank page while it stares right back at me with the cold composure of a nun who knows your sins before you confess. Another coffee might help, or at least kill another ten minutes. I sense a familiar foreboding dread approach. It's still far off, only a weather system gathering on the horizon at this stage, but I recognise its climate immediately. Pleasure curdling into pressure. Improvisation stiffening into performance.
“What’s wrong with you?” I'm yelling at myself again. ”You used to do this unconsciously, you used to draw to relax. When was the last time you made anything for the fun of it? You’re so obsessed with how you come off to an audience. Get over yourself. Have you lost it?”
The blank page offers no answer. It just keeps staring back at me, immaculate and unblinking.
Staring into the void
Morning slips into afternoon. The hours I had reserved for creative play evaporate like perfume with the cap left off. Fragrant for a moment, then gone without a trace. I cannot bring myself to make a single mark. I tell myself it’s because the book is too beautiful. Too carefully made. Each page is bound together by white ribbon, demanding an almost holy reverence.
The coffee table set up with my new stationery feels like an empty chapel. I think of all the other pristine sketchbooks that I keep buying which line my bookshelf back home, all those untouched pages waiting for an idea worthy enough to desecrate them. They remind me of how I’ve shelved my libido over the last years too. Preserved desire kept under glass, saved for later, hoarded for some imagined future version of myself who would finally have the guts to unscrew the cap and squirt out the tube. Stationary sexuality.
I feel drugged, but not in a fun way. Procrastination is its own narcotic. All the fog and self-loathing of a hangover, but none of the fun that earns it. By late afternoon I’m due to have Shan over. We’ve known each other for nearly thirty years now. She is a Sagittarius in the purest mythological sense. She has the heart of a centaur, her crossbow always faces forward, and she’s forever galloping toward the next creative adventure. I’ve always loved hitching a ride onto the back of her momentum and letting it carry us somewhere unexpected and alive.
A month ago she pitched me an idea. A good one. The kind that should’ve set my thumbs twitching toward paper immediately. I still haven’t made a single mark.
Almost shamefully, I pack away the untouched paints and the untouched book, hiding them from sight like evidence that I’m a big fuck up. As I do, I make a silent promise to myself not to spend the entire afternoon talking about my lack of inspiration. Shan is a loyal defender, but even the most patient people must eventually tire of hearing the same old shit from someone constantly standing at the edge of their own life.
TAURUS SEASON
Monday 20th April, 2026 - Wednesday 20th May, 2026
The Hermit IV : Back to the drawing board
The Hermit has been stalking me this Taurus Season. Not dramatically. No thunderclap revelations, no wise old mystic materialising at the end of a dream to espouse some cryptic prophecy. More like a shadowy figure glimpsed in peripheral vision. Cloaked, patient, quietly standing at the edge of the psyche while I avoid the white hot gaze of the blank page.
Folks tend to romanticise the meaning of The Hermit card. It can speak about wisdom and spiritual refinement gained through solitude. But it’s harder to talk about the terror of the cave before illumination arrives. The unbearable intimacy of sitting alone inside of your own claustrophobic mind. The lantern doesn’t appear because you already know the way out, it appears because you don’t. Because you’re freezing in the dark and too stubborn to admit that you’re lost.
There’s a special kind of torture reserved for artists who can’t begin. Not failure. Failure at least leaves fingerprints behind, proof that an attempt was even made. An ashtray emptied onto the screwed up pages of the shitty first, second, and third drafts. A trail of blood snaking through the labyrinth, evidence that you had the guts to enter before collapsing somewhere in the dark. Proof that something once pulsed through your veins.
No, this is a quieter torment. The merciless glare of empty space neither knows nor cares who the fuck you think you are, or were. It cannot hear you suffocating beneath its silence. The blank page becomes a mirror, cold and unmoving, reflecting back the ghosts of a potential you may never fulfill.
For Fucks sake.
When I get like this, I drink coffee until my lower eyelids feel inflated with helium. Black, bitter, medicinal. Like I’m swallowing jungle sacraments in the hope some vine spirit might snake down my throat and yank the blockage loose once and for all. Caffeine only amplifies the crackles of a faulty nervous system. The Muse mirrored by the blank page remains silent, and now turns their back to me.
I began Taurus Season with guns blazing, possessed by the kind of direct intent that makes you believe you’ll finally be able to pin your future to the wall of the collective constellation map. “After a 20 year break, I’m gonna apply for further academic study and finally legitimise my existence to society. All praise the Bull! Stability is in sight.”
My enthusiasm soon devolved into pottering and dithering. Procrastination disguised as preparation. I reorganised my notebooks. Refreshed my web browsers, lit enough incense and cigarettes to summon a Fire Spirit, whom I prayed might complete the work for me. The silence of the blank page grew louder.
In weaker moments, Pandora loosens the lid on her jar marked GPT. Don’t do it. You’d be better off reaching for the DMT instead. Convenience is the narcotic of the new Empires. It keeps their subjects distracted, passive, obedient. The Tech Empire doesn’t want artists, it wants content livestock, chewing cud compliantly behind the electric fence of the algorithm. As Uranus performed its final act in Taurus, the Bull discovers that the fence is short circuiting, and begins to buck the system.
However, the gig economy has fried the adrenal glands of the perpetual contract worker. The nervous system longs for stability the way a weary stray dog longs for an open back gate. But stability is not stillness. Uranus in Taurus has made certain of that. Taurus clings. Uranus electrifies until the grip is forced open. Together they have revealed that the ground itself can revolt beneath your feet.
The Bull eventually realises that the cattle prod now attacks from inside the nervous system too. The zap arrives through notifications, reminders, metrics, analytics. Creative Commerce. Personal Branding. Spiritual Scarification. If Uranus in Taurus taught us stability isn’t still, Uranus in Gemini might finally get it through our thick skulls that thought itself is migratory too.
I can’t sleep, the moon is in my eyes
When Uranus finally left Taurus for the rest of our lifetimes and set up camp in Gemini, my sweet pal Riley came a calling from over yonder, like a bolt out of the blue. Riley is a great big hunk of lovin’ sunshine. He’d moved up North last year but I was grateful to have him back, if only for a short while, and I took a long, satisfying drag on his American Spirit by the light of the Scorpio Full Moon.
I met his adorable friends Elliot, Roy, Olly and Jess, and they reintroduced me to the streets where I used to live. We spent the night painting together on the same canvas, tossing each other ideas, standing shoulder to shoulder with brushes in hand while the current of creativity flowed freely, without self-consciousness or any particular ambitions about the end product.
Nah, this isn’t a product. We’re not thinking about branding. The Bull breathes a sigh of relief. This is the magic of colour and light moving between bodies like shared voltage. Every time I smile at my buddy Riley, he beams an electric lion grin right back to me. Twinsies. AC/DC, babe. Uranus in Gemini had found the extension cords and plugged in a neon welcome sign into the powerboards of our heads, unfreezing my system and inviting me back into my body and back out from the dark.
Uranus in Gemini
The week after our painting jam, I helped facilitate space for the incredible artist Jessica Gabrielli and her project Foldenmove. I relished getting stuck in with the group and watching in awe as wet paint and human bodies created accidental windows into our collective psyche. It felt less like performance art and more like ritual archaeology, each gesture uncovering something sacred, something ancient.
Uranus will hold the mirror up in Gemini for the next seven years, and my mind keeps circling the same restless questions about study; where am I gonna go? what am I gonna do? Am I a dumb shit for even imagining they’d want me back?
Every possibility feels haunted by the ghosts of past lives, my younger incarnations who recoiled from academic language, or came undone before the starkness of the blank page. I’ll probably miss the mid-year intake deadlines anyway. My 23 year old self is still standing bewildered beneath the fluorescent lights of my old college, hungry for guidance but being too stubborn to ask for it and feeling like a fucken idiot. I’m not a kid anymore though. And I know this much; the images are already inside of me. They’ve always been in there and now the Muse is (slowly) turning around to face me again.
soul mapping with Foldenmove
Part of me wants to screw up my counselling study idea and find the guts to pick up tools again on my Tarot project titled “FOOL TRIP”. Maybe long time subscribers will remember my paintings? I’ve been so anxious trying to earn a living and keep a roof over my head that my creative muscles all seized up, I lost faith in my ideas long ago and screwed up those pages too. You're noticing a pattern, right?
After I earned my bachelor degree from the sinking ship that was the VCA all those years ago, I turned my back on the solitude of the painting studio and for the next decade made performance art in communion, co-created with an ever moving constellation of my Sissies, each and every one of them a weirdo and fucken’ visionary.
I don’t want realism, like Blanche, I want magic. I want coloured lights and life drawing sessions and elaborate costumes and celebratory nudity and music vibrating through warehouse walls until sunrise. And I want our joy, our pleasure, our pain to mean something in a world that destroys beauty almost as quickly as it manufactures dread. I want to create with the tides of change instead of bracing against them like driftwood. I want to make a mess on that blank page. I want my fire back.
I want the windstorm of information and possibility spurred on by Uranus in Gemini to whip itself into a ferocious blaze of inspiration. I want Queers and Artists to recognise their singularity not as defect but as voltage. I want Uranus in Gemini to split down the middle and arrive dressed as Riot CowGrrrl twin sisters who demand collaboration over competition, freedom over comfort, and magic over institutional sedation.
I want to break on through, not break on down, man.
That Sissy sure is a runnin’ fool
Then what happens? I dunno yet. Maybe that’s the real lesson of the Hermit card. The lantern was never there to illuminate the entire mountain path. It only ever shows a few feet ahead. Just enough to keep moving. Just enough to survive the night without getting lost in the dark.
Maybe the blank page is snowfall before footprints. Maybe it only looks barren because wild creatures don’t reveal themselves to everyone. Their trust is sacred, and you gotta earn that shit. The Hermit knows this. He keeps going, carrying the Star in his lantern through the wilderness, trusting that revelation only arrives to those brave enough to seek it.
My pages aren't entirely blank either. They’re already marked by paint stains, half-finished visions, friends arriving at exactly the right time, bodies moving in wet colour, spooky conversations, impossible desires, and the growing sense that art, like love, doesn’t always have to be made alone. Well, not the whole time, anyway.
It’s only been a few weeks of Uranus in Gemini action, so maybe I should calm my farm and just circulate with the new energy for a bit. Keep it moving, allowing the current to carry me toward the right folks who can help shape this thing, boss me around a bit, and lift my chin up into the light. I wanna keep my word to Shan too. Get up off your arse Uma, pick up a brush, or a camera, or a texta, and bloody begin, thanks. Stability isn’t still. Change your mind.
I’ll wear the Omen that I found on New Year’s Eve for protection this Gemini Season. The next Omen Days Tarot card I pulled back in January still scares the shit out of me, but I reckon the timing is finally right. Return to the Omen Days page on June 21st, and as the Sun crosses into Cancer, I’ll share what was scrawled in paint spatters across my soul after I reappear from a deep creative submersion.
Get the goss from your Sissies this Gemini Season, friends. And wish me luck.
Gemini Season Coming Soon
