Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. We're going to get into some astrology, like we do. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a spoiler. Venus is heavily involved. It's got me thinking about something that I've been thinking about on lots of different levels. It's your values.

A lot of people struggle with the idea of, "What are my values? How do I even figure out what my values are?" I know that some people have really kind of mixed feelings about the idea of values. I'm of the mindset that your values are incredibly important for you to be clear about. And if you're not clear about them, what better time to reflect on your understanding of your values than during a Mercury Retrograde? Because Mercury is all about understanding, and the Retrograde is all about reflection.

The reason why your values are so important is because the act of living in alignment is an act of being aligned with your values. And living in alignment brings you greater peace and satisfaction and happiness and well-being. That is related to self-worth and confidence and the ability to navigate healthy boundaries. A healthy relationship to your values is really foundational to your sense of self. It's also foundational to how you live.

There's lots of ways of talking about or thinking about values, but from my perspective astrologically, we have Jupiter, which is associated with philosophies, and Mercury is your ideas. It's your beliefs and your attitudes. We have Neptune, which is associated with your ideals—Saturn, related to your sense of morality and right and wrong and what's acceptable and what's not acceptable.

Different planets govern different concepts, different parts of our humanity. But Venus—Venus is the planet that reflects your values. And here's the thing. What you do, how you live, what you put your energy and what you devote your attention to is a reflection of your values. And you may find that some of the things that you put a whole lot of energy into aren't actually a good reflection of your values. And this is where you can start to understand places that you're misaligned.

When you are misaligned, you feel bad, like things don't quite mesh up and feel right inside of your system. Also, the choices you make as you navigate life—they don't always make you happy. And listen. Let's be realistic. Not all your choices can make you happy or should make you happy because happiness is only one thing that a person may want for themselves or need for themselves. We need lots of things, and sometimes those things don't make us happy. There's that.

I want to invite you this week to really reflect on your values, on the things that you think are most important. Within that investigation, check in with whether or not or how you are embodying those things. If you value being empathetic, then it's not just, okay, cool, you value being empathetic or you are an empath. That value, if it's embodied, plays itself out as actions, behaviors, attitudes that reflect empathy—not sympathy, not pity. Empathy. If you value honesty and loyalty, then you yourself should not only practice those principles of being honest and loyal but also center people and situations in your life that also value those things or center those things in what they have to offer you.

Now, again, we're not looking for perfection here—instead, alignment. You can't always be at a ten on the alignment scale, but you can strive to point yourself in a direction that reflects what's most authentic and important to you. As you know, we are living through really exceptional times. As we see the effects of ableism and white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia, as we see the effects and the impact of people's fear and insecurity being weaponized against them so that they go along with or stay silent in the face of atrocities, we are all on call to get clear about our fucking values and make sure that our actions reflect them.

Listen. You can't be a perfect environmentalist and social activist and friend and parent and child of somebody. You can't be all the things perfectly all at once. That's not realistic. It's a bad goal. But to live in accordance with your values, to understand that while Venus governs values, it also governs security and stability, and that the desire, the drive for those things is healthy and human—and it shows up in different ways for different people. But we never want to allow our individual drive for everything being okay, for the boat to not be rocked, for personal comfort and ease, to distract us from what's actually important.

Speak up for Palestine. Speak up. Find actions that you can take to help people who desperately need your aid, your support, your care, your advocacy. Understand that what's happening in the United States with the criminalization of miscarriages, of mental illness, of being Latinx, Brown, Trans, visibly Queer—understand that you have a role to play, regardless of your identities. I don't know you personally, right? I don't know your circumstances personally.

And so, when you hear me speaking, when you hear somebody else speaking, when you're reading an article—whatever it is—track the ways in which you get defensive, the ways in which you get activated, and be interested in your personal activation because, of course, when you're consuming information on any level, it's not tailored to you and your lived experience and your identities. It's not able to be nuanced on that level.

When you take pains to reflect on your own thinking, to notice where you get activated, and instead of pounce on that and chase that activation, explore your reactions so that you can better understand yourself, and maybe that will validate all of your reactions and help you to double down your perspective, or maybe it will expand your perspective or change it. I don't know.

I just want to encourage you this Mercury Retrograde, and also all the fucking time, to understand that there is not a destination of righteousness that any of us is meant to achieve. There's not a destination of correctness that any of us is going to achieve. Life doesn't end until it's over. You are meant to continue to grow, continue to evolve, continue to be changed by things you learn and experience, to be changed by the things you don't do as much as by the things you do.

Your life is an active conversation that you are having with your past, with the present, with other people, with circumstances. It is an active conversation that you—you—are responsible to, you are responsible for. And ideally, you want to respond with integrity from a place of alignment within you.

I want to invite you to really use this Mercury Retrograde—it is easy to simply be annoyed by all the technical difficulties and the miscommunications and the misunderstandings. Right? That's very easy to do. I'm doing it right now, actually. How about you? It's an easy thing to do. But the function of Mercury Retrograde from a spiritual perspective is to actually think about your thinking. It's to adapt. It's to be curious. It's to reflect on what you thought with a different mind, from a different perspective, and let that change you.

If you're more focused on proving yourself or defending your stance or trying to catch other people in what they're doing wrong or prove to other people what someone else did wrong—if that's the fixation of your life, you are likely not tending to your inner garden. And what astrology teaches us is that each and every one of us is functioning from our many different parts. On some level, we're all kind of living out our trauma patterns. We're all living out our nature one way or another.

And so none of us are free of our projections and triggers and bullshit. We're all problematic. We're all struggling. We all have challenging aspects in our birth charts. We all have challenging planets in our birth charts. And not all of us are trying really hard. And some people think they're trying really hard, but they're maybe not, by your standards. That's possible.

What's truly important is how you navigate your inner world, the responsibility you take for yourself, the choices you make, your willingness and ability to confront scary and hard things when it's time to confront scary and hard things. And now is that time, my friends. Now is that time.

Another thing that astrology teaches us—you know, when you go through a transit, both what happens week by week in the horoscopes that I talk about here, but in particular, I'm referring to what happens to your birth chart. Saturn forms a sextile to Saturn, or Neptune forms—I don't know—a trine to your Mars or whatever. Something that happens when we go through sextiles and trines—not from all the planets, but most of them—is that the planet that's having that supportive, "easy" transit happen—it starts to function fluidly. It functions as it's set up to function.

And what's important about this is that a system that is inefficient, based on falsehoods, cruelties, a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding—when it functions smoothly, when it functions well, all hell breaks loose. People are not happy. People don't get what they need and what they want. And so it is not enough to go through this life defending your attitudes and beliefs. You must also investigate them. Explore them. Question them and be willing to go through the incredibly uncomfortable processes of changing. And this is true in your 20s. It's also true in your fucking 70s, my friends.

That's a part of living. It's evolving. It's being present for what is and understanding that what is now is different than what you thought it would be then. And you must adapt because, then, the only information you had was the information you had then. And now you have new information. And having the skill set to be able to have conversations with present you and past you, understanding that we are constantly projecting into our future selves—that's important. It's especially important when confronted with personal or collective calamity, especially when you're going through personal and collective calamity.

And so I want to invite you to notice what your behavior says—like, your behavior over the last—I don't know—year, six months, whatever works for your brain—what your behavior says about your values. If you're fixated, if you put a huge amount of time and energy and resources into—I don't know—an art practice, okay, well, that suggests that one of your values is art. If you put that same amount of focus and energy and attention over the course of time into thinking about your art practice, then maybe perfectionism is a value that you're centering. And maybe that perfectionism is degenerating into anxiety, and it's not serving you. That's great information for you to have.

The only way for you to change something that isn't working is to first sit with it. Acknowledge it. Own it. So I want to encourage  to do just that, to reflect on what your actions, your behaviors, the things you put mental and emotional energy into, say about your values. And then check in with—does that need revision? Does that need some updating? Does that need more mindfulness? Or is it all good? It's okay to figure out that something's wrong. It's okay to not know how to fix it. Just hang out wherever you're at with empathy, with kindness, with patience, and if you can, with some clarity about where your boundaries are, with yourself as much as with other people because, contrary to popular belief, we must have boundaries with ourselves in order to have any hope of having and sustaining boundaries with other people. And when we look outside of ourselves to the exclusion of looking inside, life gets really fucking confusing, and people react really weird to you.

So Mercury is Retrograde. Reflect. Question things. Reassess. Make changes. And you don't have to execute the changes now. It's reflecting on what those changes may be.

All right. This week, we are looking at the astrology of July 27th through August 2nd of 2025.  And we begin with Venus. On the 28th, at exactly 9:55 a.m. Pacific Time, Venus will be at 27 degrees of Gemini and 10 minutes, and it will form a sextile to Chiron at the same degrees of Aries. Now, Venus sextile to Chiron is—it's a particularly useful transit because it empowers you to sort through some sticky self-worth issues.

Chiron in Aries is related to past wounding, trauma, early developmental trauma in particular. And because it is right now transiting through the zodiac sign of Aries, we know it's related to being able to be embodied around that stuff. Venus is related to many things, including of course your values and, related to that, your self-worth, your self-esteem.

This transit empowers you to kind of sort through some sticky shit that you're holding on to, whether it is real or imagined, whether it is past or present, around your self-worth. And it helps you to navigate that so that you develop a healthier, more values-based relationship to your relationship with you.

Now, this transit can also help you to improve relationships with other people, to be mindful about the patterns that are playing out in your relationships, whether they're all in your head or they're actually in dynamic with others, and to notice your own projections and patterns involved. That self-awareness about your projections and patterns can empower you to make appropriate adaptations. This is part of what the transit is helpful for.

This transit can help you to relate to and with others around things that might typically be kind of hard for you to do, hard for you to share, because if you're not wound up in a cycle of defending yourself or hiding yourself away from harm or hurt, then you can actually be open and navigate—with others or alone—your relationship to your values and how kind you are or are not being to yourself or others, depending on the situation and how it's playing out for you.

And in this moment, I want to take just a second to acknowledge an important thing with Venus, which is the difference between kindness and niceness. Niceness doesn't rock the boat. It's pleasant, but it's very surface. Kindness sometimes does rock the boat. Kindness takes more risks, but it is a deeper investment in empathy and care and support. Sometimes, when people are being truly kind, the recipient of that kindness does not feel like it's very nice. That's the thing. And because of that, a lot of times, people center niceness over kindness, and they tell themselves it's for the other person, but it's really for themselves.

If you're more invested in not being the bad guy and being beyond reproach than you are about being truly kind, helpful, supportive, whatever it may be, then yeah, you're going to center that niceness over the kindness. And we've all done it. This is not about blame. It's about self-awareness that empowers you to get better aligned so that you can do better because you have greater clarity about what you're doing and the motivations underpinning it.

Now, that brings us to our next exact transit of the week, and it's a Mercury transit. On Thursday, July 31st, at 4:41 p.m. Pacific Time, the Sun will be at 9 degrees and 1 minute of Leo, and so will Mercury Retrograde. That, my friends, is a Sun/Mercury conjunction. This transit is a little bit on the messy side, according to moi.

The Sun is your identity. It's your vitality. It's your sense of self. It's that part of you that wants to be seen and recognized for who and what you are. And Mercury is your beliefs and your ideas and your attitudes and expectations associated with your beliefs and your ideas. It's how you listen to other people or not. It's also how you communicate with other people or not.

When the Sun and Mercury Retrograde meet up, your ideas about yourself may supersede your willingness to listen. So that sucks. Make sure you're listening. Listen to what other people are telling you. You may want to try to be curious. Ask questions. Listen to the answers. And you may find any number of things, but curiosity is really helpful. Listening is really important. Neither of those things require that you abandon yourself, that you not have boundaries, that you not have discernment. You should have all those things.

When the Sun conjoins Mercury, we can get so lodged in our ideas and our identity that when somebody says or does something that is outside of our own thinking, we can take offense to it; we can take it personally. And a lot of times, people are just living their fucking lives through the lens of their own birth chart, and they're not perceiving things the way you are. And a lot of times, that sucks, and a lot of times, it's lovely, right?

During this transit, it can get sticky. That's the stuff to look out for, keeping in mind that Mercury is Retrograde, so we're meant to reflect. Things may come up from the past—and by the past, it's not like deep in the past, usually, with Mercury. It's in the more recent past. Things may come up. More likely, you're going to have a busy day, lots of news coming at you. That news might be news because you're paying attention to the world. That might be gossip or social stirrings or shit going on at work—you know, that kind of thing. Sun conjunction to Mercury usually coincides with a busy day—lots of communications, lots of shit to do, so it's often like errands and stuff like that, because Mercury governs the stuff you do in your neighborhood or your immediate community.

It's a good time for being connected to people. But Mercury is Retrograde, so again, I must reiterate it's important that you listen. It's important that you ask questions, that you don't make assumptions, and that you reflect on what you think, on what you need, and how you're communicating those things. Reflect on what other people are communicating to you and whether or not it makes sense, whether or not you are talking about the same thing, because so many of the problems that are at the root of relationship problems is that two people are having a conversation about the same book but not about the same chapter, not about the same paragraph, not about the same sentence.

So, if you're not talking about the same thing, you're never going to come to an agreement. Making sure that you are actually both talking about the same thing at the same time helps you to have effective communication. This week, effective communication will go a very long way, a very long way.

And that brings me, my friends, to the next exact transits of the week. They happen on Friday, August the 1st. And side note—on Friday, August the 1st—usually in the morning, but Mercury is Retrograde, so don't hold me to it—I drop the bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast, where I look at the astrology of the month ahead and I look at all the damn transits and break them down for you so that you can use that information in advance. You can join me over on Patreon on the kittens level and have access to that plus tons of other content on the astrology, woo, and energetic levels. Or you can purchase the podcast episode as a one-off on most platforms.

Okay. Back to the astrology. So, on Friday, August the 1st, at 6:34 a.m. Pacific Time, Venus will be at 1 degree of Cancer and 37 minutes, and Saturn will be at the exact same degrees of Aries. And then, later that afternoon, at 1:49 p.m., Venus will be at 1 degree and 58 minutes of Cancer. And guess what: Neptune will be at that exact same degree but of Aries, because we know Saturn and Neptune—they're just humping each other. They're right on top of each other.

Is it making life easier? No, my friends, it's not. Is it creating confusion and anxiety and a sense of overwhelm and maybe helplessness or hopelessness and a difficulty staying with the body around those feelings and impulses and overwhelm? Yes. Yes, it is doing all of those things. Is it happening so that you infuse your sense of reality, your sense of responsibility, with more meaning? Also yes. Is it happening so that you fortify your grounding and your boundaries alongside those things that give you meaning, that are consistent with your ideals and even your spirituality? Again, also big, fat yes.

So that's Saturn/Neptune. But here we are on this day, and Venus is exactly square to both of these big, old outer planets. So I'm going to talk about what each of the transits mean, and then I'm going to give you the, "What's it mean to have them both happening at the same fucking moment?"

Venus square Saturn—it's like the two planets most concerned with security and stability are at odds with each other. So that can make you feel pretty unsure of your place or not confident about your place in relationship to others or in the world. Venus square Saturn can be related to your finances, like having money problems, unexpected expenses. It's a fucking terrible time to make a major purchase. Don't do it if you can avoid it. You may have to spend money unexpectedly. Something may just come down to it needs your investment.

What you invest your resources and your goals and your time into is really important when Venus is square to Saturn. If you allow fear to drive you devoid of value, then you're kind of going off in the wrong direction. I think it's ridiculous when people say that all fear is bad. Fear is good. Be scared. There's a lot to be scared about. Fear is a healthy impulse that every animal has. It's good to be scared of scary things.

It's how we engage with and respond to our fears—that's where things get messy. And this is why we live in a culture now where people are like—any time you talk about something being authentically scary or bad or wrong, people being like, "That's fearmongering"—it's not fearmongering to talk about scary things and to explore how to metabolize and respond to, how to hold and navigate, the things that you perceive to be potential threats or potential pitfalls or whatever the case may be.

Venus square Saturn and Venus square Neptune is going to bring that shit up. It's going to bring it up. And again, it will be significantly easier to navigate this stuff if you are clear about your values, if you center your values. And if that's hard for you to do and it slows you down, okay, cool. Let it slow you down. Let it slow you down.

This transit can make you feel lonely, depressive, sad, and bad. It can make you feel uncute—insert all the adjectives you like. It can make you feel like everybody else gets like or love, and you don't; everybody else gets fun, and you don't. It could have you fixated on a love of the past or a love gone wrong. It's just kind of a depressive transit. I'm not going to lie to you. It's a heavy transit. And it sucks. It sucks. I'm sorry. The transit is hard.

But there are times in life—and sometimes they're periods of your life, and sometimes it's days or hours—where you experience existential loneliness. And Saturn is usually involved in that, and here it is, right? You experience this feeling of, like, "I was born alone, and I will die alone. I am ultimately alone." Can it bend you towards nihilism? Of course, it can. Sure. It can.

Again, understanding, having self-awareness around what your values are can help you because life is hard. So life is sometimes lonely, but it has value. Your life has value. Hanging out in lonely, depressive, nihilistic feelings—it's a bit of a part of the human condition. Again, don't beat yourself up for feeling shitty if you feel shitty or feeling just slow and heavy in your movements through your own psyche or the world. Instead, recognize if those feelings come up, it's an opportunity for you to respond to them with care and some grace and in ways that reflect your values.

This transit can bring up shitty dynamics in your relationship with other people. Venus square to Neptune is not going to help that. But this transit may confront you with an opportunity to either advocate for something or someone you really believe in or to hide behind niceties and hide behind just getting along. And it's going to be on you to decide the best way to navigate.

Now, Venus square Neptune—it's kind of a similar record, but it's at a different speed. Saturn is all about reality and obligation and responsibility and governs depression, whereas Neptune—Neptune governs anxiety. It's all about escapism and checking out and insecurity and paranoia. It can lead to self-worth issues and insecurities and, again, anxiety. Did I mention anxiety?

So, when Venus squares Neptune, you may be feeling like you're just walking around with spinach in your teeth all damn day. You may feel really self-conscious about the way you look, about how people are engaging with you. You may feel really jumpy and have a hard time not taking everything people say or do personally, or maybe what they don't say or don't do personally. It's important to remember everyone is going through these two transits, so everyone is going to be acting a little weird—maybe not everyone, but for sure, some of the people you're going to be interacting with are going to be acting weird, and not because they're interacting with you but because they feel off-center.

So remember to have boundaries with this transit. Venus square Neptune, on an energetic level, can just blow out your energy boundaries so that you are way too impacted and affected by other people just across the board. This transit can make you gullible. You definitely want to watch out for propaganda. The thing about this transit is it makes people needy and touchy and weird.

And then, on top of it, because of Neptune, it can make you just feel depleted, like you left all your spoons somewhere and you can't find them, especially for and around people. And so it can just make you feel really off, and then you act a little weird, and then people react to you a little weird, and then we have a cycle that perpetuates itself. It's kind of a pain in the ass.

Whenever we go through challenging transits to Neptune, I will always say it is a bad time for fucking with drugs and mind-altering substances because the lesson is to figure out how to be here and how to take care of yourself here, so to stay associated, to stay checked in. This is not the time for idealizing other people, putting them on a pedestal, or, I guess, idealizing yourself and putting yourself on a pedestal. Everyone's fucked up. Everyone makes mistakes. Nobody's life is perfect. You're not perfect. Nobody's perfect.

The parasocial relationship gets kind of accentuated during a Venus square to Neptune. So, if you're somebody who has a tendency to cultivate relationships with people who are not cultivating them back with you, then that might get accentuated on and around this date. And that's not great for you. So do your best to cultivate healthy boundaries in your thinking, in your relationships, and in your behavior.

Make sure you drink lots of water. I know that sounds maybe too simple or whatever, but trust me. When we go through squares to Neptune, you really want to make sure you're drinking a lot of water. You want to make sure you have enough sleep. If you can touch grass, that's fucking fantastic. If you can listen to music that soothes you or engages you in a way that's helpful and supportive, do that.

Wherever it is that you are feeling a lack—because, oftentimes, Neptune will have you feeling a sense of a lack—strive to fortify yourself. When Venus and Neptune form a square to each other, let me tell you what. It is not the time to starve yourself. It's not the time to starve yourself of anything. It's a time to fortify and feed and nurture—again, terrible time for spending money loosey-goosey. This is not a great time for buying new clothes or signing up for any kind of cosmetic anything, okay? This is just not the time.

This transit will pass. Give it a few days. It's not lasting forever. Just don't do that shit on and around this date. I will reiterate one of the primary lessons of this transit is to show you where you don't have healthy, values-based boundaries. And the way you get shown that is by feeling shitty as a result of not having those boundaries. And the fact that Saturn is also in the mix and Venus is also square to Saturn means that you may be pushing up against rules that you have put in place that masquerade as boundaries but are not boundaries.

Boundaries are a reflection of self-regulation, an awareness of what you can and cannot do in a healthy way, a sense of responsibility to both yourself and to others that you show up for, that you're not like, "Oh no. Why do I have to do this?" but instead, you're like, "Yes. This is what I am signing up for."

Rules, by contrast, are more about control. They are put in place to restrict or define. They're put in place to direct yourself or other people, to limit, constrict, or, again, control. It's really hard, when you have rules in place, to adapt them to be more boundaries without really sitting with some uncomfortable feelings and uncomfortable parts of yourself. We put rules in place because we're trying to control our outsides as a way to make our insides feel better. We put boundaries in place when we understand that we ourselves are responsible for what we do and don't do, for how we show up and what we center.

I want to encourage you this Venus square to Saturn and Neptune, but also every damn day, to cultivate self-awareness around where you're at with your boundaries, to cultivate boundaries that are not carceral or punishing but instead a healthy reflection of you. The cool thing about boundaries is, if I have a boundary with you and you cross a line of my boundaries, then I simply adapt. "Oh. Okay. So you've shown me who you are. I've told you who I am and what I need, and now you show me who you are and what you will or won't do or how we are or are not compatible. And now I will adapt based on that information, not to punish you, not to control you or myself, but instead so that I can remain in alignment with myself contextual to you."

But again, I will reiterate it is had to do that work without self-worth, without having a relationship to yourself that you care about. Do you care about yourself? I mean, I know you don't want to suffer. I know you don't want to feel like shit. But do you care about yourself? Are you a friend to yourself?  Are you the kind of friend to yourself where you just cheerlead yourself without really questioning? Or do you have the hard conversations with yourself?

These are great questions to explore at this time. They will help you to be in better relationship to yourself, which is a foundation for being in better relationship to others and a foundation for being in better relationship to your values so that you can show up with and for the world in sustainable ways, not in perfect ways, not 100 percent of the time—we're setting realistic goals.

But these transits, they're asking you to navigate depressiveness and anxiety and projection and restriction. A part of yourself that is hypervigilant and driven to be perfect as a way to be okay and another part of yourself that is so perfectionistic that it seeks to escape the pressures that you've placed on yourself that are impossible to achieve—it's a lot. And I cannot stress enough, if being kind and loving is not one of your values, then you are going to really struggle here.

I'm a fucking hippie, so I think everybody should value love. I know not everybody does, but it's a good baseline value. And I should say, when I talk about love, I'm not just talking about affection or really, really, really liking something or someone or yourself. I'm talking about this on an energetic level. Love is an energetic force. It is strong like water or fire. It is power, and it can be shaped and mobilized. Love is energizing and affirming. It is protective, and it is substantial. The energetics of love are worth investigating and pursuing with and for yourself, for the world, with the grasses and the bees and people that you like a whole lot, and more impersonally, to humanity as a whole, to animals and birds and such and thus. You see what I'm saying?

Love is a powerful energy. Being curious about it is a good idea. Developing a practice of accessing love inside of you, not projected out per se but just feeling what love is and hanging out there, sitting with it, maybe even allowing it to fill you up—that's just—it's just a good idea. If we're in the marketplace of ideas, I would say it's a pretty good idea.

Now, one last thing I want to say about Venus squaring both Saturn and Neptune at the same time is that it is psychologically testing. If you need help or support, if you need resources, love yourself enough to reach out for them. Allow yourself to be supported by supports that are available to you. And if you find yourself struggling, remember this: what is hard for you is not what's wrong with you. I've said it before, and I will say it forever. What is hard for you is not what is wrong with you.

Your struggles point to what needs care, support, listening, kindness. It's not the parts of you that you're supposed to condemn, punish, hide from. Be curious about your own reactions to your own struggles. If somebody comes to you this week with some bullshit or some challenging relationship dynamics, do your best to be curious, not to jump to taking things personally, but instead to be curious.

Humaning is hard sometimes. Sometimes the hard parts are really valuable. They're valuable to hang out in, and they are the birthplace of so much growth and expansion. And sometimes they're not. And we can't just try for the desserts. Sometimes you gotta eat your metaphorical, universal broccoli, assuming you don't like broccoli. This week, you're going to have all of it is my guess.

Now, that's it for this week's astrology. I'm going to run through the list. It's a shorty. On the 28th, Venus is forming an exact sextile to Chiron. On the 29th, the Sun and Mercury Retrograde meet up in Leo. And then, on the 1st, Venus in Cancer forms a square to Saturn and then, a couple hours later, to Neptune. And that's all, folks.

Now, if you've made it this far, I gotta tell you something, something that I think is kind of exciting. So here we are, almost 550 episodes in, no seasons, just Ghost of a Podcast week after week for almost seven years. It's going to be seven years in August 2025. That's right, seven years of Ghost. And I want to do something special. I want to do something different.

So this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to give away some readings. That's right. This is how it's going to go, okay? So join me over on Patreon at the puppies or kittens level, and there will be a post where you can register, essentially, to be considered to get a reading because I'm only going to choose three people. And the way that you register—again, join on puppies or kittens level. And then, in the comments section of the post that will be clearly marked, tell me a joke. I will be sipping a really large cup of liquid when I read the jokes, and the first one to make me spit out what I'm drinking is who I'm going to choose.

So I'll do this once every couple of weeks. And this is, I think, also fun: the readings will be available to all of my patrons. So I won't post the readings on the podcast feed, but whether you're a free member or a paid member, you'll all have access to these readings. And I'll do this over the course of August—Mercury Retrograde allowing, of course. We're going to be adaptable because we understand what the weather is. The weather is confusing.

So, if you're interested in getting a reading with me to be published not on the podcast feed but on my Patreon, then please join me there and get your best jokes. In case you're curious, I think puns are funny. Just putting it out there. Dad jokes? I'm into it. No pressure. They don't have to be original.

Anyways, I thank you this week and every week for joining me here at Ghost. And I'll talk to you in just a couple of days for this week's reading.