Hi there everyone,
Today I’d love to invite you to early access to my most recent blog post, Electing for the Care of Trees. This post details my experience using electional astrology to select an ideal time to prune the mimosa trees in a new home I’d moved into. This represents the first entry in my Electional Retrospective series, in which I detail an election and the situation I was astrologizing, then share its outcome. Hopefully these articles can serve as an example of how to live life in accordance with the flow of electional astrology as well as the things I’ve learned electing through the years.
Before we get into it, I’d like to let you in on a quick secret: I will be taking several weeks off of offering consultations this winter. All of the sessions I have available for the rest of the year are up on my site. If you’re interested in snagging a reading before the end of the year, this is the last call!
After a very, very busy year, what my heart and soul need most is some time to rest and to connect with my families and communities. It is my wish that I start off 2023 in a place of grounded invigoration; I’m excited to share what I’ve got cooking for the coming year.
Until then, Electing for the Care of Trees:
In April of 2021, I moved across the country and into a new house. This house has been an absolute dream for me. I get a very Venus in Pisces vibe from it—the inside is painted in shades of light blue and green, there are several feral species of mint growing allover the property, and, most of all, we have two mimosa trees growing in the front yard. The umbrella-like mimosa tree is most accurately known as Albizia julibrissin, since it isn't actually a part of the mimosa genus. If you haven't had the delight of meeting one of these amazing Venusian trees, I can’t recommend it enough. their most notable characteristic is their flowers, which look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. From early spring to late autumn (in our bioregion) albizia is bedecked in these flashy, sweet-smelling blooms. So imagine my joy when I realized that we would have two of these goddesses shading our home!
Unfortunately, as is often the case with rentals, once we had properly moved in we started to see some of the cracks in the fantasy—and the trees were one of the biggest. Although mimosa is considered drought-tolerant, even they can't keep up in our high desert bioregion. Worse, it looks like the trees hadn't been watered (or cared for at all, really) by our landlord or previous tenants. These are incredibly tenacious trees, so I knew they could be saved with some care, but the first thing that needed to happen was that they needed many of their dead branches to be pruned. This wasn't my first time pruning a tree, but if you know anything about trees, one of the first rules of pruning is to not prune at the beginning of spring because it puts a lot of stress on the tree. In our area, we were in the midst of an early heatwave which was also a stressor for the tree. Nonetheless, these branches needed to come down to give these trees a fighting chance in the coming monsoon season.
Take care,
Shuly Rose