Oh music, my muse, wavelengths that resonate with my fragile soul and reverberate along with my courageous heart—the unknown, the threshold, the journey, the excitement, the farewell, the new visions, what if?
-what if it is all not real?
-what if?
Psyched—I’m heading to NYC in less than a month to see the one and only Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, alongside the magical Warren Ellis. No contest—he’s my performer of choice. Let life seed its beauty everywhere, even when that beauty stings in pain, even when it bursts into sparks of joy. Humanity is powerful yet so conditioned. I’m done shedding tears over it. In creativity, I take shelter—that’s where my true power grows.
Human action. In human action, I rely.
“A Teacher Gives New Symbolic Forms To Traditional Images.” —The Sabian Symbol for 10° Aries (Dane Rudhyar)
Aries—the sage warrior—trains with raw flame to reforge old myths. Stripping tradition down to its bones, we clothe it in something immediate and bold: a new life, scrawled between fear and longing.
I was long inside a dream,
I could not get loose
I will tell you of it,although there is little use…
Let Nick Cave’s words drift in, stirring up that deep hum of a long dark night. We sense the flicker of transcendence inside the hush of pain. No devil, no ogre—just a flying man with trailing hair, combing illusions from your name. Maybe a pause, a blink, a ripple in the middle of a dream.
Imagine standing at the threshold between day and night, seeing the sun slip behind the moon. A solar eclipse draws back the curtain on a deeper sky. Endings and beginnings fold together; we shift from silence to an urgent call. Aries energy surges—daring us to spark anew, trusting each step. We shed illusions, rewriting our dominion with each breath.
“O Muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate…”
“O Muse, O high genius, now help me…
~Dante, Inferno II
“…there is a rubric which says: Here begins a new life…”~Dante, La Vita Nuova
As Dante suggests, art is a summons to something divine and an echo of memory. We stand at the tail end of Neptune’s sojourn through Pisces—dream and dissolution—and the embryonic spark of Aries welcomes us. Hope—speranza—becomes an active verb, fueling fresh visions. Nick Cave’s haunting lines intertwine with Dante’s devotion, forging a single tapestry: the night, the unknown, the forward leap, the new life.
In that precarious zone, we feel the hush before the dawn, the final wave of Piscean dreaminess guiding us to a shore, Aries’ flame igniting a renewed sense of purpose. Let yourself greet the dark night with eyes wide open. It’s neither wholly day nor night, and maybe that’s the point—a luminous in-between, a hush that hovers, ready for each of us to sculpt anew. Let the old forms reveal their deeper patterns. Let your next evolution rise in the hush of this eclipse—fearless, brimming, unscripted.
A long dark night is coming down… And in the hidden glow, we find the spark that says: here begins a new life. Art, like love, moves through these thresholds—memory, longing, creation. If love is guided by intellect, and memory gives birth to creation, then together they form the foundation of artistic expression and higher understanding.
In Vita Nuova, Dante presents women as the “intellect of love” (intelletto d’amore), refining desire through reason and virtue. In mythology, Mnemosyne—Memory—births the Nine Muses, each an embodiment of creative and intellectual pursuits.
The word muse itself, tied to music, suggests that inspiration moves like a melody through time, carried by remembrance and shaped by the intellect of love. Dante’s Beatrice is not merely an object of devotion; she is divine wisdom, guiding him toward spiritual ascent. The Muses, too, are intermediaries between human thought and the eternal. Love, then, is both the source and the destination—an unseen current lifting us from the weight of the world into the rhythm of the divine.
Against this cosmic backdrop, Nick Cave’s lyrics—often drawing on themes reminiscent of the Dark Night of the Soul—evoke a timeless dance of despair and revelation.
Just as St. John of the Cross wrote of a night when the soul quests for divine union in the deepest darkness, Cave’s words conjure images of longing, sorrow, and flashes of transcendence.
At the same time, we layer Dante’s Vita Nuova on top, hearing echoes of that “new life” as we emerge from Piscean waters into the cardinal fire of Aries. Cave’s haunting phrases mingle with Dante’s devotion, forging a bridge between medieval vision and contemporary musical poetry. The result is a tapestry where renewal, memory, and longing blend into a single creative impetus—an impulse as timely as the arrival of a new spring of life.
And now—A new life is coming:
My dear friend Ellery’s band, WU LYF, is reuniting—and what better timing than the day after Neptune enters Aries. Their return feels like a flame rekindled just as the sky shifts, reminding us that cycles never really end—they transform. They became a cult band over 12 years ago, and what continues to strike me is the sheer power and timelessness of their sound. What once roared with raw rebellion has now matured—through evolution, through individuation. And knowing Ellery personally, I can say this return carries depth, integrity, and the pulse of something real.
Even in their early work, WU LYF sang like initiates—voices crying out from the liminal, draped in myth and fire. Their lyrics carried the essence of the rites: descent, revelation, return. And now, after more than a decade, they rise again—seasoned, transformed, matured.
Ellery has always walked the edge between the ephemeral and the enduring—dreams cast in stone. This reunion feels like the return of a vision once whispered in youth, now sung with the voice of experience.
“And I was a brave son
And I found a flame
Oh my heart was heavy
And then the sun came.”
—WU LYF, Heavy Pop
As Dante closed Vita Nuova, he vowed to remain silent until he could speak of Beatrice “more worthily”—a silence that would give birth to The Divine Comedy. So too, in every eclipse, in every flame rekindled, in every reunion of sound and soul, there is the hush that precedes a new song, a new life.
Afterword
Even silence breathes
Even as the equinox opens and Neptune enters Aries—followed by Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter shifting signs—we may feel the hush of a world being born this year. But like Dante, who glimpsed the vision before he could give it worthy form, we too may be asked to wait, to walk, to witness. The shape of the new life will not reveal itself all at once. It will rise, retreat, and return again—through spirals, not straight lines. Yet make no mistake: we are already in motion. Nothing is still. Even silence breathes.
The result is a tapestry where renewal, memory, and longing blend into a single creative impetus—an impulse as timely as the arrival of spring in the zodiacal year.
In the glow of this unfolding, Ellery’s own words from 2022 now echo more clearly than ever…
"I am once again following something that cannot be seen, that I can barely articulate. A golden thread sewn into the seams of life’s labyrinth path. The desire to be understood runs parallel to the impulse for self-knowledge; to sing the song of myself without compromise, or confusion but competence, confidence."
Ellery’s words move like spellwork—poetic and initiatory, just like the fire this article invokes. In my view, his voice isn’t just personal—it is visionary. His writing reveals a deep commitment to the transformation of society through the transformation of self. A courageous walk through the fire of identity, shame, beauty, and purpose—he writes as one who has burned down and begun again. This is the voice of someone who has walked the spiral and returned with fire in hand.
VOiCES CREATION + iNITIATION – a conversation between Ellery and me on the launch of Song of the Self, his mentorship program back on January 2024.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – [Long Dark Night] – the haunting melody that drifts through this dark night of the soul.
WU LYF – the flame rekindled, the sound returning. Let it burn.
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