Alive & Fragile

About Alive & Fragile

“What’s wrong with being fragile?” she asked. If you consider yourself to be sensitive and hate it, please subscribe. If you love your sensitivity, definitely subscribe. If you hate talking about feelings, woo-woo nonsense or have refused anything adjacent to a yoga session in your life, hang around for a bit. If you’re the opposite, of course, stick around. If you are somewhere in between, there’s a place for you. This space is for anyone who craves change in themselves and the world. Join me as we figure this out. catharaxia.substack.com (https://catharaxia.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

catharaxia

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Mar 2025

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

69 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   You could be having so much more fun

   My personal theme for October is ‘let it be fun.’ October invites play, mischief, and embracing what is beyond comprehension. This isn’t the time to be stuffy and strict. Shake off the debris of Virgo season, the careful acrobatics of Libra season. When Scorpio descends and brings us into the underworld, you will not know left from right or up from down. You will become Alice in Wonderland. When everything is topsy turvy, absurdism is your best way forward. Albert Camus is a credited master of this way, encouraging us to happily push up the boulder before it has the chance to crush us with its imposing presence. You don’t need to “get a grip”. You need to get loose, flowy, and remember to laugh again. The world is dark enough. You must remember to smile, to find it in you to keep pushing forward. Alright loves, similar to the eclipse readings I did, I pulled a card and read the back of the deck (the overall energy of the message) for each sign. Since anyone can easily determine their sun sign, that is what I recommend reading. Feel free to explore what your rising or even your moon sign may reveal to you. The theme of this reading is timeless, so if you’re finding this after the fall retrograde season, never fret. It’s never a bad time to find more levity. Cancer: Knight of Cups (BOTD – The Hierophant) You’re gonna hate this, but it is as simple as following your heart, Cancer. This mission is something you share in common with Gemini and Aquarius. It’s a vulnerable thing to trust what we’re drawn to, but we can trust that we love what we love for a reason. For you, this journey of embracing what you love isn’t pure hedonism, but an opportunity for deeper learning and understanding. You’re a water sign: of course, your biggest well of information will be how you feel. Study this data with the same attention as a scientist. You may even find yourself contributing to wider established wells of knowledge. There’s only one way to find out. Leo: Eight of Swords (BOTD – Ace of Wands) You and Aries share the same suggestion to engage in a bit of constriction. It’s an interesting answer because this state of anxiety can feel deeply unenjoyable. For you, this feeling of entrapment is also a bit thrilling in the right context. Novelty can make this feeling of being pinned against the wall exhilarating in a way. The key to this enjoyment is the understanding that your sense of enclosure is fabricated. You can choose to end it whenever you like. Frankly, this is reminding me of the logic around submission in kink — the joy of surrendering and trusting that whatever you will be pulled into next will be ultimately enjoyable. The excitement comes from a controlled unknown, a break from the normative structure. What thrill do you wish to seek? What “danger” do you desire to tease? Virgo: Three of Swords (BOTD – Three of Wands) Typically, we try to outrun heartbreak. We will keep ourselves in miserable situations, avoid taking chances, and reject parts of ourselves and others to avoid the pain heartbreak will guarantee. You, Virgo, need to shed this instinctive protection. There’s a great big world waiting for you to arrive and explore. Locking your heart away in a tower to avoid feeling pain keeps you from experiencing immeasurable joy. Allow your heart to be exposed, broken, healed, and exposed again. Try to put away your propensity for strategy and feel the full spectrum of emotions life grants us access to. Life’s sweetness only grows sharper from its saltiness. Libra: Nine of Wands (BOTD – Page of Pentacles) This is a weird one, because there’s nothing fun about feeling stuck. However, when we’re in a moment of limbo or burnout, it is the perfect time to experiment. Look around you for a second and see what piques your curiosity. Do you have time to deep-dive into that topic you’ve kept on the back burner? Maybe you have time to try a new hobby or a completely new angle to your problem. Being stuck when you’re so close to your goal is frustrating. What’s less frustrating is stepping back and looking at it for the puzzle it is. Try to enjoy the inventive process of tinkering. You can’t get more playful than throwing spaghetti at a wall. Scorpio: Seven of Wands (BOTD – Nine of Wands) Scorpio, for better or worse, you’ll have more fun if you start clapping back instead of holding your tongue. Fight for what you care about, defend your front for all its worth. Putting in the good fight can be exhilarating. Heck, even a bit of petty warfare is fun from time to time. Whatever you’re protecting won’t need it for much longer, but you’ll have to hang in there for this final push forward. Experiment with stepping up respectfully and see how it feels. Sagittarius: Queen of Pentacles (BOTD – Ace of Cups) Sag, you’re not known for your stability or softness. However, you may enjoy indulging some homemaker traits, especially with others. That is the joy of curating a cozy space — sharing this comfort with those we love. Maybe you prefer cooking or helping a friend with a grocery run or ride to the airport. However these acts of caretaking and generosity appear for you, remember it is meant to bring you joy, too. Let these acts come from love; be another language for the interior of your heart. You may find it brings new connections or new dimensions to previous ones. A bit of Cancer/Taurus cosplay won’t tame your free spirit too much, I promise. Capricorn: The Hierophant (BOTD – Nine of Pentacles) Go grab your thinking cap, because it’s time for you to hit the books. This doesn’t have to be making progress on a reading list. We’re interested in all forms of knowledge, so if you’re drawn to learning a new skill or cultural knowledge, embrace that calling. The key here is increasing your wealth of knowledge. Your mind is a garden that craves tending, and in our fast-paced world, dutiful learning is easy to dismiss. It’s not silly to read five books on plant life or learn about the evolution of plumbing. The knowledge you propagate now can be passed down to others later. See, it’s productive and practical, just how you like it. Aquarius: Knight of Cups (BOTD – Ten of Wands) You, Cancer, and Gemini are in a similar predicament. For a sign known for doing your own thing, following your heart to find your bliss is difficult because there are many different things you love. This mixture of different loves is what gives you your one-of-a-kind edge. It can also drive you over the edge, leaving no room or energy for any of them. Trust that what you love will always have a place in your life, even if that place is in the closet or attic for a season. What does this season of your life want to focus on? Set the rest down. It won’t disappear and may even improve quietly in the background as you focus on something else. Pisces: Five of Pentacles (BOTD – Ace of Wands) I don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to think about fun when you’re overwhelmed. There is no shame in that, and there’s also no shame in asking for some help. Sometimes your friends dragging you out the door will be the only reason you make it to the club and dance your heart out. It’s okay to let people lead you out of your funk, but you will need to ask and allow them to show up for you. Do it again and again and again. This shake-up could be exactly what you need to find your joy again. Aries: Eight of Swords (BOTD – Five of Pentacles) You and Leo share something, but for slightly different reasons. Feeling bound and trapped to find your fun has less to do with finding thrill and more to do with finding care. Aries, you’re bold and a force to reckon with. No one can live their life in that mode all the time. You may find enjoyment in letting yourself “be baby” while someone else takes the reins. Intentionally restricting your powers for a moment may give yourself the permission you need to relax and let this happen. Taurus: Ten of Wands (BOTD – King of Swords) Taurus, you are a creature of comfort. You will bring more joy into your life by pushing your limit a little bit. Go out even if you’re a little tired. Go to that party even if you don’t love the venue. Do the slightly hard thing. The key here is assessing where your true boundary lies. Use both your intuition and your logic to decide when it’s best to push the envelope. Sometimes you’re tired, and you have an early morning. Sometimes you can’t afford to push your budget for another lunch date. Use that beautiful hard head of yours and decide what is best for you in the long run. Gemini: Knight of Cups (BOTD – Ten of Wands) You join your Cancer and Aquarian brethren in the call to follow your heart’s desires. For you, the desires that will bring in more fun may require more work than will feel comfortable. Maybe there’s a class you’d love to take that’s late at night or a far drive or a lot of studying. If your heart yearns for that knowledge, you must power through. Your strategic nature means you prioritize efficiency alongside fun. There are some forms of fun that are inefficient and seemingly overindulgent. Lean into those curiosities in you that feel that way. You may be surprised how easy it is to go the extra mile for what matters most. I hope you take this mission to go and have the most thrilling, strange, and expansive fun. Enjoy this spooky retrograde season like the playground it is. ‘Til next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe (https://catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Tarot is hot right now. Don’t get burned.

   Within the last two weeks, I have seen post after post of [insert celeb] consulting or carrying around a tarot deck (https://www.hellomagazine.in/lifestyle/story/from-dua-lipa-to-emma-roberts-all-the-cool-girls-tarot-now-1434815-2026-08-07?utm_campaign=feed&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=later-linkinbio), a flurry of tarot creators I hadn’t heard of before, and tarot readers at the corporate party. (https://www.instagram.com/p/DdHLEL0Eb5S/?utm_source=ig_embed) As a long-time tarot reader, lover, and advocate, the sudden shift excites and disturbs me. I remember the tides around astrology shifting from a b******t hobby your esoteric friend would ramble about to all your faves suddenly having a personal astrologer. The rise in astrology's popularity isn’t the core of today’s discussion. Today, I’m going to gently instill some tarot praxis in you before the current tarot trend wave devolves it into red-light therapy, hot yoga, silent-retreat nonsense. Meaning… 1: Tarot will not save you. You are smart and beautiful and know this already, but I will say it again. Tarot cannot save you. No amount of readings can untangle the array of issues this life will sling at us. Learning tarot is not a loophole to living. Consulting a reader will not be the difference between you batting the crane out of the sky or not. Much like meditation, therapy, exercise, and every other reflective and regulating activity that grounds us and connects us to a larger web of living, that is all tarot can give you. Extra two cents on your predicament: you will ultimately have to face it or figure it out yourself. I pulled cards about which plane ticket to get yesterday and was left at the mercy of my booking website to decide in the end. So why did I bother to pull cards at all? 2: Tarot is a mirror, barometer, and divination tool all in one. When I pull cards on an arbitrary purchase or the details of an outing, I am not surrendering choice to the universe. I am using my metal detector to sense where there could be gold. Sometimes I get a new bracelet. Sometimes it’s just a cool rock. It would make little difference to digging up the entire ground to see what I might find or spinning in a circle and pointing. I outsource my intuition and decide if I will listen to the detection or not. In this way, tarot is a mirror. Often the barometer signals something we sense within ourselves. I pull a card for each airline, and they reflect how each one feels energetically to me. Coincidentally, this energetic read mirrors how I feel about spending money on each airline, the amenities each one brings, and the familiarity I have with them. My cards tell me, “Hey, big purchases are hard, and this is how making a purchase with each of these airlines would likely feel to you.” The divination aspect of reading tarot is overcomplicated and overlooked. I saw a therapist who uses tarot the other day try to slice off this divination aspect like it was excess fat. I understand the impulse, having made similar mistakes in the past. Divination implies prophecy and hidden mystical forces being tapped into whenever you shuffle and interpret the cards. That is intimidating for anyone who doesn’t want to claim the witch title. I don’t even want to claim the witch title. Unfortunately for the witch-averse, divination is part of living. Whether or not you choose to tap into the unseen is your choice. If you are an artist, you are already divining. Scientists are borderline wizards who record the logic behind mystical phenomena. Somebody just bristled at that statement, and I get it. Post-Enlightenment, logic and data are king. If anything, the current state of the world has revealed the flimsy nature of “data.” Data and magic are not enemies. Magic is just data that isn’t yet legible to the human mind. If you shuffle those cards with intention, even as trivial as plane tickets, you are divining a result. You are surrendering to being given a mirror to gaze into for an answer. Ritualize it with crystals, incense, and water. Whip it out halfway through your morning routine. Much like prayer, intention is the only meaningful ingredient. 3: Tarot does not respond well to nonchalance. Sometimes, to downplay the overwhelm of brushing hands with the divine, people approach tarot like it is a fun party trick or a magic eight ball. If you are reading or being read for, you need to lock the f**k in. The cards are not going to read your mind because your mind is a library of confusion. If you have a messy situation with ten thousand questions, get to talking until you can list them one by one, then wittle them down to the essentials. If you want a guide on forming a proper tarot question and even creating a tarot spread, I wrote a quick how-to here: 4: Tarot isn’t all about you. Meaning, the cards aren’t there to answer every question you’ve ever had or tell you what you want to hear. The tarot will ice you out if you push a subject that cannot or should not be clarified. The tarot will hit you with a brick of truth during your fluffy love reading. The tarot will give you a completely unrelated message from what you originally prompted. All of these responses during a reading are meant for your highest good. It’s your Virgo friend who precisely identifies the weak point in your moving plan and gives you a ten-step plan to fix it. It’s your Aries friend who knows all is possible if you pull your head out of your ass and believe in yourself, dammit. It’s your Taurus friend who won’t let you monologue about your ex from three years ago again. This tough love will cut because it’s coming from an inanimate object. How dare a deck of cards read you so nasty! The cards don’t give a s**t who you are, what you’ve done, or how important it is. Treat your decks and your readings with the respect you’d give a sage. 5: Tarot is not your mom. Like all divine messaging, take it with a grain of salt. If it resonates, keep it; if it doesn’t, leave it. If you need 3-5 business years to metabolize it, that’s okay. The cards don’t know all, and frankly, any interpretation involving a human should be treated as such. We use our intuition during readings for a reason. Don’t forget that. 6: Tarot can be a fun way to get the clarity you’ve been needing. And then you may forget what you’ve discovered and move through the cycle again. Even throughout the tarot journey, we move through these cycles of discovery over and over. We don’t arrive anywhere because in life we don’t arrive anywhere. So let the discoveries be fun. Enjoy the process of noticing over and over again. That’s all for now, but I’ll share more tarot musings soon. If you’re interested in my approach to reading, you can go through the Spiritual Chiropracy page on my Substack (https://catharaxia.substack.com/t/spiritual-chiropracy) where I’ve shared monthly forecasts, reading guides, and more. Feel free to share your musings on this current tarot pop culture wave. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the rising polycrisis we’re experiencing worldwide. Can you hear the sarcasm? ‘Til next time! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe (https://catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   3 Sept 2026

   “Art is where what we survive survives”

   Strands of hair on a mantle. Tied into a bow on my finger.Savoring the taste of someone once here. Obsolete nature. Ephemerality. We are dust and to dust returned. I am dust already. This thing in me that whirs all day like a computer filled with color and light and flowers. I am such a beautiful soul. We all have light in us. The greatest sin is to snuff it out. Seeing it dead in the eyes. And we all have beauty ringing in our ears. But we will die. Inevitably unavoidable. And so if we become nothing, dust to dust, what is death and life and living?We live, laugh, pray, die. We die, and it’s so horrible because we are worlds who build containers we call “worlds”, but my god, we are a library and pool and a heart that bleeds. A city hall and a train stationand a heart that bleeds dry.We are so beautiful and fleeting and obsessive and lightning. And we spend all day trying to remember ourselves. We make art—“Please hold the beauty, my life, the thing in me I can’t get out, but in bursts, snippets, choices, memories intertwined with memories, I am nothing without you.” Reader, I am nothing if not yours, and you are mine and we are life breathing together. And we will die and become nothing, and it will not matter when or how or how fair or just it was. It will not because everyone dies. And some live to be eighty and others eight and we all will become nothing again. Except we are something right now and always and death is a cut electric line on the telephone. I want you so badly to feel and see me. And when I die, there will be nothing left to look at but the print of what I was. Not the raw moment, only light-burned paper, altering its chemistry, leaving a stain that creates a face, a moment. My life, now a picture. My light, stains on photo paper. I am so much and so small in my muchnessand it never mattered. Never mattered where we go when we die because here, we are on a rollercoaster of humanity that Death cannot comprehend. We can’t comprehend our estranged extinctive sister and she doesn’t understand why we wear socks and listen to music. Sweet music. The feeling of it in our ears and spines and legs. Humming and singing and gyrating because alive alive alive! I am alive right now and when it is done, I won’t be able to hold the feeling so distinctly, like trying to remember being small. Distant memory. Xeroxed life. I wanted to die, I wanted my life to stop because it is too much. All the feeling in your body alone, enough to start wars, create children, decimate the Earth for years to come. My body heavy and dull and always tired, hungry, tired. My life a blip of mistakes waiting to happen, mistakes passed.Why continue this fever of living? The feeling of writhing in hallucination, cold sweats. Frozen in the casing of this fever. I said I wouldn’t die because dying is hard to do. But really, life is a drug given once and in waves. There’s so much life to hold; our bodies an illusion to this expansion. I want it all. I want to feel alive, I feel it so much it makes me want to die again. To find inner flatness, quiet, decimate the city in me to rubble. I am a metropolitanwith an arts district and artisanal coffee. And I let the caramel smell knock me off my feet. I lie limp, playing dead, getting comfortable with the notion. I imagine my head caving in, my chest caving in, shrink-wrapping into a carcass. But the light is too strong and fiery and filled with indignation. And soon it is lunchtime. I’m alive. Blessed in this. Alive and thrumming. Ready to die and ready to live. And lucky to be here, sharing the universe with you. – It’s a lost civilization every time someone dies Inspired by the gentle breakdown caused by this section of this interview about my favorite book in my adult life. It’s already in the masterlist hall of fame. I was a bottomless existential-dread teen. I wish more people talked about wanting to die, but when you do, people worry, and they should, so instead I sat quietly in my room for years, considering. Not always, but often. And while a part of me still wants to become nothing, nothingness can wait because right now life, even surviving, is everything. And it isn’t just mine; it is yours too. We are looking at each other, at everyone who is and was, to see if life is possible. So I will live for me and you and for those after us to know that they can live too. And that in itself is enough. Living is enough, and I cry because I fought so hard to make life mean something and had been grieving it meaning nothing. But it means everything because the meaning is this moment and the next. And it will never be again once it is over. Even in heaven, life is not life. I wish I had better words, but hopefully these will do. (The music in the audio) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe (https://catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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