The hidden Libra energy behind Cyclical Roots ♎🐚🌀

What is right relationship? Maybe it's not about perfection, but presence enough to tend what’s here.

I'm writing this on the New Moon in Libra in October 2026, but this reflection is bringing my some places that feel long-term relevant (like all transits imo).

Whatever house, or "place", Libra lives in your birth chart is where you're being invited to reflect and renew your relationship with. Especially since Venus, the planetary ruler of this sign, just stationed retrograde in Scorpio (nothing to fear, just a space held open for presence and reflection).

For me, it's my 11th house of groups & larger community. And that's the work i do here at Cyclical Roots.

Before i called the entity/studio/spirit of my heartwork Cyclical Roots, it was Cycles Journal (and before that it was just my name).

This work was never just about moon cycles, menstrual cycles, mental health cycles, and beyond... this work is about all cycles and their relations: their origins, their connection between one another, our environments, ourselves, and our way of tending to it all.

Cycles are patterns, and no pattern exists in solitude or isolation. Patterns are always relational.

If astronomy is the dance of the planets and luminaries in our solar system (our larger ecosystem), then astrology is the relating to the energy and influences between all matter & space: the drawing down of meaning back into the body.

So the (eco)system of Cyclical Roots technically all began with patterns of creative coping with mental health: aka my art.

Then with mental health + body/menstrual patterns: becoming Cycles Journal

Then patterns of relating to body, ecosystem & spirit: Embodied Ecosystems

And the patterns of returning by the seasons & cycles to reconnect to ourselves and one another: through Remembership.

These creations are my most intimate relationships.

They do not replace the relations with my family's loving stubbornness, my partner's warm hands, the fuzzy wet noses of my cat companions, or the waving ferns outside my window...

but they are the relationship born from within and through the subtle realm which i am only whole because of.

Celebrating birth days/cycles:

while i did not announce Embodied Ecosystems to the public until June 2023, while it was incubating within me for years before, i count the day that i started creating it on paper as its birth date. Because the birth chart is an energetic imprint of a soul/spirit.

only just today did i reference this, searching all my past moth notebooks for the page i could see in my head from that day after stretching outside when i finally was ready... what i remember as the start. and the day is October 8th, 2022. the body knows the patterns before the mind does.

so, happy 4th birthday to the spirit of Embodied Ecosystems ( libra sun + venus, pisces moon, sag rising, virgo mercury )

while your physical form has only been with us since May 2025, and some may consider this the official birthday, your wisdom has been guiding me and rippling out into the world since long before. creative babies feel different to me since they are first born with their creator, then with the public or production process.

and in your short 1.5~ years on Earth, you've already reached and supported hundreds of people in physical form, and many more, i'm sure, in other ways.

and a few months ago, we even won an award:

"Best Self Published Winner via the CARTA International Cartomancy Awards 2026" hosted by TABI Tarot Association.

here's a picture of it on the altar i just created to commune with the spirit of Cyclical Roots and all we fold together. my desks have been altars, but this unused space revealed its purpose just yesterday as i was beginning to make these connections.

in my experience, the patterns truly reveal themselves when we follow our intuition.

so now i'm sitting with where we go next, since our first edition is almost sold out.

and i promised i wouldn't let the pressure of the holidays rush the time needed to make some small edits and upgrades, and how i will manage raising funds through pre-orders to self-publish once again.

this feels like the time to take the space i've been yearning for to really just be with EE since the annual Cycles Journal took up so much of my time and energy. but now, with Cycles Journal's 8th birthday, we release the Undated version: allowing space to tend.

i've been working closely with Venus cycles thanks to the incredible work of Pallas K Augustine. and one important signature of many is that Venus works in 8-year cycles.

and 8 years ago, between Venus' maximum brightness + station retrograde, Cycles Journal was born at the intersections of struggle and possibility.

( libra sun + mercury, leo moon + NN, taurus rising, scorpio venus + jupiter, cap saturn )

so when my tired body just could not create another dated edition earlier this year, and all the accumulated resistance to breaking the annual cycle built up into a surrender... i was honoring the patterns of release and renewal that were intuitively necessary but logistically unclear and frightening.

we grow through our edges, and maybe that's why Cyclical Roots, Cycles Journal, AND Embodied Ecosystems have Libra sun charts ( square my Cancer + Capricorn stellia ); they are not me, but an extension of my understandings and learnings and channelings meant for communal & collective evolution & liberation. meant to be shared and communicated through my relational values and embodied world-building, and beyond my comfort zone (all Venusian things).

and for the astro nerds out there, both Cyclical Roots + EE are sag risings like myself, so our houses align in whole sign, and that means these entities are made for group-work and sharing as the place where evolution and deeper healing happens.

all of this reflection is a focused celebration, and it does not negate the full spectrum of experience and struggle i've also been experiencing in other parts of the spectrum of relationships i'm woven within... like the discomfort and grief of being very allergic to the land right now, counterbalancing the busyness of harvest season for my partner's business, and all that we are trying to balance in life together as two self-employed anti-capitalists whose work is their passion and also sometimes all-consuming. (amongst other relations, of course)

but it's time to honor what has happened, to recognize what is already feeding us and what might even be enough, as well as what is not and where we need to bring in more support.

As always, thank you for being here and for being you.

Grounded in gratitude~

Rachael Amber