It's raining in Paris. My lover and I are sitting in the hotel lobby, checking our email, waiting till it lets up. It sounds like we’re under a waterfall.

We are actually on the outskirts of Paris, in St. Maurice. We have a 20-minute amble through a quaint neighborhood to get to the Metro. We pass bakeries and fruit stands and can dash in for a croissant or a bag of cherries. Then there’s the Metro, a warren of tunnels and stairways. It took a while to figure it out, but I love the freedom of it.

Whoa, thunder. Just when I thought it was slacking off a little. My lover sits across from me, on another upholstered armchair. For the last few days, I’ve been taking pictures of her all over the city, in her black felt hat and bright blue scarf – bundled up, beaming.

“Hey, Jen, you want to go?” she asks me.

“Let’s wait another twenty minutes,” I suggest. Neither of us have boots. We’re wearing sneakers as a concession to airport security. I have been looking at women’s boots so often in Paris that people probably think I’m one of those foot-fetishist tourists. But women here have such a sprightly way of walking, and I always wonder if it’s the footgear. They move like dancers, like actors in a musical set in Paris.

It’s very easy to romanticize Paris. It doesn’t really look like a film set. There are too many cars, too many garbage bins, and way too much dog shit. But somehow in this city, your heart takes over, and begins seeing for you. You see only the curves of the streetlamps, the iron filigree of balconies, the slightly sardonic confidence of the faces.

February is one of those months when ideals and practicalities glide past each other, not always connecting. Like the tunnels in the Paris Metro, they bring you out in completely different places. If you haven’t read the signs carefully, who knows where you could end up? You might think you’re following an ideal, only to end up in some chilly deserted park. Or you might think that you’re being practical, and find yourself in a café with an elaborately shrugging waiter.

February is a mix of earth and air. At the new moon on February 5, air signs predominate, but earth comes in close behind, constantly nagging the air to get real.

The main airy influence is Aquarius, with the sun, moon, Mercury, Neptune, Chiron and the north node in this sign. Another airy influence is Gemini, with Mars (the planet of action) in this sign. Mars makes harmonious aspects to most of the Aquarius planets, and it acts as an initiator. The nervous impulses of Gemini set things in motion, and they move towards the beautiful ideals of Aquarius – fellowship, cooperation, understanding, community responsibility.

Do they get there? It takes more than simple forward motion to reach an ideal. It takes a belief that such things are possible, that people are capable of living together in freedom and mutual respect.

Even beautiful cities have their aching times, and I was reminded of Paris’ bloodiest days yesterday when we got out at the Bastille metro station. The Bastille is gone. It’s nothing but scattered dust now, and in its place is a high pedestal with a golden, winged woman on top. Although this formally commemorates the heroes of the July 1830 revolution, the choice of location links it to the events of 1789.

I can see them now: those angry people, slamming into the bricks and mortar of that cruel prison. But where did their ideals take them? There is so much power, glory and danger in belief systems. Ideals fly high, like hawks, but they feed on things that are on the ground. That’s why people are always trying to anchor ideals, tying them up in a framework of tradition and culture and habit. They try to cage them, because an unfettered ideal can cause so much damage. I am old enough to understand this now.

In February 2008, the rarified ideals of Aquarius are anchored by earth signs. There are four planets in earth signs at the new moon: Venus, Jupiter and Pluto are in Capricorn, and Saturn is in Virgo. The earth signs are the ones who maintain tradition and habit. Capricorn in particular is the most mature sign in the zodiac, a sign of age, wisdom and worldly experience. It is also the guardian of the status quo, naturally suspicious of the forces of change embodied by Aquarius.

When the Bastille fell, there were no planets at all in earth signs. The ideals soared so high that they broke past what anyone had imagined, and wrote new possibilities in the sky. Among these were hope, citizenship, courage, independence, liberty, equality, fraternity, sorority. But there was also blood raining down.

And now it’s stopped raining, at last. My lover and I have been sitting here, bowed over our computers, for a long time. We get up, a little stiff. We wrap our scarves around our necks, jam our hats on our heads, and feel in our pockets for our Metro cards.

It’s time to go into Paris, the city of lights. Today we are going to the Louvre, where we will see statues that have been standing for thousands of years. We will see marble carved into flesh and drapery and snakeskin and lace. In the hard crystalline metamorphic rock, we’ll see the stories of the gods and the conquerors, and all the ideas that have come and somehow never left us. It’s a place where humans have taken earth and made it speak. The stories and ideas are human ones. But they last because they are made of earth.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com