A Letter to My Comrade, Whom I Love

On the Jupiter-Uranus Conjunction (April 24, 2024)

“I understand what it is to be alone when you are confused and afraid and unsure of what will happen next. You are not alone. You will never be, unless you so choose. I know what matters, here at the world’s end. Ah, my love. An apocalypse is a relative thing, isn’t it?” - N.K. Jemisin

Dear comrade.

I want to write you a letter about the apocalyptic meeting of Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus. It happens in the tender spring of this important year, on April 20 of 2024. This is a letter about the thunder troubling the ground we stand on, and about trying to understand how Earth grabs time out of the sky and generates it from inside her belly, morphing the old pathways of history into the vibrant present and the fluctuating future. This is a letter about learning how to trust apocalypse as a pulling back of the veil, and about how I want to be with you through all of this, no matter how weird it gets.

In a way, this is a once-upon-a-time story, because it stretches across time in ways that probably neither you nor I fully comprehend. To tell you the story of how Jupiter and Uranus will meet in Taurus on April 20 to terraform our lives in new and unexpected ways, I want to weave beyond the lengths of our lifetimes, and into timelines that exceed the creation of cultures —we’ll have to look at the rise and fall of empires and beyond. 

The implications of this particular Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on April 20, 2024 stretch back hundreds of years at least thanks to Jupiter’s important meeting with Saturn back in 2020. So I wonder if you will come with me as I rifle through the patterns that history has belched up according to the dance of these planets. I hope churning up that evidence will help us understand some of what is simmering up all around us now. And one thing is clear to me: I hope we can form our understanding in togetherness. So if you’ll take my hand, let’s go in.

Uranus

Let’s arrive first to a meeting with Uranus. I know this planet as the representative of change, revolution, liberation, and technological evolution. This outer planet has a sidereal orbit that lasts 84 years, so some humans will live to see their Uranus return, but not all. Humans first met Uranus in 1781, around the time of the French and American revolutions, a time when the Western world was fighting itself over the concept of freedom and individuation, though those freedoms were perversely predicated on the enslavement and genocide of black and indigenous bodies, and the eradication of indigenous ways of being in relationship with the Earth. So whenever I meet Uranus, I try to pray that humans keep learning how to respond to the principles of liberation and individuation more responsibly. We have much growing up to do as a species, and I pray we’ll learn how to better digest Uranus’ important medicine with time and attention.

Lezley Saar. Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy. 2013

Fascinatingly, before 1781 humans had never met a planet they couldn’t see with their naked eyes. Saturn, lord of time who is visible to the naked eye, was the last planet we had known how to commune with before the technology of telescopes enabled us little humans to stretch beyond our biological limits. It follows that for humans, Uranus became the marker of our ability to use technology to step beyond our embodied limits. Uranus continues to symbolize our capacities to break our chains and grow through our creativity. In the presence of Uranus’ explosive power, let us wisely discern between the chains we need to break, and the bonds we need to honor and keep. Know to whom you are accountable. Know your oppressors, know your enemies. Know what technology is and learn which technologies truly nourish life, and which deal in the colonial currency of death.

Now, slow-moving Uranus has been in Taurus since 2018, and will stay there until 2026. So let us take a moment to remember how much has changed since 2018. Where Taurus represents our values, our sense of security, our stubborn insistence on enjoying life, Uranus has been here wreaking sheer glorious havoc on our collective values and our understandings of what makes us safe and happy. Since 2018 I have seen more people become anticapitalist all at once than ever before in my lifetime. More people recognize that happiness and safety that comes through white cis het capitalist supremacy isn’t a happiness or safety worth having. We are watching our old systems fail us, and recognizing that we not only need to, but that we collectively can and want to make a different world real.

Jupiter

To make a different world, we need to meet our power, individually and collectively. This means it’s time to meet Jupiter, power’s celestial representative. And comrade let me tell you, when I think about how Jupiter has been storied throughout the history of a patriarchal culture organized around supremacy, my stomach turns. Take yourself on a trip through the Greco-Roman myths about Zeus/Jupiter. He is misogynist, and though he is queer, he is a rapist. He represents power as it gets taught to us by a culture that hates, fears, and debases all to which it assigns the label of “femininity.”

One thing I know is that Jupiter is in for some big restorying and transformation times because we are collectively more and more ready to change our beliefs about power. And because Jupiter is about to meet with Uranus, the representative of the very principle of change! So don’t forget the power of counternarrative. Now will be an important time for us to tell stories about how we have seen power manifest in and from the margins. About how we experience power in ways that look different from ways we have seen power institutionalized.

Now, we can’t fully understand Jupiter’s current or impending movements until we understand more about where Jupiter has been recently. Because y’all! Jupiter has been on an important ride. This ride has to do with the elegant era-making synodic cycle of Jupiter and Saturn, and this ride is wrapped up in movements older than you or me or our cultures.

Let us travel back to a strange year very few humans living in the modern world will ever forget. 2020. Not only was that year Covid and lockdown and the murder of George Floyd culminating in BLM blowing up to global proportions. It was also the year that Jupiter and Saturn participated in something Astrologers call a Great Mutation, which only happens every 200 years and is known for defining historical eras. Ok.

Jupiter and Saturn’s Synodic Cycle and the Great Mutation

The Jupiter and Saturn cycle is something that astrologers have been tracking for as long as astrologers have been doing their astrology thing. This is because the meeting of Jupiter and Saturn tends to correlate with shifts in the organization and structure (Saturn) of social, cultural, and political power (Jupiter). Fascinatingly, these two planets meet predictably once every 20 years. The wild thing is that for roughly 200 years at a time, they meet up in the same element of signs. So it goes: 200 years of conjunctions in fire signs, 200 in earth signs, 200 in air signs, followed by 200 years of conjunctions in water signs. So when we track how these 200 year eras match up to the organization of cultural power, it starts to help us understand exactly wtf is up rn, as in, why we are experiencing such a major shift in the zeitgeist. Hang in here with me as I spell this out.

In 2020, Jupiter and Saturn met in Aquarius, firmly transitioning humanity into a 200-year Air Era in which cultural power would be organize around the element air. This means it also shifted us out of a 200 year Earth Era in which culture organized around the element earth. (Take note though that in 1980, Saturn and Jupiter met in Libra before a final Earth conjunction in 2000, meaning the Earth Era began to crack open in 1980. We will revisit this.)

Alright. Let me show you what the earth to air transition looks like elementally. Earth is a sign that likes consolidation. In these eras people tend to be extra stoked to get rich, and hierarchies (social and material) work well when earth is dominant because earth materials stack up easily. In contrast, air is an element that likes to scatter. Think about how wind forces vertical things to become horizontal. Air topples towers. It also spreads seeds of potential across the earth. In Air Eras people tend to value creativity, communications, and horizontal organizations of power because during these eras, stacked-up shit tends to topple.

Now let me show you what that transition has looked like historically. In our 200-year Earth Eras, we have seen cultures build up a lot of wealth, and empires rise. Several earth cycles ago (3rd-5th c.), Rome was in the height of its prosperous Imperial era, which fueled itself with slave labor i.e. a violently hierarchical culture. In the next Earth Era of the 11-13th centuries, Christians began to dominate and steal wealth more aggressively through the Crusades. Since our last Earth Era that began in the early 19th century, we saw the industrial revolution, major feats of engineering, the rise of Capitalism which runs on grossly exploited/enslaved labor, the consolidation of the American empire, World Wars, the global dominance of the West, and the normalization of a class system based predominantly on material wealth generated by racialized labor.

Conversely in the 200-year Air Eras that have followed Earth Eras, we have historically tended to see empire fall and scatter, often to “barbarians” and plagues. For example, the Roman Empire fell to the Visigoth “barbarians” in the 5th century air era; in the same Air Era Alexander the Great broke up the Persian empire. In the 13th century Air Era, Genghis Khan and his nomadic bands of Mongol “barbarians” conquered China and initiated a short-lived but gigantic empire that stretched across most of Eurasia, and that had social welfare and a postal system. During this same Air Era, the Bubonic Plague/Black Death destroyed Europe’s social fabric; for a time this generated a social fabric in Europe characterized by collectivist labor values and resistance to landlords (for more on that read Caliban and the Witch). Within that same era, the Renaissance sprang up in Europe, thanks to the shift in values toward arts and creativity. 

Bony Ramirez. Las Perlas Traen Lágrimas/ Pearls Bring Tears. 2020

When we consider the cultural shifts from our last Earth Era to the Air Era we currently, and freshly move through, we must consider the Internet, one of the most human reality-altering technologies ever created. The Internet’s birthday (1983) followed the first Saturn-Jupiter conjunction in Libra in 1980, when the Earth Era’s container began to crack and the Air Era began to seep in. The Internet of course has given rise to completely new ways of interacting with information and has provided us with boundless potential for creative communication. However it has also provided Empire with a tool through which to collect unprecedented amounts of surveillance data, and through which they have made dystopian degrees of development in Artificial Intelligence. The Internet has also provided us, people on the ground, with a tool through which we can expose and intimately understand the realities of the racialized genocides that have made possible the wealth of our dying Earth Era. It has helped us learn just how disillusioned we must become with Western colonial capitalism and its foundational supremacies if we are to adapt to the realities of the present.

How Jupiter and Uranus Have Been Interacting since 2020

Immediately after Jupiter and Saturn inaugurated the Air Era in late 2020, these two bodies both spent 2021 in a series of intense square aspects with Uranus in Taurus. Do y’all remember how in 2020 and 2021, they told us to stay inside and protect ourselves from the pandemic? And instead of listening to the powers that be, we donned our masks, took to the streets, and generated the largest worldwide movement in support of black life in history. Across the globe, we organized together, on the ground. We explored and tested out collectivist, abolitionist power structures in ways that forever changed how we as people approach power. To me this speaks to the winds of Jupiter and Saturn in air signs scattering information across the globe and, at least within our hearts, beginning to topple the hierarchies humans had institutionalized during the recent Earth Era.

Of course we cannot forget the shadows of Saturn and Jupiter’s representations of structure and power. Though there is hope in how we on the ground have been liberating ourselves from how these concepts were institutionalized, our movements have been met by Empire in its death throes committing genocidal acts of terror. There is a rise of far right, fascistic governments and bigoted, supremacist populist movements across the globe, and the value of the “democratic vote” feels more and more obsolete. We can’t expect these institutions to go down easily, so let’s hold onto each other tight as we help bring them down.

This is the context through which the squares between Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus played out. Now we can close with an exploration of what it means for Jupiter and Uranus to finally meet this year, on April 20.

Uranus and Jupiter meet on April 20, 2024

Jupiter arrived to Taurus in May of 2023. As Jupiter moved through Taurus through the second half of 2023 and has been building towards its conjunction with Uranus, we have seen one of the most critical landback movements of our time become more escalated and globalized as Israel’s brutal genocide in Palestine is fully televised by people living through the genocide, on the ground. This has also elevated awareness of many genocides across the globe, in the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, China, Myanmar, Tigray and more. People living comfortably in the West are beginning to see the true price of Western dominance and its obsession with material wealth. So what will we see arise globally as Jupiter and Uranus meet in April 2024?

Uranus is a trickster. Jupiter is empowerment, and expands whatever it touches. Therefore as Jupiter comes to empowers the trickster, and widen the aperture on whatever portal Uranus in Taurus has been opening since 2018, the thing to expect is the unexpected. You can’t be ready for this unless you can honor that change is the god of this moment. 

I’ve been deeply curious to meet this moment since those tense squares of 2021, because I feel very clear that through the opaque and embodied earth-wisdom of Taurus, I won’t be able to see or predict these moments until they arrive. I’ve wondered about more pandemics, internet blackouts, escalating wars, famines, the collapse of capitalism, more weird shit with AI evolving and beyond…but those things are already clearly in progress. I recognize that learning how to stay present for those things requires embodiment first. So I interpret the first and ongoing move here as learning how to honor our embodiment, as meeting each other through the truth of our embodiment, and becoming braver in the face of uncertainty. For each other, we have to do that.

I have also been trying to learn from Indigeneity, and honor that landback is one of the most critical asks that Taurus has to make of us as Uranus and Jupiter churns the soils. It is very clear to me that if there is any one thing the Powers That Be are united against, it is Indigeneity as a way of life. Empire’s work appears to be the decimation of the humans who have multi-generational, love relationships with the land. Humans who know that land cannot be owned, and that if anything, land owns us. I know my understanding of Indigeneity is deeply limited because I have been educated in a settler-colonial state and I have been trying to survive under a capitalist regime. But one thing I believe is that in this moment in history, I need to learn from Indigeneity how to be in relationship and in reciprocity with every kind of ecology —internal, interpersonal, social, natural, wild, linguistic, spiritual, ancestral ecologies. 

Something else I learn from Indigeneity, is that while we in the West may be facing some degree of cultural apocalypse, Indigenous peoples have been through apocalypse after apocalypse since settler-colonial states have existed. The people of Gaza and Sudan (and beyond) are in apocalypse right now as the West murderously seeks to extract resources from those lands. So I hope to do my best by joining hands with the people who already know how to live through apocalypse, and to stand in solidarity, and together to peel back the veil so we can reveal new new ways of living and breathing and being liberated to participate with the world.

Alexandria Smith. untitled. 2017-2019

I think where we place our power at this moment in time will deeply impact the rest of our lives. How and what we prioritize, and what we believe to be important matters very much. How we are in relationship, how we open our minds and hearts about what relationship even means. How we resist the urge to be extractive and possessive, and strive to be in reciprocity.

So my comrade. I will leave you here with this prayer. I pray that Jupiter’s empowerment of Uranus blows apart our attachments to Western ways of being, and that we come closer to each other through the cracks of a dying era. I pray to become a humble agent in transformative reciprocity with my ecology. I pray that we can hold hands and learn intimacy with each other, with time, and with spirit in ways no one has been able to model for us just yet, but that have somehow been existing all along. All we need to do is give ourselves permission to learn them, together.

So for now, I just thank you for coming with me on the journey of exploring this moment. May we love each other through the end of one world, and toward the existence of another.

In love and solidarity,
Amalia <3

P.s. If I had to sum this letter up in a few words, it would read: Free Palestine. Free Sudan. Free Congo. Free all indigenous, racialized, oppressed people from the tyranny of capitalist colonialism. Decolonize our imaginations. Landback. Liberate the people to live with the earth. I love you.

In the future, look out for an edit that will include an extended reading list :)

sources on jupiter and saturn cycle!

https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2020/11/02/the-jupiter-saturn-cycle-and-the-great-mutation/

https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2020/11/09/the-jupiter-saturn-cycle-and-the-transition-into-air/

Coming Home To our Emotional Intelligence

Pisces Full Moon + Mercury Retrograde | Saturday 8.10.22 | 4:59am CST

Saturday’s full moon in Pisces serves odyssey energy. This is the feeling of indefinitely long soul searching journeys out at sea. The feeling of homesickness pulses from beneath the surface and we are called to honor our love and faithfulness to the things we’ve lost, or that call to us through the mists of time. There is a yearning that invites us to learn ourselves anew and refresh the way we look through the lens of our imaginations.

Six hours before this full moon, Mercury begins its retrograde (rx) phase, which lasts until oct 2. This indicates a katabasis —which is the Greek word for the mythical descent to the underworld. Mercury transfigures from communicator/messenger who makes things more comprehensible, to the psychopomp who guides us into and through the shadowy murk of hell, much of which is designed to exceed our intellect. Where communications have been smooth, we can expect the ghosts of the past to begin interrupting the present, and because Mercury stationed rx in Libra, we can expect it to get personal. Look to your interactions with your closest allies, friends, lovers, and enemies to find out where you need to pay attention to the past.

A Pisces full moon conjunct Neptune is a pro at projections, so stay aware of this and remember to find multiple outlets for exploring these ghosts and echoes of the past. Both Libra and Pisces thrive through creative acts and imaginative, aesthetic expressions. And everyone thrives when we are conscious of how we project our pasts onto one another. Remember that as much as you may see your past walking around you in the form of your loved and loathed ones, each one of these beings is a full self, also processing their full past. Honor folks in their own odysseys while you honor yourself in yours. Our relationships will be asking for attention and processing; just be sure to give yourself some space to play and laugh and create when those tasks feels crunchy.

The chart of this moon does point to a yearning to remake the self. Mercury stationed rx in close opposition to the currently rx Jupiter in Aries. This is a call to explore entirely different possibilities of who we imagine ourselves to be and how we craft the stories of who we are. How do we expand toward or contract away from one another through the stories we tell? How can we refine those narratives to honor all of the voices that make the story what it is? Remember that movies with flat villains are boring. Flesh out the stories of all the characters who participated in shaping who you are. Through Libra and Pisces we can find avenues of transformative justice, where everyone is given space to transform their behaviors as well as the systems that shaped them.

The feeling of Pisces is distinctly vast. Though it is Virgo season and both Libra and Virgo appreciate containable and manageable units of experience, Pisces humbles us here and brings in servings of emotions that may flood us at times. Often Virgo wants to get control or feel that the path forward is distinct and predictable, but Pisces is an ocean, and it simply cannot offer predictability. 

It then becomes helpful to imagine how Pisces can invite Virgo toward compromise. Explore questions like: what are the realistic steps you can take to get closer to mystery with less overwhelm? What are some practices you can use to get back to a sense of agency in your body when you do become flooded with emotion? How can you create space to metabolize the full range of your emotions?

Ultimately Pisces plunges us into experiences that we have been lulled into forgetting, or that we have buried and dis-membered by forgetting willfully (whether that has occurred through our own choices or the choices of our ancestors). Pisces invites us to re-member. To achieve wholeness by placing back together what has been fragmented, whether the process is painful or pleasant. What Pisces does at its very best is hold space for the emergence of new shapes and beings when what was once discarded is re-integrated.

The Pisces myth follows the story of the innocent Aphrodite and Eros escaping from the destructive monster Typhon. It carries elements of madness, chaos, destruction, escapism, and salvation. We have a vast and shapeshifting narrative arc to explore under this full moon right within our very lives. Staying present with this rather than tuning out or numbing will transform our capacities to connect with ourselves and those around us —human and nonhuman beings alike. By staying connected and present for the full transformative cycle of our inner waters, we come home to the rhythm of our emotional intelligence and learn how to live with our waters rather than keep them at bay.

Language as a Martial Art

Virgo New Moon | Saturday 8.27.22 | 3:17am

A new moon always signals the peace of the fertile void, but none so much as a Virgo new moon, wherein we recall how to anchor into ourselves as the pathway toward serving something larger. It has been a long summer full of humbling and transformative ego work. This new moon calls us inward for rituals of harvesting all we’ve learned and created in the past season. Virgo thrives with intention, methodical devotion, and order, so our baseline here is creating or honoring practices that firmly root our recently learned lessons and refined values into our daily lives.

Ironically, this Virgo moon’s tightest formation is a square to the scrappy chaos magic of Mars in Gemini. These two —chaos and order— may feel at odds, and this weekend may seem like any other when we are tasked with wrangling opposing energies into some form of togetherness. However this event actually foreshadows a denser series of events that will shape the entire fall and winter, and thus gives us an opportunity to set longer-term intentions for integration.

The foreshadowing began last week when Mars entered Gemini on august 20. While Mars usually zips through a zodiac sign in 2 months, the warrior has arrived here for a 7-month stay due to its upcoming retrograde (oct. 30 - jan. 12). Mars’ retrograde is a semi-rare event. Only occurring ever other year, it provocatively transforms our creative energies via these questions: what do you fight for? Why do you fight for it? How do you fight for it?

The tense square between Mars and this weekend’s new moon make this a potent time for cultivating intention and dedication as we prepare for the energetic renovations of this winter’s Mars retrograde. Due to a heavily mercurial set of energies (Virgo moon, Gemini Mars), the most pressing task now is to get present with how you use language to navigate, shape, and cut through yours and others’ experiences —and remember that language is not just words: there are languages of music, the aesthetic, touch, and beyond. Whatever languages you chooses, remember that language is the vehicle we use to move and share our experiences. It is how we connect. Brene Brown calls language “the greatest human portal that we have.” It helps us map our experiences toward or away from one another. It creates the frameworks through which we learn to respect or devalue one another.

With Gemini and Virgo so activated, we want to look to Mercury, who has just arrived in Libra’s connective terrain, and is also preparing to turn retrograde on sept. 9. This indicates that the best use of our language is exactly what you might expect: to ask questions that deepen relationality, cultivate balance and pleasure, and to honor peace and connection.

Mars however will never forget how much it likes to fight, differentiate, and separate. So when we integrate Libran and Martial energies, we the martial arts. In the martial arts of language, we can find this formula: language becomes the tool we use to both identify and respect our differences, and then it becomes the tool by which we build bridges across our differences. The fighter Mars can become a peacekeeper.

During this new moon, what if we spend time learning how to say no to language and categories that don’t fit anymore? What if we try on new, more creative words to describe our selves, our differences, and to determine how we are alike and unalike to each other? What if we can sharpen the language we use without using it as a weapon against each other? What if we cut apart the categories we’ve previously known so we can create new ways of identifying ourselves? What if we create new grammars that help us move through our concepts of the world differently than we have ever been taught to do?

Living Liberated Time

Aquarius Full Moon | Thursday 8.11.22 | 8:35pm CST

Thursday hosts a full supermoon in Aquarius, after a powerfully tense several weeks. This energy is about a transitional breaking point in our journey. Wherever we’re going, today’s moon calls us to transform the methods we use to get there. The quality and the experience of our journey is changing. 

It will be helpful to remember as we make changes to our current journey that most of life is journey, with occasional arrivals at goal points. Focusing too dramatically on distant goals is tempting for Aquarius, but that is because Aquarius tends to enjoy dissociation from the present. Questions we want to ask during this full moon are: how can I enjoy arriving to each moment and challenge within the journey? How can I use my ideals to water my garden without forgetting what else the garden needs for its growth? Does the garden need pruning, harvesting, maybe a little conversation or time spent in joy and relaxation?

This full moon conjuncts Saturn and squares Uranus, so currently we are identifying more with theprocess of integrating Saturnian gravity and maturation. We have the chance now to welcome radical change while challenging the impulsive volatility of Uranus. We can slow down for this full moon, honor our limitations, and let go of control. Instead of control, try honoring commitment and intention.

The Aquarian element of this time calls us to craft new definitions of liberation. What does liberation look like when it is not predicated on hierarchy, exploitation, or the flattening of our differences? What is liberation that is predicated on respect, limitation, and the bonds that tether us to one another in all our highly differentiated selfhoods? For now Leo season continues, and Venus has freshly entered Leo, so one thing we have to remember is that our liberation depends upon our capacities to affirm one another and ourselves.

This is a culmination of a tense summer storm that has taught us how to navigate and hopefully even welcome instability where we have historically been least comfortable with it. Mars will finally begin moving off this tense fixed axis (nodes and Uranus in Taurus/Scorpio, Saturn in Aquarius, Sun and Venus in Leo) by August 19 when it enters Gemini. There it will move until late March ’23 due to the retrograde at the end of this year. This will open up a 6 month chapter of questioning what we fight for and how we fight for it, as well as how we move toward our desires through language. 

What we want to do now in preparation for this transition is to integrate our agency and our desires into how we make plans for change. What do you believe about your ability to shape change? What do your behaviors tell you about your beliefs about shaping change? Can you bring the two closer together?

While we are in the business of welcoming change, it would be wise to look to our beliefs about time because Saturn, whom this full moon tightly conjuncts, is the lord of time. Thanks to the ongoing Saturn Uranus square since last year, we have been pretty continually reveling in the gift of queering time.

We already know that the past is something we often experience as real in the present, but in his book After the Party, Joshua Chambers-Letson makes the point that the future is already alive in the troubled present as well. He helps us remember that we cannot deny the present of the past or the future, both of which are embedded within it.

What does it mean to identify what you want for your future and how you want to feel? What if the only thing between you and what you want is a construct of time put in place by a ruling class that wants to control your time? What if nothing real separates you from now and then?

What if you imagine what you want and how you want to feel, and you begin living it and practicing it now? Try this in bite-size increments first. Spend an hour living as if there was nothing between you and the reality you want to live. The time to live your liberation is now.

As we open doors to this deep register of liberation, remember that the lunar conjunction with Saturn indicates a need for real, clear boundaries with those around us in order to have the capacity to create this kind of liberated time. 

Prentis Hemphill’s wisdom applies: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” Nedra Glover Tawwab also helps us understand what a boundary looks like: “Boundaries are expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships. Expectations in relationships help you stay mentally and emotionally well. Learning when to say no and when to say yes is also an essential part of feeling comfortable when interacting with others.”

With this Full Moon give yourself the gift of affirming your experience, your desires for change, and the boundaries you find when you look within. The more you do this for yourself, the more you can do it for others.

Practicing Our Way Into The Unknown

Capricorn Full Moon | Wednesday | July 13, 2022 | 1:37pm CST

Wednesday’s Capricorn full moon is a step into the brambles, the thickest section of the hedge. Since the portal of this full moon is conjunct hell’s own gatekeeper Pluto, this is a place where there are thorns that will fuck with our flesh. But of our own volition or dragged by the gods, we go in, because the time is now to make sacrifices of our comfort to attend to an ambition, an aspiration.

What we want to be in connection with as we go then, is our aspiration. Did you learn anything about this at the new moon in Cancer two weeks ago? Go see what your heart was yearning for during that time. Now is a culmination of that cycle. The stage lights crackle from the ceiling and shine unapologetically into the eyes of your heart’s desire. There is a show to be put on here, and some things it will require are your truth and your vulnerability.

One theme of that new moon that today’s full moon expands upon was the transient taste of belonging. Belonging that cannot be complete, belonging that we have to build brick by brick. Belonging that we have to create new and innovative structures to house, because we will not find the formulas pre-existing.

That is because a full moon in Capricorn, conjunct Pluto, shows us the failures of pre-existing systems. It shows us which of our practices need the demolition ball, and it shows us how the attachments that keep us from transforming our practices also need renovation. 

Square Chiron in Aries, this full moon moment indicates that our egos need to break. Don’t let the idea of who you should be lead you to fight your own energy. Own your energy, surrender to your energy, and see what shapes you begin creating around you, what kind of conversations arise.

Pluto supports us in alchemizing at deep levels. It helps us connect with change whether we want it or not. If we can dare to want the change, there’s opportunity under these skies to redefine success on our own terms. The definition of success in our own ambitions needs to come from ourselves right now. Locate and distill your own values, and measure your success to that standard.

Processes of change can create conflict between what was and what is becoming. Malidoma Somé offers: “Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.” For any relationship to shift into its depths, we have to tell our truths while also believing the truths others are telling us about themselves. From there we can understand the authentic shape a relationship would like to take, and from there we can begin coding the DNA for its skeleton, as every relationship between you and any entity is an entity in itself.

Venus trines Saturn and squares Neptune. Whatever portals we may begin coltishly stumbling into, with practice we can grow our faith in what we begin building here. There is extra-dimensional access during this time as though a strange wet wind carrying seeds from an elsewhere were breathing something new into the earth. Connect with the unseen, flirt with the impossible. Dream the unknown, and practice your way into it. Rinse, repeat.

With love,
Amalia

The Ebb and Flow of Belonging

Cancer New Moon | Tuesday | June 28 | 9:52pm CST

This Cancer New Moon searches for and cultivates peace amidst the turbulence of the waves that crash into the seashore. It asks for containers to learn the stories our emotions tell us as the tide swells and we ride their potent waves.

In western myth, Cancer gets represented by the sideways-scuttling crab, who lives its life in this liminal zone, ecologically tense, where the sea meets the earth. No one describes this place better than Dionne Brand:

“It’s difficult to live near the sea. It overwhelms. Well, not true. It owns. Your small life is nothing to it. The sea uses everything. Small things like bits of black bottles and rusty bottle tops, smoothed transparent fish, fish bone, cockles against small rocks…The sea can make a tree into spongy bits, it can wear away a button to a shell. It can wash away blood and heal wounds.”

Such is what Cancerian waters invoke. Life not in the sea, but by the sea, where human life longs to be united with the sea, and knows that falling into a total belonging means annihilation.

Because if it does anything, Cancer feels its bonds. It starts low, with the bonds that are essentially umbilical, to the parents, to family, to the bonds our bodies will never forget. Those bonds are eventually cast wider, to those we’ve befriended, those we’ve loved, those we’ve chosen as family, and even those we’ve chose as community.

Like the seashore, bonds are turbulent. We can feel the violence that echoes through them. Birth is violent. A seed pushing its way through the soil is violent. A wave crashing onto earth is violent.

And Cancer is inherently tribal. It lives between the we and the y’all, or if in severe expression, between the us and the them. Cancer feels that there is an us that needs protection and care, whether that’s a community, a family, or an internal family system of parts of a self that need protecting. And if there is any sign willing to cut a bitch to protect a bitch, y’all, it’s Cancer.

This new moon creates supportive challenges to personal growth. It squares Jupiter in Aries, so we have some occasion to expand a little beyond our ego shells, which may have been functioning more like cages. We have to grow beyond who we thought we were into order to become who we are. Of course this can feel like breaking, or like pain.

Registers of “we” here challenge “I,” so see if it’s possible for you to stay humble to your sensations and emotions, and to find the language to share them with others. Venus in Gemini sextiles Jupiter, and there could literally not be a better aspect to facilitate relationality around the expansion of our sense of self.

How does Venus in Gemini facilitate this relationality? It makes it easier for us to ask each other questions about our experiences, and try out new language with which to represent our personal experiences more accurately.

Perhaps you can begin curating questions to ask yourself and your loved ones. What does this pain of breaking open feel like for you? How do you experience growth beyond your own edges?

These questions and capacities for learning are particularly important at this time because Cancer can forget that in the context of togetherness, individuation still has to happen. So within our togetherness, we need to make space to learn about our particularities and differences. Not everyone experiences the same events in the same way; nonetheless we need to be able to hold ourselves and each other when events occur.

Another quality of Cancer is nostalgia. It’s very easy for Cancer to be so in love or in loops with memory that it forgets to recognize the present as something different from the past.

(If y’all know anything about me it’s that I like to queer time and time travel and revel in how the past is fundamentally present. And so is the future. But we can still differentiate between them.)

The myth Cancer likes to fall for is that if you stay in the past by excessively running its narratives or trying to solve its problems, you’ll finally find belonging.

This can look like identifying the same story around you all the time, and asking yourself what ifs. As in, if I could just figure out how never to experience this traumatizing circumstance again, I will finally belong with myself and others.

First, it’s important to normalize that. That is you responding to how you desired to live in the past, even when your annihilation was near you. Your organism has always had this desire to live. You can cherish that.

And what you can do now is ask yourself, what does it look like to respond to that desire to live now? In the present.

It’s very ok to not know. The courage to not know is admirable, and it’s made more available through the Aries Jupiter - Gemini Venus sextile. Beautifully, this aspect in the chart also directs us to a first step, already mentioned above, namely: explore language. Natalie Diaz once said “Language is one of our desires to live.” 

You can expand your concept of languages, just like you’re letting your life, your concept of self, and all your relations expand. Explore the language of words, of grammars, the language of emotion, the language of touch, the language of symbols, of the birds, the frogs, the beyond. Can you get to know them through questions?

As you go, remember that Cancer exists in the ebb and flow of belonging. It knows that we have to be careful of the alluring sea and its obliterating riptides. It knows that every umbilical cord is severed and remains so. Cancer knows no belonging can be complete without the disappearance of the self. Finding our way back home is never a repetition of what was once belonging. It’s the creation of a new and different experience of belonging. Finding belonging can feel like a sweet and lulling memory, and it can feel disastrously uncomfortable because it isn’t a memory. So with this moon let us learn how to intend and eventually build containers safe enough to expand into new experiences of I, us, and we.

With love,
Amalia

The Names Of Desire | Gemini New Moon | Monday | 5.30.22 | 6:30am

“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” - Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury

The Gemini new moon brings with it the joys of following curiosity and playing with names. It invites us to heretically forego names, maps, and systems of knowledge as we’ve inherited and known them. With that release, a portal opens into regions of ourselves we’ve been waiting to explore and name as our own.

In healthy Gemini fashion, we can let curiosity leads us onward here. Thanks to Mercury’s ongoing retrograde and a seductive glance from Neptune, we may find ourselves in the presence of the illusions and narratives that have kept us wound up and spinning circles. Luckily the friendly aspect between Mercury and Neptune also offers helpful ways of approaching these illusions. We could imagine them from a different vantage point, say as a film projected onto a screen, instead of as fear/fantasy projected onto other beings. We can see how illusions may operate for us and how those narratives may have become stuck in the past, and over the course of this lunar cycle we can contemplate and choose our narratives carefully to create a new present reality. Any intentions you set for these changes get a boost from the sextile the Mars Jupiter conjunction makes to this moon, so keep your pen and paper nearby today, and record your inspirations.

About this Mars Jupiter conjunction, it may tempt us to throw ourselves into overdrive. You may want to go fast and hard but frankly, from a full-sky perspective, this is not the time. Thanks to Mercury still retrograding, the moon being dark, and Neptune casting beguilingly glamorous daydreams upon us at all hours, for the next 2 or 3 days we’ll fare better by going slowly and bending deadlines as far away from ourselves as possible.

Instead, as the polymorphous being of Eros comes out through Mars and Jupiter, cultivate Gemini’s hidden talent for listening and learning. Get curious about what you feel, and after deep listening, seek out conversations about what you learn.

See what it means to explore the regions beyond how you’ve been conditioned to repress desire, because in the way that a solar system organizes around the sun, you can trust that the organism of your body will organize around desire. Resistance and repression do little for you or your environment. This is a rich time to locate the mysterious seeds of your desire, and to name them in ways you’ve never heard them named. If you have to resist something, resist the binary, capitalistic framework that has been naming our desires for us for centuries.

The contemplative days surrounding the dark moon also help us to trust that the changes necessary to bring our desires to fruition will begin happening their own pace. The task of creating change is not all on your shoulders. Mutable Gemini facilitates change with ease, and puts us in conversation with Octavia Butler, who dreamed through the religion of Earthseed that god is change. Patterns that need to change will, and as you set intentions, rest assured that support will come to you through the many beings all around you. Writing from the voice of her ancestors, Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote “there is no you i don’t surround.” Can you feel that you are and always will be held by beings who want you, and your evolving process of becoming, to be here?

A note on the theme of pleasure as it plays out through June: Taurus currently hosts Mercury, Uranus, and Venus, who traipses queenly through these verdant fields. This sphere of the sky is Venus’ own dimension, her hometown as it were. She knows how to resource here, and as her basket becomes heavy with all she gathers, what she goes home to create is a deeply relational pleasure, wherein all the beings she invites to be around her can be involved in the co-creation of gratification. And in Gemini season, when things proliferate, we can be sure there will be many conversations and moments of co-creation to be had, with our human an non-human companion alike.

While we chatter with these many beings, Mercury’s current square to Saturn creates the tension necessary to renew the ways that we cultivate conversations. Renegotiate how you interact with the voices that tend to block you from feeling pleasure. Reassess what pleasures you’ve indulged in historically that tend to block you from being authentically relational. See what it means to stage conversations in which every voice, including yours, is laterally respected as equal. No hierarchies.

Throughout June, Venus invites us on a pilgrimage toward our pleasure. Encounters with these pleasure-centric conversations will only multiply throughout the month, and so will your capacity to listen and affect change as desired.

Happy listening, happy naming,
Amalia

Where Freedom Stirs | Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio | Sunday 5.15.22 | 11:14pm CST

Tonight the skies offer up a total lunar eclipse. The event will be visible from the western hemisphere, a revelatory moment where the sky’s theatrics are on full display. From where I am in New Orleans (CST), this event peaks around 11pm. Convert to your time zone and see if you can witness this event.

The astrological and mythic stories that contextualize this event match its visual theatricality.

The Vedic myth that describes eclipses details this: a dragon demigod is seeking the elixir of immortality that’s getting churned up during the creation of the universe. This stuff is called amrit. The dragon is caught in the act of drinking the amrit, and a god (Vishnu, preserver/protector of the universe) smites our demigod by cutting him in half. The demigod, already immortal having drunk the immortality-bestowing amrit, is placed in the sky as two points perfectly opposite each other: Rahu, the head of the dragon, and Ketu, the tail (or ass) of the dragon. These points are known to western astrologers as the north node (Rahu, head) and south node (Ketu, ass). When the luminaries (the Sun and the Moon) pass over these points, the head or the tail of our dragon are said to swallow, digest, and release the luminary.

Tonight’s event is a south node/Ketu lunar eclipse in Scorpio. This means the Moon is passing over/through/into the ass of the dragon. The idea here is release. What are we releasing?

Eclipses are times when we’re seeking the elixir of immortality, or at least remembering our perilous ancestral journeys to do so. The nervous system may be running high, and feelings of linear time may collapse. We may be feeling caught in the particularly Scorpionic struggle of defending ourselves against possible loss, death, or danger. These are emotions and sensations that cause us to sweat and stress. They can snare us into the binary thinking that there is only life or death, loss or gain, light or dark, legal or illegal.

However there is much in between, and one of those in-between things is shadow. Eclipses are the product of shadow: they’re a living mythology of light and shadow that play out several times each year, when the shadow of the earth swallows the moon, or the shadow of the moon blocks the light of the sun. Planetary bodies display tricks of the eye, create spectacle, flirt with representations of life and death, beauty and terror.

During eclipses, shadows are out to play. So, what happens when we play with the shadows?

Let us play then, and meditate on shadow, a strange in-between thing. Shadow is attached to all beings, it’s attached to light and matter, which are necessary for life; is shadow alive? Shadow is attached to bodies; is it part of the body? Shadow seems immaterial, but somehow also, not. You can feel your skin raise and prickle when shadow passes over you. You and all the earth-bound creatures can feel when a shadow swallows up the moon or sun.

Shadow is a little creepy, it can make our skin crawl. Shadows hide things. How do we become intentional about what our shadow is hiding? Because when a shadow falls on something or someone around us and that thing or someone is made less visible, we can trick ourselves into thinking they’re not there, or that they’re less real. Be careful of falling for illusions of “otherness,” of something that, because it’s been made less visible by your shadow, is now something the egoic impulse can name as not-you and against which you can measure yourself.* In studying your shadow, choose carefully where you cast it. You can always move over a few inches to see what is behind your shadow. When you do, just as the shadow of the earth reveals the moon to us anew tonight, you’ll be able to familiarize yourself with the mysteries and brilliance of a whole being you might have forgotten was there.

And now, as ever, be careful to notice upon which bodies power-holding institutions are casting their shadows. Go in and meet others in the shadows. Remember from there that being in the shadow does not subtract your sovereignty over your mind and body, and that no matter what agency any body claims over yours, you still cast a shadow where things go bump in the night, and where your freedom stirs.

Shadows hide things, so cultivate curiosity about what you are hiding out of reflex, and think carefully about what you want to hide intentionally, and from whom. Hiding can be a necessary act of protecting the vulnerable. Scorpio wants to know who your body can trust, and with whom you can let go to share in the connective act of holding vulnerability.

So again, what are we releasing? One way of perceiving this is that we are releasing into the shadow. There is no escaping the shadow, the eerie in-between that evades definition or capture. There is no escaping our fugitive parts of self. So my proposal is this: can you care for your fugitivity, and care for the fugitivity of those around you who are also in process of breaking their chains and creating their freedoms? With compassion, can you let your shadows merge, and see how movements gestate there in that darkness? Can you let these movements grow into bodies that create shadows of their own?

To our becomings through eclipsing,

Amalia

The Gestation of Ideals: Full Moon in Virgo 2019

Full Moon in Virgo | Tuesday, February 19
0 degrees | 9:53am CST

Virgo: the functionary of the zodiac. Humble, patient, and diligent, its agenda is literally just to get things right. With Tuesday’s Full Supermoon at 0 degrees, Virgo’s athletic commitment to the regeneration and the maintenance of ideals is robustly lit up. This Full Moon offers the hope and optimistic belief in our own creative capacity to work toward whatever it is that matters most to us, whatever makes us feel most connected in this existence.

Virgo is the only sign in the zodiac associated with a female humanoid figure. This full, round, 0 degree Moon reflects back the image of a pregnant mother. She knows the mysteries of the womb, creating the order and stability required to gestate new life and usher it into its full expression. Though she curates order, Virgo is fully aware of the importance of inspiration. To become more than routine, Virgo needs to make action in the name of something vast, and so she draws from the abstract pools of her counterpart, Pisces’ multidimensional unity consciousness, the infinite web of connection permeating reality. Virgo’s own ruler, Mercury, sits conjunct hypnotic Neptune in Pisces, strengthening our access to this infinite wellspring of the collective consciousness, and offering up treasures from the deep.

Jupiter, however, strong as ever in Sagittarius, squares Neptune and Mercury. This is a big signature that speaks in strokes so broad the mind literally has to bend to perceive its meaning. Mercury conjunct Neptune in Pisces opens the aperture of our minds so that the amount of ambient psychic energy being processed is much higher than usual. But with the king of the skies, giant Jupiter, squaring this otherworldly Piscean duo, how we handle this information is very important. Psychic information, which comes from a transpersonal web of connection, is all too easy to confuse with projected emotional information, which comes from our hormonal responses to stimuli. Failing to sort through what’s what would directly violate Virgo’s civilized code of conduct, thus debilitating the magic of this Moon.

Robert Fludd | Light Flowing Forth From Darkness | 1617 |bsourced via archive.org

This Moon wants you to see clearly. It wants you to sort through your emotional landscape so that whatever is gestating within you has the space to come into the world. Check yourself and see where you’ve been humbled and where you’ve been empowered in manifesting your creative and relational visions since Winter Solstice. With Pisces Season beginning, we’re moving toward the Spring Equinox now. It’s time to start walking the line between light and dark and seeing how our strategies have worked and which have to be discarded or reworked. There’s no rush now: patience is our virtue of the day, and clear unbiased vision.

While patience is the order of the day, the skies don’t let us off easy with this Moon. The chart of the Full Moon has heavy-handed aspects that make our emotional and creative investments out to be the most loaded areas of our psyches. Venus, lady of love, beauty, and art, conjuncts the two gods of hellfire and brimstone in austere Capricorn, Saturn and Pluto, as well as the South Node, which purges. Few other signatures could make it as glaringly obvious that we need to make space for some chats with the shadow sides of our habits in relating to ourselves and others. While the Neptune-Mercury combo bring out the most spiritualized of experiences, the Venus-Saturn-Pluto bunch bring out base emotions like fear, greed, resistance, and jealousy. In relation to ourselves, our creativity, and to others, we can expect to see the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves. Such an ambitious Capricornian signature asks us to accept the challenge to reconcile these aspects.

Fortunately, Virgo loves to master and perfect. Her strongest skill is in sorting through material so that the best can come through. And Virgo, Mercury-ruled, is heady. She likes nothing less than to sacrifice her loftier principles for her animal impulses. Base emotions have to be acknowledged and processed, but it would devastate Virgo to let these emotions run totally loose and dictate the way we live our lives. Categorically accurate, this sign reminds us that while we live in animal bodies, we’re no longer just animals. Humans are hybrid beings, straddling planes of existence, and exploring the farthest reaches of free will and agency.

Harnessing agency and making conscious choices in our every relational move is the deep work of this Full Moon, and the secret to getting there is Capricornian pragmatism. Listen carefully for what works and what doesn’t in nurturing your sense of connection, and engage only the patterns that help you to move through and grow from emotional intensity. All patterns that keep you stuck in the intensity become material to purge.

This is a portal Moon. While your feathers may be ruffled by the Venus-Saturn-Pluto grouping, the Mercury-Neptune conjunction forms a tight sextile to it, supporting us in channeling higher consciousness when we meet with conflict in the 3D. This means that we can breathe into chaos, welcoming the wind it blows into our sails, and look to the bigger meaning without dragging conflict out. Stay proactive by sorting and organizing the meaning of your experiences, and remember to leave space in your organizational scheme for the unknown to surprise you. Allow yourself to move step by step, A to B instead of A to Z.

Let this Moon expand your awareness. Let it show you the full range of your motivations so that you become less of a stranger to yourself. Take time to organize your inner experiences but move right along to focus your attention on your growth process as you accept and meet challenges. Sort the wheat from the chaff; give yourself permission to be the best you can be. With a Virgo Full Moon, getting aligned with the tenderness of your growth potential will come as a relief.

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The Mediator of Many Worlds | New Moon in Aquarius 2019

New Moon in Aquarius | February 4, 2019
15 degrees | 3:03pm CST

“Every microcosm, every inhabited region, has a Centre; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all.” - Mircea Eliade

Today a New Moon occurs precisely in the middle of Aquarius. After a powerfully transformational lunar cycle of eclipse-instigated extremism, this New Moon re-orients us toward a quiet place. It calls us back to center, the purely spacious aspect of ourselves that mediates neutrally in the midst of radical change. This is a sacred place that shows a human the depth of dignity and creative power available to them.

Aquarius is a very human sign: its archetypes include the alien and exile as well as the crowd-seeking humanitarian. It craves both solitary individuation and the kind of manifestation that results only from social engagement. Aquarius wants us to ferry ourselves between worlds, solitary and social, inner and outer, literal and imaginal.

Mercury sits very close to this New Moon, so all things changeable and mercurial are afoot. It may be a challenge to stay grounded into the present because so much is shifting and so many perspectives are available, but it’s a challenge well worth taking up. Mercury’s strength in this portion of Aquarius is in building bridges between seemingly disparate worlds. The gift this placement offers is an unusual grace in mediating between our own perspectives and the perspectives of those with whom we enter into connection. If we can stay present with the fact that there is always an in-between space in our connections with others, we can build the appropriate bridges to link those shores. 

Staying present, centered, and aligned with your highest self in the midst of conflict allows you to develop the mental fortitude that can remove all blocks that separate you from allowing all potentials to exist, including the ones you most desire. It’s important now to get clear on what you believe about yourself, and how substantially you believe in your best self. With Pluto and Saturn on the South Node, it’s increasingly crucial that we purge any disbelief in our personal power to manifest our creative visions into 3-dimensional reality.

Kate Bush | Art by Daria Hlazatova | www.dariahlazatova.com | sourced via Instagram

Jupiter in Sagittarius supports this Moon via sextile. This is an aspect that permeates the air with the vibrant scent of world-expansion. Our mental and emotional landscapes are unfolding to reveal new possibilities. The main thing now is not to block those possibilities, and to refrain from acts of desperation or grasping at the possibilities we want most. Maintaining an open heart in the present is infinitely more important that fixing our minds on a specific outcome.

Just before the New Moon, Venus shifts gears from her Sagittarian academy into the mountains of Capricorn. This shift calls us to look at the difference between theory and applied knowledge. Venus in Capricorn loves to implement structure. We’ve been learning about intelligent, broad-minded modes of connecting and creating, and we need to allow ourselves to begin organizing our resources and applying them efficiently. You may need to reassess your commitments and create new schedules to accommodate for the novel energies entering your life. Be willing to get innovative in how you structure your day-to-day. Learning how to manage your energy resources so that you can stay connected to your center will yield abundant results now. The fertility of your present moment depends on how you feed the soil.

Currently the wounded healer Chiron is at the final degree of Pisces, preparing to start a new turn around the zodiac when it enters Aries on February 18. This final degree of a sign is called the anaretic degree, the degree in which something comes to a head and must decide how to transform itself. In this case, we’re facing a pivotal moment in which we must release a long cycle of learning how to heal ourselves and our communities. Though the methods of healing we’ve already developed may have worked in the past, we will need to learn new methods now. There may be confusion about how to heal situations at this time, but be open to trying new techniques and experimenting with innovative strokes of genius coming from yourself or other developed individuals. Empower yourself by nurturing your capacity to re-evaluate from the present moment and create totally new vehicles to move yourself forward.

New Moons always invoke darkness and mystery. Remember that above all, you don’t need to stretch yourself so much that you overcompensate or strain your energetic resources. Plant intentions that pave the way for your best self to take the stage, and rest. These are the tools that will bring you closest to the center from which you can mediate between all worlds and create the most connected experience available.

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The Liberty to Pursue Truth | Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Leo 2019

Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Leo | January 20, 2019
0 degrees | 11:16pm CST

“Still, as humans, we want truth. Our stories, our courthouses, our lives, our contemporary anxieties and depressions are all searches full with this desire. Humans want truth the way water desires to be sea level and moves across the continent for the greater ocean.” - Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World

Sunday night’s Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Leo is a fixed sign Moon in a sky heavy with cardinal planets. It grants us access to something that, perhaps despite our knowing, has held on tenaciously to its presence in our lives. What reveals itself as fixed within us is represented by the Leo Moon: our individual, creative wills grappling fiercely for expression. With five planets in cardinal signs and the Eclipse event occurring at 0 degrees of Leo, we’re witnessing enormous seed energy. Something begins: our souls embark toward the untrammeled creative expression that propels our existence in these bodies.

Not much that is untrue will stand the test of this Lunar Eclipse. Secrets will be released; the knowledge that had previously hidden from the light will be fully revealed on the other side of this portal. Whatever organisms up until now have been resisting this movement toward truth will be thrown off, and a true death will be invited. 

The Ant Nebula | sourced via hubblesite.org

A true death means that nothing stands between the thing that has died and its ultimate transformation. This Eclipse in Leo craves the full death of the old structures of power that have resisted the scope of truth that accounts for all of the drama of life, from seed to star to dust. This Eclipse wants each of us to arrive at our completely unique presence, the kind of presence that allows an individual to know how they are going to respond to something, as informed only by their radically unique will.

This kind of death is a door to the only magic that can create a coherent world from many: it opens to totally authentic self-expression. Every being has its purpose. All it needs is to express itself. That is truth.

Collectively we have been dismantling old structures of power for many years now, in a heightened sense since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008. Letting these old architectures die has required every tool available. We’ve reflected on the global inequity wrought by now-crumbling institutions; we’ve reflected on how we’ve internalized these structures of power; we’ve adopted self-care and self-reflection rituals; we’ve expressed some of the ugliest most buried truths; we’ve done it in privacy and stillness, and we’ve done it through the dramatically rapid-speed and impactful platform of social media: we’ve used every tool available. We have been learning to peaceably destroy so that we can create the new. We have begun bending our minds to experience beliefs that outstrip the notions these old structures of power instilled in us. We have learned to leave behind the voices telling us to turn our consciousness away from this warm animal body, and to hear the new voice snaking through the sky: your own, pure and true.

This Eclipse offers us a powerful opportunity to witness the shadow material that has come to light since our Capricorn Eclipse on January 5, and to respond to the material in ways previously unavailable. Whatever had you resisting your life force in the past is in its death throes now, with or against your wishes. With very little container withholding us from being exactly who we wish to be, we’re too eager now to create. To dance off the cuff to a rhythm that locates us entirely in the present. We see linear time wanting to step back to witness us. We are seen, totally and completely, for who we are, which is exactly who we wish to be.

Remember. Your own witness is all there will ever be. You see through the eyes of an infinity of moons and suns. There is no separation between you and the stars you witness. Your perception takes you to every corner of existence. Perceive yourself as you are, which is exactly as Soul wishes to be.

Illustration from the Juniper Tree, Grimm’s Fairy Tales | sourced via Pinterest

Fairy tales tell us that when something dies, its story can be told beautifully enough to change the hearts of the living. Letting the old version of yourself die, letting ineffective system die creates the space for the kind of story that creates new life, with all its ensuing wilderness. When we make space for new stories, we make new chaos. The prayer to send up is that we stay more connected and responsive as the wilderness shows itself in every moment.

Eclipse seasons encourage us to purge. To unload what keeps us from connecting to truth. Truth, of course, isn’t motionless. It reveals itself through the drama of life. Resistance to the truth is all we’re asked to purge. The resistance to motion, to drama, to birth and death. Without this resistance we flow into truth as water “moves across the continent for the greater ocean.” 

Remember Luna makes no promises that everything will become obvious. She simply invites us to look. This Eclipse is a supermoon, which means the Moon is closer to the Earth than usual, revealing as much as she can. Her proximity helps us to take the blinds from our eyes and look up to truth as our soul’s reflection goes dark, and returns to reflect the light just a little more clearly. In gratitude for the invitation, give the gift you were put here to give: with all of your heart, express what you witness.

*This Eclipse will be visible from North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

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Death and the Maiden | New Moon Solar Eclipse in Capricorn 2019

New Moon Solar Eclipse in Capricorn | January 5, 2018
15 degrees | 7:28pm CST

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

There is a classical motif in which a maiden explores a territory, usually a carefree landscape, a place where she can gather flowers and reflect on her own internal wealth, externalized by a springtime scene. In this image suddenly, beneath her very feet, the ground maws open. Death shows his face, and beckons or abducts the girl into his somber world.

The fascinating thing about the Death and the Maiden motif is that it matures through its recurrence. While the girl is beckoned into the underworld, she always returns to her springtime landscape, only to cycle back toward her journeys through the underworld, accompanied alone by her added layers of perspective.

We can apply this vision to the return of Eclipse Season. Our last sequence of Eclipses in July and August gave us enormous trials and breakthroughs in staying centered amongst inflammatory environments. The many months of retrograde-filled skies that followed escorted us through the polarized abysses of our personal underworlds, and we’ve seen ourselves adapt to these environments. While rest and rehabilitation are in order, our tests of endurance are not over. We’ve come to a place of perspective, but the shifts we’ve undergone in the past months through our journeys have primarily shown us just how much we can actually do, and therefore how much we have left to do. We’re just getting started with our world-building. As Capricorn likes to remind us, we’ve built these muscles to use them.

Intensely Capricornian, today’s New Moon partial Solar Eclipse focuses the lens in on several long-term cycles that will come to a close in 2020. From now until the end of that year, we will be resolutely refining our capacities to bend the structures of our world to our spiritual advantage, building the new realities we most need to see in the world around us. Every step along the way, Capricorn will be offering its gifts, teaching us how to become increasingly grounded, disciplined, and focused without disservicing the soul’s presence in the body.

Capricorn Constellation | sourced via Pinterest

Capricorn is the sea-goat, the ultimate earth-extremophile, fearlessly navigating the deepest currents of the sea and scaling the highest mountains in one fell swoop. Capricorn constantly cycles between the delicate beauty of the foothill’s wildflowers and the shallow sea’s reefs, and the cold hells the mountaintop’s thin air and the ocean floor’s darkness. In short, the language of Capricorn’s gifts is both exhilarating and terrifying, affirming us in the wildest moments of accomplishment, and rigidly barring the way where survival is unworkable. Capricorn’s are heavy gifts, ones that ask us to walk the line between the ascendancy of what we care for, and its death. 

We must be very careful now to focus attention on our real values because Saturn, the Master of this Capricorn Eclipse, sits very close to the Moon and Sun during the event, and Saturn binds us to whatever it is that we truly value. So get clear on what it is that you value, and what internal structures connect you to these values. Which structures have trapped you in the past, and which contribute to the liberation of your creative energy? Organize yourself by getting an understanding of your ambitions and which bonds actually help you work toward them.

Following value systems, Saturn brings our attention to hierarchies, a frequently abused subject. Hierarchy is easy to get wrong because many of us mistakenly perceive personal power as something sourced from outside ourselves, when in fact the power that permeates all of Being is sourced from within. Knowing that the path of your own instinctive, creative energy is the most loving gift you can offer the world, think about what the fire in your heart propels you toward. If you make those things your first commitments, what are you willing to sacrifice to get there? Now is a time to allow for a radical restructuring of your personal hierarchy of ambitions and bonds.

Whether or not you have to reorganize, don’t forego the hierarchy. Having a structured understanding of your priorities will prove hugely useful as you move forward from this point in time.

With the Sun eclipsing in Capricorn, there’s a spotlight shining brightly on what works and what doesn’t. Inefficiency and ineffectiveness are under scrutiny now. The project of releasing ineffective methods previously employed by your ego is most important. So get with it: decompose the ego structures that just haven’t worked for you. With Eclipses, if we can let go of what doesn’t serve while nurturing the highest intention of welcoming in what does, then the work is 95% done. If you don’t know yet what structures will serve you in the future, keep your eyes open, and before you know it you’ll encounter the strategies that will pave the road you’ll soon be walking. Where we find ourselves then will be infinitely more supple than where we were.

With all of this in mind, remember to stay restful and low-key in the days surrounding this Eclipse. Eclipse energies are exhaustingly potent. With a supportive sextile to this Eclipse from Neptune in Pisces, you’ll want to respect whatever boundaries are necessary to help you hone in on metaphysical reflection. Buoyant Jupiter squares Neptune, and Mars in Aries squares Mercury who is newly ingressed into Capricorn, so the unhealthy impulse may be to overextend and spiral outward chaotically into assumed “responsibilities” to avoid the intensity of the soul’s efforts to reorganize and clear out the internal landscape to make space for something more joyful. 

The reality of this Eclipse is that on a very personal level we’re processing the dissonance of global end times. The architecture of value, the methods of securing resources, and the structures our societies are built upon are in the midst of massive historical decay and shift. If we don’t take the time to turn attention inward and build an order of loving-kindness amongst ourselves, our environments, and those closest to us, we continue sowing seeds of chaos. So stay present with yourself and the world you create every day from your own resources. These are the perspectives you need to carry with you into the underworlds.

Sandro Botticelli | Pallas and the Centaur | 1418 | sourced via Wikimedia.com

While hard work continues to permeate the air, we have a very positive ingress to look forward to in two days’ time. Venus will enter Sagittarius, where she brings a kaleidoscopic array of color and momentum into the realm of intimate and creative energies. While today is a time for deep-sea diving and building new internal orders, by and by we’ll be revealing the new colors that we’ve found therein, organically establishing new social orders, borne from the most authentic body politic that can exist: a community of self-creating individuals.

Ultimately the strange beauty of the Death and the Maiden motif is that the maiden comes to embrace Death when he arrives. She welcomes her time in the underworld, knowing her power there. With no dread or resistance, she fluidly navigates the multifaceted layers of her existence, harnessing her agency to build a new world from wherever she goes.

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The Homing Beacon: Full Moon in Cancer and Winter Solstice 2018

Full Moon in Cancer | December 22, 2018
0 degrees | 9:48am PST

Full Moons fall right in the middle of a lunar cycle. While New Moons are what we associate with beginnings and Full Moons are usually culminations, for several reasons this Full Moon has eked out its own title not only as a culmination but as a good beginning as well.

Taking place shortly after the Winter Solstice and at 0 degrees of Cancer, this Full Moon signals a moment of birth: the opportunity to nurture in new and previously unexplored ways, and to redefine the way in which we come home.

This is a time of year when we ritually reflect on the previous cycle and look to new beginnings, but this Moon lends the Solstice a particularly powerful spaciousness, as though the unknown is hungry to reveal itself and the most pertinent work for us is to caringly witness the shapes coming through the night.

Cancer, whose landscape we’ll be exploring under the light of this Full Moon, cares unconditionally. Her mother archetype shows us how to get curious about what goals will actually nurture us at the basic level where soul meets body and ancestral lines are healed. Nurturance will remain a critical theme for a good 18 months to come, because this Moon also brings in the themes of the new nodal axis: Cancer and Capricorn. While the Moon is too far away from the Node in Cancer to eclipse now, she still flags us onward into the evolutionary theme that the next year and a half of eclipse seasons will unravel.

Image by Enoki Toshiyuki

That theme is the polarity between home and work, Cancer and Capricorn. Between inner life and how we give of ourselves to the outside world. Between fertile self-nurturance and community-improving industry. As we approach this Solstice and Full Moon, it will come easily to molt old habits of mind that have held us back from most effectively translating our inner lives into something truly world-building, thanks to lucky Jupiter and Mercury conjunct in Sagittarius.

Saturn sits within range but at a healthy distance from the Sun, sharing his medicine without necessarily indulging his fondness for the tactics of the extremophile. His maturity here graces us with structure as we approach Cancer’s watery intuition. And he’s right, a structured approach to the molting process is necessary at some point. To do this properly we need to get clear on two questions: “How does my home life feed my work?” and “How does my work feed my home life?”

If home is the safe space from which you can care for yourself, what is home to you? Start with your abstract awareness as home and extend outward to your body and headspace. How can you make them feel safe to you? And from there, home becomes a shapeshifting display of an individuals’ feathers. “A house isn’t a home” necessarily. Is it your daily practices, your family? Is it your house, your garden, or the open road? Cave swiftlets create their nests from their own saliva. Give yourself an open field to define what home is to you. What does it need to serve your self-nurturance best? Does it need new spacial or energetic dimensions, more or less of other people’s energies?

Albrecht Durer | Portrait of the Artist Holding A Thistle | 1493 | Inscription: “My affairs follow the course allotted to them on high”

And work? If your work is the gift you naturally give to the world excluding the question of money, acknowledge it. What do you do like its your job, like you were put here to do it? Write poetry? Metalwork? Impeach the president, or offer acts of kindness? If you’ve got nothing you like doing industriously already, then fantasize about it. What would make you eager to get to work, what are you good at? And how do you want to get paid for it? In recognition, praise, money, or skill trade? What kind of pay do you need to create a mutually symbiotic relationship between this work and the home explored above?

You’ll want to workshop these ideas from the privacy of safe home space so you can make a sustainable plan to move forward without rushing into it from fight or flight impulses. Remember this is Winter Solstice and Saturn’s eye is upon us. It’s a time to be internal. From here you mark your start line, but be sure to take ample time to warm up in your dream space. Getting your ideas clear now will give you excellent and timely material to work with over the next year and a half. A 0 degree Moon signals no rush.

A good note to make in your introspective hours is that Mars is edging into conjunction with Chiron in Pisces, urging us to discover how we best defend and care for our wounds within ourselves and our societies. Check in and see who actually needs resources and has gotten none. Start small and remember that this goes for your inner child or inner parent, as well as your friends and neighbors with less privilege than yourself. If you can go there, whatever fire was lacking will ignite.

Neptune in Pisces and Venus in Scorpio are sextiling Saturn and trining one another as well, so we have a nice current of energy flowing into acts of creativity that require us to translate our inner worlds into a 3D one. The Jupiter-Mercury conjunction gives the mind extremely rich tools with which to create new realities, so look within for how you’re going to make your new world. With the Moon peaking in fullness from her own domicile Cancer, our lunar functions of creativity and connection are flowing and can easily gather momentum now.

May you meet yourself with the magic of a love ethic this Solstice, and may the Full Moon in Cancer guide you home. Blessings.

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Choosing Your Fate: New Moon in Sagittarius 2018

New Moon in Sagittarius | Dec. 6, 2018
15 degrees | 11:20pm PST

“KAY: I think that world peace is when two people start a conflict, and if it turns into a war then one day the war will finish, and after the war finishes, one of them will agree with the other and then it will be peaceful for a while until the next conflict.
EMMA: So, we have peace, and then conflict. Is that what you are saying? Is there some reason for that?
KAY: I think we have conflict, because without conflict our world would be no wrong answers and then everyone would agree and you wouldn’t need an education and stuff, because there is only one answer.
EMMA: What would one answer be like? What if there was just one answer?
KAY: No choice.” 

-Interview with Kay, a 10-year-old from China, included in The Divine Child by Dr. Emma Farr Rawlings

“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.” - Carl Jung

During the Renaissance, when mythology reigned in the imaginations of authoritative culture-makers, the dictionary definition of the word jovial was: “under the influence of the planet Jupiter.” What the word means, like the planet’s archetype signifies, is those of “good humor” and “good nature.” Thursday night’s New Moon takes place in Sagittarius, just a short distance from Jupiter himself. It is a jovial moon. It asks us to bring forth the best within our natures.

Jupiter has plenty of pleasant associations, among them blessings, luck, courage, expansion, fertility, optimism, exuberance, abundance. The list goes on. But one feature we don’t always bring into the conversation about Jupiter, who was traditionally the “king of the gods,” is that in his hands laid fate. The words Jupiter and fate were synonymous in Virgil’s Aeneid. This god decided the outcome of our hero’s lives.

The question of fate is a hard one, but let us suffice to say here that free will does exist since we definitely experience it. Of course in reality, shit happens, much out of our control. The space between the way things go and the way we choose to take action in the world is the space in which our fate resides.

We might conceive of magnanimous Jupiter’s hands as holding that space. If you want to choose the shape of your fate in your own hero’s journey, you can work with the stars by appealing to Jupiter, especially since the luminaries are currently in such incredibly good graces with him at this time. The strongest approach you can take toward Jupiter is to model yourself after this archetype. Recognize where you can be generous and where you can appeal to the generosity of others. Share your insight, your time, and whatever resources you feel safe to share and let others share theirs with you. Framing your mind and actions around positive Jupiter experiences like abundance, expansion, spaciousness, togetherness, etc. is particularly likely to take now, and alter your reality in a long-term way.

Art by Alessandro Sicioldr | http://www.sicioldrart.com

Since the conversation between the Sun and the Moon this month begins from a place where perspective is available, just be sure to get some. It will come easily. Sagittarius is the sign that houses wisdom, perspective, far-and-wide horizons, and education. It allows you to find your bird’s eye view. Journal or have conversations with trusted friends or counselors. Educate yourself on what matters to you. Look for an elevated view so that you can consider all aspects of yourself. Your happiness, your sanity, your health, your inner and your outer lives. Once you can see the complex map that brings all of these facets of your Self together, you will see the topographical reality of what you’re dealing with. It’s from here that you should begin making choices.

As you look at yourself, don’t be afraid of Mystery. This Moon is squared by an exact Mars-Neptune conjunction in Pisces, which is quite intense. This is about the body re-learning to house and defend the spiritual nature of the human reality, which acknowledges and then quests for the unknown. Stress most certainly has a place in this picture: the Unknown is not the most logical bedfellow to sanity and safety. While our inner children might feel increasing delight, our inner parents may feel concern for just how complex this map really is.

We will need to be careful of this tension because with Mars in the land of Mystery, the prevailing mood surrounding the Unknown could go one of two ways. Either we fear and fight against Mystery because it shows us where we’re vulnerable, or we fight for the liberty to be in right relationship with Mystery. At all costs now, do not numb out. Witness yourself with your own personal mysteries included, as Mystery will always have a very important place on your map, and that is under the X that marks the spot. It’s the buried treasure, and who knows what treasure actually lies under there? From here, it doesn’t matter. You’ll have much to explore on your map, but as Sagittarius knows best, you have got to have that little X upon which you look fondly and with some awe. Without this, your map becomes boring, and let’s recall that a wise person once said, “There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering —a hell of boredom” (Victor Hugo).

Art by Hayley Harper | @hayflux

This is a perfect Moon for boldly setting long-term intentions, whether or not you perceive challenges. So place your X, and remember to put it on the spot to which you feel the most magical, mysterious, magnetic attraction. No matter what. You absolutely do not have to see all about how to approach that X yet. The future is never meant to be crystal clear, only the present. So when you mark your compassionately determined X, just be committed to adopting whatever strategies reveal themselves to you to get there. The strategies may be surprising, and reveal themselves through chaos. Your job is to cultivate the strength of courage and free will to respond to them, and go ahead and let this magical, moonlit Sagittarius part of yourself shoot its arrow into the misty distance.

Mercury stations direct hours before the New Moon is exact. This event favors our project of getting messages out to the gods of bounty. Whether your wishes are outlandish or not is unimportant. Maybe your mysterious wish is to see the Northern Lights, maybe it’s to see your own inner truth. But just remember that you need to stay in your present to get there. If all you’ve got now is a wish, then sit with the wish. If you’ve got a wish and an able body, start moving. A wish and a pen, start writing. A wish and an Internet, start scrying.

One thing we all have with which we can empower our wishes is our own experience of the world. Our own perspectives, whether or not they are always from a bird’s eye view. So honor that. Jupiter-like, share it. Your perspective is part of the mysterious magic of the collective dream. By sharing yours and witnessing others’ perspectives, you honor collective integrity and create a more connected existence. This kind of connection is part of the Mystery we’re all moving toward. Stay true to your ever-shifting perspective and a jovial sense of humor, and you’ll go sure-footed the entire way into the Unknown.

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Breaking the Binary: Full Moon in Gemini November 2018

Full Moon in Gemini | Thursday, November 22, 2018
0 degrees | 9:39pm

“If it brings me to my knees, it’s a bad religion” - Frank Ocean

I recently had a wise person pass on some insight about navigating psychic waters. That when a human communicates with non-human realms, domineering voices are never to be trusted. A person’s right to make choices should never be degraded by any other being. The message was clear: that human or non-human, all beings are equal. Our work is to not let one voice take precedence over another. Instead it’s to listen to all voices, all the harmonies and dissonances, and find balance among them. This is really good Gemini medicine.

Thursday’s Full Moon just barely falls in Gemini, hours after the Sun’s entry into Sagittarius. The polarity between Gemini and Sagittarius is the axis between the personal narrative and the collectively accepted narrative. Ultimately it can come down to the difference between experiential knowledge that informs individual sovereignty (Gemini) and “the one true path” according to the collected knowledge of the ages (Sagittarius). Things get tense around this polarity these days. All over the globe, people are increasingly connected to one another’s personal stories, and it’s more possible than ever to challenge the orthodox view of history, of humanity, of gender, and of the importance of each person’s experience. Broadly accepted cultural narratives are breaking down, and without them, anything can happen. So we may as well begin choosing where we’ll go.

We can start with revising how we communicate, teach, learn, and process information, since this is common territory to both Gemini and Sagittarius. While Sagittarius gives its knowledge via histories and religious doctrines, Gemini is a fast, fact-finding, chatty place in the sky. As Sagittarius creates a narrative we can call the norm, Gemini is busy fact-checking, weaving new threads into the story, trying to fit in the most complex and contradictory of realities. Healthy Gemini looks like a happy heretic, and strong Sagittarius looks like the curious teacher, looking not at her own interests first, but integrating her students’ stories as she points unobtrusively to the Moon.

Drawing by Alessandro Sicioldr

During this Full Moon the spotlight is on Gemini, the voices of the many and the interest in all information, light and dark. What we need now is to hear everyone’s stories. And so we need everyone to speak and to be heard so that our collective narratives can no longer erase us. Do your best now to stay educated, to think for yourself, know yourself, to tell the stories you know from your own perspective, and to listen to the stories of those around you. The most toxic thing we could do now would be to bisect the soul into the good twin/bad twin and ignore the more challenging information that takes patience to understand. To ignore or shush part of ourselves because it doesn’t fit in at the dinner table.

It’s an edgy moment for such an inquisitive Full Moon. It falls on America’s Thanksgiving, a bafflingly loaded time historically, and for most people, personally as well. Full Moons generally exaggerate affairs. Just like holidays.

To further amplify the talkative Moon, dream warrior Mars in Pisces squares the Moon, enticing us toward the bravery we need to stand our ground in defending the right to shape our lives according to our dreams. We’re also called to defend our right to be vulnerable. The square aspect wants us to show bravery in the face of extreme tension, like the kind of tension borne because we have multiple realities. This Mars business is about grabbing inspiration from the ether and the underworld, and grounding it squarely into the third dimension. Retrograde Mercury is closing in on the Sagittarius Sun at this time too, prodding us toward the underworlds of the stories we tell ourselves religiously. The shadows of our stories want to be seen and discussed. And with bountiful Jupiter on the Sun and Mercury, we have luck in going there. The mind is confident on the hunt for real information and for revising accepted narratives.

So however you choose to take this holiday, go into it knowingly. It’s an important time to educate yourself about the flaws in the narratives you’ve inherited from your culture, be it national, local, or familial. And remember that sharing your personal story helps all of us to revise these inherited narratives, collectively.

As for the controversial topic that is Thanksgiving the holiday, there’s a small reading list below for educating yourself on indigenous people’s perspectives on the holiday, and how to potentially bring up cheerful topics like genocide and racism at the dinner table, if you’re taking that note from the Mars square. It’s worth considering that to celebrate this holiday without making space for those conversations could be a manifestation of shadow Gemini (skipping the fine print) and shadow Sagittarius (religiously telling ourselves a one-sided made-up story). So if you think it’s at all possible to plant seeds that could shift toxic ideologies any of your loved ones harbor, this is the time to plant them, lovingly.

But the fact that tragedy is inherent in the holiday doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a time when the American capitalist machine takes a moment, albeit small, to make space for families to come together. And whenever we can break from work and gather with family, whether that’s your friends, your acquaintances, your cat, your biological family or just yourself, the time counts as precious.

Tunnel of Light (From Paradise) Detail | Hieronymus Bosch

No matter what, stay connected to yourself during this Full Moon. Assess honestly what you can handle. Though edgy, this Full Moon is tender. It takes place at 0 degrees of Gemini, meaning it’s a rich time to shape the intentions of fledgling dreams. No matter how you spend the day, take time to suss out your own binary codes and strike a balance between your light and your dark. And be sure to cultivate reverie and optimism for your personal ambitions.

There are always magical portals available during Full Moons. For this one try to find the portals that lead you further into the narratives that account for your dignity and integrity, and grow your compassion for those around you. Don’t trust the voices that take up more than their fair share. If there’s a story that creates hierarchy or discounts the voices of the disadvantaged, don’t swallow it. A good Gemini remedy is to speak an informed truth from the heart. Do what you can to share yourself where it’s safe to do so, vulnerable belly up.

Good luck with it, and please check out the resources below. If you have any to add, please do in the comments.

“Thanksgiving, Hope and the Hidden Heart of Evil” by Jacqueline Keeler

“Goodbye Columbus” by Jacqueline Keeler

“Native American Girls Explain the Real History Behind Thanksgiving” on Teen Vogue

“How To Talk To Your Family About Racism on Thanksgiving” by Rachel Cargle

“Thanksgiving for Native Americans: Four Voices on a Complicated Holiday” on The New York Times

“An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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Where the Living and the Dead Dwell | Autumn Equinox + Harvest Moon

Equinox | Sun enters Libra
Saturday, Sept. 22 | 6:55pm PST

Full Harvest Moon in Aries | Monday, Sept. 24, 2018
1 degree | 7:52pm PST

Libra season begins tonight, Saturday September 22. As the Sun enters the sign of the scales, the Autumn Equinox occurs and we witness the luminaries good-heartedly share equally of the day’s 24 hours. Total equilibrium, this fleeting bliss, is today’s gift.

The Harvest Moon will quickly follow Equinox, and as Luna rises full on Monday evening, she’ll light up a dark sky whose night now claims more hours than the day. The Sun has passed the torch off to the Moon, as the Sun (our projective, externalized selves) seeks more and more time each day behind the veil, where he gestates a new Self to be born with the vernal Equinox.

So by this lunation, we’ve entered the dark portion of the year. The only way to serve ourselves fully is to follow suit. The sunless hours invite us into our internal landscapes, to discover the peaks, valleys, coves and caverns where both our living and our dead dwell. As we open the books that have rested on the shelves in the adventurous part of the year, we’ll see what specters file out. In this place our eyes do nothing, and only our hearts know where to go.

A good way to ritualize this transition is with an old Mabon custom: to visit the burial sites of your ancestors, especially female ones. Wine is poured onto the ground as an offering to the wisdom of the aging goddess. But if you can’t go to your ancestors’ literal burial grounds, turn to what you can find of these women’s stories.

We have an opportunity here to give gratitude for our elders but also for what we’ve learned in our own aging processes. The wounds, the battle scars, and precisely how our bodies and souls have responded ask for witness now. The Full Harvest Moon is conjunct self-healing Chiron in Aries, and square mature Saturn in Capricorn, so this Full Moon likes the idea of making a plan to keep working with your personal healing journey as your external self rests. It wants some sort of structure, practice, or intentional space you visit regularly to become part of your life if it isn’t already. And if it is already, it wants you to recommit.

Paul Klee | Blossoms in the Night | 1930 | sourced via paul-klee.org

Whatever you open up through your commitments now, you want it to be manageable, and you also want it to be directly related to healing old patterns. Remember that with the New Moon in Virgo, we made friends with non-linear time and the wisdom of the earth. Now we begin to visit our deep personal pasts, via the flow of energy in our own little bodies. Old wounds and old narratives, ancestral stories, the versions of yourself long gone from the visible world: all are due to visit. For the veil is thin and thinning. Now is the time to face and make offerings to these old ways of being that float through your awareness via memories, unexpected emotions, dreams, etc.

Because as Samhain approaches, these things will only become increasingly real. What we want to do now is remain alive to these strange arrivals, to attend and befriend them rather than fear them. Because the Mars-Uranus square remains activated, it’s likely that trauma or circumstances that have disrupted your system in the past will continue to surface, and old, reactive patterns may become too close for comfort. Keep in mind that when we look to old versions of ourselves (and our ancestors) we have the agency to create a different present. Much of the work is about non-attached observation of what comes up, and the willingness to take the reins down a different path.

Remember also as the nights grow longer that nothing coming from your own depths is inherently evil. Every last bit of it is information trying to help you devise the unique healing technology that is yours to develop, even and especially when it’s information that’s hard to swallow. For poison contains concentrated magical potential. “The dose makes the poison.” Look closely at how your system responded to past poisons, and note how when you put your mind to it, your system no longer has to shield itself so violently against the toxin. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, if you can move past what didn’t kill you. Understanding yourself through negative definition is helpful now. For example: I am not that poison that taught my body how to defend itself, and I can now release the poison from my system.

This Harvest Moon’s conjunction with Chiron suggests that the healing work we’re doing here is about building bridges of several kinds. We’re building bridges between our minds and our bodies through cultivating a better understanding of how we’ve functioned in the world up to this point. We’re building bridges between ourselves and those around us by letting go of defenses that no longer serve us. And we’re building a bridge to a future we can’t know yet because it is radically different from the past. That bridge is built in alignment with love, not fear. It takes steadfastness, and faith.

Remember that Harvest Season is the beginning of a full half of the year. As we harvest the fruits of our spring and summer’s labors, we have quite a bit of time to organize the pantry. Don’t rush to understand what goes where and and how everything will fit in at this moment. As you make commitments to the birth of a new Self, don’t overextend your visions of the future. Let your hands fall open. Libra season does best when we go coolly, so into this night, go gently.

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Root Medicine | New Moon in Virgo

New Moon in Virgo | Sunday, September 9
17 degrees | 11:01am PST

“I realized that the expression ‘blow my mind’ was born of the fact that America had cemented access to imagination and fantasy and that it would take dynamite to remove this block! I believed Leary’s emphasis on the fact that we only use one percent of our mind or potential, that everything in our education conspires to restrict and constrict us.” - Anais Nin, The Diary

There are times when staying down to earth requires exceeding the limitations of a marriage to the rational. Virgo is the sign of literal healing, and of understanding how to care for the systemic whole. It takes us to the roots of an organism, showing us the deeper work required for healing. But the roots that Sunday's New Moon in Virgo point to require a powerful imagination. Opposite Neptune, this New Moon magnetizes our attention toward something much subtler and more full of contradictions than Virgo, with its fondness for the rational, would choose for itself.

Butterflies | Shibata Zeshin | 1881 | Japan | sourced via www.metmuseum.org | Public Domain

And so, this Moon urges us to recalibrate, and allow our sense of holistic health to expand exponentially, so that healing becomes an exercise in relating to the interconnectedness of everything and the non-linear nature of time. Like Neptune, this process is "out there." Neptune totally dissolves boundaries, and overwhelms us with awareness of just how much our actions impact all of existence. It exposes the entanglement of roots: that your roots can't be disconnected from her/their/his roots. Virgo Moon vs. Pisces Neptune brings about an acute sense one's smallness, but of one's participation in the butterfly effect. 

So what does that mean practically? It means that even though Eclipse Season is over, we’re going to be overwhelmed with the importance of sticking to our healing path. It means that we will need to begin systematically removing whatever relationships, circumstances, habits, or projects are not supporting that healing journey. Because while we're distinct bodies above ground and require the spaciousness to take in the nutrients we need, when we look below, our own health impacts much more than would be readily apparent.

By now, we're deep into the healing journey of the past two years. We're very close to harvesting that medicine. So close that the idea of compromising that medicine isn't remotely appealing. Just remember that whatever poisonous factors we we haven’t released in the growth process yet could truly damage the medicine we’ve been cultivating for so long. 

With this Moon, we essentially have the opportunity to sober up to the extensive nature of our healing projects’ needs. The intoxication of this summer’s frenzied dance of luminaries dies a little more every day as we continue tending our gardens. While for some, the diminishing inebriation will be relief and for others it will be hangover, Virgo Season is making us all increasingly capable of hearing the weird and ancient wisdom that the earth emits. 

On September 4, Mercury also ingressed into Virgo, further accentuating our minds’ receptivity to these chthonic messages. The capacity to perceive the roots of our current conditions is stronger every day now, and we have new access to the ancestral hum generated so far beyond the outer reaches of the mind’s grasp. The Mystery of our lives as organic beings continues to reveal itself.

But of course while Mercury’s entrance into Virgo has made grounding easier, it’s also made contemplating the heaviness of the world around us easier. Saturn stationing direct on September 5 added weight to the recognition of personal responsibility and accountability. This Moon sings the earth’s grief to us, and the intuitive logic that we ought to do right by what we hear becomes harder to deny.

Vasilisia the Beautiful at the Hut of Baba Yaga | Public Domain

Luckily this Moon is supported by a sextile from Jupiter and a trine from Pluto, so that while there is uncertainty to deal with, energy flows easily into our desire to face the shadows. If we can light the way through these corridors with optimism and courage now, we can unlock the strength to have faith that generational and global healing is actually a possibility on Earth.

So let’s remember to take a look at what we’re healing on the global scale: an unsustainable economic reality that has for many centuries driven us to prioritize atomized individuation and economic “productivity” above the health of our physical, spiritual, and collective bodies. While Virgo season encourages industry and the maintenance of personal boundaries, we have to remember that if we partake in industry that doesn’t make space for rest and the celebration of togetherness, we’re perpetuating a system that has hurt far more than it will ever heal. Personal work has to be done to the end of a beneficial coexistence.

A final word on personal work for this lunar cycle: just a few hours before the New Moon, Venus vacates her captivating Libran home, and plunges our desire bodies into the peculiar tunnels of Scorpio, full of smoke and mirrors. Suddenly the act of connecting with others becomes host to a feverish curiosity that ultimately should be sated. But a morbid fascination could also result. Ethics like honesty, personal integrity, and respect for others’ autonomy are important here, because Venus will station retrograde in this sign in early October. All Scorpionic explorations you indulge in from now until then will be revisited, and the meaning of their consequences will be amplified throughout the rest of this year. So when you let loose, just do it with open eyes and the best of intentions.

And in the meantime, New Moon blessings. May the Dark Moon be gentle for you.

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Visionary Pragmatism | Full Moon in Pisces

Full Moon in Pisces | Sunday, August 26
3 degrees | 4:56am PST

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” -Cormac McCarthy

As the curtains close on the climactic events of Leo Season and the Eclipse portals, grounded, practical Virgo Season arrives with a contemplative Full Moon in its opposite sign: mystical Pisces. Pisces Moons are across the board sensitive, visionary times. However when Luna is Full in Pisces, her dreaminess becomes a little more vulnerable. Suddenly she cares about seeing her dreams manifest. She has to extract herself from the ether and descend into the material because her desires have become seeds, and she needs a functional vessel in which to plant them.

This is a strange task: it gets to the heart of the human plight and the potential of human magic. How to shape the material world with our mental, psychic, and spiritual power? The shapes that appear among the stars this weekend whisper these kinds of existential questions in our ears.

While it would be nice to say that with Eclipse Season over the ride will be easy from here on out, it just wouldn’t be true. The fires we’ve been through have truly transformed our personal realities, and we’re deeper into them than we might have predicted. 

Whether it feels like precisely the space you’ve always felt was your home or it feels terrifying, it is still new and unknown, and therefore makes you vulnerable. The work now is not to shield yourself against your vulnerability: it’s the time to acknowledge it, to seek connections around you, and trust in the magic of Pisces. That right now, you’re precisely where you’re meant to be, because there is indeed a plan bigger than yours. And in all reality, your personal plan is still part of that bigger play. While you may be a marionette on a stage, without your agenda included in the plot, the play is incomplete. 

Taos, NM | 2018 | photo by author

So this Moon is a critical time to recognize the importance of your priorities. On the ground. It’s time to take stock of what your plans have yielded and how you can restructure your daily life so that you get results more in alignment with your more “visionary” truth. Now is the time to assess what area of your daily life is anemic, and integrate whatever is missing from your schedule. Because whenever we’re downloading big Piscean visions, we still have to recognize the realistic kinds of organization and structure that help us effectively follow the path to our healing. Because healing is what Piscean vision is really all about. The path to wholeness.

While this path is sometimes treacherous and triggers the keyed up nervous system, this weekend it’s important to dedicate time to rest and to developing strategy from a calm, collected place. Take the time to listen and respond to your own emotional needs. Full Moons are, after all, times of celebration. With a Pisces Moon, what you have to celebrate is likely your tenderness.

There’s a highly advantageous Grand Earth Trine between Uranus in Taurus, Saturn in Capricorn, and Sun in Virgo, so nothing will feel better now than stopping, taking stock, and having patience with yourself as energy flows through you. Grounding yourself by taking time to meditate on the phenomena of the earth around you will open you up to connections both up toward Pisces and down toward Virgo.

We’ll want to be conscious of Venus squaring Pluto this weekend and week, which may wake up potentially explosive compulsions to buckle in the presence of rage, jealousy, the fear of abandonment/isolation or the desire to manipulate your surroundings. Be careful of resisting your new growth. This evolutionary square asks you to step up your game and become the better version of yourself. Namely, the person who acts from a place of love, first.

The sensitive Pisces/Virgo axis wakes up an opportunity to inhabit the body more consciously, and to understand that the body is the locus for spiritual transformation and healing. This is a highly creative act, unique to each individual. With this lunation, creativity will surely flourish under the pragmatic touch that respects mystery.

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Lifting the Veil | New Moon Solar Eclipse in Leo

New Moon Solar Eclipse in Leo | Saturday, August 11
18 degrees | 2:57am

“O insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.” - Shakespeare, Othello

Eclipses have always been associated with apocalypse. When we look at pre-scientific revolution accounts of them, we get colorful descriptions about “demons of darkness” coming to “eat men,” or “dark terror hanging over mankind,” about “the end of the world.” Etc.

Apocalypse is an interesting concept. It’s a Greek word, and when we look at the direct translation, the meaning is “an uncovering.” I’ve also heard it translated as “a lifting of the veil.” Technically with eclipses, there is a lifting of they veil, after it drops, of course: the veil being the shadow of the earth, or the body of one luminary passing in front of the other. In the case of the Solar Eclipse like we’ll see late Friday night/early Saturday morning, we get the latter: the Moon aligns just so, and she passes before the Sun, blocking its light.

French tapestry | Gallery of the Apocalypse | sourced via Alamy

If the Moon represents our internal knowledge and the deepest mysteries of our intuition, then what happens during a Solar Eclipse is that our lunar intuition uncovers new ways that we can be powered by the Sun, i.e. our identity, or, who we think we are. This Eclipse takes place in Leo, the Sun’s own domicile, so the concept of identity really reaches a watershed moment here. Who we think we are becomes overpowered by what we feel. Our masks literally fall off, and our true faces open to the world. We uncover both what is useless to us and may fall away, and what we are underneath the old excess. From humiliation to triumph, the full gamut of emotional experience accompanies the process.

While Eclipse season usually only sees two eclipse events, this weekend’s is our final of three eclipses this year. A month and half in to this energetic portal, the word “intense” hangs on the line, a threadbare flag, floundering in the wind. Look around yourself and notice what has changed. Internally, externally. If you can, open up to still more change, the final push that takes you beyond the constant flux of this rebirth process. The wisest thing you can do is to relax into it.

This affair is taxing. Let’s remember that Eclipse season is not the season in which we “succeed” in the conventional sense of the word. It’s not when we see all the results of the efforts we have put in, it’s when we witness the breathtakingly elegant proportions of this solar system as our luminaries disappear behind shadows and behind one another. Our work now is to plant the seeds of pure awareness and allowance, without judgment or attachment to outcome. 

Mary Devincentis Herzog | sourced via lions roar.com

Far beyond our control, this is when the belly of the earth opens up and gushes out hot, fresh magma, extremely fertile as it cools. What we do now is watch the outpouring, adjust to its alteration of the landscape, and cultivate our own resilience and plasticity with a disposition of lightness. Consciousness is the product of billions of years of slow evolution. Eclipses remind us that to demand immediate results for our efforts is foolish. Instead, we’re wise to direct our intentions toward serving the authentic stuff that turns up from the center of “th’affrighted globe.” It is the realest stuff we have.

I highly recommend seeing where this Eclipse falls in your chart, or having a professional Astrologer calculate that for you, as this will tell you about the nature of the magma revealing itself, and how you might want to handle it in the future. But of course for all of us, the chart of this event holds plenty of relevant information.

This New Moon Eclipse event is quincunx both Pluto and Neptune, which creates an acute fulcrum energy. We are working with the sense that the spiritual significance of the collective, historical state of affairs must be responded to, and simultaneously there is this extremely important and heavy-hitting personal project of nurturing and ultimately sharing our own individuated emotional realities and creativity with the world around us. Much hangs on our capacity to hold both projects steadfastly, but their relationship creates substantial tension. To the logical brain, the relationship between them is oblique and if we’re not careful, one could easily bulldoze the other. However the quincunx in this chart tells us that these two projects are entirely related and require one another in the process of their own becoming. To fully understand and begin healing the historical reality, we have to dedicate energy inward.

Proportion is everything. It is bizarre that the Moon, 64.3 million of which could fit into the Sun, appears from the Earth to be the exact same size as the Sun during Eclipses, and can even entirely obscure it. The Moon represents our emotions, our soul, and the very intimate secrets to our happiness. It’s scale is private and small. In many ways, it’s our reptile brain, containing our emotional intelligence and the intuition that escapes the rational mind.

While the Moon is so much smaller than the Sun (the Sun representing who we perceive ourselves to be), the Solar Eclipse illustrates how in the end, our proximity to the Moon makes the emotional body as and sometimes much more powerful than the rational body of the Sun. If we fail to tend the emotional body, her eclipse activity will stop at destabilizing the solar energy. But if we tend her well, she will also purge, renew and reinvigorate it as well.

The most important aspect of tending the emotional body comes in bearing it witness, but the Eclipse’s chart also offers us tactics. First, we’ll want to catch and cast out self-limiting beliefs (Sun and Moon square Jupiter), as well as energy leaks in personal relationships (Venus in Libra trine South Node and Mars and opposite Chiron). Let discipline and structure be your friend (Saturn square Venus), and balance boundaries with pleasure. Don’t be afraid to look, and mentally assess your fears and doubts around the image you present to your community (Sun/Moon conjunct Mercury Rx). There is magic available for creating new kinds of beauty, for dropping and renewing the masks, exoskeletons, and costumes we show the world.

Utagawa Kunisada | Samurai and River | 1850 | Rijksmuseum | Public Domain | sourced via Pinterest

These themes will continue to resonate for the few months ahead, as Eclipse charts carry potent energy for some time. So don’t rush yourself. Plant the intentions now from a place of gut instinct. Remember that while this is an Eclipse, it is still a New Moon, and this is the cycle’s tenderest time. The dense, chthonic energy of the the dark moon invites our engagement, but it only shows the multivalence of its fertility as the light waxes in the coming weeks.

The day after this final Eclipse, Mars will retrograde back into Capricorn, where he is exalted. This chapter of Mars Rx, which lasts until August 27, will likely be somewhat easier Mars’ Rx trip through Aquarius. In Capricorn, Mars dons the mantle of the archetypal wise warrior, who has a much easier time picking the right battles than Mars’ youthful, futuristic, revolutionary Aquarian face. We may collectively feel the willingness to slow down, take a deep breath of Capricorn’s fine mountain air, and move at exactly the pace of pragmatism that we need, discerning what work in front of us is ours to do.

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Polymorphous Mountains: Healing In Your Own Time

Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Aquarius | July 27, 2018
4 degrees | 1:20pm PST

On July 22, the roar of Leo season ripped through a regressive sky. The weight of Cancer season’s built-up undersea pressure has lifted, but the weight of so many retrograde planets has not. Friday’s Full Moon Lunar Eclipse* shares the sky with five planets plus Chiron retrograde, and about a week after the Eclipse, Uranus will station retrograde as well.

This Full Moon is, by any standards, remarkable. It is a Blood Moon, and has the longest duration of eclipse in a century (six hours). Mercury stations retrograde two days before the Eclipse, Uranus squares Luna, retrograde Mars conjuncts the Eclipse, and the Moon sits so close to her own South Node that she will don the mantle of a total Lunar Eclipse. Ravens from other worlds call, we find the dragons of the psyche and cosmic loopholes whose passage will take us only the gods know where. So much retrogradation and the sheer longevity of the Eclipse itself whisper intimations of a portal to a space outside of linear time. We get a clue as to what uncanny distillations of the soul are possible when we participate with the directions it gives us.

Mercury’s retrograde clues us in to some of the work this lunation offers up: note that when Mercury stations retrograde, it does so because it’s as far away from the Sun as it can get. This means that our cognition, thoughts, and rationality, have walked the path of daylight to discover thoughts as far from the realm of the Sun –our sense of sanity and the personal center– as they can. Now our thoughts must come home, and they must go into the shadows of night to do it. 

Our last Eclipse, the New Moon in Cancer, scared up plenty of headlines that felt far from sanity. Headlines aside, many hearts and minds have strayed far from center as well. Inflammatory language has made for some conversations moot to reason. Evolving the external conditions of our lives toward increase has been hard going.

Memento Mori | Artist Unknown | 1st C. BC mosaic | Public Domain | sourced via Wikimedia Commons

Instead we've been in the purgative phase, asked to drop whatever doesn’t serve our health. With Mercury retrograde during most of Leo season (until August 18), how we see and present ourselves publicly is meant to change. The ego usually rails against this type of change, so make space for the friction. Remember that the purification process is not always attractive. It is, after all, maggots that clean the bones so we can see the condition of the skeleton beneath. Opportunities for review and revision will be pressed up to the window, and we may see them with disgust, distorted skin flattened against glass. 

As gross as the process of transformation may seem, we ultimately have to turn to the purifying waters of Luna, the soul, who herself eclipses during Full phase, taking still more light out when our bodies least expect it, accustomed as they are to the cycles of the Moon. With so much darkness, perhaps we aren’t meant to scrutinize the process of change too closely. Fear is programmed into cellular memory when we face this kind of eclipsing activity (in the firmament or in ourselves), but with our agency, pure, non-judgmental awareness can take the reins.

When we experience a lack of clear, rational, sunlit perception, we are usually granted vision of the interior kind. We may remember that sometimes we have to take steps backward in order to take any more steps forward intact. In the end we choose whether we struggle against the retrograde motions, or instead trust the axiomatic “As above so below” and turn retrograde with the planets.

It's interesting to note that this Full Moon Lunar Eclipse takes place when the Moon is at apogee, or farthest away from the Earth. As opposed to a "Supermoon," this one is what we call a "Micromoon." This is one reason the duration of the Eclipse is so long. The symbolism continues to point us toward taking steps back for perspective, zooming out and seeing the broader scope, feeling into the full process of our emotional transformation.

Still on the matter of cultivating distance, this Eclipse takes place in Aquarius, whose archetype is the self-proclaimed exile, aiming only for liberation. We’re called to strip ourselves of some worldly power in order to go beyond the safe container of human society so that the true stuff of the self can be seen. Polarities rise together: in this lunation, real-time social inflammation rises to show us the value of the spacious and autonomous zone of Aquarius’ beyond-the-wall sovereignty. At this point in Eclipse Season, we need elbow room to do it right. 

Let’s recall the recurring importance of Mars’ retrograde themes: the purification of the warrior body, and detachment from our sense of passion and excitement to put ourselves “out there.” Our rage may feel bottled up with no clear outlet for expression.

With purification themes amplified by this Eclipse, our trek beyond the wall is where the journey for the wild healing herb begins. In effect, it is time to go up into the mountain to find the medicine for the wound that lies beneath our confounding sense of rage. Where you see the feral id (of a nation, of a community, of a self) unleashed, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, stop. Stop partaking and instead seek the wound beneath, and call in the healers, call yourself out to the quest for the medicine.

Dittany of Crete | sourced via Gutenberg.org | Public Domain

A journey up a mountain for a healing balm is rarely sanctioned by the state as productive. We’re unlikely to find outside applause for this work, and in Leo season that can be hard for some. 

But works of magic are potent in Full Moon times, and so up we go, to a place where we watch deep time unfold and we bid nothing but the call of the journey. Praise that the previous New Moon Solar Eclipse opposite Pluto’s hellish gaze jarred us out of our comfort zones. By now, we can coolly observe the burning embers of the fact that compromise will never take us to the extremes necessary for healing. 

Perhaps the mountain you climb looks like taking a step back from a claustrophobic relationship. Perhaps it is taking the risk of dropping some hours at your job, or changing jobs. Perhaps it looks like letting go of substance, or putting down your device and turning your gaze inward, or toward the actual state of life around you in real time. This mountain is a polymorphous thing, and only your intuition will tell you how to climb it.

While eclipse season has been volcanically intense for many, there have been some consistent safety nets granted by the stars: Jupiter continues to trine Neptune, softening the edges and easing the flow of energy toward spiritual development. This Full Moon Eclipse in Aquarius also takes place on Friday, Venus’ day, and Venus herself exactly trines Pluto, making the beauty in our hard work apparent. If you can release the external conditions, the internal pressures, the resentments, or the rage that hide your truest wounds from you, you may be surprised by the pleasure the healing process affords.

*This Eclipse is visible in much of Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, the southern portion of North America, South America, and Antarctica.

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