The cliche “follow your passion” has been countered with the advice to instead “follow your effort” by author Cal Newport and others. The theory is that passion is a byproduct of hard work during which you will gradually discover skills and interests you didn’t know you had.

Astrology speaks to this. There are three areas of the chart associated with work, covering the terrain of career, hard work/ sacrifice, and income/resources. All three of them are the same element of either earth, water, fire, or air. Two of them are hidden from view of the rising sign—the helm of the ship, so to speak. One of them is in a tense relationship (square) to it.

There was a moment during my first “real job” after college graduation that reflected this tension. My tenth house of career is the practical earth of Virgo and my rising sign is the meaning-oriented fire of Sagittarius. During my first performance review my boss gave me a nice raise and a glowing review, but I started to cry tears of sadness. I was horrified that I was crying in front of my boss because I knew I should just be grateful. But my idealistic, and very young, Sagittarius nature was wanting to find meaning and fulfillment beyond a cubicle. Vocation and occupation were at odds, although I had a sense then that writing was my vocation and had already taken steps to find outlets for it outside of my occupation.

Decades later I know that this tension between what the world asks from us and what the soul, which doesn’t concern itself with practicalities like mortgage payments, asks from us is to be lived and not eliminated. James Hollis has said he reminds himself daily to “Shut up. Suit up. Show up.” As prolific as he is, even at his advanced age with many health problems, he still needs to say this to himself, so I often call it to mind myself.

The season of Virgo, the sign of the harvest, service, and work has just begun. And before we can even properly get our footing, here we are almost immediately facing a Full Moon eclipse in watery Pisces, Virgo’s opposite, which could have us wanting to focus more on passion instead. Uranus with its startling insights and sudden changes will form a square to this eclipse, which may distract us all the more from suiting up and putting in effort.

To sit in this Pisces/Virgo tension it may be helpful to recall James Hillman’s reminder that vocation is not associated with a particular job and that “character is not what you do, but the way you do it” (The Soul’s Code). In other words, your calling is reflected in your effort and not completely separate from it.

A perfect image for this reconciliation of Pisces and Virgo is The Hanged Man in tarot. The Hanged Man is associated with the water element, yet there is earth present. It almost looks like The Fool lost his footing at some point after leaping off the cliff and got caught on the tree. He is choosing to not panic and is appreciating the new perspective (while expressing gratitude that he didn’t land on his head!). Or maybe for some of us it feels more like a deliberate, even arduous, climbing into position onto that tree.

Whatever the case for you, as you steer the helm of your ship, keep in mind an old adage the late Dolly Parton, who was a double Virgo, liked to say: “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”

Subscribe now

Interested in an Astrology Consultation? Book a session here.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for my monthly newsletter, Reading in Depth, for a dedicated monthly dose of depth psychology essays, reading recommendations, and timeless wisdom sent straight to your inbox.

In depth,

Anita Ashland

Another opportunity to attend a free master class in projection is any election season. Here in Wisconsin we had a primary for governor last week during the New Moon eclipse in Leo.

The polls and pundits were practically measuring the drapes for a double-digit Francesca Hong victory. It was as if everyone was skipping past the 5 of Wands clashing of sticks, so to speak, and going straight to the 6 of Wands celebration. When the dust settled, David Crowley squeaked out the win.

For weeks, the collective was hypnotized by a narrative—a confident projection of how things had to go. And then, in a single evening, reality quietly dismantled the script.

It’s a classic Leo season dynamic: In its shadow, Leo remains stuck in the performative spectacle—bold assertions, the need to be front-and-center, and the fierce tribal posturing online. We project our desires for rescue, or our fears of doom, onto names on a ballot, treating political candidates less as real human beings and more as avatars in high-stakes theater.

But Leo has another face—one that never asks to be seen.

The late Jungian analyst Marion Woodman was born under a New Moon in Leo. Unlike the Sun blazing in midday, a Leo New Moon is solar light planted in the quiet, mysterious dark. It doesn’t perform. It doesn’t need applause or external validation. It’s the steady, quiet, self-contained pulse of the authentic Self.

In Conscious Femininity, Woodman offered a perspective that cuts straight through the noise of our political landscape:

I think the future of our planet depends on human beings discovering their own light, becoming conscious of the universe as one soul (p. 109).

Notice where Woodman places the responsibility. She doesn’t say our salvation depends on the triumph of our preferred political platform or in perfecting our predictive models. She points directly to the inward task: discovering our own light.

When we hand our authority over to collective projections, we trade the grounded wisdom of the body and the heart for the frantic, reactive energy of the crowd. It’s an act of individual agency carried out in silence, much like the 7 of Wands—one figure holding position while everyone else presses in. The collective needs individuals anchored in their own center, capable of seeing the whole.

As Leo season enters its final days, the invitation isn’t to dwell on the shock of external outcomes. The invitation is to call your energy back home.

What is one collective noise or expectation that consistently dims your light—and what would it look like to stop letting it?

Subscribe now

Interested in an Astrology Consultation? Book a session here.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for my monthly newsletter, Reading in Depth, for a dedicated monthly dose of depth psychology essays, reading recommendations, and timeless wisdom sent straight to your inbox.

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

Master classes in projection are all around us every day. We are all enrolled in them, tuition-free, but often are unaware of it.

Spend even five minutes in the subreddit of your favorite team, in any sport, and you’ll see how fans project their unconscious desires for power and transformation onto players and their feelings of helplessness onto front office managers making the decisions.

You also get to experience the curious paradox of how no one hates a team more than its fans.

For example, yesterday millions of us were caught up in the madness of constantly refreshing our feeds as we projected all our hopes onto superstar baseball players at the trading deadline. It seems appropriate for this to occur during Leo season, the astrological stage of ego and performative spectacle.

One minute it’s, “How terrible, our cheap team hasn’t made any trades yet!”

The next minute it’s, “How terrible, they made a trade and gave up too much for it!” even though what the team gave up were minor league players the fans didn’t care about before.

It’s an opportunity to reflect on what our hyper-fixation on external outcomes reveals about our own internal state—and why “withdrawing the projection” is the first step toward peace.

It’s also an excuse to share this James Hollis quote about baseball:

There are few things more rewarding than for a shortstop, deep in the hole, to turn and throw the ball toward second, and see the second baseman intersect base and ball at the exact moment. This is less about practice than about the integration of spirit, the communion of soul (Hollis, p. 124, Under Saturn’s Shadow).

It would be fun to talk about baseball with Hollis, although he grew up in Illinois and there is a risk he is a Chicago Cubs fan (the bitter rival of my team the Milwaukee Brewers). Here’s hoping he is a White Sox fan!

Baseball writers have been making this connection for decades. I found this article about Jungian psychology and baseball which gets at something deeper than stats:

So baseball measures the feats of its heroes by threes and fours. Jung’s belief was that heroic activities in the outer world are manifestations of the hero within us all. This inner hero, if aroused, can perform miracles…

He goes on to tell the story of an 11-year-old boy in 1926 who was dying of blood poisoning. During his final minutes he asked to listen to the World Series game. Babe Ruth hit three homeruns during that game. As The New York Times reported, the boy’s fever began to break after that third homerun and he went on to make a full recovery.

For us, the miracle won’t be as dramatic as that, but the invitation is the same.

When we step back from the performative theater of the game, we give our projections room to breathe. We stop demanding that young athletes or corporate decision makers bear the weight of our unlived lives or our desperate need for a savior. Maybe we even learn to remain unfazed when the fans of the rival team deride us.

That’s when the enchantment of the game reveals itself.

It’s not found in the stats but in the sacred geometry of the diamond—a mandala carved out of grass and dirt. It’s found in the mythic quest every batter makes: leaving Home, venturing out into dangerous territory, navigating bases, and risking everything to find their way back Home where they started.

And as Hollis reminds us, it’s in those rare, luminous moments where our inner and outer actions align perfectly that time seems to pause. It doesn’t belong to the box score; it belongs to the soul. We are free to sit back and let the quiet magic of the game awaken the hero already within us.

Whether your team made a blockbuster trade or not yesterday, may you find your way back Home today.

Subscribe now

Interested in an Astrology Consultation? Book a session here.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for my monthly newsletter, Reading in Depth, for a dedicated monthly dose of depth psychology essays, reading recommendations, and timeless wisdom sent straight to your inbox.

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

This week has a pull between two things–being fully, unmistakably yourself, and wanting to belong.

The Sun is currently in Leo and there is a Full Moon in Aquarius this week. This Leo-Aquarius polarity is one that Jung himself lived, with his Aquarius rising sign and Leo Sun sign. Jung wanted to be accepted by the medical community and not dismissed as a mystic. He also frequently exhorted us to distinguish ourselves from the collective, yet remain connected to the human whole.

Jung’s moon sign was Taurus, which sits as a tense square between Aquarius and Leo. I was reminded of this Taurus moon when doing a tarot spread on Jung’s birthday, asking what he would like us to know about the Leo-Aquarius polarity. Three of the seven cards were pentacles, which are associated with the earth element and with the sensation function in typology. The birthday message from this spread was clear: The real genius of the Leo-Aquarius polarity is to use the sharp clarity of the mind to build a real-world vessel so that the mysteries of the soul have a safe and grounded place to reside.

Jung’s Taurus Moon is in the private 4th house of home, property, ancestors and I can’t help but recall how he had Bollingen Tower built on his property and retreated to it for several months each year. From a typology perspective, this is similar to someone with strong intuition working to incorporate their weak sensation function.

This is the typology work Jungian analyst Ken James calls our “assignment”; not fixing what’s broken but tending what’s undeveloped.

For Jung, the path to maturity isn’t about choosing one side of the polarity over the other, but about integrating the two: becoming the unique individual (Leo) in order to bring something meaningful back to the group (Aquarius). As Jung observed, “Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself.”

What is the “tower” you are building—the real physical thing that gives your inner world a place to live?

Subscribe now

Interested in an Astrology Consultation? Book a session here.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for my monthly newsletter, Reading in Depth, for a dedicated monthly dose of depth psychology essays, reading recommendations, and timeless wisdom sent straight to your inbox.

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

I was rummaging through one of my boxes where I stash handwritten quotes on index cards—looking for some Cancer inspiration—when I found this one. I copied it down at some point, in my own handwriting, and I had no memory of doing it. The quote had been waiting there, patient, while I forgot it existed:

“The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies” (James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul). Hillman’s rising sign was Cancer. As a double Aries and self-described “renegade psychologist,” he focused on deconstructing psychology, but met the world through a crab’s sideways gait.

Jungian analyst Esther Harding, who was a close associate of Jung, and was born when the Sun and Mercury were in Cancer, tells us how the soul does what it does, “The moon insinuates into man’s mind ideas and intuitions which are not at all in accordance with intellectual standards but are strange and bizarre... they may be creatively new” (Harding, Women’s Mysteries: Ancient & Modern). The crab pulls into its shell—not to hide, but to listen.

Shortly after his mother Abigail Adams died, her son John Quincy Adams, whose Sun sign was Cancer, wrote this in his diary in tribute to her: “A more prudent, more affectionate, more indulgent, and more energetic mother, never was a blessing to a child. Her life was a series of continuous self-sacrifices for those she loved.” His wife Louisa, who had a Cancer Moon sign, described her mother-in-law Abigail as “the guiding Planet around which all revolved.”

Adams didn’t summon that memory of his mother—it arrived on its own, just like the quote that found me in my box. Today’s New Moon in Cancer works the same way: not something you do, but something that happens to you if you let it.

What’s sitting in your box right now, forgotten, waiting for a reason to surface?

Subscribe now

Interested in an Astrology Consultation? Book a session here.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for my monthly newsletter, Reading in Depth, for a dedicated monthly dose of depth psychology essays, reading recommendations, and timeless wisdom sent straight to your inbox.

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

Historians often say that events don’t repeat, but people do.

I’ve been thinking of that often as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini that happened in 1776 will repeat on July 4.

As I think of people from that era, John Quincy Adams, who was a young child in 1776, comes to mind. The chart of the United States has a Cancer Sun and Adams was born under a Cancer Sun.

Jung said that a child’s greatest burden is the unlived life of their parents; Adams’ life reflects that more dramatically than most. Both his parents placed the weight of the nation on his shoulder. His father John Adams, who served as president, said in a letter to his son, “If you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession but of your Country it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness and Obstinancy” (p. 49, Founding Son). That enormous pressure triggered bouts of severe depression and dejection throughout his life.

Adams was eventually elected president but served just one term. Consumed by despair after losing the presidency, he felt he let the country and his late parents down. He could have done the nineteenth-century equivalent of retiring and playing golf every day, but instead, he ran for congress and served for nearly two decades. It’s hard to imagine an ex-president today taking that kind of step down.

Yet, it wasn’t until his presidency was over and he entered the House of Representatives that his true destiny started to break through. As the abolitionist movement grew, Adams fought fiercly to preserve their right to petition. He didn’t fight with arms, but with words and mastery of procedural motions. When his opponents tried to silence him with a gag rule, Adams used an ingenious parliamenteary maneuver to hold the floor and rip the gag from his mouth. This is what a Uranian moment looks like from the inside. Not explosion—declaration. Not force—the right word spoken in the right room at the right time.

Current activity in the sky is returning us to John Quincy Adam’s story. In his chart, Uranus in Gemini is currently forming a square to his ascendant ruler Venus in Virgo. Jung’s daughter, Gret Baumann-Jung, said Jung remarked about how one’s astrology remains in effect even after death: “Shortly before his death, as we talked about horoscopes, my father remarked: ‘The funny thing is that the darned stuff even works after death.’”

His soul’s signature, Venus the ascendant ruler, was hidden away in the 12th house, an isolated place. In astrology, Venus represents the soul’s deepest loves and longings—and Adams’ was kept under lock and key during the first half of his life. Uranus is currently in the 9th house in his chart, associated with moral principle and public advocacy. Adams is long gone, so it’s interesting how Adams’ story of how is now being revisited again thanks to the new popular book about him, Founding Son.

What is the Venus-in-the-12th thing in your own life that a Mars-Uranus transit might be trying to square?

In 1836, Adams knew he was engaged in his final crusade and would not live long enough to see slavery abolished: “This is a cause I am entering at the last stage of my life and with the certainty that I cannot advance in it far; my career must close, leaving the cause at the threshold. To open the way for others is all that I can do. The cause is good and great.”

That way is still open for all of us.

_____

I explored this further with astrologer Arin Dosch in our July forecast episode — including an I Ching cast that arrived at the same place from a completely different direction.

Subscribe now

Interested in an Astrology Consultation? Book a session here.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for my monthly newsletter, Reading in Depth, for a dedicated monthly dose of depth psychology essays, reading recommendations, and timeless wisdom sent straight to your inbox.

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

C. G. Jung observed that psychological type applies not only to people but to groups, cultures, and nations. For me, examining historical shifts and collective events through this typological lens is the most compelling way to use Jung’s model.

For many years, Jungian analyst John Beebe and other typologists have diagnosed the United States as an ESTJ society. In a healthy, balanced manifestation, ESTJ prioritizes efficiency, structural integrity and fair play. Historian Joanne Freeman has observed that the founders believed that the most important thing that they were doing was creating a process of government—processes that would correct course when human nature faltered. This relies heavily on extraverted thinking (Te) as the Hero function in ESTJ, which places planning, collective organization, and objective processes at its very heart.

Since Watergate in the 1970s, however, our processes have completely broken down. Why?

Beebe offers a profound clue. He suggests that the United States is no longer operating as a balanced ESTJ, but rather as a highly distorted, top-heavy version of the type—one where the top three functions are all pulled into the outer world and are extraverted. In this imbalanced state, introverted sensation (Si)—the function of historical memory, precedent, and anchoring truth—has been replaced by extraverted sensation (Se).

Now that Uranus is in Gemini for the next seven years, sometimes I wonder if extraverted sensation has leap frogged into the Hero position? If Se is now in the driver’s seat, the American psyche has shifted from a structured, process-oriented society to an impulsive, hyper-reactive one. We become a culture fixated on immediate external stimuli, physical consumption, shocking spectacles, and rapid-fire data. We become quick to assume others think like us and lose the patience to listen.

More dangerously, this relegates introverted intuition (Ni) into the inferior position. We lose our collective vision. We lose our capacity for depth and capacity to track meaning, and foresee long-term consequences of our actions. There are countless examples across the entire political spectrum—on the left, the right, and everything in between—of people caught up in reacting to the immediate moment and failing to articulate a cohesive, long term vision. Uranus in Gemini—an air transit associated with the rapid and unstable acceleration of thought and data—acts as a massive amplifier of this chaos and a weakening of the checks and balances.

When our outer processes fail us because we have lost our psychological anchor, where do we turn?

For starters, we can consider how our own typology can contribute to rebalancing the nation’s. There’s a dire need right about now for the depth of introverted intuition, the historical grounding of introverted sensation, the ethical alignment of introverted feeling, and the relational cohesion of extraverted feeling.

Finally, we would do well to ponder these words of James Hollis:

Each of us has to find that personal resilience, that sense of interior guidance that allows us to chart our pathway without which we will become subsumed either by psychopathology … or caught up in the fevers and disorders of the world around us” (Hollis, A Life of Meaning).

By cultivating that interior guidance within ourselves, we perform the ultimate act of what James Hillman called “psychological citizenship:” offering a quiet anchor to a world caught in a fever.

Subscribe now

June 25: Living Seasonally With Astrology seminar in Chicago |
Reading in Depth monthly newsletter | Consultations

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

I had a grand vision for an expanded vegetable garden this year. The dirt had other ideas.

It was difficult to plant the seedlings we had grown and even the pumpkin seeds seemed resistant to the hard dirt. A peony bush that has bloomed without fail the past 25 years failed to do so this year. There is a lot of dirt but not many flourishing plants.

Which is when I stumbled across something apparently the ancient Babylonians knew all along: Gemini is associated with bricks. It’s quite a paradox—airy Gemini associated with the most earthbound material. Gemini gets caught up in ideas and grand visions and can forget to focus on the practical.

The garden was trying to tell me something about sensation before I had the words for it. Jung says we “need a function of consciousness that registers reality as real: this he called the sensation function, which delivers to us the sensation that something is” (John Beebe, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type. Everything else rides on sensation: thinking then defines what it is, feeling tells us its value, and intuition its possibilities.

There is a brick wall on the Sun tarot card. I had never really focused on that detail before as it’s much easier for the eye to be drawn to the exuberant child on the horse with the dramatic banner, sunflowers, and sun in the background. The latter part of Gemini (the third decan) is ruled by the Sun and therefore correlates with the Sun card. This is fitting, as those are the final days leading up to the Summer Solstice.

It’s the brick wall, however, that holds everything together. It provides a container for the sunflowers and keeps the horse from running wild.

Rather than focusing on the withered failures, I’ve found myself noticing what actually showed up. The other peony that bloomed. The petunias hanging in there quietly. And in the backyard, a new bird feeder with a solar camera that sends me videos throughout the day—269 visits from Baltimore Orioles in the past week alone, and one visit from a baby Northern Cardinal. The sensation function doesn’t always deliver the harvest you planned. Sometimes it delivers the one that was possible.

What are you building this season?

What vision needs to meet actual dirt before it becomes real?

Subscribe now

June 25: Living Seasonally With Astrology seminar in Chicago |
Reading in Depth monthly newsletter | Consultations

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

Gossip reminds us that to be human is to be messy. Perhaps that is why we love it so.

A neighbor’s affair or a coworker’s sudden departure can quickly become a modern-day Greek myth. There is a particular kind of thrill in spilling the tea with someone who hasn’t heard it before, and thereby keeping the myth going. Scandals and drama in celebrity lives quickly go viral for similar reasons (fun fact: I subscribe to the delightful Sports Gossip podcast and without fail will listen to the segments when the gals talk about the latest Aaron Rodgers drama).

According to James Hillman, gossip is the “psychic ballast of human dirt“ that keeps us anchored to the earth instead of floating away into rigid, sanitized spiritualities:

Something psychological is going on in our craving for tales of souls in a mess. Such tales express the psyche’s myth-making function at the personal level of storytelling, tale-tattling. When the psychologist disregards gossip, he may be sailing too high, off into the superiorities of the spirit. Gossip provides the psychic ballast of human dirt that keeps us down to earthly involvement (p. 26, The Myth of Analysis).

It’s now Gemini season, and while pop astrology often reduces this sign to superficial chatter, its archetypal roots run much deeper. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, the Roman counterpart to Hermes. As the psychopomp, Hermes’ primary job was to navigate thresholds by carrying messages back and forth from the upper and lower worlds, bridging the lofty spirit and the heavy underworld.

In her book You Didn’t Hear This From Me, Kelsey McKinney points out that at its most basic, gossip is simply “one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present.” By that definition, a prayer request or speculation about where a baseball player will sign is gossip. It is an essential part of being human. “What is gossip,” McKinney asks, “if not a way to decipher the world around us?” Gossip is Hermetic medicine; it provides that necessary psychic ballast.

Historically, a gossip was a “god-sibling”—someone bound to you by spiritual affinity who was present at threshold moments such as baptism and childbirth. In The Moon and the Virgin, Jungian analyst Nor Hall links gossip to the Sibyls—the ancient prophetesses. It was an unvarnished truth-telling that bypassed patriarchal structures. She writes:

An old Midwestern mother of poetry once told me that words have two uses: the first is for analysis and the second is ‘to heat and move you.’ When asked how to go about getting in on this second aspect of language she said to go and listen to the rhythm of country gossip. Gossip is worth listening to: it means ‘god speaking through a woman‘ (p. 189).

But as power structures centralized, those closed-door conversations among women became a threat. McKinney traces how god-sibb evolved from a title of deep emotional intimacy to a weaponized verb used to police discourse.

There are times when refusing to listen to gossip in a fit of piety commits harm. McKinney describes how, in religious communities, “the codifying of gossip as a sin could be used as a shield for misbehaving men in power to subjugate women in their congregations.” When the head pastor of her childhood church had an affair, the immediate shutdown of the “gossip mill” under the guise of spiritual righteousness was actually an explicit tactic to maintain the power dynamic of the organization.

In other words, what we dismiss as “idle chatter” is often the whispered survival network of the marginalized. As McKinney notes, author bell hooks observed that gossip has historically been the only social interaction where women felt safe to state what they really think and feel, rather than what pleases the listener. Far from being an avoidance of truth, gossip is a collective, messy search for it.

Pass it on.

Subscribe now

June 25: Living Seasonally With Astrology seminar in Chicago |
Reading in Depth monthly newsletter | Consultations

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

A book found me in a used bookstore recently. I was scanning the history section looking for anything by Jill Lepore, but then a thick paperback with the stars and stripes on the spine caught my eye. It had the title The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America so of course I bought it.

I had never heard of this book and have had my nose in it as often as possible since I bought it. Psychologist and philosopher William James, who would go on to have a big influence on C.G. Jung, was a member of this metaphysical club, which first met in 1872. At the time Jupiter the philosopher/sage was in Cancer copresent with Uranus, associated with brilliance and sudden insight. It was a conversation club that emphasized critical thinking and philosophy.

On page 179 there is a discusson about “the method of least squares” and shooting arrows at a bulls-eye. A bulls-eye is “implied” by the distribution of shots that miss it. In other words, “The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.“

As Jung said, “But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them.” — C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Before “bulls-eye” became associated with archery in the 1800s, sailors in the 1700s use the term to describe a small, dark cloud with a circular center in an otherwise bright sky. It was also used to describe the thick, circular glass in a ship that let light into the dark quarters below.

We have a New Moon in Taurus, the sign of the bull, to help us pause and get our bearings. Before the Gemini sky lights up, let this Taurean Moon be the thick glass lens that lets a single light into your dark. Step back, look at the pattern of your experiences, and find the invisible center of gravity holding it together.

Subscribe now

June 25: Living Seasonally With Astrology seminar in Chicago | Reading in Depth monthly newsletter | Consultations

In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

For over 2,000 years, ancient Greek people believed in Bugonia: the belief that bees could spontaneously generate from the decaying carcass of a bull.

Taurus represents the bull—the heavy, material, physical reality of the earth. The bee represents the “particle of divine intelligence” (Frith Luton, Bees, Honey and the Hive: A Jungian Exploration of the Symbolism and Psychology, p. 63).

To get to the golden honey inside the hive, the strength of the bull must first be sacrificed or transformed. We are currently in a collective moment in the United States where the “Bull” of our old economic structures, which was built on power and the concentration of wealth, is rotting, and we are looking for the “Bees”—those that do the real work—to emerge.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recently spoke about the “erasure” of the actual work that sustains us. Since the 1980s, we have stripped away the recognition of the nurses, grocery workers, and sanitation crews who keep the hive functioning. As she notes:

“That erasure of the actual work of a society strikes me as being one of the hallmarks of an economy getting to a really dangerous point because it means that you concentrate power among those people who are wearing the suits. At the same time they aren’t actually the people we need to support to keep society functioning in a healthy fashion.”

In the natal chart, the sixth house represents this “invisible” work. Positioned just below the western horizon, it is the place where the Sun’s light fades into the earth. It is traditionally the house of toil, illness, and “bad fortune,” because it is here that the ego must submit to the needs of the body and the collective. The “suits” avoid the sixth house; the “bees” thrive here.

But the sixth house is also the sacred laboratory of the humble. Luton describes the labor here as more than just drudgery—it is the “temple cleaning” that keeps the hive alive. When we honor the plumber or the grocery worker, we are honoring the very “cells” of the hive. This is where the “Divine Mind” manifests—not in a boardroom, but in the repetition of the necessary.

The Taurus glyph (♉︎) is a circle (the Sun) with a crescent Moon resting on top. It is a sign of “earthing” the heavens. C. G. Jung, who was born under a Taurus Moon, stayed grounded through his medical work and masonry at Bollingen. “It was essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world…I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I have a wife and five children…these were the actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed” (CW 7, par. 32). It is no accident that Jung had Mercury and Venus in the sixth house of Cancer—the mind and the heart rooted in the house of ordinary sustaining work.

The bee’s dance is a “circumambulation of the Self.” By honoring real work, we rotate around a “numinous, life-giving and sustaining center” (Luton, p. 151). Our survival depends on our willingness to look at the “carcass” of our current system and welcome the humble, everyday tasks back into the temple. Only then can the bees return.

Subscribe now

Come see me in Chicago on June 25.

I would love to see you in person this summer. On Thursday, June 25 I’ll be at the Jung Institute of Chicago leading a six hour experiential seminar: Living Seasonally With Astrology.

Rather than a dry lecture, this will be an salon-style guided discussion, with props, music, and reflection time. We’ll use the archetypes of Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and Virgo as symbolic mirrors to explore the “living” quality of each season.

• Format: In-person only (no video, just presence).

• Registration: Look for the “Summer Intensive” Thursday session. CEs are available.
  Click here for details and to register.

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul).

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).

The Tower of Babel story shows people building a tower to remain centralized, to speak a common language, to reach heaven. God was ticked off at their hubris and put a stop to this endeavor by turning their single language into many languages. As a result, the people could no longer understand each other and scattered across the earth.

Toni Morrison suggests what might have happened if they had stayed put:

Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as postlife. (1993 Nobel Prize lecture).

Morrison’s “heaven at our feet” asks us to slow down, but our current moment is engineered for the opposite.

This is what James Hillman meant when he warned of the “monotheism of Hermes that holds us in thrall.” Hermes’ task is to make communication possible with little regard for the content of the messages he delivers. When we prioritize a single, streamlined way of communicating, we lose the “complicated, demanding” beauty of the individual story. This will likely become increasingly acute as Uranus electrifies Gemini until 2033.

Yesterday I heard a bird singing at 5:30 a.m. shortly after a rain shower. I am very familiar with the song of the American robin, having heard it many hundreds of times. But this bird’s cadence was unusual enough that I held up my Merlin Bird ID app to record it and confirm if it actually was a robin. Sure enough it was.

Then I glanced out the window and spotted the robin perched alone on a power line in our backyard; it continued to sing its solo for another 30 minutes. This is Uranus in Gemini—the eccentric, unique breakthrough.

The robin is a reminder to lean into our own unique songs and to “take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives.”

If Uranus in Gemini provides the high-voltage electricity for our unique songs, we need a grounded vessel to contain that power. Without a center, the eccentric song is just noise; it needs a place to land. The antidote to the monotheism of Hermes is Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home:

“Hestia brings focus, inwardness, concrete immediacy, and a sense of place as counterbalance to Hermes’ frenetic traveling of digital space. Her presence affords the possibility of dwelling, inhabiting; she is the warmth of the hearth fire that offers the intimacy of being at home in the interiority of psychic space (psychologist and Jungian scholar Michael P. Sipiora, Psychological Citizenship and Democracy: The Political Relevance of Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology).

While we may be stuck living in the shadow of the Tower, we can build a hearth at the base of it. In a world of Hermetic speed, perhaps the most revolutionary (Uranian) thing we can do is stay still and listen.

Think of the robin on the power line; it used a tool of global connectivity (Hermes) as a place of local dwelling (Hestia). It transformed a high-voltage wire into a sacred perch, proving that we can be “on the grid” without losing the unique cadence of our own souls.

Subscribe now

Come see me in Chicago on June 25.

I would love to see you in person this summer. On Thursday, June 25 I’ll be at the Jung Institute of Chicago leading a six hour experiential seminar: Living Seasonally With Astrology.

Rather than a dry lecture, this will be an salon-style guided discussion, with props, music, and reflection time. We’ll use the archetypes of Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and Virgo as symbolic mirrors to explore the “living” quality of each season.

• Format: In-person only (no video, just presence).

• Registration: Look for the “Summer Intensive” Thursday session. CEs are available.
  Click here for details and to register.

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul).

WRITING & RESOURCES.

Subscribe to get weekly-ish essays weaving ancient wisdom with depth psychology insight.

Because we seem to be in a “things will get worse before they get better” time in the collective, we have an opportunity to do even more civic depth work as “psychological citizens.” James Hillman describes a psychological citizen as one who works to “see through” events and sense the invisible patterns in public life.

Reading history books is one of my favorite things to do as a psychological citizen, as it is about reading life backward (to borrow another Hillman phrase). Bob Crawford, author of America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President to Political Maverick warns us that “We tread on unsteady ground when we attempt to draw parallels between the past and present. If moments and events do not repeat, perhaps people do.” Angelina Grimké is one of those people.

On May 16,1838, just days after getting married to fellow abolitionist Theodore Weld—which was considered the wedding of the century at that time and called “an abolition wedding”—Grimké found herself inside the newly built Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia speaking to a mixed-race audience as the building became surrounded by a mob. The mob wasn’t happy about the mixed-race audience and was afraid of “amalgamation.”

Grimké was not intimidated by the shouts coming from outside, even as rocks were hurled and the windows shattered. “What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? What would the levelling of this Hall be? … What if the mob should now burst upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons—would this be any thing compared with what the slaves endure?”(p. 200)

The very next day a mob of 30,000 people surrounded the empty Pennsylvania Hall and threw rocks, broke down the door, and poured forth into the building. They set fire to a stack of broken pews. By 10:00 pm the roof collapsed and “only the charred walls of the building remained. The fire smoldered for a day. The charred remains sat untouched within sight of Independence Hall for decades to come, a message to all that the City of Brotherly Love would not tolerate the radicalism of the abolitionists.”

Imagine seeing those building remains for decades. It must have felt like nothing would ever change.

I looked up that May 16 date in my astrology software, along with all the other dates of the stories of this time period in the 1830s-1840s, and one placement appears in all of them: Pluto in Aries, which lasted from 1822-1853. This week, as we experience a massive Aries stellium, that same fire is back in the collective sky.

In that hall, Grimké was living out the Aries core theme: the struggle to individuate and, in this case, rise up against corrupt authority. Aries reflects the impulse to go into dangerous situations to assert one’s independent spirit.

Grimkés’ husband Theodore Weld, several years prior, endured many mobs and physical attacks as he traveled the country organizing for abolition. His powerful style of writing and speaking was described as “logic on fire” yet he refused to seek the limelight. He pivoted away from being a charismatic leader and became a “foot soldier” focused on writing and laboring behind the scenes.

Grimkés’ advice to Southern women who felt they didn’t have any power to overthrow the system was: “‘You are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do; and if you really suppose you can do nothing to overthrow slavery, you are greatly mistaken.’ She tells her audience they can read on the subject, pray over the subject, speak on the subject, and act on the subject.” And so can we.

Or as historian Heather Cox Richardson said in a video back on September 18, 2025: “Figure out ways to take up space in this moment and be ungovernable (non-violently of course and legally)… this is literally what the people who established the United States of America did. They made themselves ungovernable.”

Logic on fire, taking up space, being ungovernable. Which of those three is the most uncomfortable for you? Which of the three do you need to stop apologizing for? Which ones have you expected others to do that you need to start doing yourself?

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

Typology, which found me about 35 years ago, was my eventual gateway into Jungian psychology. I remain a fan of type because it provides a practical way to understand our energy flow and the difficulties we have with people.

When I started this iteraton of my blog eight years ago, many of my early posts were about John Beebe’s model. It wasn’t the easiest book to understand, so writing about it helped me process it.

Speaking of difficult to understand type books, Jung’s Psychological Types, which is now over 100 years old, should be a logical starting point, as all of today’s typology models spring from it. If one starts there, however, there is a risk one might end there too.

Fortunately there are many authors we can turn to who bring clarity and a unique lens to typology. Let’s begin with two books that are my top recommendations for those newer to typology:

Personality Types by Daryl Sharp

Sharp adheres to Jung’s views in this book and, in only 128 pages, provides a concise overview, while also showing the practical application.

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman

There is no one better than von Franz at explaining Jung’s type model. She focuses on the inferior functions of the types and her wit shines through. Hillman’s essay on the feeling function is brilliant.

Thes next two books go deeper into the topics of the archetypes of type and the role of type in individuation:

Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation: Overcoming One-sidedness in Self and Society by Steve Myers

Myers argues that typology is best viewed as a stepping stone on the path to indivudation and isn’t a meant to be the destination or a label.

Compass of the Soul: Archetypal Guides to a Fuller Life by John L. Giannini

This book focuses on the archetypes of the function pairs (NF, NT, ST, SF) and has a feeling function, or NF, vibe throughout; to read this book is to feel how type is a mandala and compass.

As much as I agree with type being a help during the individuation process, it cannot be denied that it is helpful in workplace settings, even when working with people who know nothing about Jung and individuation. The next two books are helpful in that context:

The Power of Polarities: An Innovative Method to Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations. Based on Carl Jung’s Theory of the Personality by John van der Steur

The author focuses on the polarity aspect of type and comes from the perspective of having used this in the work place and with sports teams. He is influenced by Robert A. Johnson and I love his interview with Johnson.

8 Keys to Self-Leadership: From Awareness to Action by Dario Nardi

The eight keys are the eight functions, of course, and, in INTJ style, there is a chapter devoted to each, with tips on developing each function.

Now we arrive at what I consider the pinnacle of type, which is Beebe’s eight-function model. These final two books are devoted to that:

Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function Model by Carol Shumate

This book explains John Beebe’s eight-function model with great clarity and I recommend reading it prior to, or in tandem with, Beebe’s own book. The tables and descriptons pull everything together in a way that is satisfying for one’s sensing and introverted thinking functions and I refer to them again and again. I also enjoyed her analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s INTP type.

Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type by John Beebe

Beebe expands Jung’s model to include four shadow functions and he also assigns archetypal roles to the function order. In this model type can breathe and becomes invaluable for shadow work. Beebe draws from film references in explaining his concepts and one can see how one’s own type is essentially a cast of characters. Beebe’s type is ENTP and his extraverted intuition takes one down many nooks and crannies; it’s best to go along for the ride and turn to Shumate’s book when you need clear definitions.

Any one of these books will help you find your way through the type world on your own terms. As Daryl Sharp wrote, “In the area of typology, as with any attempt to understand oneself, there is no substitute for prolonged self-reflection.“

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

In the span of just a couple of days, some of us may have gone from feeling a bit water-logged and fatigued, and even victim-y, to rushing forward with a new burst of energy.

This is the shift from watery Pisces (associated with the Moon card in tarot) to fiery Aries (associated with the Emperor card).

115 years ago, at the beginning of another Aries season, a literal fire destroyed a garment factory in New York City.

The roof exit was blocked that day, a common practice at the time, for fear that workers would steal or take unauthorized breaks.

Frances Perkins, who happened to be visiting New York City that day, was an eyewitness to this fire, which came to be known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Her journalist friend Will Irwin said, “What Frances Perkins saw that day started her on her career.”

Twenty-two years after that fire, Perkins became Labor Secretary under President Franklin Roosevelt, and is the reason the United States has Social Security and many other programs. She said “just fifty people could make a difference. She would act on this theory again and again, each time planting herself in the middle of the circle of fifty” (p. 53, The Woman Behind the New Deal).

Reflecting on Frances Perkins and her groups of 50 brought to mind the recent essay by Charles Duhigg about the importance of organizing instead of focusing mostly on mobilizing. Mobilizing is great for getting people to do something specific. Organizing “is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.”

Perkins understood instinctively what Jung articulated, “Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself” ( On the Nature of the Psyche).

Neptune and Saturn recently left their long term stay in Pisces and have moved on to Aries. It’s tempting to celebrate this shift to a more energetic, individuation-focused sign and be done with Pisces already.

But then I think of Perkins. Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, and the Sun were all in Aries when Perkins was born, and possibly the Moon, too, if she was born in the early morning. It’s obvious how those symbolic mirrors in Aries reflect the passion and energy she had to be a catalyst for substantial change.

Yet Venus was in Pisces when she was born. She had a “deep mystical streak common in many very religious people” and once said that she “saw people’s auras, allowing her to target those worthy of cultivation.” This “sixth sense” is what would help her bring those groups of fifty people together. “It gave her an uncanny ability to spot people of unusual promise before they were widely recognized by others” (p. 26).

Maureen Murdock reframes the heroic quest as relational and collective. “The heroic quest is not about power over, about conquest and domination” but strives instead to bring balance through the marriage of the masculine and feminine aspects of our nature (The Heroine’s Journey).

Aries might find us normally making haste. But Saturn asks us to tend the fire rather than be consumed by it—to move with purpose, rather than urgency. To plant ourselves in our own circle of fifty and to make haste slowly. Together.

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

Eleven years ago, before I was blogging about things like Demeter’s sacred pigs and depth psychology books, I wrote about the movie Babe as a business parable.

I saw it as a story about using your strengths, building relationships, and challenging alpha-dog hierarchies.

I see now what I was really tracking: the return of the pig to dignity. Or, the rehabilitation of what patriarchal consciousness cast out as unclean.

So how did pigs become unclean in the first place? Nor Hall writes in The Moon and the Virgin about how pigs were Demeter’s fertiity. Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest and therefore associated with the sign of Virgo.

The word “pig” was considered sacred in Greek and Latin and pigs were not to be eaten during the rites. “But pork becomes unclean and pigs become ‘disgusting’ when the mother functions of the feminine, and the goddess of rotting and rutting and springing-to-life, are no longer revered” (p. 81).

But the stories persist. Children still love pigs.

A core book during my childhood was Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. The main characters are Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. To this day I try to carefully avoid harming daddy longleg spiders if I come across one while cleaning, in honor of Charlotte’s “Some Pig,” “Terrific,” and “Radiant” messages she wove into her web to encourage Wilbur; moreover, these messages encouraged the Zuckermans to spare Wilbur’s life and see him as a valuable animal.

The book quietly chipped away at restoring what two thousand years of patriarchy had degraded. More than forty years later, the movie Babe would do it again.

Full Moons are our monthly reminder about holding the tension of opposites. There was one in Virgo this past week, which was also an eclipse, adding to the intensity, with Mars added to the mix.

Which brings me back to Babe, and what this pig has to teach us about the Virgo eclipse.

Babe is a pig who finds success doing the work of a sheep dog. However, he doesn’t dominate (masculine/solar/patriarchal) by yelling and nipping like the sheep dogs; he kindly asks (feminine/lunar/relational) the sheep to follow his instructions: “If the three ladies with collars would kindly walk out of the ring I would be very much obliged.”

This makes Babe a sheep-pig. He is virginal in that sense because he stays true to his pig nature (kind, asks permission, builds relationships) while doing sheep dog work. He is Virgo energy incarnate: useful, humble, excellent at his craft, serving the whole.

And just to clarify: the alpha (Mars) energy isn’t all bad and Babe works with it. Alpha dog Rex, who marinated in resentment over Babe’s success during most of the movie, ended up removing a significant barrier for Babe so that he could learn a password of a different group of sheep and communicate with them.

Eclipses are culminations and also help reveal what’s been hidden. Virgo is discernment, seeing clearly, and separating wheat from chaff. What if this eclipse is asking:

What did you cast out as “unclean” that actually carries fertility and wisdom?

Where have you been trying to be a sheep dog (dominating, nipping) when your actual gift is to be the sheep-pig (asking, befriending, serving excellently from your own nature)?

So, yes, be discerning. But let’s also call to mind what Farmer Hoggett says to Babe after his big accomplishment, “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

As if all the current commentary about what is going on in the collective wasn’t enough, I made the “mistake” of noticing an upcoming Yikes! kind of transit in my natal chart three years from now.

Fortunately I actually remembered to do for myself what I try to do for clients to help them “read their lives backward” before discussing an upcoming transit. I ask them to tell me stories during the time periods of the earlier cycle(s) before we discuss what themes lie ahead.

“Reading life backward” is a James Hillman phrase and his book The Soul’s Code is devoted to this. It means the events in our lives tend to only make sense in retrospect.

So I found myself reaching for my pen, journals, and a notebook with a set of dates in the past and let my life speak.

As Thomas Moore says, “All work on the soul takes the form of a circle, a rotatio. … The life of the soul, as the structure of dreams reveals, is a continual going over and over of the material of life“ (Care of the Soul).

Above all, we circle back not to navel-gaze, but to face what we must do gladly: “Jung’s solution was both succinct and elegant: Free will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do“ (Liz Greene, Jung’s Studies in Astrology).

When I reviewed those past experiences in my life with a fresh pair of eyes, I realized they weren’t all about me. They were also about bearing witness to what others were going through, and about how the personal and collective were interwoven.

With all the profound challenges present in society and the world right now, and a new war underway, I think about Pisces, and how it is characterized by an expansive, boundary-less capacity for emotion and a compassionate identification with the world’s suffering.

The two fishes of Pisces symbolize the tension between the soul’s desire for transcendence and an equally strong pull toward material enmeshment.

Which now brings us to the current Mercury Retrograde in Pisces, which asks us to honor both—to feel the suffering without being drowned by it; to reflect without escaping into spiritual bypassing.

Retrogrades are a perfect time to read our lives backward, which can help us metabolize what is going on in the present. All the Mercury retrogrades this year are in water signs, with this first one occurring in Pisces. This brings much-needed waters of healing and an intuitive, feeling-toned vibe amidst the loudness of everything going on in the fire and air signs this year.

Below are the dates of previous Mercury Retrogrades in Pisces during the past seven years.

March 5 - March 28, 2019
February 16 - March 9, 2020 (the retrograde started in Pisces and ended in Aquarius)
March 14 - April 7, 2025 (the retrograde started in Aries and ended in Pisces)
February 25 - March 20, 2026
And a sneak preview:
February 9 - March 3, 2027 (starting in Pisces and ending in Aquarius)

As you review these dates, and perhaps grab a journal or calendar to look back, ask yourself: What was happening in your life during these periods? What was happening in the collective? And in the lives of the people you care about?

If you keep a dream journal, what were your dreams telling you during those periods? Dreams tell us what is really going on inside us.

Did anything from those periods feel off script? Were you taking on too much responsibility for the emotional well-being of someone else? Did you experience any suffering? Were you especially creative?

As I review these dates myself, there are both mundane and the most dramatic details. For the 2025 period, my journal shows my relief at receiving a bathroom remodel estimate that was actually within the realm of affordability, unlike one received a few weeks prior. During the 2019 retrograde, I had a dream about my late grandfather that felt like a visitation dream (Pisces is my 4th house associated with home, property, ancestors, parents). The 2020 dates coincide with when the world shut down at the beginning of the pandemic.

The practice of reading life backward isn’t about proving that transits “work.” It’s about learning to see life—with all its small mercies and large upheavals—as the life we were given to live. As James Hollis writes:

“The love of one’s fate is not fatalism, resignation, defeat or passivity. It is an heroic submission to the gods—not my will but Thine—which leads to the blessing of a life lived as it was meant to be lived“ (p. 58, Creating a Life).

I invite you to try this practice during Mercury’s retrograde journey through Pisces. Grab your journal, look at the dates, and let your life tell you what it knows. The stories we tell backward reveal the form we’re living forward.

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

When a ship carrying British soldiers arrived in New Haven, Connecticut in July 1779, Yale president Ezra Stiles watched it for a while and wondered what it meant.

As the soldiers started to disembark and head toward New Haven, Stiles hurriedly moved his belongings.

In his journal he recorded with dismay that, in his haste, he broke his Fahrenheit thermometer that he had owned for many years.

There’s about to be a battle in the American Revolution and Stiles is worried about a thermometer!

Yale historian Joanne Freeman frequently tells this story and says, “The everydayness of history is vital to remember and it’s particularly important to remember now.“

She notes how part of us freaks out when dramatic things happen in the collective and the other part of us worries about running out of milk.

“The way change will happen will not just be from big decisions on high. How change happens will be from people on the ground doing everyday things.”

Of course that reminds me of what Clarissa Pinkola Estés says:

Imagine the entire world in aggregate as having a soul. Imagine it is our work to reach out to repair the part of the world soul that is within our reach–the edge that belongs to self and the corresponding part that belongs to the world. The key words are ‘to repair that which is within your reach.’ So we ask ourselves, ‘What is within my reach?’ I am! I am within my own reach.’ (Terror, Violence, and the Impulse to Destroy: Perspectives From Analytical Psychology).

The question of “what’s within my reach” has been on my mind a lot lately, which is why I keep finding myself drawn to historians for reassurance alongside my depth psychology reading.

Church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch says “the historian is the guardian of sanity in society.” He also describes a historian as a “non-directive counselor.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recently said in an interview, “I think people spend a great deal of time worrying about what might happen. I always hear, ‘How is this going to play out? What’s going to happen next?’ My answer is ‘We don’t know. You never know what the future is going to bring.’ Until something actually happens I tend to get less concerned about it than other people do.”

Those of us who study and practice astrology have asked, or heard clients ask, those same “what’s going to happen next” questions. Especially this week, with a dramatic eclipse in Aquarius (February 17) followed by a rare Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries (February 20). The last one happened in 1703, well before Stiles broke his thermometer.

Quite frankly, I’d prefer to worry about my thermometer (assuming I could find it!) than spending the week doom-scrolling through the news and predictions.

It’s easier to obsess over a rare Saturn-Neptune conjunction–something vast and impersonal happening “out there”–than to sit with the uncomfortable truth that we have agency and have choices to make. Small ones, mostly. Ordinary ones. The kind that might not show up in an astrology forecast but that actually shape how we move through change.

While we’re all watching the dramatic eclipse on Tuesday and the rare Saturn-Neptune conjunction on Friday, the Sun quietly enters Pisces on Wednesday, sandwiched right in the middle. Pisces–the sign of dissolving, compassion, mending.

Maybe that’s the real transit to pay attention to. Not the loud ones infecting us with anxiety, but the quiet one inviting us to the “mending loom,” to borrow an Estés phrase. To sit with what’s within our reach. To do the small Piscean work of tending to what’s broken and reaching out to what’s hurting.

Another story Freeman likes to tell is about George Washington. He would take a walk every day, pause at a church to look up at the clock, and then take out his time piece to compare the time. He did this to show everyone he was a normal person like everybody else and not a king. He even received fan mail about it. Coincidentally his Sun sign was Pisces.

We can look up at the cosmic time, so to speak, but also take out our own figurative time piece down here on the ground and focus on the everydayness. The mending looms are waiting. We can be “guardians of sanity,” doing our part to “lift off the world’s shoulders our personal part of the burden” (James Hollis, p. 128, Tracking the Gods).

Subscribe now

Sources:

Joanne Freeman quotes from Good History, AI Slop, and Why It Matters Right Now-a LOT
Diarmaid MacCulloch quotes from How to Write Rigorously
Heather Cox Richardson quote from Heather Cox Richardson Returns!
Block quotes from Clarissa Pinkola Estés and James Hollis are cited inline.

Every year in grade school, Valentine’s Day filled me with a particular dread.

Like Charlie Brown waiting at the mailbox, I worried: Would I get enough cards? Would anyone forget me? Would the popular kids get more than me? Would the cards I made be set aside by their recipients with barely a glance or, worse, with derision?

Looking back, that childhood anxiety reflects the astrological difficulty of Valentine’s Day–it occurs during Aquarius, the sign of the collective, of how we measure up in the group. Love reduced to a tally sheet.

But this year, Venus, the goddess of love, has just entered Pisces, right before Valentine’s Day, offering a different kind of love entirely.

James Hillman, a double Aries, also had Mars and Jupiter in Aquarius in his astrology chart. This was perfect for the firebrand intellectual who spent decades challenging Jungian orthodoxy, building archetypal psychology, and winning arguments.

But he also had Venus in Pisces. While I was reading The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume III: Soul in the World by Dick Russell I came across passages that reminded me that he had this placement. And as he aged, something shifted.

“The fires that now blaze,” he told his friend Wolfgang Giegerich, “are more for the aesthetic and sensuous than the ideational. These days I often awaken with lines of poetry rather than with ideas“ (p. 450).

How many of us spend our early years leading with our Mars and Jupiter energy–ambitious, combative, ideological, building, preaching, and proving? And then life asks us to grow into something softer and more Venusian?

Hillman called this shift “thinking in a thingly way,” which means staying close to the actual texture of things rather than pulling away into abstraction. “Remember, O human, O Cartesian man,” he wrote, “that you are an animal, and in this remembrance, you will see and find the world animated, alive, sensate and imagistic” (p. 450).

Venus in Pisces thinks with things rather than about them. Not analyzing the flowers but actually bringing them inside and letting them transform the room.

Russell quotes his wife Margot McLean describing Hillman’s love of flowers: “He was convinced that flowers actually wanted to be picked and brought inside, not only for their own sake but for how they affected and transformed the space to which they were brought. They liked all the attention.”

When I was out shopping on a cold January day I spotted some flowers in the store and, inspired by what Hillman said, bought them. That’s thingly thinking. Not “flowers symbolize Venus in Pisces,” but simply: these particular flowers want to come inside.

Maybe that’s what Valentine’s Day is really asking of us–not the tally sheet of cards and candy hearts, but the thingly act of love: noticing what wants attention and giving it.

Sometimes the most profound act of love isn’t a card in a mailbox, but the simple, quiet act of bringing the flowers inside because they want to be there. And in that remembrance, we find the world–and ourselves–fully alive.

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

Questions? Email me or DM me on Instagram

At age 70, James Hillman, author and founder of archetypal psychology, finally got his Leo moment in the spotlight.

Oprah Winfrey invited him on her show to discuss The Soul’s Code. Her excitement was palpable–her copy of the book was full of handwritten notes in the margins. She told the audience her own “soul’s code” story from her childhood. She read this passage aloud:

We selected the body, the parents, the place and the circumstances that suited the soul. And that belonged to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice. And I do not understand this because I have forgotten.

After the episode aired, she called him and said “We did it!” The book shot to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and was translated into 15 languages. Several celebrities, including Robert Redford and Andre Agassi, read the book. Hillman finally had security and recognition.

His son Laurence noticed, however, that the success upset Hillman on some level. The Soul’s Code was “the least psychological, the least James Hillman, the most how-to book of all of them (p. 246, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume 3: Soul in the World by Dick Russell). He got famous for being accessible, for a parenting book disguised as archetypal psychology, not for his fiercest ideas about becoming “psychological citizens” or transforming therapy into “cells of revolution.”

Those ideas–the ones that didn’t make him famous–feel urgent right now. Hillman insisted the consulting room should awaken people not just to their inner lives but to the political and social world they inhabit. He wanted therapy to help people notice what’s wrong and respond with soul, not just adapt to dysfunction.

“The destruction of nature, the decline of culture and the oppression of the poor are daily facts,” he wrote, “that require daily acts, neither enraged nor numbed, but engaged” (p. 639).

I love The Soul’s Code and the acorn theory it espouses, which affirms that we each have a unique calling that is present at birth and gradually unfolds throughout life as it faces challenges. However, under this Full Moon in Leo, I feel compelled to acknowledge that it’s not enough to ask “What’s my calling?” (Leo) “You also have to ask: “What forest am I planted in, and is it healthy enough for ANY acorns to thrive?” (Aquarius)

This reminds me of one of my favorite novels, The Overstory by Richard Powers, where trees are some of the main characters. The intricate way in which they communicate is described throughout:

We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea…A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses…Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

Hillman understood this. He drew on Jung’s idea that individuation isn’t about isolation–it’s about deepening our relationship with the world. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, in a passage that hasn’t been far from my mind since I first read it last year:

We can explicate Jung’s idea of individuation as something that brings a self closer to the world, as giving no permission for us to retreat from the world, nor to go and hide, whether out in the cave or up in the ivory tower. I understood his inference: that people who are doing individuation work are so valuable, that their lives no longer belong to them alone. It ought be said, and often, that we literally owe some portion of our lives to tikkun olam, repair of the world soul. We literally owe some dedicated circuitry of the heart to the repair of the cultural milieu, each in our own way (Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy).

Leo’s courage isn’t just about shining. It’s about shining the truth, even when the collective (Aquarius) isn’t ready to celebrate it. So here’s a question this Full Moon asks: What are you being called to offer that won’t make you popular–but might help tend the forest we’re all planted in?

P.S. Mars-Pluto and Reading Life Backwards:

With the recent Mars-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius, which kicked off a new Mars-Pluto two year cycle, there has been a lot of anxiety about what this brings. Last week I looked backwards instead and tracked the two-year Mars-Pluto cycle that began in February 2024 and just concluded.

What I found confirmed that the real gold wasn’t in predicting the future–it was in discovering that even under these supposedly difficult transits there were many beneficial things that happened that I had completely forgotten about. Yes, there were difficulties, too, especially during the opening square phase!

If you’d like to try this practice yourself, I created a simple and free tracking guide for the Mars-Pluto cycle that just concluded. Instead of white-knuckling through “scary” transits and worrying about the future, you can process the past and see the actual patterns of your life, which is always more nuanced and interesting than a forecast. It’s another way of tending the forest–understanding what actually helped you grow, not just what you feared might happen.

Subscribe now

WORK WITH ME

Astrology consultations | Symbol & Soul Sessions (tarot, I Ching, book prescriptions for the soul)

WRITING & RESOURCES

Monthly newsletter: Reading in Depth (exploring depth psychology books).
Blog posts: Subscribe to get weekly essays

Questions? Email me or DM me on Instagram