Christopher Nolan misses the opportunity—or chickens out—in his Odyssey to give Calypso her due moment of protest, let alone do justice to her power as captor of Ulysses. Nolan’s film presents her as a nurturing, quasi-maternal sounding board, with her own story neglected, her own moment of protest left unsaid.

On my walk home to my Brooklyn apartment, an unsheltered man paces behind me—one I greet daily, noticing how handsome he is. I offer him a piece of blue raspberry bubble gum; he declines with a twinkle in his eye. Hearing the ghost of my own housing trauma, I sometimes think to myself, if I lose my home, at least I could still be handsome like this fella. I don’t think this is just a shallow thought, either—between his smile and that handsome possibility, there’s the vivacious curiosity that Robert Bly calls a sign of wildness. The man’s greeting and smile linger, lengthening the stretch of the sidewalk and shortening the distance between us as I walk home.

With his capacity to bend space like that, I think of him as a threshold dweller. These neglected threshold-dwellers are the domain of Hermes—to whom Calypso’s monologue is addressed. The word “neglect” comes from ne, “not”; “legere”, “to pick up, from leg, “to collect, gather.” Calypso’s own name comes from “hidden, hider” (perhaps originally a death goddess), from PIE root *kel- (1) “to cover, conceal, save.”

Calypso picks up, collects, and gathers Odysseus, but Nolan fails to gather her story—conceals it, in fact. The threshold dwellers are all too commonly neglected in their reduction to a function, if anything, serving as a vague player from the human perspective containing the comings and goings. Like Calypso in Nolan’s coldly masculinist fantasy, the neglected will mark the thresholds between the places where the protagonist isn’t sure if they belong anymore—between here and there, neither of which is certain if it can become “home” in real time, in the present or future tense. Whether in stillness or in movement, the neglected hold down the perimeter, allow for crossings, comings and goings. But whether this is a role they’ve agreed to, that’s another question.

I recently returned for a visit to my hometown, to attend the burial of a beloved great uncle. In rural Worcester County, Massachusetts, the automobile has become the only normal way to cross thresholds. There’s no train, no express bus—and though steeped in apple orchards and a history of utopian communities, the town sings the drone of car culture. I felt it the instant I stepped onto the lawn of the house hosting the reception. I wore my backpack, knowing I was dependent on a drop-off and would also be dependent on a pickup from the place. Others closed the doors of their own cars, or rented ones.

I asked the host, a family friend who I had never met, where to put my backpack. He gestured toward a corner, but the atmosphere spoke loudly within the polite quietude—as if my bag, or the question of where to put it, came from the disruptive cadence of another planet. A nanosecond of not-belonging, coming perhaps less from overt stigmatization and more from the illegibility of my presence (a backpack-carrier, in this upper middle class New England mansion?).

He showed me his vast farm and tractors, purchased from my grade school friend’s father. By association and some capacity I possess to cut through the small talk, he revealed to me that his sister had taken her own life only a few weeks ago.

It came out of his mouth as if it were a spill from a delicately gripped wine glass. I breathed with him in a long moment of silence as we gazed out upon the farm, almost wanting to hold his hand if it hadn’t felt socially incorrect. The breathing silence went on for a moment that, in chronological time, trailed into a negligible placeholder between anecdotal conversation—he chimed in about the fox who would visit daily—but in terms of Kairos, the quality of time, became a watershed, a gathering whispered in bass tones of what had connected us.

“She committed suicide,” he said. In that moment, with the tall grass blowing in the wind, his navy blue suit and tie melted into dewy eyes of grief. The illegibility of my bag in the house, and my lack of car, didn’t matter. All that mattered here were the tears, the wind, the weight of the unspeakable truth named, and two men finding solace in the animals who crept behind the oscillating reeds. Calypso’s territory— and, I like to think, not dissimilar from what turned her on to Ulysses in the first place.

I left this encounter more convinced than ever of my lack of belonging to where I come from, in a present-and-future-tense context. To belong may be the opposite of neglect—a place and its constellation of people picks you up, gathers you, implying they see you in your parts and in your whole. And then there are those stolen moments. The stealing of Ulysses by Calypso. The stolen, grief-stricken silence over a suicided sister. The would-be tender event of recognition, erased into a faded smudge, stolen by the nymphs, monsters and gods guarding the thresholds themselves—or by the tyranny of the mainstream narrative, and its intolerance of those who fail to meet the criteria of belonging.

The question was always whether Ulysses would be able to make it home. But though it may be easy to recognize that longing in all of us, what happens when a culture makes illegible the keepers of the thresholds between here and there? For those aspiring to a truly inquiring and authentically lived life, the boxes of the mainstream narrative won’t work, because one size will never fit all. Much time must be spent, therefore, between here and there—those zones where the dewy eyes, the spilled truth, the gaze upon the oscillating reeds, can be reclaimed instead of disappearing. The place where Calypso would have us hear her protest and perhaps call her out on what she herself has stolen, too.

As I scribble in my black diary in Prospect Park, a pigeon paces behind me. Two more fly behind me on either side. A garbage can sits to my right, with a rusty chain stretching behind two glimmers of sunlight on the ground behind it. I dream of calling forth this pantheon of neglected things. To call forth presences that sing and shine through the cracks when these moments, these passages, are no longer avoidable. To listen to those who have marked the roads and who make feral the no-road, to those who are the strange attractors of the hermetic moments underneath the bags rendered illegible, on the underside of the normalized habit of neglect.

WABOMS//Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School devotes itself to articulating this pantheon of neglected things. For those who sense that in these times, belonging may not be simply ‘here’ or ‘there’, WABOMS is a year-round lab of advanced psychophysical lineage medicine and interdisciplinary spirit work. We train practitioners to apply the six imaginal zones directly to their own artistic, astrological, and healing modalities. Our ascending autumn cycle begins September 6th. Six live group calls on Sundays with creative homework and community support each week. Claim your place here.

The quest for self-love— Leo— continues its eclipse season portal, flinging the gates open to intuition from deep past. This occurs with Sun’s conjunction to Ketu- the south node, the dragon’s tail- this week. It brings a power outage on usual egocentric expressions of vitality— but access to ghosts, recordings, echoes, reflections and rumination on your native self-expression. It’s about self-love before societal static.

Leo really is about self-love before societal static. What echoes, recordings, spirits and deep time intuition fling open this threshold to self-love before societal static?

It may happen through outer contacts. It may happen through contact with your own inner life. It may happen through contact with mysterious sources encoded in your DNA reaching out to you as echoes through deep time.

It will also bring to the surface what has taken you to the edges of emotional risk. Scrolls, notes, memories, musical resurfacing that brings you an awareness of grief, nostalgia or displaced tenderness.

There’s more to the story, though, involving the tango between purgation and love. Moon in Scorpio squaring this Leo Sun-Ketu configuration has a purgative quality— like the colon processing what’s been accumulated and held. What has been sitting in your system, waiting for elimination? The resurrected echoes of dead chapters aren’t only psychological material. They’re also the body’s toxin buildup asking to move through.

But some of those echoes coming up from the past, too, aren’t asking to be eliminated in the usual sense, but rather to be loved in a newer, more mature way. It’s one thing for ancestral baggage to be released; it’s another for ancestral wisdom, unfinished tenderness and interpersonal eros to be received differently than it was the first time.

Tied to this are the circumstances that have made you confront death, physical and metaphoric. With Moon waxing in Scorpio, the echoes of what had died become the mechanism that generates self-loving expression before societal static. Listen to those echoes, those looped recordings, that make you reckon with edge, risk and confrontation—and with what you actually need—rather than forcing yourself to suffer in a self-flagellating way.

The myth of Echo applies here. Echo, a mountain nymph, distracts Hera while Zeus seduces all the nymphs he wants—theologically, this could be interpreted as Zeus allocating to each being their unique portion of the cosmos before Hera assists in their individuation.

Echo’s distractions might be a container within the divine field as each being is apportioned their genius through desire and necessity. But when Hera catches Echo, she curses the nymph to only repeat what she’s just heard. Perhaps Echo’s curse, though, serves as a reminder of the particularity of your life. Do you allow time for the echoes that bring you back to recognizing your allocated portion of the cosmos, the original frequency of your undomesticated genius?

Relationships can assist the process—with Venus sextile Jupiter—but this can’t be named as a clean-cut “relationships serving for good or ill.” The relationship connections themselves may serve as another echo, another reflection. Relationship here might be like a stuffed animal claw in an arcade game, reaching for cuddly creatures while the machine loops an encouraging voice. Stuffed animals here stand in for comfort, intimacy and insightful clues about what you actually need to move toward the native reverence of your own self-expression, rather than remaining a consumer of passive entertainment walled-off from your own self-knowledge.

Treat these unexpected recordings, ruminations and detours as massage therapy appointments for the soul, without needing to shift into a knee-jerk frequency of acting out any of their claims literally. It can be such a relief when the edges of your wounds are countenanced by recorded scrolls that echo with silver gentleness in your imagination rather than loud bombast—and without needing an accelerator. What does that do for you this week?

It’s a good time to consult your friendly neighborhood astrologer for clarity and remediation on how these energies are working on you personally. I am always available to you. You can book a reading with me here by selecting the price point that makes the most sense for you and you’ll be guided to my calendar where you can schedule it at your convenience.

Oh..no, what were you gonna say?—

Oh, NO, I was just…

There’s a guttural stop. An awkward freeze. A lean in and a “oh, sorry, were you going to say something?” Or, if one is more verbose: “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you!” Or a simultaneous, “Oh, n-no go ‘head. No, no go ‘head. No, n-please…Oh I was just gonna say uh-uh…wait, who’s speaking first?”

The crisscrossing of vocal utterances through the digital airwaves may be the most raw piece of true improvisation in today’s world.

Before one catapults into the nasal escape hatch of nonprofit meetings—I just want to be miiindful, if anyone has any access needs they’d like to name—in a nasal drawl signaling nonthreatening intelligence. just.to.be.clear. What are we using our 2pm for?— somewhere, those seemingly ingrained pathways break down into a preverbal moment of true improvisation. The Uh-uh-uh, you were saying, go ahead. No, you go ahead, could go on infinitely…

Until one must stop in silence. And truly wait for the other to speak. And truly face themselves.

Perhaps what’s at the root of an honest social improvisation today would live in the capacity to face the aloneness behind our own screens. In this way, the virtual zoom stammer is not only an innocuous blip in the flow of conversation. It’s also the cadence of our curse to sit with the consequences of a salient paradox: the convenience of how comparatively easy we can access each other today, and yet the melancholy of feeling more isolated than ever.

The meeting behind the rectangle seems to bring the comfort of homogeneity and convenience, but the crossing of “uhhh, sorry, no, you go ahead” demands we recognize that we’re still all a mess, and that true listening may require a moment of sitting just a little bit too long with ourselves in the gap of awkward silence.

In a time when language is habituated and arguably colonized by em-dashes, rhetorical contrasting and overly normalized preambles and qualifiers, the “oh, no, sorry, you go ahead…oh no, hahah” breaks the trance for a moment. One must sit and face the agonizing embarrassment of not knowing who will speak first in the next instant.

This occurs during in-person conversation, too, when people interrupt each other. But the delay and the pranks of the screen, including those moments when human faces freeze into contorted expressions, and that split second of not knowing if they heard you, not knowing if they’re with you and listening, and not even truly knowing if they’re here or gone, and reckoning with the truth that in some way they are not, in fact, here, but in front of their own rectangle—this phenomenon is unique to today, opening up a new plane and spirit ecology of language.

In that moment of the stammer and the “oh, I think you froze there,” lies an inability to speak the agreed-upon vernacular. An interruption in the rhythm occurs that itself becomes brushed off as normal. But it’s a wasted opportunity to brush it off and normalize it too quickly, rather than sensing the fertility of this glottophagic breakdown of language.

If language itself has been quietly coerced to be the same, to be harmless, to communicate as conveniently and in as frictionless of a way as possible, we forget how the curious drive to hear, to listen, to understand, to wait to be told something, the delicious-but-painful tension between hearing and not hearing back, wondering if we’re overly colliding or if we just mispronounced the most important word, is how we breathe life into language.

In a sense, words are already alive. But as in time-honored traditions of theurgy, when sorcerers would breathe life into statues, so, too, might exist a come hither invitation by the gods of language to breathe life into phonetic statues—so malleable yet enduring, susceptible to melting and freezing alike, but with the capacity to loop worlds of meaning through echoes of their cackle in any state, regardless of the zeitgeist-dominant cadence. Tongues are serpentine tricksters, salivating, hungry, lingering on a taste or on an interruption as long as it takes to be satisfied.

How much can the ear bear? How much silence can your ear of today handle, when the silence confronts you with deep time memory of corpse-syllables that you’ve failed to bring back to life? The sitting posture in front of the ambivalent rectangle and the panicked flesh post-interruption bears the colliding clue to making your speech alive again.

We’re increasingly asking non-human beings (like AI) to speak and think for us. But unearthing new thunder of divine creation demands a slowing down, an interruption, a cacophony with the moment of listening, enough for us to actually lean in and listen deeply.

The zoom stammer must, in this sense, be the diagnosis and the cure. For against all habits to zoom forward into unquestioned mumbles, staccato head-nods and aggressively reassuring affirmatives of the nasal, the opposite of zooming, or its counterpoint, must occur: a disjunctive stop. A homeopathic dose of embarrassment at the syllabic utterances breaking down, our half-words and grunts and laughter tumbling palimpsestically over each other, with relentless politeness toward each other but tepid rudeness against the impersonal forces of time that don’t care about our sense of convenience, conspiring to break our glotto-lingual spells.

Imagine you spoke for an entire day colliding with the “Oh, no, go ahead.” “Oh no, you go ahead.” What would that do to your communication?

I wonder what sort of new humor, what quality of tenderizing-through-embarrassment would arise. I wonder who would arrive in the silence of sitting with those blushing cheeks and spinal chills of self-awareness.

The Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School (WABOMS) works directly in this territory: the preverbal, the stammering body, the place where language breaks down into something more alive. The Ascending Autumn cycle begins September 6th. Registration is open here.

The old story goes that the Buddha visited a hermit, giving him a strand of his hair. The hermit took this strand of hair to a king with alchemical powers, and asked for the hair to be enshrined in a boulder with the shape of the hermit’s own head.

With the help of heavenly god of excellence Thagyamin—who is on a continuum with Indra, Hindu king of the devas—they found a boulder at the bottom of the sea and built a pagoda to enshrine the strand of hair. According to legend, the strand of hair itself prevents the boulder from rolling down the hill. And as for the gold, way-finding worshippers continue to cover it in golden leaf to this day.

The stone quality of this solar eclipse in Leo calls us toward an inner gold—a trust in all the different ways our creativity will radiate into the world if we stay true to ourselves, even if those ways seem quiet.

There’s power in being seen quietly, of our contributions radiating out through a mere strand of hair (recalling the Leo haunting of the ancestral lion) and through the gold of this trust right at the edge of gravity, even during the seasons when we spend our 3D lives as hermits.

That strand of hair may be just the key in your DNA, the version of you revealed by your deep self, that unlocks the needed message for you to see your own gold clearly, or to hear the necessary insight.

Put another way: you can use this eclipse window to go inward and ask for profoundly intuitive help. It’s the help of messages that come from deep past and liberating future versions of you. It’s the help from messages encoded in your DNA. It’s the help from the plurality of selves from your deep past who contain resources, beyond your usual awareness, to face whatever circumstances befall you.

With the eclipse conjunct Ketu—the dragon’s tail, the south node—there’s a need to allow a power outage, an ejection of energy. But that doesn’t mean it’s draining—Ketu also represents our link to intuition from the deep past. And it’s this kind of intuition that matures Leo’s ability to see the purpose of the quest—your capacity to see the purpose of the quest, now.

On my walk during the morning of the eclipse, my hematite bracelet snapped, all the stones scattering across the sidewalk.

“Of course,” I laughed to myself. “They always talk about how crystals can be reactive and volatile during eclipses.”

But the gravity doesn’t tell the whole story. Stones edging toward gravitational forces, in another way, find that quiet strand of hair that makes them balance, stand proud, and radiate their creativity in unseen ways.

It’s a good time to consult your friendly neighborhood astrologer for clarity and remediation on how these energies are working on you personally. I am always available to you. You can book a reading with me here by selecting the price point that makes the most sense for you and you’ll be guided to my calendar where you can schedule it at your convenience.

There’s an abundance of ‘fire’ in this week’s eclipse, but as it’s conjunct the south node, it’s also a power outage, so the fire in this case doesn’t mean that there’s a surge of energy. There’s, on the contrary, so much heat that it can, if not careful, burn up the energy available, agitate it, or waste it on drama.

Rather than an abiding life of the heart, excess shadow of Leo can be over identification with the steep drama of ups and downs, of victimized “poor baby” struggles, and of dopamine rollercoasters as a hobby.

This is especially true when accompanying the eclipse is a grand trine in the air element- an energy circuit that circulates back on itself, air begetting air. This reminds me of the expression “blowing a lot of hot air,” but it also draws particular attention to mental processes and the neuroscience behind our states of mind. When attention to neurobiological chemicals mixes with a penchant for melodrama, we must watch the susceptibility to burning ourselves out, blowing ourselves up, or scratching the existential itch in a way that only creates a rash.

Now for the good news: if we refuse to take the bait of horizontal melodramas and instead practice tons of self-love through the steep relationship cliffs and potent victimhood-betrayal-loyalty cocktails, claiming our ancestral birthright of regality but flexibly shifting our positions while remaining strong—if we can do this, this eclipse is actually documented as flinging open unexpected ways forward, unblocking the path and helping us disentangle from closed neurobiological loops, cracking open our narratives that had once been rendered inert by self-pity or entitlement.

It’s a good time to consult your friendly neighborhood astrologer for clarity and remediation on how these energies are working on you personally. I am always available to you. You can book a reading with me here by selecting the price point that makes the most sense for you and you’ll be guided to my calendar where you can schedule it at your convenience.

Nearly a decade ago, my mentor Montgomery Taylor (RIP, 1946-2022) told me what he feels an astrologer’s “job” really is.

He said, “if we can make the outer planets, as we know them today, in our own lives and in the lives of our loved ones—especially the archetypal forces of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto—support each other rather than running on their own independent agendas or vying for dominance, then we’ll be on path.”

In short, he meant that liberation from stagnant thinking (Uranus), transcendence of the limitations of the past (Neptune) and transformation & self-fulfillment in the material plane (Pluto) ought to support each other, and that we have a say in this process. Those descriptions of the planets aren’t the whole picture at all—but they bring home his point because each of those archetypal aspects of these generational forces represents an emergence of something fresh.

For instance, some might be surprised to see Pluto characterized as “self-fulfillment in the material plane.” But we mustn’t forget that the chthonic Plutonian forces present in wildcard ways. They can be the terror of Kali’s destruction but they can also be hidden riches that roil to the surface in an unexpected boon. Or, sometimes, maybe most of the time, these two qualities work together.

The highest integrity way to imagine the sensationalized Barbault Basket—an astrological configuration where the outer planets form a ‘cradle’ shape—is as a room of softly laid down antique instruments readying themselves for you to set the tone. Within the wrenching tragedies and nihilistic excesses of the current 3D world, there’s a room of quietude that nonetheless prepares you, and all of us, for a tonal shift, if we approach these antique instruments respectfully and sit at them with composure.

My take is that the sensationalized astrology of this month, ironically, isn’t what generates the most drama, crisis or immediate action; it rather creates a quiet room inhabited by tuned musical instruments where a symphony is about to play. And you must be willing, if necessary, to play the piccolo with complete reverence.

The much hyped Barbault Basket is bookended by Jupiter in Leo, opposing Pluto in Aquarius. It’s one thing to remember that Pluto works like the chthonic gods of Hades and Kali—what decays, transforms and composts. It’s another to remember an overlooked theological aspect of Jupiter: it’s not only about expansion (a frequent Jupiter keyword used in astrology). Jupiter allocates portions of the cosmos to beings.

Jupiter allocates to you, your domain, according to your precise character and uniqueness. To know your domain, that part of the cosmos you’re apportioned, is to know your sovereignty, your self-possession, your compos mentis. To know your domain is to know that you’re worthy of love and kinship in the world.

What if your domain refers mainly to how you spectate—how you see—rather than how you muscle through and vie for dominance over your world? What if the lens of respect and love is itself your domain—no extra padding needed—through which you intuitively listen, step by step, moment by moment, to how your life wants to be lived?

I suspect Jupiter and Pluto, bookending the cradle, may be making these provocations that are neither entirely new nor the same as they always have been. Rather, if we are living in a time of global poly crisis, the command toward the frequency of respect and love—first within your own domain and filter—sets the tone of the coming changes. It does so by making respect and love your non-negotiable compass.

As we enter Leo season—the sign of radical self-love—I invite you to consider that living in the world as a person means claiming a domain of love, appreciation and respect. Polish your lens so that those qualities become how you see. It’s a radical act to do this in a time of such blatant disregard for life.

What interior heart’s vision do you hold as naturally abiding, before all your social masks come on as guests? This is the lens to polish, like a gong ripple of pure self-sovereignty prior to content, that lays the foundation of your contribution to the social changes on the horizon.

Shadow scopes are here to help you walk with integrity, with a high-camp, trickster twist. Read for your rising sign (and your sun and moon signs too, why not!) and report back to me.

Leo: A stinking cloud in your immediate environment grows, threatening to spread its murk across your entire field of vision. This almost renders you a hunched, inward looking recluse unwilling to let yourself radiate and shine—as if the rot itself of all that’s on your plate shines more immediately than you. But there’s more to this concave state of curled tissues than meets the eye: that all the skeletons roll out of the closet, all the stenches of your baggage make themselves so clearly smudgy, means the world is readying itself to meet you, sending you into a protective pseudo-stasis before you fling yourself laughingly at all of it.

Virgo: Suddenly all the children who died too soon in your bloodline awaken, forming a parade just behind you. All the laughter sounds scarier than the most stern voices of your crotchety authority figures: how can a cackle be so celebratory and gregarious if not nefarious? There’s a point this season where you don’t quite turn back as if nostalgically regressing, but rather yield backward, letting yourself be held by the giggles of deep time. This is a strong counterpoint to your labor, and the infinite expanse of reclaimed spontaneity bubbles and sparkles forth into your monastery, rattling you into renewed action.

Libra: Too many agreements, too soon! Did you ever imagine becoming bored of too many people agreeing? Now, every time you hear “yep” and “uh huh”, it seems you hear snoring and snorting. This doesn’t mean everyone you know becomes unintelligible, but rather that a different intelligibility must announce itself—a counterbalance beyond the simplistic repetition of the affirmative. The more you grow frustrated by the autonomously reproducing fruits of your own diplomacy, the more you challenge yourself into ways of perceiving beauty beyond the superficial habits of understanding.

Scorpio: Sweating and trembling at the possibility that your footprint of intensity will be seen and remembered, you stand exposed. How could your goals be rendered into an animalistic cartoon experiment? It might be time to reflect that your deepest goals and inner sanctum aren’t only valuable if they’re kept close to your chest—they don’t lose their value if they’re made wide-eyed and shaking on a platform for all to see. Rather, despite your strong will, you’re rarely in control of others’ perceptions, and you can learn to love all the interpretations of you, in their varied genres, as experimental art, in a different but equal way to the seed vision only known by you.

Sagittarius: Are you suddenly carrying too much, your dreams growing in your abdomen like a ball of pus shaking you restlessly toward the new places you want to go? Or are cystic temptations forming like balloons just barely in the sky of that promised land, your desire jiggling and skipping as you grab for them? You have a unique opportunity this season to receive that pinprick of a reminder: as you move into this new life, you first learn to carry yourself into it—warts, flabs and all. You’re not doing anything wrong; you’re learning the sacredness of carrying your own baggage to transcend the velocity of old habits. Then you meet the new place, the new you, fresh.

Capricorn: Some kind of growth within the growls of those beasts deep within you—the ones that won’t let up on their greed—compels you to show your hand. You’re not only a climber in the sanitized social sense; you’re a climber in the sense of one who loves gripping on the barnacled rocks against the shore. You love the scrapes, the side effects of lustfully devouring the ravenous entrails; the bruises of going for the local lovers others have a hard time seeing. Now, this season, becomes a time you might no longer fear those inner animals, but know that they’re a crucial part of your undomesticated creativity, the less predictable ‘climb’ that makes your life more gripping.

Aquarius: A gigantic pitch, agreement or contract holds its palm face up to you, laced in some honeyed drool—is this the relational dream, or is there a catch? Your perception’s caught the sticky mess leaked onto the zeal for entering into collaboration. To go forward with this, means less that you’re naïve about people’s baggage as that you must be willing to dance, too, with the earthy, sappy slop of 3D connection. You can also watch that up-facing palm approach you and decide: is it this growth that’s aligned with your values, or is it a reflection of the magnetism you now embody, which you can also redirect at will?

Pisces: There are always urine samples that need to be delivered. The downstream effects of a particular rhythm proclaim their celebratory presence in your nutritive and hormonal fluids. Are those gargantuan tubes a hygiene test or a celebratory goblet? It depends on the frame you give it. Of course, it’s not all “you” running this show—those microbes and morsels as party guests say, too, whether it’s a diagnostic or a celebration or both. Make an intoxicated toast to the lab reports! Make the uninvited pests supreme dinner guests! You have a unique capacity, this season, to turn the turgid tides of the mundane into the markers of magic.

Aries: Have you got the hang of those swift-footed dance steps enough yet where you don’t become incontinent and lose all the loose change in your pocket in the middle of the dance floor? The rushes of what goes in and what comes out becomes exaggerated in this expression-heavy time. Think gambling spoils down the drain, baby spitup in your face, and a whole inventory slurred out of a clown carrying the list on a dollar store birthday balloon. You’ve rarely thought there’s too much spontaneity, and if anyone can handle this much, it’s you. Remember in this season that when you’re dancing, your greatest ally is the strong connection to the ground under your feet.

Taurus: Your capacity to open a dark expanse into light has, in the past, been a delicate dance that’s caught you by surprise. It’s as if you’re a gothic sentinel who can suddenly part the sky, either as puppet master or marionette (sometimes it’s unclear for you which is which). The dance of opening the dark on the exact spot you are, into light, requires the stamina to stay put, to hold your attention, and to open your own agility that this ‘parting’ gesture demands. This season, you’re really doing it- not only making that space between dark and light sing its song, but feeling your back support, expanding your exquisitely serene focus, indulging in medicinally gothic earthiness.

Gemini: Gathering into sidewalk chalk-and-jump rope games sometimes holds a bigger purpose than meets the eye: within those leaps, scribbles, tic marks and dances, oral cultures rise and fall. The popup book of your senses amalgamates into street cartography this season; your genius thrives on the colored chalk checkmarks in the ditches. Those places where the tar is uneven, where you might trip if not for your jump rope leap, where a hula hoop makes that pavement wink at you with the knowledge that it’s maturing. You let the limitlessness of your mind play, in disguise, through all its playful rhymes, rhythms and rhombuses.

Cancer: You can’t wait to put down what you’re carrying, until you realize that when you weren’t looking, a sack of gold appeared in your arms. Whatever you were carrying before became moot, and your moans of toil become the wailing of incredulity that you’ve hit the jackpot. Why does this win come with birth pains, feeling even heavier? The truth of these whole-body opportunities had whispered behind the snooze button of the retrograde; they’re now announcing themselves through the birth canal. If there’s great agony, it’s only because the ecstasy of this new you comes with knowledge of crying and sweat buckets, reckoning with what you’ve endured.

It’s not a time to solely obey emotions or strictly obey logic.

It’s a time, in the aftermath of the New Moon in Cancer, when we’re particularly vigilant to the psychic emotional weather of lingering attentions. And these attentions can be pesky, sludgy, lonely, paranoid, but they can also clear the way for a bizarrely neglected streak of your genius to come careening back into your life.

The ‘climate of lingering attentions’ here continues to revisit questions of “who is feeding?” and “who is being fed?”…and what and how we’re being fed.

Lingering, throbbing questions and concerns return to haunt us—especially questions about attachment and nourishment. What qualities of attachment and nourishment are present in your life? Where have you needed to starve pseudo-sources or recipients of nourishment in order to restore your integrity and your longer term self-nurturing? These are tough, sometimes ruthless, questions. But they all come down to what will be one of the core meditations of Jupiter in Leo: self-respect and self-love.

To restore the integrity that’s rooted in your self-respect and self-love, renouncing pseudo-nourishment becomes necessary.

But it may not be a rational process. It’s letting yourself hover and dip onto those lingering attentions enough that you discover what’s soul food and what’s degenerated into trauma bonds and parasitic lettuce. There may also be a secret third category, though: what kind of grit and rot* have taken root in a generative way?

Like rained on cardboard or spat upon ink that’s run on a page, there may be some source of your genius, of your character, that had once been consecrated with chaotic fluids but then discarded, left to gestate while you forgot it. Don’t be surprised if Jupiter in Leo’s quest for radical self-love uses this new moon week as a conduit for this self-source to rush back into your life.

The key is to first feel your feelings completely. Rather than looking for informational or logic-based research guidance— which we might be tempted to do because the new moon is conjunct Mercury retrograde in Cancer—the first step is to *feel the feelings completely.*

The second step is to rely on your own inner guidance for what kind of attachment and nourishment is best for *you* right now. That includes calling upon your ancestral bodyguards to ask what kind of attachment and nourishment are best for you now.

The rest? Ask your astrologer.

The gates to the 6-week live WABOMS “dog days of summer” cycle open this Sunday, July 19th at 12pm EST. Six live group calls, community support and practice in between. Register here.

_{*thanks to Biborka Darvas, kindred spirit in astrology and art, for bringing my attention to the word “rot.”}

I remember when one of my grandmothers scoffed at the idea of me doing physical labor. She felt it was trite. “Nope. You need to be doing something using your head,” she said. “Yep. You do.” No muscles lifting. No blacksmiths toiling. Hephaestus’ shops closed long ago. Aphrodite has no husband in today’s world.

One of the maladies of the contemporary human is the thumb’s demand to swim to the next profile. The thumb joints alone show the asanas, the prowess, the choreography needed to be human today.

Think of the absurdity of the truth that we can become aroused by staring at erotic images on a tiny screen. But it happens. Tiny rectangles—prisons for the eyes—make us salivate. It takes an act of will to look away from that solid box that slips so easily out of the hand, keeping all the secrets of our desire. Heavens forbid it falls to the ground—oh no, the screen might smash!—and the hands are finally brought into action, with one sweaty palm clutching a panicked jaw and the other reaching into the underworld for the device.

The contortion of our hands into claws, with our thumbs poised in warrior poses ready to jut back and forth showing off their swagger, is one of the core postures here. It’s been collectively decided, silently, that the claw position suits the human being best today. Even in self-pleasure or in intimacy with another, a claw might dictate the cartography of touch, so imprinted is the gesture of the holding of the device, so embedded in the cells is this particular mudra of contorted hand and bent thumb.

Charcoal gods speak through these claws. Sudden whispers and cautionary raven voices shriek through the frozenness of our finger joints.

Another core posture, sibling to the claw, is the perpetual press of the finger tip. In a profound isolation, the rest of the body remains still. The fingertips alone dance like puppies fluttering their paws up. It’s as a light flick of water, or a whisper, while the rest of the person remains checked out. The tips are the only expressers. The legs, on the other hand, are crossed and bent round each other, with feet going numb and falling asleep.

Eventually the fingertips call their bluff and can’t carry the whole burden of expression when the asleep foot must be shaken out. And eventually, some life must come into the face, some steps must be taken out of the cafe, some sun and earth allowed on the skin. With the loss of the arms and of the agility of the spine, everything becomes relegated to a flick and press.

What is born when every emotion, including those yet to be discovered, must find constant gradations of the flick and the press as their primary modes of expression?

It’s a kind of imposed scalar shrinking, an invasion by some force that seeks to shrink and expand the scale of the gestures of the cosmos’ expression on this force’s own terms and accepting nobody else’s. The shrinking of scale to flicks, presses and rectangles that wobble and fall out of a hand-cum-claw—and then the pivot to an enlarging of scale, to using these digital yogas to compose the most sensationalist soundbites so that people feel aroused and alive—this scalar vacillation becomes a perverted balance beam whose time is now. Going numb or going nuts, going limp or going large, going deep or going dissociated—these fluctuations become sites of profound incision, of legion, of becoming knocked down and demented due to a perversion of scale.

Scalar shifts happen less now through the gliding and exertion of laboring hands, but through spaced out pushes and pulls of attention. One side says “make me feel something” and the other side says “I’m dead to the world. I can’t.” The result becomes a need for sensationalism and intensity to dictate the affective experience—where you can only feel something if it’s sensational to the point of caricature. The experience of Scale itself, here, becomes vampiric, feeding off a perceived need for drama and intensity to battle the fatigue of only allowing the fingertips to be alive.

There may be other gods, though, even deeper than the perceived rock bottom of the parasitic vampirism. They live where the finger joints snap. Where the claw freezes into carpal tunnel. Where the hands remember when they’ve sweat in their nervousness about touching a new lover for the first time; when they remember the rush of sweetness thinking about a new crush; when they held the hand of someone in grief. When it’s time to shake them out after a long time typing. When they need to pick a nose, or pick their sibling fingernails, or scratch an itch somewhere they wouldn’t want anyone else to see.

Even in those tiny moments when we might become possessed by the wonder of the spaces between our own fingers and bringing them towards or away; possessed by the wonder of the grime under our fingernails, or of the cuts and scabs from dryness.

Here, right in our skin, there are other scales, other gods, and it’s possible that our fingers in this scalar vertigo imposed by unknown divinities, may map new pathways toward recognition of the labor they have done. The claws may return us to very unsung old gods, in different drag, and it’s possible that the next step is tracing their mudra, singing their songs.

On Sunday, July 19th, the gates officially open for our upcoming 6-week live psychophysical laboratory: The Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School (WABOMS). We are stepping completely out of standard, disembodied pop-astrology cliches to work directly with the raw, elemental lineages of the Six Imaginal Zones—moving from cracks and palimpsests to floods, preverbal sound, and the rewilding of your cosmological template. This is an intimate, live sanctuary for those I describe as generous, bold, and tender. Passive consumers need not apply. Six Sunday calls at 12pm EST with community support and creative projects in between. Claim your seat at the $222 Founder's Legacy rate.

What can you no longer do?

Or, put in a more nuanced way: what’s the structure for your feeling life—and what structures have worked in the past that, with grief, some form of separation is called for now (whether on a large or small scale or somewhere in between)? The moon in a square to Neptune that’s separating, but still in dynamic tension—so it still brings a sense of confusion, or grief, that’s also a stepping stone to clarity. Or post-clarity grief.

Mercury stations retrograde in Cancer right on time for the full moon. The tricky bit—remember, Mercury’s the trickster—about a full moon that encourages boundary and ending older forms of nutrition that have decayed—is that Mercury in Cancer remembers. It holds strong emotional memory; the cells and emotional body store and are storied.

You might notice memories of past structures that become a post-grief bargaining, a post-clarity bargaining of what you decided, especially if you decided to walk away from something. Memory of your mammalian attachments to these previously nutritive structures flood back.

But Mercury performs a signature trickster move here: the memories of the structure that previously nourished you are juiced up and saturated by other fabrications of what you lost…in other words, things that didn’t really happen but are now autonomously contrived longings about what might happen, or a cathartic re-attachment to that once-nutritional apparatus you’re grieving.

These wet apparitions, mixed with their imprinting claims of memory, may tempt you into bargaining back into the old. But here’s where a proper dose of Saturn performs the alchemy: Saturn encourages us not to take these re-attachments literally. Your grieving tears for what once was, aren’t literal glue bringing you back in ways you don’t need to return. Instead, you can honor the nutrition the past structure provided for you—honor the seriousness and weight in images of memory and longing and tears—without making the cognitive move toward assuming your choice to move on is a mistake.

Reminding us of what we can’t do anymore, Saturn brings the gift of decay and of what’s no longer possible as a means to clarity about our boundaries. But, masterful at separating what belongs in the literal life structure as distinct from what belongs to melancholic reflection, Saturn isn’t squeamish about leaving you to feel the aloneness of a choice, the naked, exposed quality of a decision.

So much of what this full moon trains us to realize is the truth that the world will not go back to the way it was before. You might be seeing fractals of this reality in your personal life right now. And we will miss certain aspects of the old world. But one of the hidden gifts here is that there were ways of seeing our lives and communities in the past that made life harder, even though they were habitual.

So when considering that this full moon in Capricorn is training you for the momentous astrology of July, consider how Saturn and Mercury work on you now. What structures must go? How can you honor your sacred grief for them while gifting yourself the clarity of knowing it’s time to walk away from them? How is your felt sense of kinship changing through it all—through the lonely choices, through the chaos of you and others leaving, through all other transitions?

There are ways the old world—which in recent years has reached its deepest descent into materialism—made kinship harder rather than easier. How is what’s happening now making it more possible to, in your own uncharted way, divert your life into a stream of kinship? It won’t look like the past, but you’ll take your love for everything in your past and you’ll make new beauty and support systems out of it.

If you're seeking guidance through this transition, astrological readings are open — book yours here. And if you're called to walk through these thresholds in deeper community, the first cycle of Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School begins July 19th — registration is open.

Emotions speak and spill under thick layers of mud. It can feel as though even when your sagacious clarity knows what will keep you compos mentis (self-possessed, sovereign, autonomous), wide and deep inner being fantasies pull you into their grip. You find yourself listening to AI slop music by accident, in your trance of indecision with those sirens and hairy ancestors perched on the karsts and swamps, tempting you into what they want you to do. You find yourself making strange bargains with mother, with father, with reputation, cooing over the possibilities of how folks will gossip about you. The reverence and irreverence, the gravity and the scandal, are delicious in equal measure.

But these are examples of the wide ground of deep time underneath: the karsts and the frilly horn-shaped muds in your underbelly, the sweet beckoning underneath your intuitive hunches toward what will really bring you sovereignty. The task is not to obey the beastly bearded siren-like temptations. The task is not to ignore them and pretend they aren’t there, either.

I’ve written the above with imaginal fidelity to my own inner experience. Part of the right response to those deep inner beings—whether you personally call them beings, or fantasies, or both—is by cultivating your imaginal fidelity to them. In so doing, you transform them into art without letting their claims wreak havoc in your literal life (or at least, less so). How does imaginal fidelity call you to move the needle on them as images?

What I’m calling imaginal fidelity here may be considered an intermediary between feeling and intuition. We tend to blend feeling and intuition together into a mishmash in modern discourse—but in classical Jungian and elemental psychology, feeling and intuition are different faculties. Feeling corresponds to the water element, and what feels comfortable is a viscerally evaluative response to what’s happened. Intuition, on the other hand, corresponds to the fire element— and with a vision of *purpose* and *future* that’s teleologically directed. Feeling might want to stay put; intuition sees value in leaving for the sake of the future path.

This distinction matters here because the square isn’t really asking you to choose between comfort and fear — it’s asking you to notice which faculty you’re listening to.

Concerning the choice you might face in the fallout of this Sun square Neptune week, you might find it’s not as simple as a choice between comfort zone and scary future. It might depend on whether your imaginal fidelity leads you to create a third way between two seemingly irreconcilable options, or a clean cut—a cut, for instance, of deeply entrenched comforts that have rotted, or of some delusion, distraction or ignorance holding you back from embracing the full ramifications of your intuition. Imaginal fidelity transforms each image it touches with compassion and beauty, while also leading you into a necessary act of scale—whether that’s to be found in a cut, a stretch, a middle way, an angle or a flow.

Essential to consider, though, regarding our sense of direction, is that we are in a time of collapse and emergence. And the choices that we make need to reflect the new paradigm emerging: what’s the choice that’s going to open your heart? And feel the contrast: what’s the choice that’s going to keep you reactive, brainwashed by algorithmically engineered desires, and terrified?

Though it’s hard for us as human beings emerging from the deepest descent into materialism to consider another way of living in the miracle of materiality other than the distorted ways of greed, manufactured scarcity and extraction, the bridge we are here to cross is all about centeredness in heart, soul and spirit that roots itself on the firm earth. This threshold also means knowing those deep underbelly parts of you, and not running in fear of them.

Sometimes the experience of engulfment (the chthonic counterpart of the imaginal zone of Affect) figures heavily into this experience—you’re engulfed by those primal survival screams, by claims to comfort, by those inner beings clutching onto you to meet their needs. And in the space between this engulfment and your perceptive sense of direction, in the most extreme cases, it can feel as though you’re sinking, drowning. And this is why, in the practice of imaginal fidelity, you need a threshold spirit who can hear your prayer, who can meet you where you sink, whose back you can ride on back up toward that perceptive sense of direction once again. Consider now if, as you listen to your intuition, your feeling and your imaginal fidelity, you can move toward the choice that will allow you the greatest sovereignty and the greatest heart opening.

If you’re curious to meet that threshold spirit yourself, WABOMS — a year-round astrological, psychophysical and magical training ground anchoring art, healing and animist spirit work within my Six Imaginal Zones and AstroErotics systems — begins its Descending Summer cycle July 19th.

And if you’d like more personal support navigating this energy, astrological readings are open for July.

In short, Venus-Pluto alignments contextualize a two-step choreography of our current evolution: 1) clearly share your heart and your truth, and 2) let that truth be received. Let it land. And it may feel confrontational, but it’s better than the alternative. That’s the most medicinal aspect of Pluto—the wrathful feminine going so far, in some cases, as to tear away our comforts, call us out, and strangely, paradoxically, replenish us through that process.

The Venus-Pluto opposition that perfected on June 17th, 2026 reverberates as a confrontation with addictions or compulsions—including those in the world of daydream—that have served as sweet relational comforts for a long time. It’s that moment when those comforts are presented with a hint of doom, or of lack, as if your love itself is presented with an empty grocery store shelf.

Your desire, or the high of those daydreams that fill your palms and fingertips with high-voltage sweetness, meet the reality equivalent to supermarket shelves swept bare. No more sardines, we’re all out. When Pluto’s chthonic forces say, “we can’t supply you here,” what happens to the charge? How do you become able to achieve greater sovereignty, or a greater compos mentis (self-possession) within the charge?

This runs the gamut from desire in love to becoming aware of the possibilities of famine. The dynamic meets at these nodal points of how truth is spoken; how you bargain for desires and needs. If the time when a collective crack opens is now, when our previous materialistic era is losing definition, then how do Venus-Pluto cycles become exercises in speaking from the heart?

Part of speaking from the heart is practicing hearing “no.” Part of hearing “no” is seeing all of our supply of goodness darken.

The shelves go bare. The beloved falls to the ground, on another plane, unaware of you as desirous lover, wearing charcoal veils and roses the color of your internal bleeding; their gaze presented in a way that’s unclear if they’re dead to you or just standoffish. Either way, the presentation of desire and need, that reaching-into-relationship as going comatose, pulled into a different register of communication or non-communication, in another way, gives richer color to your sense of beauty. Within that absence, in the awareness of lack, or removal, supply cut off, even in scarcity, there’s on the other hand an eerie brand of mercy and togetherness. There’s a relief in having spoken the truth.

The grief of a desire not met, or withheld, doesn’t occur in the chronically manipulative flavor of withholding— it’s rather the directness of the “no”, the directness of confronting the dissonance between our escapist daydreams and the wildly different register through which the beloved, or the food, or the sweetness itself receives our daydreams.

To directly sense the difference between these registers is needed as one of the Venus-Pluto cycle’s initiations for us into deepening our heartfelt communication. It’s through the grief of this directness that it’s possible to come into greater mercy—even through silence. A stopping of the usual business, the usual, habitual filters of communication from the more materialistic paradigm. It’s realizing that we have an opportunity again, just like in 2020, to do grief, and do it together. Part of grief is togetherness, even in silence, and even if not physically together.

And part of grief is the inherent softening that happens in the vulnerability of the truth having been spoken. Within the truth spoken, and within the pause of the grief felt, then it’s possible to get real about how to meet each other, and move into this accelerated new world and new frequency, knowing that it’s all different. Knowing that familiar markers won’t keep us company.

What will keep us company are the darker hues of our softness. The shards of deep purple across the catatonic faces of the “refusal” of our beloveds and the barrenness of our comforts. The tense muscles facing the ominous beige of the bare shelves. These may be more helpful guides, more cunning, more canny, more clever and more loving allies, as we step into this new place, more helpful than all the old benchmarks.

Be vulnerable, speak your truth from a loving heart, and keep your Will.

I’m leading a free virtual solstice gathering on June 21st at 11:30am EST. If you’re interested, please RSVP to this email and I’ll send you a zoom link. Astrological readings with me are open to help you as you personally navigate this energy—you can go to the link in my bio to schedule a session at your convenience. Registration for Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School is open, with the first cohort beginning July 19th! We combine astrology with the erotic imagination, animistic spirit work and somatic alchemy.

I have several reflections on my astrological understanding of the global polycrisis when considered within larger time cycles and on extractive capitalism as understood from a soul, spirit and imaginal cosmo-vision lens. These might turn into a series, or only a couple of paragraphs—let’s see. I continue to have more questions than answers, and my thinking changes as I digest new information.

For the moment, I want to direct attention to the wind in the brain that accumulates toward the end of Gemini month. This term—wind in the brain—is one I’ve coined in reference to a particular flavor of moodiness and depression that can show up around this time of year. It’s a buildup of information: free-radical, pressurized air in the skull, and the splitting that can happen in an effort to sort this proliferation of air. It can coincide with moody crashes, severe neurochemical drops and cravings to replace the stimulation—or grasp at any flavor of coherence to anchor the mind’s leap into extremity back to grounded action.

The Sun’s extremity of maximum North (from our perspective, which is actually Earth’s maximum northward tilt toward Sun), as it nears the solstice point, presents the feeling of impasse or making a move. Even within this distinction, there’s a split. On one side, there’s the impasse—the crystallization of indecision in the present, saying all has halted and nothing can move forward, all information leads to unraveling. The impasse implies the right transformation of insight is to be frozen in time. The only action is inaction, or to witness a gradual descent and collapse of the conditions for the impasse, with the collateral damage of ourselves. Impasse’s etymology comes from pass: from Latin passus “step, pace” (from PIE root *pete- “to spread”).

On the other hand, there’s the command to make a move: that even when the information that bottles up would serve to paralyze us, we cannot afford to take the path of least resistance and stay in Impasse’s crystalline dome of inaction. The world can seem so heavy and pressurized that there’s no choice but to pivot into a lighter register, a trickster’s levity that we access in order to stay alive.

It may be that the agony of Impasse’s chronic descent becomes the only way the trickster discovers this aspect of its own alchemy—that heavy density and seriousness become simply uninhabitable. Perception here has no choice but to break through to levity; to fierce, irreverent and cackling movements from the heart.

That last phrase—from the heart—is an important key. As a chthonic, underworld-oriented thinker, up until this point I haven’t been one who resonated with a word like “Ascension” or ascensionist-oriented mystical frameworks. But recent research has told me these are different words that, properly understood, describe pathways that equally draw a person into their lived, felt experience, through different lenses (which way is ‘down’ and which way is ‘up’?). Those who write of collective processes of ascension, notably Mark A Shryock, name that there’s a swift frequency shift into a more heart-centered form of communication.

In short, though it may not appear so, there’s now greater capacity for our hearts to be open and to give the gift of our vulnerability. As at this turning of the ages, global humanity has reached a deeper descent into materialism than we’ve seen in thousands of years (and, in fact, cosmological research suggests we reached the culmination of this in 2025), there’s a split at hand.

A portion of folks will remain in materialistic consciousness of the old order- extraction, accumulation, scarcity. A greater portion of folks will move into a felt sense of their ability to speak from the heart and move from the heart. It doesn’t mean our bodies won’t be at risk of the effects of poverty, war, genocide, and climate catastrophe. But it does mean that with a consciousness shift, there are capacities available to us now that we can’t even imagine when strictly operating from materialistic perception.

I’m not asking you to believe anything I say. I say all of the above more as inquiry and possibility than as absolute truth—and as an act of writing the world I want into existence. I hold all of this in the spirit of an agility to move between different paradigms — because the voice of Bayo Akomolafe is now constantly present when I move into any collective narrative or social criticism: there is no neutral information. It’s desire and bias and feeling all the way down.

If you’ve found that overthinking, or an overwhelming flux of information has brought you to an impasse, or a mandate to passively witness your personal unraveling, take heart that within this apparent impasse, there’s a crack. There’ll be a moment of truth, an entrance or an exit that you can’t unsee. And through this in-and-out motion, a sliver of light points you to the plane on which your trickster thrives.

Toward this end of Gemini time, before Sun reaches solstice on June 21st, the circuit between thought and feeling is especially pronounced, able to sense into the heart of the matter like dark ground with an electric beam zipping through it. What do you think about how you’re feeling? How do you feel about what you’re thinking? And what if you make moves from there?

I’m leading a free virtual solstice gathering on June 21st at 11:30am EST. If you’re interested, please RSVP to this email and I’ll send you a zoom link. Astrological readings with me are open to help you as you personally navigate this energy—you can go to the link in my bio to schedule a session at your convenience. Registration for Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School is open, with the first cohort beginning July 19th! We combine astrology with the erotic imagination, animistic spirit work and somatic alchemy.

The etymology of extreme is early 15c., "outermost, farthest;" also "utter, total, in greatest degree" (opposed to moderate), from Old French extreme (13c.), from Latin extremus "outermost, utmost, farthest, last; the last part; extremity, boundary; highest or greatest degree.”*

At this point in the solar year, the Sun in Gemini nears its maximum northern point from our perspective here on Earth. In its fullness, the Moon in Sagittarius nears the maximum southern point from our perspective here on Earth.

That means that there’s a built-in tendency in these signs to go toward extremes. Three relevant kinds come to mind: 1) Analysis paralysis, 2) indecisiveness, and 3) false dichotomies.

All of these three flavors of extremes connect to the mental constructs we create—how to access the underlying (often quieter) intuition that clarifies inner purpose and freedom. Sometimes our mental constructs calcify and obstruct our access to this intuition; other times the poison is also the cure whereby cognitive tools can be used to navigate and heal blockages to accessing our intuition.

1)False dichotomies: bust them. When you think when you catch yourself thinking “this aspect of my life is at odds with that aspect” go instead toward dissolving those two into each other. The quiet voice of intuition doesn’t need to be at odds with anything.

2) When you’re considering analysis paralysis, shake your body. Get yourself into movement.

3)And when you’re considering indecisiveness, consider how that there’s a generative medicine in the act of making a choice itself, without needing to turn into an existential crisis.

This is also the closest Full Moon of the year to the Galactic Center (27 Sagittarius): what’s at the heart of the matter for you? What’s the secret ingredient within all of this that underlies your self-sovereignty? It doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else, as long as you can know, feel or hear this inner voice.

It’s the last week to pledge to my Kickstarter—go to the link in my bio pledge and participate in the first cycle of Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School.

*https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=extreme

With this in mind, I can’t overemphasize to you how crucial these next eleven days are.

This Kickstarter is how that work gets its foundation.

There are eleven days left on the Kickstarter to support the upcoming year of my astrology practice and for the first cycle of Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School/WABOMS.

I’ve been sitting with how to write this. There’s the version where I just tell you about the structure. That’s all true and relevant.

But what I really want to say is this:

This school exists for people who have traveled far enough from their origins that there’s no longer a map. It’s for people who feel the grief of that and also wouldn’t trade the journey. It’s for people who know that something moves through their desires, their wounds, their creative work, their erotic life, something larger than just their own psychology, and who want a living framework for that knowledge rather than either spiritual bypassing or cynical dismissal.

It’s for people who have felt the specific loneliness of being illegible to the places and people they came from, and who are ready to discover that the very thing that made them illegible is the thing that gives them access to a deeper kind of belonging.

The school works with six zones of the body, where affect, desire, power, vision, grief, and vitality actually live: their correspondences in the zodiac, the planets as erotic realms, the land you’re standing on, and the threshold intelligences that govern each zone’s capacity to open, close, heal, and transform.

If this speaks to you- and if you’ve been watching from nearby and wondering if this is your moment- it is. Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School is a year-round living mystery school meeting in recurring six-week seasonal cycles, with weekly live Zoom calls, artistic projects, and community support in between. You can enter at any cycle, at any season. The first cycle begins on June 7th.

One six week cycle is $222. Register at my Kickstarter here- we’re eleven days away from our deadline.

Stories aren’t only intellectual here- especially with Taurus, you tell yourself stories about your life because you love those stories.

Do you love consensus reality stories? Do you love conspiracy stories? Do you love scandalous stories? And where are you in relation- do you love heroic stories about yourself? Do you love victim stories about yourself? Do you love deviant stories about yourself?

The trap is either holding on too tightly to a fixed story, or deconstructing and splitting your mind up to the point of agony. Mars’ configuration to the new moon reminds us that we can let go sometimes, when a story is becoming oppressive, when a story becomes a piece of baggage that we’d be relieved to simply set down, just as you let food cycle through your body and flush out toxins.

Where are you in your story cycle, what stories are turning you on, and how are you applying the eroticism of your mind to appreciate the miracle of your life?

Speaking of stories, I’m in the middle of one right now.

I have 20 days left to raise $11K on Kickstarter, all-or-nothing by June 6th. This campaign supports my year of astrological work and the launch of Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School, WABOMS.

The June solstice will be the central day of the first cycle. We enter the feeling zones and dynamics of our energy body and the energy body of the land through the spirits of the solstice- leaping into eroticism, artistry and healing.

If this new moon has you thinking about what stories you’re ready to inhabit more fully- this might be one worth entering.

Here’s the campaign page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdastrobody/wyrd-astro-body-mystery-school-launch-year

Every dollar and every share matters right now. Thank you for being in this story with me.

But it can also lead you to fall into a rabbit hole that’s hiding in plain sight, as in old Irish folklore about finding yourself ‘spun around’ by fairies. Pluto retrograde and its dark goddesses can spin you around in excesses of terror, rage, cruelty and impatient traumas wearing sociocultural masks.

I myself experienced terror, meanness and chaos, the likes of which caught me by surprise, a barrage of insults that I unknowingly walked into seemingly by a naive misstep. It felt like I had suddenly stumbled into a nightmare when I had convinced myself of the innocence of the route.

It brought to mind the theme of not seeing the whole picture- we might say, “not seeing someone’s true colors” until we learn the hard way- but also the undersides of the picture, necessary for a holistic assessment of the situation. These undersides of the picture include cracks, divagation, engulfment, anonymity/erasure, scalar wounds, and preverbal sounds for undifferentiated feelings (these are the chthonic components of my six imaginal zones, and we’d work with each of these in WABOMS- Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School).

Sometimes vulnerability is received and tended to; other times darker forces misuse and rend it. If possible, from a human perspective, discernment helps, but sometimes the primal forces of the underworld- Pluto retrograde- can bring little pockets of terror and chaos that spin you around that you’ve unraveled yourself into. A faculty of clear-seeing, knowing that forces around you and others’ complexes have brought a nightmare into your orbit, while also not believing the lies of the bad dream that aim to annihilate you, helps. Let it pass like a bad dream.

On the other hand, sometimes Pluto’s stations are initiatory portals for surrender. This is a different quality of Pluto- a longer term process during which life unravels and where a day world technique or way of seeing cannot be applied. Each person’s case is unique. Are you in a bad dream in which your own lucidity and capacity to deliteralize voices of annihilation of called for? Or are you in a longer term process beckoning you to surrender to the soulful process of not-knowing?

One thing’s sure: sociopolitical forces conspire with cruelty in a way that threatens to destroy us, but if we face them clear-eyed and hold fast to our values, can bring us into a more mature relationship to our erotic force and our proclamation of our own aliveness.

This is part of why I’m building Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School—WABOMS. Not despite the terror and the cracks and the preverbal sounds of an unraveling world, but because of them. We need containers that can hold the chthonic alongside the celestial. Places where the undersides of the picture are not pathologized but worked with, honored, and transmuted into creative force.

We have 26 days left to reach our funding goal of $15,000 by June 6th. Since Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, we receive nothing if we don’t reach the goal. If this writing has meant something to you, if you’ve felt the Plutonian spin and want a community that knows how to work with it, I’d be honored to have your support.

Here’s the campaign page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdastrobody/wyrd-astro-body-mystery-school-launch-year

There are reward options at every level, from readings to full year enrollment in the school. Choose anything that feels right for you.

I’m building something in the middle of primal terror. That’s what this is.

With gratitude and Plutonian blessings,

Nate Alden Speare

The full moon in Scorpio (May 1st, 2026) we’re experiencing now shows us the complete alchemical transformation of how Mars links with Will. The new moon in Aries was centrifugal, boldly thrusting the will outward. This full moon in Scorpio is centripetal, and pulls experiences inward toward the center. The will thrusts out, meets the world, feels burnt and stung. And Scorpio reveals what is indestructible after those agonizing burn-and-sting feelings.

What is left over?

You know what’s left over when you tap into that wild, undomesticated, vital force current where all of your soul says yes.

I’ve been living this transit. The past several months have included genuine thrusts outward—building something I’ve never built before, feeling the burns, and discovering what remains indestructible underneath. What remains is this work, where I discern the times through my own tides and life experiences, blended with the lineage currents I’ve been embodying for years.

Which brings me to something I want to share with you directly.

Ten days ago I launched a Kickstarter for Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School—WABOMS—a year-round school that brings together everything I’ve been building: astrology, AstroErotics, the Six Imaginal Zones, the planetary masks carved in Bali, and a rewilded understanding of the tropical zodiac as a living cosmology.

WABOMS meets in six-week seasonal cycles, twice per season, anchored to the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days. It’s a feedback loop: a place to be held by something that was there before you and will be there after you. A place where your desires, your urges, your creations are recognized as polyglots that speak the language of the gods hidden at the bottom of the garbage barrels and the ones in the heavens too.

We’re 18% funded with 36 days to go. Since Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, we need to reach $15,000 by June 6th to receive any support at all.

If this work has meant something to you—if a reading shifted something, if a shadow scope landed at the right moment, if AstroErotics opened something you didn’t know was closed, if one of my videos inspired you or sparked insight—this is a meaningful moment to show up.

Here’s the campaign page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdastrobody/wyrd-astro-body-mystery-school-launch-year

There are options at every level, from a $33 symbolic founding membership to readings, cyanotype talismans, and full year enrollment in the school. Whatever feels right.

And if you know someone who might resonate—someone who has been asking what’s left over after the burns and stings, who wants to tap into that indestructible vital force current—please share this with them.

With gratitude and full moon blessings,

Nate Alden Speare

Quick note: the Kickstarter I told you about is going live today, April 22nd at 6:30pm EST. Earth Day felt like the right moment to plant this.

Here’s the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdastrobody/wyrd-astro-body-mystery-school-launch-year

If you feel called to support on day one, it would mean a great deal. Early momentum makes a real difference.

Thank you for being in my world.

Warmly,

Nate Alden Speare

In honor of this alignment, I’m sharing an old essay I wrote in 2021, called Knife Consciousness. I wrote it when Saturn transited the degree in the zodiac of my natal Mars in Aquarius. Scroll down to read the essay under the image.

But first, a quick PSA: astrological readings are available through my website here, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign on April 22nd. It supports the upcoming year of my astrological practice, and if you’ve followed past campaigns I’ve done, the premise is similar. But it also includes another focus- I’m launching Wyrd Astro Body Mystery School (WABOMS) — a year-round school combining astrology, erotic embodiment, and visionary work in six-week seasonal cycles. Each cycle will be magically structured to a central seasonal event, and will draw inspiration from the mask work of my artist residency in Bali last year.

I wanted you all to know as I’d be honored to have your support on day one of the campaign. I’ll also have readings and other offerings available through it as usual. Can I count on your support on Day One- April 22nd? I will send you the link as soon as the campaign is live.

Sending you blessings, with supportive and invigorating vibes as we head into Taurus season.

written in May 2021.

Over the last few months I’ve had several encounters with knives that became catalysts for connecting messages from my inner worlds. What helped me map the significance of these seemingly trivial moments with knives was an awareness of cyclical timing: then, the knives transformed into messengers.

I realized that in its holistic aspect, a blade serves as a material medium through which sound waves travel. A blades’s purpose is not solely to destroy, dismember or limit, but to amplify vibrations, to act as a conduit for the messages of the wind. In swordsmanship, a good swing makes a sharp whistling sound; a wrong swing makes a flat whooshing sound. The good swing nods to Aeolian tones, named after Aeolus, god of the wind. For all the blood they draw, blades may actually be devotees of the wind god, vessels determined to transmit the messages that blow in the wind.

Astrologically, knives & blades fall under the incisive resonance of Mars, the pioneer—who, when blocked, becomes the warrior. In my recent encounters with the blade, I was simultaneously aware that melancholic Saturn backed into the same degree of the ecliptic as my natal Mars (where Mars was when I was born)—the thirteenth degree of Aquarius. I felt a sense that at this time, something would occur to remind me of structured boundaries (Saturn) in regards to my own ability to move forward (Mars) that could incite anger or urgency (also Mars) and that could invite an elder or authority figure (also Saturn).

The first event: I took a trip home and experienced conflict with an elder. I had been practicing meditations to “cut disempowering cords” as part of some treatment with a natural medicine doctor to enhance my boundaries (also Saturn). Only a day prior to the conflict, I had performed a meditation to cut the disempowering cords with this elderly figure. The morning after the conflict, she handed me my grandfather’s old pocket knife. “This is yours now. Your grandfather would want you to have this,” she said.

In the second knife event, it was Fourth of July weekend, and with transiting Mars in Leo exactly 180 degrees away from my natal Mars, I had thought, “this weekend could bring some heat and something could flare up—I wonder what?!” Cut to my kitchen: I was chopping a poblano pepper, and the capsaicin burned my hands (Mars is hot peppers, burns & inflammation). As my middle finger swelled up, reddening, hurting like hell into the wee hours, I flipped off outer space through my laughter: “The universe has a fucking sense of humor, eh?!”

The orbital planes of reality spun, within & around me, calling to each other with a mating song—mine in red; the Mars dimension colored beyond my perceptual faculty, but in a way that still reddened my perception through the earthly filter.

Reflecting on how I would apply this anecdote to a bigger picture, I called my mentor, Monty Taylor*. “Well, what did those burns tell you about how you’d handle a hot pepper next time?” he asked. “I would wear gloves when chopping it,” I said. “Ah, so you’d handle it with boundaries & care—and that applies to potential emotional conflicts as well, because Mars is also the conflicts in our lives.”

We amplified it further: Mars rules steel, and it’s said that rubbing a burn on stainless steel neutralizes the pain. The burn of Mars, triggered by the martial knife passing through the spicy martial pepper, cures itself by the aspect of Mars that’s sturdy as steel. Like cures like: one side of Mars’ spectrum cures the other side. Applied holistically, this relates to treating conflicts with the strength of the substance (steel) that enables the perspectives to pass through the relationship while not reacting to them; only resting in solid foundation, a strong, silent sounding board for spicy emotions.

While this doesn’t eliminate pain, it conjures the genealogy of emotion as reassuring medicine: the steel of the knife that released the chemicals of the pepper triggering the burn is the same, in disguise, as the steel that neutralizes. The alchemy of sameness and eachness ensues, in the recognition that the martial steel carries a common mission of transporting the conflictual or invigorating messages of the winds and of our windswept enemies & lovers.

Hold a knife by the end of the blade, no harmonics will release from tapping it. Hold it by the end of the handle and it vibrates in many ways. All harmonics move the end of the blade, so we need to remove ourselves from the blade to live in a kitchen, or an orbital plane, inclusive of the spinning messages while holding to our root.

*Monty Taylor transitioned into the other world in July of 2022.

This episode of Planets in Culture welcomes Daniel Giamario (@danielgiamario)—founder of the Shamanic Astrology Paradigm and the Turning of the Ages Mystery School (TOTAMS). Giamario elaborates on his position that “astrology is the highest of the lower mysteries.”

We discuss the relevance of the living, breathing, human astrologer and astrological counselor in these chaotic times, at the turning of the ages. Our conversation begins at 02:36.