Though Neptune and Saturn will not join again in Aries in our lifetimes, they still color this era with the singe of soot and sweat. What are we to do under such heaviness? The surefooted Chiron in Taurus stands still and asks us to emulate him. Feel the floor beneath you, the ground below that. Reach your awareness into the topsoil, the life-feeding decay, down into the sediment, through fossils and the tangible layers of time. Keep going. Find the stones that form your region, forge deeper down to the bedrock and remember what it is you stand for in this moment.

The solidness of the Earth, the potentiality of all she contains, of all she can be holds us and is held in us. Each of our bodies carries the power in the micro to shift the macro. With Chiron's retrograde in Taurus, I want you to focus on what it means to return to awareness of your body's power. As we slowly transition from Taurus back into Aries to finish our processing of what wounds we have in warriorship and leadership, recognize the transition. Root into this lengthy time at 0° of Taurus.

What have you begun here? What wisdom does the body want to share now? Breathe into your head. What thoughts are dancing and distracting you from listening? With love, let them go from your focus. Breathe into your heart. What yearnings are pulling you out into life? With hope, let them open you. Breathe into your belly. What hunger calls you to tend yourself? With awareness, move to feed it.

Your body is the best divination partner you could ask for, but only if you learn not just to listen but to ask. Bring your questions to your only 24/7 companion in this life. Before spirit, cards, coins, bones, or stars, stir the inner landscape, the embodied knowing, and ask. Say your question aloud then wait and notice what rises, where your sensory rhythm responds to words. After a pause, offer up an answer to the question and then listen again. Look for the signs of comfort, discomfort, excitement and ease or fear and tension. Read yourself. Then offer up another answer to the question and read again. Find the answer in the body language, because it is your language. You must learn how to speak it.

When we cannot come home to ourselves, we cannot easily travel out into our lives. When we cannot listen ourselves, we cannot hear others over our bodies' whispers and doubts. Understanding can only come alive in presence, in the light of purposeful attention. So as Chiron stands still, awaiting the kiss of a moon so soon on her way to exaltation, invite your body into the brave work of a dialogue too often denied by the persistent pace of life harried and hurried at the heels of systems too turgid to function for much long. Beat them to the stop. Win the race by refusing to run, even if only for a moment. Your body is waiting.

With tenderness, on Venus night and hour,

A child of the detriment moon

(Breathe. Breathe--Hold!)

I watched the clock

(Exhale. Hold.)

And reflected on the malefic nature

(Tiny breath. Exhale. Hold!)

Saturn and Mars.

(Good. Breathe.)

The stable slowness of the hour

(Exhale. Hold. Just a little bit longer--)

and march of minutes carrying the black hands onward incrementally

(Breathe. Exhale. Hold. Small breath. Good. Exhale. Hold. )

as the red raced relentlessly forward, indifferent to the staccato of my lungs obscuring what drives me.

(Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Exhale. Hm. Tiny breath--Hold!)

Control and inward action only seen on the ultrasound as agitation in the muscles at such external stillness strained for a motion to match the tension.

(Hold!)

In this, the malefic makes things happen

(Breathe. Exhale. Hold. Good.)

but always at a cost.

(Breathe)

This piece was largely composed on December 27, 2024, and began at 9:28pm. I was originally intending to publish it for the new year but time, in the tumult of transits, slipped away. I never resisted the loss or looked back to it. I assumed it would no longer apply and my memory released the truths of it. However, after some not-so-subtle encouragement from Jen, Devon, Ash, and Silverius over on the Three of Wands server, I looked at it again tonight and realized it still speaks to both the present and what is ahead. Incidentally, Jupiter is yet again at 13 degrees Gemini, exactly where it was when I wrote it over two months ago. While the fog of fear has receded some as the year grinds and speeds through the tumult that had caused the trepidation in the first place, the messages remain the same. We look to what we do next, and in that, to what we do now. So with that said, what follows is an offering from my 9th house, where the moon and south node eclipse my sun. May these words be released into the minds of those they will most serve and move unseen by the eyes that would find them unwelcome.

***

People keep asking me what is coming. They ask me what to do. They ask me how I am. They ask me how I'm handling this. The answers vary externally depending on my energy and my ability to access my Libra Mercury and its abundance of code cracking, register adjusting, and word working. But internally, the answers remain the same. Fear burns under my fire.

There are days and seasons where divination is delayed, where the messages won't come, or worse, where we won't want to seek them let alone heed them. For me, eternally a child of the Saturn-Uranus conjunction, the consistency of such times is less reliable. I reach for the stars even as I look away. I shuffle my decks even as I question the last cards.

I am in such a time now, staring down the fog of Neptune with a Saturnian’s grim conviction. I do not claim to know all of what is coming, but as the volume has risen over the last 7 years of truly listening, I trust the foreboding I feel. Or at least, I try to. The truth is, I keep checking. I keep looking at the readings, at the transits, at the news. I keep turning to history and to those better schooled in the arts and the ins and outs of this time-tracking system preserved from the proud minds of the past. I keep asking, is it true? Do you see it too?

And again and again the answer is yes. I beseech the Best, and still, the answer is yes. I ask teachers and peers and receive only echoes: Yes. You are right. Be worried, be vigilant, be ready. How can one bear the weight of such knowing? Even when it’s inspecific, the painful pressure of the losses to come pinches the brittle nerves of these already bowing shoulders. Yet I have been told I have a survivor's chart. And do I not say on the roughest of transit days, “forewarned is forearmed?” But what if I am too scared to heed the warning?

As I sit across the table from myself, reader and querent, practitioner and client, embracing my mutability to embody both roles, I ask in the face of my fear: so what? Does fear change what you need to do? Does fear change your intentions? Or is the work the same? What does it matter that the sword of Damocles hangs now above you?

It doesn't. What I need to do remains the same. I have known that I needed to be prepared. But it doesn’t change my intentions. So what is stalling me out? In a word: denial. I must acknowledge the possibility to reprioritize. In fear, I hid from actions that acknowledged the realities of that fear. That’s the same as choosing to simply sit in the fear. To truly prepare for the worst is to expect it in earnest and perhaps I fear that most of all. Reality is not an easy thing for an anxious heart. What would it mean to face it and walk on anyway?

***

I drove home from a holiday gathering that had been belated by bad astro-weather and worse health earlier in the week. It was a cascade of mutual cancellations that came as a relief. I've been so tired. Tired upon waking, tired through the day, tired in conversation, and tired on the way home. I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to get gas. I didn't want to do it, to do anything. And in that moment, the somber epiphany of Saturn sitting on my north node came out with unavoidable clarity: It isn't going to get any easier.

Putting off a task doesn't make it easier. And in a broader sense, waiting to feel better when I have chronic fatigue and the standard health of a maltreated moon, is simply an excuse for ongoing inaction. It isn't going to get any easier. So do the things now. Do them while you know you can. ‘Want’ isn’t a factor when dealing with such a hand.

Like a chorus of agency, it ignited within me the quiet fire of consistent action. Any action taken to clear the way, to make things easier later, to get them done, to set desire aside to simply do what I must, is one well taken. Every action convinces me I am capable of another. Every action reminds me of where my power lies. My ability to grasp geopolitical theaters, corrosive clouds, and weeping waters, to martial millions into caring about each other or at least leaving each other the fuck alone, is limited. Yet here, in my body, in my home, in my life I can look to the next right action. I can look to what needs to be done.

With compassion, I can carry myself forward step by step, brick by brick. I can chop wood and carry water. It's a simple and ageless adage, rerooting again and again in the soil of a thousand faiths and philosophers. For me, I find it most intimately in Stoicism. The spheres of control place me in proper order. Epictetus reminds me that not only could it be so much worse, but that I owe my easier circumstances actions equal in effort to what is actually possible. What freedom remains is to be exercised rather than ignored as granted.

Now unlike the Greeks and Romans (and more so their modern Stans) all arguing upon the porch, and more akin to the Cynics, I recognize that sometimes simply being, resting, enjoying and existing are the most essential parts of my purpose and rebellion. Sometimes the thing to do is to actively not do. I say this so you don't think I'm advocating grinding myself or anyone else into productivity dust in these disturbing times. To the contrary, sometimes the next right thing is meditation, sleep or food. Sometimes it's calling a friend. But the point is, we must continue to act, to live in all that entails—live fiercely, vibrantly, fully. Because it isn't going to get any easier.

The avoidance, the fear, the habitual, repetitive escape from both the good and bad of life, from what nourishes us, what challenges us, and what needs our attention, these things are killing us in equal pace to the calamities that cause us to maladaptively cope in the first place. Because if we are consistently not present, if we are willfully not participating in our lives but only chasing after them as something that we’ll get to have later then what are we even coping for? It’s surviving out of habit. When we are ensnared in cycles of dissociation, procrastination, anxiety, and anything other than authentic, deliberate choices day to day, we have no time, energy or awareness for taking action on the atrocities, ugliness, and systemic horrors. We’re reacting, not acting. Like many of our problems though, this is self-perpetuating. We keep cycling, overwhelmed by what is outside us, afraid to look at its impact within. But it isn't going to get any easier.

How can we be expected to do it when we’re already struggling so much? It’s not right! Right? At a certain point, we have to acknowledge that it isn't a matter of what is fair. It is not fair or just that we are faced with these choices. It is not healthy or right that we must push through the exhaustion, the hurt, the utter isolation. It is unthinkable that we should have to defend basic decency when we can barely take care of ourselves and struggle to stuff joy into our spare minutes. But it is what we have to work with. We have to lower our shoulds and oughts down into the muck and mire of what is. It should be different but it is not. We ought to have more grace given but we do not. We must work with what we have to create a world where those who survive have better. We must recognize, even in our weakness and depletion, that the only way out is through. The obstacle is the way.

***

And in this, we find the crux of what is coming next. We find the Martial and the Saturnian. We find Aries Saturn and the slew of transits that surround them. We find the immovable object in the land of unstoppable forces. And we find too, where my delineations deserted me in the absolute fear of facing down this impending Aries onslaught upon my already more than enough damage-dealing Mars.

I say this for transparency. I say this so you know what is behind the stars and the cards (and their absence). I say this so you don't think when I do this work that I don't understand its impact, its gravitas, or its sometimes absolutely anxiety-inducing implications in the face of harsh alignments. This is perhaps why some accuse me of contributing to fear-mongering. But when you are malefic-ruled and in the middle of the meat grinder, sometimes all you want to do is save others from falling in the way you did.

Though this is a personal reflection and meandering look my emotional landscape, the transits and how we can move through them, I want to pause here to remind others that no matter what the aspect is, what transit or timing, no matter how similar it is to what someone else went through, we are all different and all have a choice. Your chart is no one else's. How you weather the weather won't be the same as your forebearers. Though much seems and feels fated, even in Stoicism, we are shown that the dog tied to the cart has choices about whether to walk, jump in the cart, or be dragged. Life may be funneling you in one direction, yet you can decide what you will do or take with you along the way. You can choose how you respond to your life. So yes, I'm getting into the uncomfortable territory of what we are walking into. But we all have choices in how we handle that walk.

And again we return to Aries Saturn. What does it mean to choose to build something? What does it mean to have control? What does it mean to make demands on what is around you and call it to order? What does it mean to fight for something bigger than yourself? What are the rules of the fight? These questions and more call into focus Saturn in Aries, the place of his Fall, the planet of lasting systems in the sign of immediacy and challenge.

For me, this is one of the Saturn placements I struggle with. That is true of many of the ones I have not experienced in my adult life. My awareness of them the first time around when I was younger was lost to simply living life, unthinking of stars and planets beyond the prospect of their immensity, beyond peering at them and exploring the idea of moving among them. So with this, it's only really from Sagittarius to Pisces that I can claim to know what each Saturn consciously feels like on the body. As a Capricorn rising, I have worn each since my return and tasted the difference. But now that we approach yet another boundary, another demarcation between the signs, where Saturn sets his sights on a new territory, I wonder how Saturn's new uniform will feel.

Tight, burning, uncomfortable, and yet functional enough to get the job done? More practical? Sturdy? Evocative? Armored? Ready for movement and action? Whatever the look, in this first house year, I'm scheduled to wear it whether I want it or not. If you've been here even for a little while, you likely know that I have a predilection for Mars and Saturn, both my own and in transits. So naturally I have been trying to crack the code. Ironically, it was that very fixation that kept me from seeing that the whole reason I struggled to understand Aries Saturn is because I live alike but in duality, through not one placement, but two.

With Aries Mars Rx tightly square my Capricorn ascendant, my daily existence is the unstoppable force in argument with the immovable object. I witness within and in the outcome of my actions, the dueling wills of ‘now’ and ‘later,’ of ‘you must’ and ‘i won't.’ Some things are too close to us to keep perspective. Sometimes it's not simply losing the forest for the trees, but the tree for the bark. In living this square, I’ve found the answer is all about who goes first. Picking an order of operations unlocks the energy lost in adversarial cross-purposes. Luckily, it doesn't necessarily even have to be the best order. It simply needs to be decided. First this then that. And in that the energy is freed and explosively available for movement and action.

As I think about this, not only does it help remind me how to get out of this fear fog (really, Neptune, please stop), but it opens a window from which to witness my Aries Saturn brethren and their upcoming returns in a new light. When I watch them, I see their wills waiting to ignite. This was first highlighted for me by the visionary artist and astrologer, Adrianne Tamar Arachne. She noted the way Aries Saturn returns raises the question of what activates their willpower. The focus becomes finding what drives them and figuring out what the fuck they're going to do about it. And as I look to those I love who burn and smolder over the state of things, I see something to be unleashed. But that unleashing isn't going to be easy.

For Aries Saturn, the slowness will have to be won in trial by fire. The patience will be found in the inferno of eagerness at the edge of what could be, what needs to be. The lasting impact will come only after the lessons learned in action, rather than in advance. Aries Saturn will face us like an aggressive novice who already knows all the answers, and in that showdown, everyone is slated to see where truth and power are actually up to the test. Yet the ability to hold anger and use it, like a furnace feeding on coal, is the ability of the Aries Saturn at his best to forge something worth it in the rubble of mistakes. And in this glimmer of optimism from the depths of Fall, I think of my partner who has the placement natally.

Once, early in our relationship, in a self-destructive spiral out, overwhelmed by life and the pressure of a domicile Saturn that was soon to herald the pandemic and already pinning down my ascendant, I wallowed. I picked at myself with the histrionic misery of inaction and paralysis. I cried out for the worst. If I could only just hit bottom, surely I could get better! And at that moment, my Aries Saturn love said to me, “Do you really want to fight to get to where you are now?” It rung me like a bell. What horror was that? What terror to crave to be in this place again? Then he asked me, “What is the next right action?” For months after, these questions became a tag team aimed at my choices, an inspirational self-attack to fend off the malaise of executive dysfunction that only enabled me to get further behind and to feel increasingly worse.

They resonate in the same way that thought on the way home did: It is not going to get easier. Do you really want to fight to get to where you are now? What is the next right action? These are the questions of Aries Saturn, and are doubly asked with the uncertainty of Neptune traveling in tandem. What is the life you want worth to you? What are your values if you aren’t embodying them? Are you willing to combat what keeps you from them or will you change course?

As of now, I am recommitting to my fight. I choose to move into the fear, facing it teeth first. If it's going to charge me either way, I'm damn sure not going to let it get me from behind. It doesn't matter if I can't see through it yet, if the plethora of planets dancing back and forth between Pisces and Aries and the arms of Saturn and Neptune blur the lines with doubt. It doesn't matter if the details are unclear. I don't need to see everything to know the next right action. I don't need to know the outcome to know that I don't want to fight to get to where I am now. I don't need to want to do it now to know that it isn't going to get any easier if I don't. These are the whispers of what will come. But I'm not going to wait to hear the horns of their arrival to start acting on what will need to be done to face them head-on.

***

So as I reread these words for the first time since forging them in the fire of last year's end, as I hide from the light of the first eclipse of 2025 ominously eating the moon and my sun alike, I charge you and myself to do this now: Know your next step. If it's bigger than you can take in a single moment, it is not the next. Even when you don't know where you are heading, zoom back in on your feet, find your footing, and take the step. As we transition, transform, and release with collective screams the chaos of this Pisces season into the urgency of Aries over the next week, keep stepping. Keep looking at where you stand and where one foot can take you. No matter what comes, your work is the same. First this, then that. First we survive, then we thrive. It isn't going to get any easier but it is now and always only ever one action at a time.

O Mars! O Ares! 

Red of face and unyielding of fist! 

You of the fierce fires of day! 

You of the strategic flames of night! 

Hear now how your deeds have earned you respite!

Battle-bloodied and ram-hearted, return to your restful reward. 

Claim the laurels of Aphrodite's arms entwined with yours. 

Let your passion and pride pursue only the pleasure of recovery as you await the next war. 

Let us join you in the meats and honeys that celebrate your prowess with victorious feasting.

Breathe deep and savor the fruits and creams of Zeus, the ample abundance of your formidable father. 

And as you enjoy what was earned, let us too learn to replenish, to be fed by more than the burning spices and fury of the fight. 

Allow the lands of our bodies to move uninjured and unpillaged as you plunder instead the sweetness of the offerings extended. 

Set your sword to the smith that your blade might be sharpened and let the whistle of the whetstone sing you to sleep in this moment's peace. 

Reclined in the shade of dreams and let Luna, too, in her silvery beauty pass by, spared your wrath to wash your wounds. 

And in such grace, show us how to honor the strength we expend with equal joy and to our welcoming health attend.

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Upon the moon's monthly ingress into Leo, I watch this leg of her journey initiate a fresh challenge between the lion and the water bearer once more. The standoff occurs mere hours after Pluto's final ingress into Aquarius in our lifetimes–a phrase many are tired of hearing astrologers expound upon. But we emphasize it to remind others and ourselves of the iconic transition that is not to be lost, lest we forget to note the parallels between this path and the ones walked before. Under this opposition, my thoughts return to a contemplation left incomplete at the beginning of Leo season, one that is echoed now at the beginning of Sagittarius. 

Settling into the third season of flame, gazing at the transits before my own hearth, it strikes me now that with Pluto's presence in Aquarius, the light of our fire seasons will transform over the next two decades. Aquarius will oppose Leo as it always has, but now with the added weight of Pluto’s presence there, it's important to remember that Pluto will also sextile everything that passes through Aries and Sagittarius going forward. The fixed air of transformation will blow steadily upon the flickering flames of these passionate signs of the zodiac. So I sit here, under Luna's own light, illuminating my house of shared resources, and consider again with renewed focus, the far-reaching implications of this transit for all of us collectively.

We, as astrologers, talk a lot about the burgeoning age of air, about technology and social issues, about the winds of change, about extraterrestrials and the Other, about the marginalized and oppressed, about systemic abuse and collapse. But I have seen very little on this transit that talks about the way air feeds fire, fanning the flames far more often than it blows them out. When we look at the dance between air signs and fire signs, we see spread and we see conflict. We see collaboration and challenge. We see innovation and excess. We see collectivism and radical individualism. And we see all of these in colorful and complex combinations. But because of his slowness, it is harder for humans to see how Pluto plays out astrologically through the sign interactions and cycles as no human can live through Pluto's full orbit and we have not even seen the Pluto return of the planet's discovery in Cancer. As always though, even with incomplete information and only curiosity as food for thought, we can still speculate.

This is where I began months ago, following a curiosity, a thought, a fear. Zooming in on Pluto's place in all of this, the sun's opposition at the beginning of Leo season struck me on an atomic level. Among other things, Pluto draws focus, Pluto sharpens awareness. Like Saturn, Pluto's impact on the Sun is difficult to escape, with both planets restricting and warping the quality of light, as Pluto carries none and Saturn stands dimly at a distance refusing to let the Sun’s rays brighten anything beyond him. While Saturn holds the gates to the cosmos at the end of human sight, Pluto is unseen, hiding under his cap of invisibility, unknown in his cold remoteness. With Saturn hosting Pluto in Aquarius we see these icy, alien attributes compound. This leads me to wonder: What effect will this magnification of the malefic have on the Solar? 

My thinking first stumbled into these speculations and considerations, because where I was, it wasn't just ‘fire season’ because of the Sun's yearly ingress into Leo. At the time, I was driving to see my brother, himself a Leo stellium, in the Colorado foothills. Around me, the air was choking with the brown miasma of a canyon fire, too close for comfort to the road I traveled upon, to his home, to my sister’s. The smoke stained the sky, the forest, my car and my heart. Its inescapable cloying left me thinking about climate change. I was thinking about how every fire season seemed to get worse. I was thinking about how the summers of my childhood, the pleasantness of being outside, had died.

And then it struck me, under the harsh rays of the Solar-Plutonian opposition, that our relationship with the Sun was changing. With Pluto in the diurnal Saturn sign of Aquarius, challenging our radiant star, the notion of radiation became increasingly literal. We have entered into a time of unprecedented temperatures globally, worsening UV rays, raging fires, devastating droughts and a deepening contempt for and anxiety over a season that used to be considered fun here in the northern hemisphere. The sun, so often a happy figure and symbol throughout history, throughout art and the occult, has begun to threaten us in new ways. The Saturnian side of that threat arrives in water shortages and restrictions, in laws passed and discarded trying to regulate the crisis, in the feeling of barrenness as things wither and die, as the ice melts challenged by Sol’s Leonine light. 

Ironically, in many ways, Pluto in Aquarius is also a Solar age. Yet here we find the reminder that astrologers of the past, particularly the medieval Islamic astrologers, viewed the sun as a malefic. Helios is one of the celestial bodies that is prone to harming others if not contended with and given proper respect. In our own charts, if he is maltreated our vitality suffers; if other planets are too close to him they suffer, burnt and combust. And oh how he burns! He accelerates, he feeds, he houses divinity and potential, but also ego and the separation of self from the others. In a paradox, his nature of being apart from others and the gravity that comes with that also keeps all the other bodies in the solar system moving, spinning in order, singing through the cosmos. His light is one half of the equation of life. Equal parts tyrant and parent, titan and sovereign, the Sun is an inescapable part of our reality and Pluto is bringing him into even greater focus. To understand how that dynamic changes things, we need to understand how Pluto changes things in general.

When we began attributing meanings to the outer planets, astrologers focused on the events that occurred around the planet's discovery, around how they moved in their synodic cycles, and around the mythology of their names. Where those different categories found overlap, the meanings were most likely to stick. In the case of Pluto, if we set aside the attributions pilfered from Mars and Saturn, we find three of particular relevance here. The first I have already implied, which is the way Pluto alters our sense of scope and scale, rendering the insignificant significant and vice versa. This is tied to the second, which is Pluto's relationship to atomic energy. The third is an intensification of anything Pluto touches, a fixation, particularly when dealing with fixed signs like Aquarius. When we combine the three we see a reason for increased concern for what Leo seasons will bring us over the next two decades. 

However, despite the dire nature of our circumstances, painfully highlighted by the Leo / Aquarius opposition, I believe that free will, though the subject of endless debate, is a useful exercise and experiment if nothing else, and one that keeps us sane in a world that is so far beyond the grips of our control. So with that, what can we do as air adds fuel to the fire? We can look to technology, to the needs must of innovation inspired under pressure to fix problems we probably should have addressed an age ago (Uranus in Gemini trining Pluto may give us support with this). We can look to collective action, with Aquarius rallying to build a protective barrier against the ego of our undoing (it’s appropriate to note here that most Boomers have Pluto in Leo and will be in their oppositions throughout this transit). We cannot continue to act in isolation if we expect to survive. This is of course another paradox as many Aquarians watch and study the structures and systems of society while feeling very much removed from them. So the question becomes how can we build a society that includes those who stand apart? Incidentally, this brings us back to Aries and Sagittarius, the signs sextile to Aquarius, who are also very much prone to walking their own paths unencumbered by others even as they love their friends and chosen people. Perhaps the answer lies with Leo and our challenged Sun, for few can bring people together with the warmth and joy of the heart quite like Leos. Yet how do we bring that Leonine love back into connection with those who struggle to feel, trust or keep it? How do we mirror fear with solution, heat with temperance, denial with accountability, then alchemize it all into action? There are many recipes that we could choose to make from these ingredients and under these skies. Some are medicinal and some are poison. 

One of the quite literally darker realities lurking in the delineations is to allow the Saturnian hosting of Aquarius to push us further from the Sun and into the dark of a nocturnal living, of more active winters and more hidden summers. As climate crisis has risen in tandem with technology, the agricultural schedule of the past, which fewer and fewer people adhere to by necessity rather than by habit, is eroding. Circadian rhythms and sleep schedules are combusting under the artificial lights of homes and devices, illuminating ideas, inputs and the night, even going so far as to bleach out the stars from eyes and awareness in major metropolitan areas and the suburban sprawl beyond. Does Pluto in Aquarius speak to this false light, this contrivance of the stellar constructed by man to break out of the tyranny of nature's rhythms? It is one possibility but it is far from the only option. The inverse could also be true, abandoning the shackles of coercive social technologies to find self-liberation in the wisdom of the tangible. As is often the case, I suspect the reality will emerge somewhere in the middle with different people straying to different extremes and certainly those I have yet to consider.

But lest I be too Saturnian again, let us remember it is now Jupiter's season, a time of expansion, of embodying our philosophies and changing them once they prove inadequate. It is a season of generosity and hope, even if these particular skies are darker and more combative with the looming Mercury and Mars retrogrades. Let us beseech Jupiter, even in his detriment in Gemini, to help us consider the possibilities and ideas available to remake this new era into something necessary instead of something inevitable. So in this, what will you choose? How will you handle the heat as it grows? Whose hand will you hold as you seek a path of promise? Look to your charts for answers. Look to the planets and the stars for the map. As the Sagittarius sun is initiated into this new era by Pluto, perhaps we too can begin our quest for the vision that can carry us forward collectively, instead of in the increasingly uncomfortable isolation of these outdated and self-undoing systems that seem so determined to drag us down with them. 

As we sit amongst the cracked shards of a dream built on a backdrop designed solely to cover what we did not wish to know or acknowledge, we are awash in wave after wave of humanity's excess: rage, despair, fear, hope, defiance, uncertainty, indifference, numbness, betrayal, confusion, frustration, hopelessness, contempt, isolation, and for some, even joy. A simple binary decision crushed an already shattered collective into the chaos of what could be. 

We screamed, wallowed, dissociated, mocked, fought, denied, argued, gloated, and collapsed. Many continue to and will continue to for days, weeks, and months to come. But in the day after the day after, what is next? The answer is as it always is: the next right action. For me, that is here, in the words I share with you. It is deliberately not isolating myself or abandoning my principles or practices, but leaning deep into them, feeling for the soft silt at the bottom of the river of my life and reminding myself to continue to build its banks lest it become a marsh and mire. This is a lesson learned from Saturn’s stay in Pisces, the need to contain and guide the flow without restricting it. It's an uneasy balance between being and building.

I write this on the moon’s night as she crosses over Pluto in Capricorn for the final time in our or our children's lifetimes. She looks now around the empty vessel of Aquarius, surveying Pluto's future path, stepping outside of the systems to understand how we got here. Gratefully, I follow her detached assessment and let myself breathe, and with that breath pray that the collective returns to their breath as they return to their work and actions in this life. But neither I nor Luna are unwounded, for her latest journey forces her to face off with Mars, a nascent leader, free of his Cancerian armor and looking for a fight in Leo. Pierced by such prideful anger, both she and I carry on, recognizing that the act of living is the act of learning to bear injury. Still, it's easy to get lost in the perspective of the painful side of what is possible, what could be coming, what is already here. It's a simple thing to disappear under the doubt and fear. It's an understandable thing. 

But it isn't going to grant clarity, ease or action. It will only overwhelm. Instead, I look to my feet, and as below, so above, so I look to the sky. I watch Mercury in their detriment, in the bold, brave, and confidently courageous sign of Sagittarius, co-present with Venus, heralding the Sun still submerged in Scorpio behind them. I look to their slowing, their entrance into the pre-shadow of an admittedly ominous retrograde. And like them, I slow, preparing myself for the pitfalls ahead. 

Here, the general disruptiveness of retrogrades, martial by nature, is only amplified in the belief-bound and fiery sign of the centaur, which at its worst can be dogmatic, explosive, and avoidant when the consequences come. Yet in all things there are gifts, and this retrograde brings us the gift of challenging our beliefs and those of others. It can be ugly work, but it's essential in the refinement of our life philosophies. What wisdom guides our actions and our hearts? Where have false stories led us astray? Where did we confidently charge into a situation based on erroneous or incomplete information? These questions will carry us through the coming weeks and cause us to reconsider at best, or deeply regret at worst. 

But what about now? What about what's next? What's next is what was. Between the Mercury pre-shadow, the Mars pre-shadow we are already in along with all of the outer planets currently retrograde, we review, we repeat–whether we like it or not. The recursive nature of this time is a gift reminiscent of Groundhog's Day. While we can't actually change the past, we can change how we behave when we are confronted with its resurgence in the present. What was will be again, but we needn't be who we were when we met it the first time. In this way, we can call upon astrology's strength. It is an art that grants the ability to look ahead at the schedule of history’s repetition and plan accordingly. 

Normally, I would encourage action here, but there's so much of that in the air already, a choking smog of threatening demands, pleading implorations, and holier-than-thou prescriptions. Instead, I'll offer possibilities and share what I will do. I'm going to watch my mouth, pick fewer fights, and discern which are the worthy among them. I'm going to be forgiving to myself when I fail, when emotions and my malefic nature flare into fires fueled by hurt and fear. Then I'm going to get back up, return to my spiritual practices, to my journals, to my loved ones, and I'm going to try again. 

I'm going to look to others with compassion or at least understanding, recognizing that no one got where they are in a vacuum. Cultural conditioning, trauma, scarcity, grief, and fear form and fill the cracks in the worst of us, moving us in ways that are hard to hold in our hearts when we witness or embody them. But I'm going to try, both to hold and to witness. I'm going to try to step back into the fierceness of love, of warriorship. I'm going to reclaim the power I have in my daily life, to strengthen my sense of control on that which is in the sphere of my influence. 

And I'm going to rest. 

What are you going to do? This isn't a challenge, and it's okay if you don't know. For some, figuring that out will be the next step itself. But if any of my actions offer you a spark of hope or inspiration, it is my hope that you'll take them too. If not, it is also my hope that you find the ones that do. 

For now, I call upon the prayer from the Cycle Community and Cycle teachings to say: May True Love be the expression of power in the world, and may we be the ones to bring it. 

Modern astrology has taken to maligning Capricorn and Aquarius as cold, unfeeling, uncaring robots at worst, and closed-off, work-centric intellectuals at best. But in truth, that quality of stoic remoteness and the sense of inaccessibility others experience from Saturnians is a byproduct of a fathomless capacity for grief and witnessing. Black-garbed and grim, it is Saturn who sounds the funerary bell and Saturn who built the casket.

Saturn is the container, the walls that hold the visible solar system in place and barrier us against the stranger, more ephemeral outer planets. More specifically, Saturn holds the harshness of what others cannot. With the night Saturn sign, Capricorn, we see what it is to be tangibly held in the grip of earth-based action. With the day Saturn sign, Aquarius, we understand what it is to be a watcher outside of that container, to comprehend it conceptually.

In both cases, we are given the strength to bear the unbearable. This is why so many Saturnians appear over-boundaried, distant, and aloof: it's self-protective. Yet the reality is that the grief we bear for the whole of creation, for the human and more-than-human world, creates an aching wound that will never close and thus must be concealed lest it be exploited. But here is where Saturnians can self-sabotage and become those stereotypes in earnest. Their fear of their own aptitude for holding life’s unpleasantness can lead them to steel themselves against it.

Striving to survive such pains, many Saturnians hide that grief even from themselves, creating internal boundaries of dissociation and compartmentalization to help them cope. If they can barricade themselves against their awareness of the world, they will not have to exercise their facility for bearing it. But closing it off from consciousness

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does not mean it is not still held within. Saturn holds horrors and so too do his children. So the next time you think of mocking or dismissing those born under the hand of the greater malefic, consider what could be behind their walls and the magnitude of their resilience in the face of suffering. 

And to my fellow Saturnians, please remember you can stay safe without buttressing your hearts. The world needs your mourning. Without it, humans are all too quickly forgetting what it means to give Loss the time and reverence it so desperately needs. We cannot leave death and decay unacknowledged; to do so opens the way to festering and illness. So I beseech you, restore the weight to endings by honoring your own ability to witness, by offering open tears and laments to the collective despair, by letting the salt of your cries dry your doubts and brine your resolve that you might embody for all the possibility of pushing on in the face of such sacred sorrow. 

May you weep for what was that we might make space for what will be. 

-L. 

A Child of Saturn
Capricorn Moon, Rising and Neptune