Now that Mercury has retrograded back into Libra, I think it’s no longer in such an opposition with Uranus that we’re all digging and and staying put psychologically. I also think that the entire entry I’ve been working on related to this transit can now wait for Mercury to go direct again.

There’s always something to write about, isn’t there?

I still can’t find a shit to give about my social media.

Instagram has brought an endless cascade of garbage into my life, and I, an astrologer, have nothing more to add to Instagram astrology. I don’t have anything sassy or pithy to say that I want to overlay onto a still frame from a television show I don’t watch and then share it with everyone. All sorts of useless things, from posts of screenshots of maxims that were just posted on Twitter to the same trite astrology memes that really teach you nothing accurate or substantive about the signs at all, just doesn’t do it for me. I can’t figure out how to break or even tweak the algorithm to get things I might actually like, because truthfully: I don’t even look for things I might actually like. I get recommended a lot of stuff about nail art for some reason For some reason, just about all the wholesome food-related stuff, the geology, the nature, the art, the astronomy is now replaced with beginner’s astrology and commercial New Age woo that makes me think the algorithm is just trying to piss me off now.

I would think that there would be some sort of ennui with Uranus retrograde in Taurus passing through my 2nd house, conjunct my natal Chiron, or at least a desire to refuse new forms (Uranus, retrograde in a fixed sign) of self-validation (Chiron in the 2nd house) through trying to convince others (Mercury transiting the 8th house) that I am something I’m not (retrograde, in Scorpio) while maintaining a rather mundane life behind the curtain (8th house transit), especially through photographs (Neptune transiting my ascendant/1st house) that idealize (Neptune in Pisces) or help me create a false version of myself (1st house).

But I think that if you’re looking for validation somewhere like Instagram, you’re basically staring into a hole in the ground searching for a reflection in a pool of water that will never collect.

But it’s not like I’ve deleted the app yet.

I don’t have Netflix or Hulu anymore, either.

I go through watching television in fits and starts, usually because of some trauma, like illness, or someone dying in front of me and me having to be quarantined in that apartment for two weeks in a pandemic.

Otherwise, my time on these channels is spent looking for something to watch, being overwhelmed with choices, starting to watch something that doesn’t capture my attention, then doing something active

I’m more of a hobbyist, really. When I want to relax, I like to listen to music and engage in one of my hobbies. I was recently gifted a sewing machine, and now that I have time, space, and freedom, I really want to get back to it.

It’s hard for me to simply watch or read about other people doing stuff when I’m not doing anything.

The burden of this Xennial microgeneration: Uranus transiting natal Chiron

I have some good news: I have a new desk. I believe that it’s actually a child’s desk, but I can sit at it with my feet flat on the floor. This means I have a new desk at which I can type comfortably for hours on end, which means I can really write again, and with the weather getting colder, what else should I do but focus on those books and novels and articles I started?

No pressure of course.

No pressure. Not that I heal my core wound (Chiron) pertaining to maintaining and being comfortable (Taurus) with my value and self-worth (2nd House) through my varied plethora of career endeavors (ruler of Taurus, Venus, in 10th house Capricorn conjunct the midheaven).

Uranus, both when it’s direct and retrograde, is transiting the natal Chiron of everyone who was born between about April of 1977 and June 1980. That’s a pretty narrow generation of people who are now about 40 – 43 years old. Probably not the best transit (or maybe the best ever?) to occur during the creeping phase of the mid-life crisis of Neptune square Neptune that these guys are also experiencing/about to experience.

But I guess that depends on how you look at it, because life is either half over or half remaining, and for many, this is a period of dissolution or reimagination: youth is gone if not in body than in mind, and if not in mind, then you’re fucked.

There are some among this little cohort, particularly those who already turned 42 over the summer and older, who are also facing Uranus opposing Uranus, which is a time of total revolution a.k.a the Official Mid-life Crisis.

The truth is that you get a double whammy here, two for the price of one: the Neptune square and either simultaneously, or right after, the Uranus opposition.

The creeping mid-life crisis vs. the official mid-life crisis:

So, there is a difference between the Neptunian aspect of something and the Uranian aspect of something. Neptune transits are like a slow rising tide or the fog coming in — you don’t realize they’re there until you’re stuck in the thick of it, confused and lost. Those of us who are about 41-42 right now are in the thick of this for a while as Neptune retrograde hovers at about square our natal Neptunes and then back again.

This is the confusion about who we are and what we want. This is where we look at the lives we created and determine if this is what we want, and if so, what does it even mean? Are we with people we love? Do we feel passion for what we do? Is it simply worth getting up every morning to earn a paycheck? Am I doing anything close to what I always dreamed I would be doing (ding! ding! ding!) and maybe, just maybe, I should have a new dream (bingo!)?

Having this particular transit during a pandemic in which we’re forced to slow down and spend time alone is actually not that bad though. This is actually okay. This is a good time to figure out who you are based on your own dreams because you don’t have a lot of other options, even if you’re scrambling to make ends meet, because even at the end of the day,

This is also, incidentally, a time when a lot of people get into or get out of addictions. You may find that people at this age are drinking more or struggling to drink less. Definitely health and getting older is an issue, and for both women and men, the signs of aging are undeniable, including the fact that you just can’t drink like you used to.

This is a part of life that is like the crisis moment of a dream just before you wake up, including the fact that you don’t actually know that you’re dreaming because even as strange as your thoughts are and as strange as the world around you seems to be, you still react to it as if it’s real, so it may as well be.

However, I have a suspicion that you’re not supposed to wake up from this, but rather, go deeper into the dream, but I’ll let you know when I wake up if I do wake up, because I’m actually okay with all of this. This pandemic, this surreal time, this tiny room in which I listen to the Cocteau Twins and type away into the night could be a dream, but I don’t know if right now, that really matters to me, because if there is yet some other world in which I’m asleep, I don’t want to go back there, because I have never held too tightly on what I thought life would promise me, and I was never too afraid to change my mind when life presented me with clues, and this is kind of what it is:

This is like a series of clues, synchronicities like mystic bread crumbs dropped through the woods that were gobbled up as soon as I dropped them, as if maybe it doesn’t matter, because part of the human condition — and maybe a good chunk of my particular human condition — is the feeling we translate as lost, as if we could truly be lost, as if we’re even able to escape this planet alive.

And then there’s the Official Mid-lifeCrisis, the Uranus opposition, in which you realize that you’re not actual the individual you thought you were. You are not the master of the things you thought you controlled, and time, your body, life, your own heart, make you so much like everyone else that you can’t really look at your life and say “oh no, not me,” because in the end, you’re your mother, your father, your boss, the people you know who didn’t make it much further than this, your friends and enemies who made different decisions than you did: you’re just the same as everyone else, so much so that the only person you’re alienated from is you.

You’ve done what you thought was right, what you were supposed to do, what you had to do. But what do you want to do? Is this what you really want? Don’t you still have time? Who is this old person staring back at me in the mirror? Have I lived, or have I merely survived? Was I wrong all this time? Even if I was successful, was it what I really wanted, because now I’m wondering what’s left now with this aging body, this softening (or hardening) heart, this tired soul.

So how this translates to buying a penis car and dating a much younger person is that it is very scary to come to terms with the fact that you are so adult that you cannot stop being such an adult. It’s not just your body, your responsibilities, your body of work, your reputation: you have created an entire universe around yourself based on an idea of who you were as a younger person, and it can be scary to let go of that.

And you know exactly what’s going on with you, unlike with the creeping crisis.

However, this overt crisis can be quite relieving in some way if you’re the kind of person who 1) is destined to have a better later life than early life (heavy Saturn energy) and 2) is very Uranian to begin with and never conformed, never thought of themselves as young, old, or any other label.

But for the folks right at my age, the class of 1996 and the class of 1997 or near it, we’re not quite there yet. We get to first deal with a special Uranus transit during the creeping mid-life crisis.

Chiron issues

Chiron is an asteroid that represents the primal wound that we spend our lives trying to heal. It’s with us forever; it’s a vulnerability in the wall that is our psyche that gets punched open by any random thing that happens in life. Some people have much more Chiron emphasis than others, especially if there’s hard aspects to Chiron, especially if it’s near an angle.

For example, I have a chart of a woman who was born with Chiron rising in the first house widely conjunct her ascendant and making a T-square with a Jupiter Rx and Venus opposition. Her Chiron is exactly conjunct my Venus. She has told me before that I look the way she always wished she looked. This wasn’t actually a compliment; the tone of her voice, the way she chose and strung together her words was tinged with hostility as if I had deprived her of this face and complexion of mine or somehow acquired them unjustly, and she made me suffer for it.

I have the chart of a man with Chiron exactly conjunct his natal Moon (incidentally also experiencing this transit to his natal Moon, which is fun stuff – when I had this transit, it was in the shadow period before my Saturn return), and this is a man who always believes that he is never appreciated for taking care of people (the Moon), or that he never gets the care he wants (also the Moon), although he tends to conflate what he wants with what others need, and doesn’t seem to understand why his “gifts” go unappreciated, so he keeps insisting (Taurus).

I also have a chart belonging to a man with Chiron opposite his Sun/Mars/Uranus conjunction. He’s probably a sociopath. He feels entitled to act out (Mars) however he feels no matter who it hurts, because he sees himself as the perpetual victim (Chiron in Capricorn) even though he’s the one overtly hurting others, often suddenly and violently, but with emotional detachment (Mars conjunct Uranus in Cancer), and without conscience (Sun).

Chiron is the place where we feel that we are perpetually deprived and need to compensate or have had to go without while the rest of the world takes for granted what it seems to have so readily. There’s definitely an outside-looking-in sense with Chiron, but there is also a sense of shame that may come with trying and failing to fill the hole that we think Chiron leaves in us.

And that’s a lot of the problem: while we may actually have been deprived of what Chiron represents at some point, it’s usually not always the case. For example, this Chiron in Taurus cohort has a wound related to our sense of pleasure or comfort, and many of us may have trouble allowing ourselves to just relax and simply be or feel that we have to earn basic comfort, including emotional security. Many of us were not secure in our possessions though we were born in a time when so many people were flaunting so many possessions (the early 80s) when materialism was normalized. This is especially true for those who were children in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. The area of life we feel this in depends on the house Chiron is in, but we’re all feeling deprived of simple comforts.

However, we also were very young around the time that both artificial sweeteners and sugar-in-everything became a thing. I think we were part of the fat-free generation that was essentially raised on sugar, and one of the last groups of kids who had cookies-as-cereal and plopped down in front of the television every Saturday morning to watch cartoons for hours on end until GLOW came on.

I watched GLOW.

I mean, I don’t really eat cereal and I never go down the cereal aisle, but this was the kind of stuff we could put in a bowl, pour milk on it, and call it a meal:

So our little cohort (seven years) of Chiron in Taurus natives (March 28, 1977 – June 20, 1983) weren’t the first to be feed basically sugar all the time, but we were the first children whose diets were questioned.

This was also a time that it was normal for mothers to go to work but also for mothers to need to go to work to help financially support the family, though they were unjustly blamed for creating family instability. We were latchkey kids, the children who were in danger of Satanic communist daycares (see below), because what was worse than Satan? Communism! (Taurus hates communism).

We were also the ones who didn’t quite benefit from the Dotcom boom because most of us (not me) were still in high school or college, and left right around the time of 9/11 and the dotcom collapse, entering an economy that didn’t quite have room for us the way it had for just about any warm body a scant few years before, so money (Taurus) problems and having to earn your keep by actually working (Taurus) was a thing again.

We were also the ones who came up during the Satanic panic and stranger danger (Taurus, too), with the idea of possibly being snatched up from the comfort of our homes (Taurus) and disappearing forever (fixed signs). Most of us were actually taught how to avoid pedophile strangers and random kidnappers each year of elementary school from first grade on. It wasn’t until sometime after that people began to actually look at the statistics that 1) most children are molested by a family member or someone close to them, 2) a lot of children are molested before the hit first grade, and 3) most children who are kidnapped are taken by a person known to them whom they trust, like a non-custodial parent.

We were the target of the Just Say No campaign (because if Nancy Reagan actually wanted to target teenagers, they would have written “Say Nope to Dope!” on cigarette packs instead of inside the flaps of boxes of Lemonheads) . We also got to go through the first version of the DARE program which essentially taught us how to do drugs (Taurus, again). Remember the big drug suitcase the cop brought to class to show you what the drugs looked like, what they did, and how much they cost? Yeah, that was like getting to have a cool teenage older brother once a week.

We — the girls, at least — were the target demographic for the New Kids on the Block, boyband extraordinaire and merchandise machine like no other. Seriously — the mountain of New Kids on the Block swag was growing from inside the Earth like a volcano. There was no other boy band that did that much merchandising (yes, the Beatles made films, but New Kids merchandised everything that existed), and you could never collect it all, either because you couldn’t afford it, because your parents wouldn’t buy it, or because you can’t actually acquire all this shit non-stop and do things like sleep, so even the most die-hard, dedicated Blockhead will be materially deprived in some way (Chiron in Taurus!)

And man did we have toys! I used to like going to KB Toys at the little mall where I lived when I was a teenager just to look at all the shit they were still selling kids and also to see if they had any serial killer trading cards (no. Go to Spencer’s Gifts even though your parents forbade you to go in there), but as a child, it was Kmart, KB, and the Sears Wish catalog, colorful and plastic manna from heaven that would never stop raining down.

Is this is a wound? Do you know how fucking nostalgic my cohort got for our childhoods? We were mooning over it when we were like in our twenties.

Now, this cohort was born just before our culture started seriously giving a shit about kids’ self-esteem, and many of us were still raised by people who attacked us when we did something they didn’t like (this is commonly called spanking in our culture, which is a specific word for adults attacking children in a culturally-condoned manner). Even in more progressive states, teachers and principals could still hit us, and it wasn’t that we didn’t get a trophy just for showing up; we could be abused by adults and told that would build character….and then…sit by and watch as the world changed and treated our younger siblings in a vastly different way. It wasn’t until we were leaving elementary school that liberalism really took affect, and the people who were becoming teachers actually wanted to be teachers and were not merely women who settled on it because it was one of the few things women could actually do for a career, and those new teachers were being taught that children weren’t merely empty banks and that children’s psychological health mattered, but the guard didn’t really change until after we had gone through the old one.

This small group of Xennials has a Chiron wound concerning what we value because we have always been in between major changes in the world.

My Little Pony: A Chiron in Taurus Story

In fact, around the time Uranus was transiting over my ascendant and natal Moon when I was about 27, 28, I had an insatiable desire to collect all the first generation My Little Ponies that I could, but only those My Little Ponies that were around when I was a young girl, replacing ones I had that I lost as a kid (I think my Dad threw out all my toys or my mom just gave them all away), and getting ones that I wanted that I never got.

They’re now actually in my parents’ attic in a box way in the back where my childhood toys actually should fucking be, waiting for me when my parents die so I can go into the attic, find them, and get nostalgic over them.

I have Chiron in Taurus in the second house, closely trining Jupiter in Virgo (collecting lots of stuff). Surprised? I’m not the kind of person who actually likes to collect things all the time, but there are things I get stuck on — I used to have quite the collection of astrology books, of glass Christmas ornaments, of Yankee Candle candle tarts — and this was one of them. At a very insecure time in my life (Saturn return shadow), I needed to have those plastic toys and what they represented to me.

I can barely remember the My Little Pony cartoon, and I know I watched it. I know I watched the My Little Pony movie, too. Aside from Butterscotch and Tropical Breeze, I can’t remember which Ponies I owned as a kid. They didn’t actually represent playing pretend or the joy of playing with other kids. They represented the blissful minutes I spent in those toy aisles staring at all the colorful possibilities of all those sweet Piscean smiles on on those elegant and sleepy pony faces staring back from those pristine blister packs that all came with a different story.

Yeah, so that’s Chiron in Taurus for you, and frankly, I couldn’t think of a better way to illustrate it for you, because the upcoming Full Moon will be conjunct Uranus, but first:

Uranus transiting natal Chiron means?

Uranus is the planet of change, of revolution, of replacing the old rules and instituting the new. Interestingly, it’s not chaos. It’s not actually anarchy (because if you want anarchy, you really need some Neptune and Saturn in there to dissolve authority). It’s change. It can be progress but it doesn’t have to be: not everyone agrees on what progress is, after all. There are people walking around my home country working, spending money, fucking and making babies who actually think that a Trump presidency is progress.

Like, remember that election where we could have had Hillary Clinton be president instead of Donald Trump? That was some Uranian bullshit right there. We had two very possible changes from the norm: a woman who was perfectly qualified could have been president, nearly 100 years after women were finally allowed to vote, or a racist subhuman with no experience, no cerebrum, and no moral conscience could be president instead. While to most Americans and the rest of the world, this was a no brainer, regardless of where Clinton campaigned, some serious Uranian bullshit happened and Trump became president.

Uranus energy tends to come from the outside in. Not always, but most of the time Uranian things come from people, situations, and things that are thought and conveyed rather than from deep within us. The reason is because change really needs a catalyst, and even though change comes from within, you need a reason to change. It can be as small as someone saying something, or your old jeans not fitting right, or a chance encounter that leads to something you’d never dreamed you’d experience.

Uranus transiting brings change to the way we relate to our primal wounds, the way we try to heal them or cover them up. For example, if your primal wound is Chiron in Taurus in the 6th house, you may use food as a way to cope, either over indulging or being very picky. However, this Uranus transit may have you re-thinking or changing your diet in some way. Perhaps you got laid off and can’t afford to eat out or order in all the time. Perhaps you’ve been diagnosed with metabolic disorder, or you have a metabolic disorder and are concerned with how susceptible that makes you to COVID-19. Perhaps it’s philosophical and you’ve decided to go vegan lately.

If your primal wound is in Taurus in the 9th house, you may struggle with organized religion, politics, and travel. Perhaps you are a native-born stranger in a strange land, the child of immigrants in an otherwise homogenous society. Maybe you were raised in a church that always fundamentally rejected you in some way, i.e. you’re LGBTQ or just smart. Or maybe you struggle to find meaning in life and to find a way for yourself, starting and stopping college, joining and leaving movements in order to find a place where you fit in. The pandemic, of course, will have you taking college classes from home, which can make you seriously question if you like what you’re studying enough to pursue it because you’re without all the peripheral things, like friends, parties, and extracurriculars. You may come to realize that the political affiliations you had do not actually serve you because now that you’re down, no one is helping you get back up.

Chiron is forever.

The thing is that your Chiron wound is part of you for the rest of your life, and the sooner you accept that, the better. You will not actually recover from your primal wound, but you will learn to live with it, and through that, help others avoid the same pain. That’s the evolved Chiron. The unevolved Chiron may do all sorts of things but that, like project Chiron problems onto others, spend their lives covering up their Chiron wound or ignoring it, or trying to make others responsible for it. Now, it’s likely that you first become aware of your Chiron wound because of something someone else does, but how you deal with this wound as an adult is your problem, even if the adults in your early life 1) tore that sucker open, and 2) didn’t teach you how to deal with it OR taught you maladaptive ways of addressing that wound.

Tidbit: you will bring Chiron into your life.

If you don’t already have strong aspects to your Chiron, you’ll attract people who have that energy, often people of the same Sun or Moon sign. I tend to bring a lot of Taurus Suns and Moons into my life. The two long-term relationships I had was with men with Taurus Moons, and I think I’m done with men with Taurus Moons. There is something about me that is fundamentally intolerable to them, and yet they come to me.

Hello, Full Moon in Taurus!

I’m late with this post because I haven’t been feeling well (no, not COVID-19, Full Moon emotional things), but the Full Moon was in effect yesterday and will be until about election day, which is also the day that Mercury goes direct. This adds an emotional, instinctive cast to how we deal with changes to our primal wound.

I spent the entire day in bed, actually. I mean, I think one of the unintentionally worst things I did was insist to myself and the world that I’m okay, because I’m actually not. Rick’s death is not so much the issue now as the rest of it, like the loneliness, the loss of those dreams, all that ambition for both of us that will never be realized, all the time, effort, and work that is now gone with nothing to show for it. What happens now? I know that I still have dreams and ambition and a tremendous capacity for work, and that this pandemic can’t last forever, and if Chicago isn’t it for me, it’s onward and likely westward until I find a place to call home, but for right now, what do you do?

I’m not in a place or situation anymore where I can’t honor my feelings, where I am not allowed to be sad. I’m not stuck with people like that anymore. I don’t have other things that need to be addressed first. I have no one’s needs to put above my own, and there is no possibility of anyone putting me in a position like that again, or at least, for a long while.

Is a day in bed crying, listening to soul and lamenting the mountain I started to climb six years ago that I just had to turn around an abandon such a bad thing? Because it is the day when the veil is supposed to be the thinnest, and Mars retrograde is still squaring that Capricorn stellium, and it is kind of reality for me that if I were to die right now at my desk, no one would know for a while, at least not until I was flagged for not clocking in at work or not showing up for court. Do I really trust the freedom that I have now to reinvent myself and honor the emotions and the dreams I once put aside, or to follow the new ones that developed as I learned about myself these past few years? What else do I have to prove before I can enter the gates, or have the gates always been open, with no gatekeeper?

Do I even have what it takes to do any of this?

Oh hey, and in case you’re wondering — yes, my Chiron in Taurus is in the 2nd house, and it makes a wide opposition to my Mercury and a trine to my Jupiter.

So now what?

So my assumption is that we do during this transit is to change and to accept the change, which is very difficult for a primal wound in the most fixed of fixed signs, to our primal wounds, especially because many of us don’t have much else to do with our time. For many of us, this may mean changing our approach to the wound, from licking that wound to helping others deal with those same issues, or it may mean turning attention back to the primal wound so we can help it close up a little bit if it will never really heal.

Whatever you do is likely going to be something different for you. If you’re used to tackling your problems by getting busy with something else or actively trying to fix them, you may just feel like wallowing. If you wallow, you may decide to create a change. I really wish this was one of those things I’ve already done so I can advise more objectively, but from what I’ve experienced, the best thing is to let Uranus teach you about your wound, and to not be angry or upset when it reminds you that it’s still there. Specifically, we will never prove our worth to others or ourselves if that’s a priority. Someone, somewhere, for some reason won’t value you, and it may not actually be because they’re stupid (but that’s entirely possible). You may not be able to acquire all the things you want, all the markers of success you think you should have, even though you insist that you’re not doing it for the money or the fame or the other worldly rewards (even though you know, you are kind of going through all the motions as if that’s what you want. Just sayin’.)

But this is still Taurus energy: we don’t surrender (that’s Scorpio energy). We’re meant to stand our ground, to remain, and to endure. Self-preservation is perfectly okay, so what are you doing to preserve yourself? Maybe a little indulgence in a healthier diet and a little less indulgence in alcohol? Perhaps some more me-time and a better work-life balance, saying yes to a quiet night in (noise actually does age you, you know) and no to going out when you don’t want to go?

It sucks it’s kind of happening during a time when we all have to live in a Tuarean-like shut down, but…