Are you having trouble sleeping?

Are you having vivid dreams when you do sleep?

Are you searching your past to figure out what was true and what isn’t?

Confused about who you are and what you’re looking for?

Looking for something, but you have no idea what it is?

Concerned about whether you’ve ever done anything right in your life?

Ready to leap out of your skin?

Welcome to the solar eclipse in Sagittarius today.

The last total solar eclipse was in Cancer in 2019, and that was heavy, wasn’t it? And then it was followed by a pandemic.

Solar Eclipses?

I don’t write about these because I’m not certain as to their effects, even though they’ve been studied extensively. To me, it would make sense that during the first few days, during, and after the eclipse that it may have some effect on people, but not necessarily color the rest of their lives in some significant way until the next eclipse. I do think, however, like many other transits and phenomena, that they can be harder or easier depending on the person.

But when the shadow (Moon) covers the Sun, it’s all that the Moon is — the primal fear, the primal need, memories, karmic, and instinct — covering the personality (the Sun), overtaking it. And it’s not so much that you don’t feel like you don’t have emotional skin or a filter anymore, but rather that you feel as if you no longer have the ability to compartmentalize your emotions, a skill you take for granted in order to simply get things done. The old defense mechanisms don’t work because the monkeys have escaped to the other side of the fence.

It’s not psychosis. It’s not weakness. It’s a momentary jailbreak of lunar energy.

However, I think that especially now, with sensitivities and uncertainty running high, a solar eclipse right now is just another tweak of the nipple that nobody asked for (as if anyone asks for these anyway). I don’t think it’s helpful that the energy concentrated is Sagittarian energy, which must learn from experience but most be able to choose what lessons it learns.

Sagittarius.

I don’t think I could honestly write a better description of the sign. I could quote Alan Oaken and Dane Rudhyar, but I think that Harvey Sid Fisher here really sort of encapsulates what it’s about at its core, and I think this song and delivery is completely Sagittarius-approved. But moreover, this is a philosophical sign, but it’s not a bookworm, actually, unless it’s trapped physically. This is a sign that needs to be free to experience.

In fact, I think that it can be surprising to people when they discover that a lot of Sagittarians aren’t buried in crumbly philosophy books or learning about the world from reading exclusively, but that they need to do it themselves in some way. They’ll read what they must and the rest is up to them to experience. Otherwise, you won’t find them interested for very long.

I think that people may also be surprised to learn that Sagittarius isn’t as interested in what’s going on in the minds of kings and scholars so much as they are in what they think themselves. Sagittarius Suns, Sagittarius Mercuries, Sagittarius risings, and the like are not interested in worshipping the minds of others — in fact if they are book learning, it’s still experiential, because it’s an instructional book or a novel that puts the idea in context so they can live vicariously through the characters and “go native” in that world.

But this makes sense – what’s the point of exploring ideas, pushing the envelope, and seeing just how far you can not only expand your mind but to show to the entire world just how complex and rich (and beautiful) it is and how life on Earth is a journey, if all you’re going to do is regurgitate what some other intrepid explorer already said? How could you possibly know anything anyone else wrote or did was true if you haven’t experienced it in some way for yourself? And why not you? If we can all experience things, then who could possibly have the authority to say that their experience is supreme simply because they said so? Cue bloviating, cue know-it-allism, cue foot-in-mouth disease, cue blogging about experience to explain astrology, because after all: astrology is about experience in the end, and anything else you ascribe to it only comes after experience.

And when we discuss Sagittarius optimism and propensity to play the odds and take risks, we have to see it in the context of searching for experience, because even depression and hopelessness and despair are experiences that you can be curious about — in fact, that is a Buddhist teaching to be curious about one’s own experiences, and an existential kink to get a kick out of them, especially the fucked up ones. Even getting your heart broken, or having a sudden loss, or great disappointment and humiliation is an experience and it doesn’t have to take hold of you and shape you as if you yourself are the clay of this incarnation. We also know that while Sagittarius tends to talk a lot, we also know they don’t take everything seriously, because while some words can be powerful, most are not, and they just keep coming, like snow on a winter’s morning. Most of those flakes aren’t that big a deal, but maybe you get one right in your eye, like nature’s way of saying “fuck you this morning!” But even still, snowflakes melt and turn into water, which turns into vapor, which disappears.

So there is a lesson here in the eclipse if you’re feeling broke, or broken, or feel as if you will not accomplish what you are here on Earth to do, whatever that is, because you are trapped by the choices you’ve made, by the limitations of being the man or the woman you have become at this age, by the choices others made for you long before you were born and otherwise without your consent:

this is all a vital experience to help you learn the truth about things. Whatever truth you’re looking for, this is the work.

The salve to the eclipse burn: prophecy

I don’t mean like sitting around trying to figure out when the world ends — that’s really only a salve for people who are completely hopeless and powerless and would find it preferable for this world to end.

I mean looking toward the future when this shit show of a year has ended, when this experience has come to an end. Look at where you are going from here, right now, with these feelings of restlessness and uncertainty. The Moon eclipses the Sun, and the memories just keep flooding back, don’t they? Can you forgive yourself for being stupid, inexperienced? Perhaps you regret nothing. Perhaps you regret everything. Perhaps you won’t let yourself explore your feelings of regret because then that would mean that you have done something wrong and maybe your ideas about who you are at your core are possible wrong.

So let them be, and then think about what you want to do at any given point in the future, and what you really, actually want without editorializing it, rationalizing. If you want your cake and to eat it too, go ahead and think about that. Think positively as if nothing bad is happening now, or that it will just go away at some point, and it will be a memory to put in the stack of the other memories that you’ll have when you’re someone new in the future.

I wanted to say that the salve was “freedom,” but really, the only thing you can be free to do is think about the future. You can live in horribly oppressive conditions, you can have nothing to your name right now so you can’t do anything you want to do, and you can find yourself left with obligations that make you unable to choose your moves. You can only be free in thought so long as you can think, because even if you are so abused that you are coerced into divulging your thoughts, you can actually bury what you really think and feel so that even you can’t retrieve it in order to protect yourself.

And then they come out in dreams, in experiences we call “deja vu,” in synchronicities, in moments that we are so sure we foresaw somehow…like a prophecy.

What about your prophecy for later this week?

Well, shit. Yeah. I was just trying to comfort you.

So far, the electoral college is being terrorized by conspiracy theorists and insane people.

And yes, the irony does not escape me that I speak about Sagittarian truth and experience and I’m currently living in a savage nation where our own election officials are being threatened because of people who believe in a hoax that was created before the current president even took office? And you can’t tell them otherwise, because these people live in an alternate reality in which they believe that democracy had already died and that the one man who was here to save it (whatever their version of democracy is, anyway) is being unfairly removed from office in a conspiracy to install a puppet leader for the Illuminati or whatever the fuck these people think nowadays.

And isn’t there something incredibly Sagittarian about a staunch, unwavering belief in your own ideas no matter the evidence before you, and isn’t there something incredibly Sagittarian about “doing your own research,” which largely consists of scrolling through Reddit while you’re taking a shit?

All prophecy is self-fulfilling.

And that’s it, isn’t? You will put in motion what you are sure will happen. You actually believe in 2016 that there would be election fraud in 2020, you’re going to act as if that actually happened (it didn’t, but you know). You believe that you will be free from your burdens and your debts, you will act accordingly, even if all the forces in the world try to stop you.

I’m not optimistic for right now. I am for the unforeseeable future, and I’ll continue to write things as if anyone gives a shit what I have experienced or what I think is true, and maybe in a few days when the eclipse’s shadow has passed, I’ll be able to make sense of my dreams lately, and the people and places in them.