Happy Imbolc!

I know I’ve written about Imbolc before, the midwinter celebration in which we welcome the sun back. Here in the Great Lakes region, we’re expecting a winter storm. It’s about 45 and rainy here, but it will cool down and the snow will come. Imbolc is one of the Earth celebrations, so it’s not astrologically significant unless there’s something coincidentally happening in the Heavens, and there is:

There’s no planets in fire signs right now.

Happy No Fire! Not really. But now that Mars has entered Capricorn, there are no more major bodies in any of the fire signs. In fact, right now, the environment is very heavy – very fixed, pretty cardinal – with very little mutable energy, save Jupiter and Neptune in Pisces.

Granted, Mars is transiting my natal Venus, and that should be good for something, right? I mean, I’m sitting here dealing with work and a headache, looking out at the fallen snow all over the alley knowing that this time around, it’s not a good idea to try to drive in this, looking forward to every moment I can lay on the sofa.

But having no fire and little mutable energy right now may be the slow down and focus we need…provided the world lets us do it.

But this is a good time for this little reminder:

You have a body for a reason. You incarnated for a reason.

Use that body to do what you’re supposed to do here on Earth because most of us aren’t actually supposed to fritter away our lives trying to escape Earth. Buddha found enlightenment on the middle path, not in trying to force his body into submission to the desires of his ego…because spirituality can be an illusion of the ego (and it often is these days).

Are you being frugal? I mean with your money and resources but also with your time, because this isn’t the season for multitasking. Truthfully, most people can’t successfully multitask anyway, not even Virgos or Geminis. And I mean multitasking in all things. How many television shows do you need to keep track of? How many text threads? How many email accounts, phone numbers? How many people demanding x,y, and z? Because even if you think you’re entertaining yourself with those really intense television shows with all the real-life drama or the cgi or the over-the-top storylines or the rapid-fire TikToks that just keep coming, you’re not relaxing. You’re not giving your brain the opportunity to stop tasking – and a distraction is different from entertainment, and entertainment isn’t rest.

Rest.

Happy Aquarius New Moon conjunct Saturn!

So I’m not loving it, actually. This new moon is in my 12th house and so is Saturn, and while this has actually brought a lot of gifts: specifically, a lowering of my inhibitions when it comes to being out there publicly, it’s also digging up old things for me and bringing them to the surface as if so much time hasn’t passed. Saturn was last in my 12th house 28 years ago or so, when I was first starting high school, and it was a time in which I started simply giving up: you’re all going to think I’m weird, you’re all going to tell each other I’m weird and unlikable no matter what I do, so I may as well do what I want and act as I want. Everything changed for me then. The difference is that I’m not living my adolescence with my body but I am in my mind, and I know intellectually that so much time has passed, and yet I remember humiliations, betrayals, and unfair treatment as if they just happened. I know it’s my adult mind that knows better processing what the child who had no guidance or protection was experiencing, this adult who now has the insight, the language, and the agency in the present who still feels so…haunted.

Is that Saturn transiting the 12th house? And must I believe in everything I imagine?

The new moon in Aquarius, however, is a time to focus our energy on progress and figuring out where we belong (Moon) as individuals (Aquarius) what we need (Moon) to feel liberated from the trappings of society (Aquarius), and what we fear (Moon) about being different from everyone else (Aquarius). If you can imagine being one of those people who has always lived in the same place and have had the same friends your entire life as if you never graduated from high school, you can imagine this as very scary energy, because wherever this moon ends up in your chart is the area of life in which you’re forced to figure out how you’ve changed. And frankly, being different is getting a little old these days: everyone is an empath when what they really mean is that they’re very self-absorbed have decided that their lack of emotional boundaries means they can actually feel other people’s feelings. Real empaths are not bullies, and they don’t have to make excuses for their shitty behavior, period. But the reason I’m talking about this is because this seems to sort of jive with the Aquarian moon energy: cool, distant, intellectually understanding but the instinct is toward experimentation and not being terribly sensitive.

There is also the Aquarius paradox: we are all individuals, just like everyone else, and who belongs is still an Aquarius question.

And this new moon is conjunct Saturn, so I think less of the live-and-let-live and more of the ain’t-nobody-gonna-tell-me-how-to-live-but-I’m-going-to-tell-you-how-to-live irony that is Aquarius is going to be the mood, that hyper- and yet lack of self-awareness that is Aquarius that Kid Rock unironically embodies, in fact, will be the thing, people coming at each other but not in the right direction.

And I tell you now that you can stop saying this shit, because it’s been a few decades since The Left has allowed themselves to be referred to as the tolerant ones, or that they’ve really even considered the term tolerance to be a good thing. Rush Limbaugh died and took his ideas with him, guys.

But hey: at least he can maintain his sobriety now.

In the belly: the Pluto Return

So, I’m perhaps the last astrologer on Earth to comment on the nation’s Pluto return in its own post or video largely because I don’t want to scare people. I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as it’s going to sound, largely because we are already steeped in this. I mean, we’re in a pandemic when it’s becoming obvious that we cannot unify, that it’s socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us, that critical race theory terrifies those opposed to it because it gives us a way of speaking about what people actually see and experience in a way our culture otherwise does not, that mediocrity and the algorithms that spoon feed it to us have ironically made us MORE insecure about ourselves, that we will have no choice but to confront the way that we deal with debt, particularly student debt and medical debt, and the fact that we’re not the superlative.

America is not the most free country in the world. It doesn’t have the most free press. It doesn’t have the best healthcare. It doesn’t have the best quality of life. It doesn’t have the best salaries. It doesn’t have the best music. It doesn’t have the best films. It doesn’t have the best job opportunities. It doesn’t have the best education. It doesn’t have the best infrastructure. It doesn’t have the smartest population. It doesn’t have the healthiest population. It doesn’t have a good work/life balance. It doesn’t have the highest literacy rate. It doesn’t have the most wealth.

It does have the most private gun ownership. It does have the highest incarceration rate. It does have the highest student debt. It has the highest medical expenses.

It’s been at least since the 1980s that experts have been warning us that despite all the Reaganite bullshit he was feeding people and putting in place of their regulations and union-protected jobs, America is too much, too big, too expansive, and not enough realism. But hey – this country is a Cancer Sun with Sagittarius rising, and you know what kind of perennial teenagers those types can be, right?

But here’s the thing: we are already waste deep in it the cesspool. It’s been slowly filling for decades. We’re used to the smell now. The trouble is that we keep being told that if we want to empty this cesspool, god will miraculously reach down with his magic pump and drain it for us, but only if we all get down on our knees to pray right where we stand. It’s not just overtly religious and overtly magical: billionaire space races, plant-based diet cure-alls, side hustles galore, wellness bullshit that requires you to be both rich and jobless in order to achieve peak spirituality, fame and adoration for not being talented or interesting, cop worship and fascist bootlicking as a thin veil for public support of genocide, and ironically, a glamorization of the legal profession but without respect for it, an economy entirely dependent on debt, cheap shit from China, cheap food, and scaring people with debt, what happens when you’re dependent on cheap shit from China, and what happens when you have to live on cheap food.

But didn’t Billy Joel already warn us?