Ada Pembroke @adapembroke - Tumblr Blog

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Writing for One Reader: Uranus in Gemini and the Death of the Gatekeepers

#Uranus in Gemini

Toddler Liberation Front: Uranus in Gemini and the Art of Verbal Rebellion

#uranus #Uranus in Gemini

Erasure Poetry and Pluto: A Practice for Transformation, Grief, and Buried Treasure

#pluto #erasure poetry

What Is Erasure Poetry And How to Make Your Own When Words Fail You

#erasure poetry

Mercury in the 12th house: You Don't Know How Smart You Are

One of the smartest people I've ever known grew up thinking she was the family idiot.

I studied with her for years, and I had no idea. I knew her as a musical genius who studied at a famous conservatory and played in symphonies on TV before we reached high school.

While the rest of us struggled to balance ordinary teenage stuff with our academic work, she juggled school and an actual career. While the rest of us stayed up late to study for tests and came to school exhausted, she came to class looking well-rested and happy.

Everyone at school admired her intelligence. I paid extra attention when she spoke up in class. She didn't talk much, but her voice was worth waiting for because what she shared was always insightful.

But she walked into school and saw pictures of her family members on the wall, prestigious doctors, professors, Ivy League graduates. No musicians. No quiet genius. She measured herself by a standard that said you had flashy academic credentials or no worth at all.

The biggest challenge for Mercury in the 12th house is a lack of perspective.

Lack of perspective isn’t just a Mercury problem. It is a challenge for every planet in the 12th house. They all struggle to see themselves clearly in different ways.

For Mercury, lack of perspective is especially painful, however. It may be the most difficult part of having Mercury in the 12th house. Mercury is the planet of perception, so lack of perspective is a direct threat to Mercury’s basic function.

As a person with Mercury in the 12th house, this challenge with perception isn’t as simple as needing to “face reality.” It is common for people with Mercury in the 12th house to be raised in environments where their particular style of intelligence is not highly valued. You may find yourself in a situation similar to my musician friend, who struggled to value her own intelligence because of her family’s assumptions.

Partly, the Mercury in the 12th house experience represents a long-standing issue in our culture.

For a long time, intelligence was synonymous with IQ. You were able to get high scores on a test of reasoning ability, or you weren't. Your intellectual value came down to your score.

In the late 20th century, psychology started to diversify its understanding of intelligence. We began to understand that IQ tests aren’t universal measures of intelligence. They are biased against people from particular social backgrounds. Psychology also began to recognize that intelligence is about more than the ability to reason logically. The ability to respond to others with empathy and diplomacy is a type of intelligence. A surgeon's hands and a basketball player's feet have their own intelligence. A person might struggle with math but write gorgeous sonnets, and that is a form of intelligence.

You may have grown up in a family or culture that didn’t value your intelligence, but you don’t have to stay with that limiting understanding of yourself. Astrology recognizes 12 basic styles of intelligence that correspond with Mercury signs, and there are people out there who value them all.

In the game of life, your intelligence is a much needed gift to your adventuring party, and astrology can help you get perspective on who your people are and what you have to offer.

I wrote more about how to find your people in my article “Finding Your Adventuring Party with Astrological Archetypes.”

Mercury in the 12th house is a gift in disguise.

We all know the trouble with low self-esteem and underestimating yourself, but underestimating your own intelligence can actually be a gift.

My musician friend may not have had perspective on her place in the intellectual pecking order at school, but her humility saved her from arrogance, and we loved her for it. Many of her peers struggled to form relationships, nurture friendships, and gather allies; but she had friends everywhere she went because she assumed that she wasn’t the smartest person in the room.

When you don't start out thinking you know everything, you are more open to learning. You are more likely to listen when others speak. You are more open to other perspectives. When you assume that you have a lot to learn, it isn't a threat to you when you don't know everything.

When you don't believe that you are talented, you know that you have to rely on your skills, and you aren't afraid to work hard. My friend from high school was able to balance her workload more easily than the rest of us because the standard had always been high for her at home, and she was used to working hard. Many of her peers were lazy. We had a habit of using our intelligence to get through our assignments quickly. When things got difficult, we weren't used to working hard, and we suddenly started to struggle, not just to learn the material, but with the effort of working hard at all.

All of these qualities of Mercury in the 12th house exist as potential in anyone with this placement, but it doesn’t mean that expressing them will be easy. Not everyone is as easy-going as my musician friend!

I would like you to see the picture I’m painting here as potential. The qualities of humility, openness, and hard work can be tools in your toolbox, tools that you can pick up anytime and learn how to wield.

If you are struggling with Mercury in the 12th house, I would love to help you develop a strategy for working with it. Book a Tea With An Astrologer Reading to start the conversation.

Learn more about Mercury

#12th house #mercury #mercury in the houses

A Happier Saturn Return... with an app?

If you're approaching your 30th birthday, you may be fretting about your Saturn return. (Don't fret!) The Saturn return has a scary reputation in astrology land. It's the time, some people say, when Daddy Saturn is grading your adulting homework.

"You'd better show Saturn your best side, or else!"

Saturn is the planet of adulting. Your Saturn sign describes what adulting means for you. And your Saturn return marks a major turning point in your story. If you’ve been wondering when you will really, truly become an adult, your Saturn return is the answer. And as we all know from coming of age stories, growing up is never easy.

Saturn returns aren’t difficult because Daddy Saturn likes to eat his babies. (Well, he does, but that's another story.) It's because Saturn is the part of us that really enjoys doing hard things.

Saturn is the part of you that does a silly dance when you finally beat a video game boss.

Saturn is the part of you that collapses on the couch exhausted after a day of cleaning and feels proud (and SO GLAD it's finally done.)

Saturn is the part of you that pats you on the back when you finally break up with the partner who doesn't respect your boundaries.

Your Saturn return is a really big transit, and you will be happiest if you accomplish something really big.

The kinds of accomplishments that are going to be satisfying during your Saturn return are the kinds of things that you can't tackle in an afternoon. They're goals that you can only reach by taking small, difficult actions consistently over time. Like going back to school and finishing your degree. Or committing to a long-term relationship with your partner.

(What exactly that "something big" should be depends a lot on your personal goals and how Saturn shows up in your natal chart. Looking at your Saturn house and sign can help you figure it out.)

People tend to focus on the big, flashy milestones with Saturn returns, but Saturn is the planet of lead. He’s the opposite of flashy.

Saturn knows that commitment in a relationship isn't just putting a ring on it. It's choosing to have that hard conversation when you'd rather just sweep an issue under the rug.

Graduating from college isn't just about showing up on graduation day for the ceremony. It's writing tedious paper after tedious paper (and Saturn will frown if you use ChatGPT... even if you get away with it.)

Reaching that Saturn return milestone can sometimes feel like putting in lots of effort and not getting anything back until you get that one big prize at the end of it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One of the things I’ve learned from the Saturn in Aries generation is the value of figuring out what motivates you and giving yourself your own rewards along the way.

I'm writing this article ten years after my Saturn return finished, but Saturn work is important for me in this lifetime. Being a Saturn person has its rewards, but it's kind of like living through a never-ending Saturn return, so I'm always looking out for tricks to help me do hard things.

A few months ago, a client of mine introduced me to the self-care app Finch.

(I am not affiliated with Finch, and this is not an ad. Sorry, there is no discount code at the end of this post.)

Finch is a bit like the app form of the digital pets that were popular in the 90s. By checking items off your todo list in Finch, you help a little birb grow and make friends and go on cute little adventures.

As an astrologer, I was struck by Finch's potential to help take those tiny steps that lead toward the big accomplishment at the end of a great Saturn return. The secret is dopamine, the pleasure chemical that pats you on the back when you’ve accomplished something. Sweeping the floor by itself often isn’t enough to give you that hit. You need to pause and celebrate, and it can be hard to remember or find the time.

People talk a lot about the dopamine hits you get when you check items off your list in Finch. Daddy Saturn might not pat you on the back for spending an hour studying the migratory patterns of gray whales for class, but a little birb might clap and dance around when you check that item off your list.

You don't have to use Finch to have a good Saturn return, and using an app like Finch won’t guarantee success. Every brain is different. What works for me, might not work for you.

You'll know that you're on the right track when you feel that small hit of satisfaction when you've done the hard thing that you know is right. And you slowly, ever so slowly watch yourself making progress toward something you truly want.

#saturn #saturn return

Astrology of Imbolc: Strangers, Radicals, and Snowdrops

Imbolc is a Celtic festival, traditionally celebrated as the first festival of spring. Depending on who you ask, Imbolc falls sometime around February 1st or 2nd.

It is commonly assumed that all of the festivals in the Wheel of the Year are connected with the movements of the sun, but Imbolc is one of the fire festivals. Its meaning doesn’t come from the sky. Rather, it marks an important moment in the agricultural cycle. It is the season when lambs are born, and it is from this new life that Imbolc has the right to claim to be the first of the three festivals of spring.

Imbolc may not be an astrological festival, but, because it falls consistently at the beginning of February, we can still find connections between the meaning of Imbolc and the astrological season.

Imbolc in Aquarius Country

Imbolc arrives when the sun is in the sign of Aquarius. Though midwinter technically falls in December and Capricorn season, Aquarius season feels like the depths of winter. Rationally, we know that winter is waning, and spring is just around the corner, but it’s still cold. The light and warmth haven’t actually reached us yet.

Aquarius sees what it sees and refuses to bow to consensus when the group has become unmoored from reality. When the sun is in Aquarius, we are connecting with the part of us that refuses to go along with the program.

At Imbolc, the Winter King may be fading, but he isn’t dead yet. Aquarius the Rebel refuses to bow to the King of Summer until he’s actually arrived.

Aquarius the Genius

Ironically, it is Aquarius’s refusal to see what isn’t there that allows it to see the true first signs of spring: young lambs and snowdrop blossoms. Seeing white flowers against a background of snow requires subtlety bordering on genius. Imbolc is a festival of hope, but real hope is only possible when one refuses to accept false promises.

Aquarius’s stubbornness may seem pedantic, but it is just the other side of its fixity and dependability. Aquarius is the sign of the water bearer. Even though Aquarius isn’t a water sign–and is, actually, famous for its ability to put emotions aside–its determined grip on reality channels emotion like a river running through a deep, rocky canyon.

The frustration of February with a winter that never seems to end is necessary fuel. It’s cold outside, but there’s work to be done. We no longer have the luxury of staying inside and living off our winter stores like we did in Capricorn season.

Aquarius gives the farmer the will to get up in the middle of the night and go out into the snow for the birthing of lambs. It gives rebels the backbone to fight against the system. It gives genius the will to pursue a goal no one else can understand.

The Flight of the Exiles: The 6 of Swords, Imbolc, and the 2nd Decan of Aquarius

When the ancient Egyptians looked up at the sky, they didn’t see signs or planets. They saw stars. They divided the sky into 36 pieces, associating each section of sky with a star. These sections came to be called decans. In modern astrology, every zodiac sign has three decans. In modern magical practice, each decan is associated with a tarot card.

Imbolc falls in the second decan of Aquarius, and the tarot card associated with the second decan of Aquarius is the 6 of Swords. The 6 of Swords shows a veiled adult and child riding in a boat filled with swords. The boat is pushed through the water by a man with a pole. Where is the boat going? We cannot see the distant shore. We only have the suggestion of defeat in the 5 of Swords to guide us to the conclusion that, for this boat, the journey is less about the destination and more about escaping a troubled homeland.

This card suits Aquarius because Aquarius is the sign of the Exile. The sun is an exile when it is in Aquarius because it is as far from its home sign of Leo as it can possibly be.

When the sun is in Leo, it is known. Leo is the holy child, treasured and blessed. In Aquarius, individuality dissolves into the anonymous faces of the crowd. The individual may find support from the community, but it is the support an individual fish receives in a school of mackerel. The crowd is just a place to hide.

The Stranger is a Goddess in Disguise

In Ireland, Imbolc is celebrated in honor of Brigid who travels from house to house. It is traditional to enact a ritual of welcome. Members of the community adopt the role of Brigid, and householders welcome her into the home for a feast.

Historically, travelers needing food and lodging in February were a real test of hospitality. Agricultural communities who relied on the food they could raise locally had meager stores after a barren winter, unless luck and thorough preparation prevented it.

The festival of Imbolc was a reminder that hospitality is sacred to the gods. Exiles and strangers are under the gods’ protection, and Brigid is one of many gods who wander the land, testing hospitality.

Imbolc, Aquarius, and You

At Imbolc, you may find yourself the host or the stranger, the genius or the exile.

To find more about where the themes of Imbolc and Aquarius want to play out in your life, look for the area of your natal chart that contains 10-20° of Aquarius. This is the place where you are being challenged to trust your own vision and keep an eye out for the hidden signs of spring.

This essay was originally published in The Living Hearth.

#wheel of the year #aquarius #magic

Pluto Return: When History Becomes Legend

The planets never stop moving. They run through orbits in the sky, circling through the wheel of the signs, returning to the places where they were at key moments, repeating familiar themes as they spiral through space.

When a planet returns to the sign and degree where it was in your natal chart, you are experiencing a planetary return. Every year on your birthday, the sun returns to the place it was when you were born, and you experience a solar return. The further a planet is from the sun (or Earth in the case of the moon), the longer its cycle is. The moon completes a full cycle roughly every month. Saturn's cycle is over 350 times longer than the moon's. It takes almost 30 years to reach your “dreaded” Saturn return.

Pluto is the planet with the longest cycle that most astrologers work with. You will not experience a Pluto return until you are 248 years old. 248 years old. There's a problem with this number, isn't there? 248 is far, far longer than the expected human lifespan. It feels wrong to talk about experiencing a return with a cycle that long. With modern medicine, many of us can reasonably hope to see our Uranus return at 84 years. Even a Neptune return (165) years feels potentially doable if technology gets good enough. But there is something about lifespans over 200 years that sends us careening into the realm of sci-fi and fantasy.

Typically, when astrologers talk about Pluto returns, they aren't talking about people. The Declaration of Independence recently celebrated its Pluto return, and astrologers talked a lot about the significance of the United States celebrating a Pluto return. But even countries rarely reach their Pluto returns. Astrologer Austin Coppock has repeatedly pointed out on podcasts that most modern countries scrap their constitutions long before they reach their Pluto returns, resetting the clock on their nation's identity before they reach that plutonian reckoning.

We may not be alive when we celebrate our Pluto returns, but our natal charts don’t disintegrate when we die. As long as we are remembered, our legacy can still be influenced by astrological transits long after we are gone.

Historical figures hit an important milestone at the Pluto return. Secrets are unburied. Out of print books return to publication. It is not uncommon for people who have almost been forgotten to experience a surge of popularity. Pluto has a strong connection with ghost stories, as if the Pluto return gives the dead more power to haunt us.

During her Pluto return, Marie Antoinette had a moment in the spotlight with the publication of Sena Jeter Naslund's book Abundance and a movie starring Kirsten Dunst. During his Pluto return, Thomas Jefferson had a strange moment in the spotlight when there was a mistake at the US Mints that printed Jefferson nickels, making coins with his face on them from that year way more valuable than usual. (One of Pluto's less common titles is the Lord of Buried Treasure.)

The Great Transformation of the Pluto Return: What Is Remembered Lives

Pluto is a planet of great transformations. A Pluto transit can change your life forever. At the Pluto return, people (and events and countries) go through an important change. They move from history to the realm of myth. Memory is not precise. Facts become blurry. Over time, the quirks that make a person an individual are sanded away, and we are left with an archetypal hero of legend.

Philosopher and historian Mircea Eliade says that it takes two or three centuries for the memory of an individual to dissolve into archetypes. People can only really hold memories in their heads for the first few generations after someone has died. Eliade says that if you are remembered after two or three centuries, you are remembered as a myth or legend, not as a historical figure. It is as if, as memory decomposes, the details of individuality rot away, and myths and legends are the bones underneath.

As Lord of the Underworld, it is, perhaps, not surprising that Pluto is involved in the process of history decomposing into myth. The Pluto return happens at 248 years, right in the middle of Eliade’s 200-300 year range. This milestone can be seen as a test of an individual’s ability to achieve immortality. If we celebrate your Pluto return, you will likely be remembered for a long time after, but you won’t be remembered as yourself.

In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade says that stories of historical figures evolve to become more and more like existing legends, even merging with older mythological figures. In Claude Lecouteux's, King Solomon the Magus, he talks about the ways that the King Solomon merged with the myths of Alexander the Great over time. Both of them were said to have had adventures that took them into the sky and to the bottom of the sea.

Benjamin Franklin’s legacy only just reached its Pluto return in the 1950s, but we are already beginning to see his story merging with the story of Prometheus. Like the titan who brought civilization to humanity, Franklin is known for a number of practical inventions aimed at improving everyday life. One of these inventions is the Franklin stove, an echo of Prometheus’s gift of fire. Even the story of his decision to fly a kite during a lightning storm has promethean themes. The connection to electricity echoes Mary Shelley’s promethean story Frankenstein, and electricity is commonly associated with the promethean planet Uranus.

Is it a good thing to become a myth?

Eliade says that humanity once had a deep awareness of this process of myth-making. In Plato’s day, a person didn’t consider themselves fully real except in the ways that their life participated in myths. People knew that, the more archetypal their life was, the more likely they were to be remembered long enough to become mythological figures.

Becoming a myth is not the same as becoming a hero, however. Mythology is full of victims and villains.

When Marie Antoinette reached her Pluto return, she was at a crossroads. She could have been remembered as the Villain who refused to empathize with starving peasants. (“Let them eat cake.”) Or, she could have been remembered as an early Victim of the Reign of Terror, scapegoated for systemic problems outside her control, problems she tried to understand by developing an interest in agriculture like her contemporary the English “Mad King” George III.

As far as the myth-making process is concerned, it didn’t matter if Marie was remembered as Villain or Victim. Both of these roles are thoroughly established archetypes. All that mattered to Pluto was that the complexity of her individual situation was erased to reveal the archetypal skeleton underneath.

Marie Antoinette could not have said, “Let them eat cake,” and been a Victim at the same time. Myths can be beautiful, but they aren’t complicated. A myth cannot handle a character who is a poor victim and privileged at the same time. It can’t handle the complicated tragedy of someone trying, and failing, to empathize. For whatever reason, the zeitgeist needed Marie Antoinette to participate in the Victim archetype, so the official narrative has settled on the story that she never said, “Let them eat cake.”

In a hundred years, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Marie Antoinette’s story begins to merge with stories of other queens who lost their heads like Anne Boleyn.

Ultimately, though, whether or not becoming a myth is a good thing depends entirely on your definition of good. Do you want to be remembered at any cost? Are you okay with your legacy being shaped by the needs of people who never knew you, two and a half centuries from now? Would you like to be remembered, even if you aren’t really remembered as yourself?

#pluto

2026: The Year of the Magician

Most people know me as an astrologer, but tarot was how I got started with the magic of storytelling. One of my professors in graduate school was Rachel Pollack, and her keynote talk on the archetype of the Hanged Man my first semester changed my life. It took me from being a wallflower in the ballroom of enchantment (awkwardly quoting Jung at anyone who would listen to me) to a weaver of enchanted stories.

When you share your life in public the way I do, you need to keep some things for yourself. Hollywood is littered with the empty husks of people who forgot the difference between their public persona and their true selves.

Tarot has always been at the heart of my work. For the most part, though, it has been a private influence. I’ve talked about Rachel’s influence on my work. I’ve published a few essays on tarot. But I don’t talk much about my personal tarot practice or things that I learned in readings.

Until now.

This year, I’m going to crack open the door and share a bit of my private tarot practice with you.

Card of the Year: A Tarot Ritual for the New Year

Every year for the last 15 years, I have calculated the tarot card of the year for myself and for the collective. As much as I love working with astrological transits, I find that meditating on the cards of the moment helps me to tune into the archetypes of the zeitgeist in a more intuitive way. I have a deck (The Wild Wood Tarot) that I use only for drawing cards of the day and cards of the year. I keep my zeitgeist cards on a small altar over my desk, and I look to them to recenter throughout the day.

One of the things I love about cards of the year is how simple it is. You find the card of the year by adding up all of the numbers in the year and finding the major arcana card that matches that number. You find your personal year card by adding the numbers of your birth month and day to the number of the year in the same way.

Sometimes, you get a number that is bigger than 21, and you have to keep adding numbers until you get a number that matches a card. Sometimes your first card matches a card, but it can still be reduced. In those circumstances, you get 2-3 year cards.

For the collective, 2025 was the Year of the Hermit (2+0+2+5 = 9)

For me, 2025 was the Year of the Devil (2+0+2+5+0+5+1+0 = 15) and the Year of the Lovers (1+5 = 6).

The Card of the Year tells the story of the year in an elemental way.

With the Hermit and the Lovers as the cards of the year for me, the tension between the need to relate and the need for solitude was one of the biggest themes of 2025. I was happiest when I found creative ways to resolve their contradictions, and I was most unhappy when I was forced into solitude and felt lonely.

I can put these lessons in astrological terms. Jupiter spent half the year in Gemini, overwhelming everyone with words, words, words, words. And when Jupiter moved into Cancer, it shifted into my 12th house.

But the archetypes of the tarot helped me to personalize the invitations of Jupiter, to see them as characters in a story instead of grand cosmic forces.

It helps sometimes to step outside of yourself and look at your struggles from the outside, seeing yourself as a character struggling with conflicting needs that manifest as internal conflict (“I want to be alone and with others. Ack!”) or external conflict (“I want to be alone. Stop bothering me!”).

2026 is the Year of the Magician.

It is technically also the Year of the Wheel of Fortune. (2+0+2+6 = 10, 1+0 = 1)

But The Year of the Magician has a certain… well… magic to it, doesn’t it?

When I look ahead at the astrology of 2026, seeing the Magician as a unifying archetype adds clarity to a messy soup of transits: Mercury will be retrograde in water signs, and we will need containers to help us manage all of that soupy emotion. There will be a Neptune-Saturn conjunction inviting us to work with spiritual forces that cannot be contained. The north node enters Aquarius reminding us that the path forward is to build containers. (Yes, I will be talking a lot about containers this year.) Venus will go on an underground journey/sewer crawl in Scorpio. And we will continue to grapple with the ongoing mini triangle with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto… with the God of the Sea at the center.

All of these transits are about water and power, specifically the power of containing and channeling water.

I believe growth will happen in magical containers in 2026.

We will need cozy, safe spaces with stable, well-defined (but not rigid) boundaries where emotions can flow and deep, creative, emotionally authentic work can happen.

The Magician is a powerful archetype to channel this year because the Magician uses containers + emotional energy to create change in the world.

The Magician tells enchanting stories that shape our understanding of what’s possible.

The Magician performs rituals that paint a better world in symbols and imagery before that world has arrived. (You can’t be it if you can’t see it!)

The Magician weaves together wisdom and intelligence, speaking the language of ancestors and magical traditions, working within and reshaping lineages, reclaiming the treasures of the past and making them into something individual and new.

In 2026, we are being invited to level up as Magicians.

We are living in a time when we desperately need people who are capable of imagining better futures, specific futures that capture the imagination and are practical enough for communities to work toward together.

We need people with visionary narratives powerful enough to inspire communities to gather and do hard things.

We need people who think like librarian mages, searching the attics of history for forgotten treasures, scouring dusty old books for words of power.

We need people with the patience of old wizards, secure in their power, and with the bloody-mindedness to lock themselves in a tower until they understand the secrets of the universe.

We need people who can spin stories of enchantment and make them true.

I want to help you find your inner Magician.

As an astrologer and community builder, one of my favorite things is creating spaces where people feel safe to cocoon like caterpillars. I would like to help you connect with the vision and passion necessary to become a Magician we need… whatever that looks like to you.

Let’s meet your inner Magician over a cup of tea.

#2026

A Tale of Two Mars Returns in Gemini

Recently, Steven Forrest wrote an excellent article about Mars returns. If you'd like an introduction to this underrated astrological event, I highly recommend it. In the article, Steven mentions that he searched for examples of Mars return stories, and he was surprised that he didn't find any. My daughter and I both have Mars in Gemini, and we recently had striking Mars returns, so I'm taking Steven's comment as an invitation to share those stories.

Mars retrogrades are dramatic. Typically, Mars spends about 6 weeks in a sign, but when Mars turns retrograde, 6 weeks in a sign can turn into over 6 months. Mars represents our inner battery, the kind and amount of energy we have to work with. 6 months of Mars in a single sign is long enough that we can start to wonder if we're getting a personality transplant.

Unless, of course, Mars has gone retrograde in your natal Mars sign.

In my late 30s, my Mars return lasted 7 months.

This was the first time I had consciously experienced anything like this, and I didn't know what to expect. Extra anger? Bad headaches? Drama in my communities? With Mars in the 11th house (conjunct Chiron) those were things I had experienced with Mars in the past. The extra long time lead me to believe I would experience more of the same.

Instead, that extra long Mars season was a vitally important look in the mirror.

I knew that I was in for an interesting ride when, on the very first day Mars went into Gemini, a Virgo-ish friend of mine had the world's most eloquent breakdown. She described in exquisite detail what Mars in Gemini felt like to her. Scattered. Buzzy. Full of energy that was impossible to channel in a single direction. Brain fog. Embarrassingly chronic forgetfulness. An agonizing full-body pain the moment boredom set in.

"How," she demanded, "Does anyone live with this? How do you ever get a single thing done?"

I feel at this point that it is important to mention that the experience of transits is not the same as the experience of having that planet in that place in your natal chart. Unless you're blessed with vivid past life memories, your natal chart is all you know. You can't really know what it's like to live with anything else, and your chart is the lens through which you see the world. When we work with natal placements consciously, we have time to get to know them and negotiate a relationship that suits us.

There are also an infinite number of possible expressions of a planet-sign combination, and my experience is not going to be the same as yours.

That said, my friend's experience of Mars in Gemini stuck out to me because it was so familiar. I knew that buzzing energy. I knew the difficulty focusing. I lived with it every day. It just didn't occur to me that everyone else didn’t feel the same way.

I've written previously about the importance of recognizing that we don't all start from the same place in life. Some of us have extra advantages. Some of us have extra challenges. That doesn't make us less or more as people, but it does have an influence on the texture of our lives. It influences how much we have to fight for a place in the sun.

6 months of watching everyone around me struggle with energy that I work with every day changed the way I see myself and the world radically. It sparked an important conversation with my therapist that led to me receiving a diagnosis of ADHD, and it led to a period of unmasking, when I had to look long and hard at how hard I was working to look “normal” and keep my life together. When I accepted that focus and executive function are more difficult for me than other people, I was able to give myself permission to use tools that other people don't seem to need to manage my life. I live out of my todo list app and rely on excessive timers and reminders to get me places on time.

In giving myself permission to be myself and use technology to help me uphold my values, I realized that I had long been selling myself short because I believed I wasn't capable of stepping up with the level of organization I needed to reach my goals. (There's that Mars in the 11th house again!) I'm no Virgo (even if my progressed Virgo ascendant gives me permission to play one on TV) but people have started to ask me how I manage to be so organized. The truth is that I'm not organized, but I've accepted my limitations and handed over my need to be organized to technology that fills in the gaps.

Empowerment doesn’t always look like putting your head down and bulldozing your way through obstacles.

Mars Return… Toddler-style!

My daughter was born during that extra long Mars in Gemini chapter that helped me find the courage to accept the way my mind works. As of this writing, my daughter is a toddler, and I'm looking forward to seeing what her particular expression of Mars in Gemini will be like.

In his article, Steven talks about one of the classic faces of the first Mars return, the child who suddenly becomes willful and starts screaming, "NO!"

I have seen this face of toddlerdom, and I appreciate the way that Steven focuses on how natural it is for kids to flex their independence muscles, but I don't think that's what my daughter's first Mars return was about.

Typically, the first Mars return happens when children are about 2 years old. Because of that retrograde in her natal sign, my daughter ended up experiencing her Mars return extra early, when she was just about 18 months old.

(This is why, as Steven said, getting that exact date is important.)

18 months can be an important time with big milestones: walking, talking, feeding yourself, and learning how to fall and pick yourself up.

Mars isn't just our batteries or our fighting spirit. Mars is also courage.

My daughter started her life in houses with hard floors, and it took courage for her to practice walking when she knew that falling down would hurt. At 18 months, she lived with parents who both worked from home and took care of her, so meeting people she didn't see constantly was a challenge.

Watching my daughter grapple with her Mars return taught me that it takes a ton of courage to grow up. We can't learn to walk until we can face the pain of falling down. We can't talk until we can face the pain of being misunderstood.

Toddlers need courage to go down the really tall slide. They need courage to look a stranger in the eye and wave goodbye to their parents. They need courage to try new foods and face the disappointment of getting broccoli instead of chocolate. And they need courage to sleep in the dark.

Mars is the energy that gives us the strength to face our fear and pain and the grit to overcome obstacles. The Mars return is an extra boost of strength when we need it the most, but we all have choices about how we will respond to life's challenges. A fearful toddler can choose to face their fear and go down the slide, or they can walk away and save that challenge for another time.

For kids who are gentle or shy, the Mars return may not look like belligerence or shouting, "NO!" It may look like timidity around strangers. It can represent a challenge that a child is facing for the first time or the need for extra energy to reach a difficult developmental milestone.

Parents of toddlers going through their first Mars returns need a lot of discernment. We have the power to remove obstacles and take away necessary challenges, and we have the power to force our children to confront challenges they aren't ready to face.

Knowing your child's Mars sign--and the time of their Mars transits--can help you walk the delicate tightrope of helping your child face challenges without being overwhelmed by them. You can be the voice of Mars that gives your child the strength and courage to succeed at whatever life throws their way.

If you are struggling with Mars, or you are a parent who wants to become a better ally for your child’s Mars, I would love to help. Let’s have tea and talk about it.

#mars

10 Years of Narrative Astrology

My journey with narrative astrology began in 2015 with a business card. I was on my way to my first conference as a professional astrologer. Freshly out of my Saturn return, I was stepping into a new career and a phase of adulthood as wobbly as a fawn, eager and unsure. My mentor encouraged me to get business cards to exchange with colleagues, which made my new profession feel more real… but maybe a little too real.

I designed the cards myself with a template I found on the internet, and I agonized about what I should put in the “job title” space. I was an astrologer, yes, but that didn't feel like enough. It felt too flimsy. It didn't do enough to support my right to be there.

Why did the world need another astrologer?

I thought of the professional astrologers I knew who hated writing and struggled to put their unique insights into words outside the consultation room. I didn’t have that struggle, and I thought there might be something in that. Maybe I could offer my background in the literary world as a gift to the community.

I wrote Narrative / Astrology in the “job title” space. And then I forgot about it until I gave my mentor a card just before the conference. He stared at the card for a long time.

"Narrative astrology," he said finally. "Don't forget that. It's going to be important."

I didn't realize it at the time, but the instinct that I needed a strong name to lean on was more important than calming imposter syndrome before my first conference.

What has changed in the last decade?

When I was heading off to that conference ten years ago, the argument over fate and free will was at the center of debate in the astrology community. For years, emphasizing human agency had been considered vital for the ethical, psychologically healthy practice of astrology. With the rise in popularity of ancient philosophies like Stoicism, these underlying principles came into question.

For a variety of reasons, fatalistic astrology has now become mainstream, and there are ways in which I think the critique of the emphasis on free will was vital. Given what we know about systems, is it right for us to say that the agency of the individual is everything? While it’s true that people can do extraordinary things in difficult circumstances, what do we lose when we talk as if everyone is starting with the same advantages in life?

I believe that astrology doesn’t give a complete picture of the world unless it is able to talk about systemic factors and privilege, and ancient astrological techniques give us a language to talk about these very real 21st century problems

These ancient techniques also speak to people.

Many people born at night don’t resonate with their sun signs, but they feel more seen when I pull in ideas about sect from Hellenistic astrology. I had been taught that there are no good or bad places for planets to be, but I noticed that people with planets that are debilitated in the essential dignity system tend to have legitimate struggles in life because there are things about debilitated planets that threaten systems of power.

The irony is, the more I acknowledged struggles with things outside my clients’ control, the more empowered my clients felt, the more free they felt to act with agency.

Fate + Free Will = Story

As I tinkered and experimented, it became evident that my literary background didn’t just make me “good with words.” I needed deconstructionism to help me break down dysfunctional stories that were keeping my clients down and help me graft Hellenistic techniques onto my evolutionary roots.

Then, one day I remembered those old business cards. I realized that story was the glue that tied the astrology of fate and free will together.

We see the world through the lens of stories. Every interpretation of every astrological symbol is a story. Story shapes the way that we experience reality, telling our brains what the world is and how it works. Every story we adopt (consciously or not) is a story that our brains will happily find evidence for.

Stories shape our lives, but consciousness shapes stories. When we become aware of stories we don’t like, we can reject them. We can ask the world to show us evidence that those stories aren’t true. Sometimes, making a positive change in your life is simply a matter of saying “this isn’t the way I want the world to be” and then discovering that the story you dislike isn’t all there is.

But even when reality fights back, we can create stories that we want to be true and fight to make them true. This is how we become heroes in our own life stories, and it is how we create coalitions that can successfully take on systemic oppression.

Why do we need (narrative) astrology now?

As I was working on this essay, I stumbled on a lecture by the historian Timothy Syder celebrating the paperback release of his book On Freedom. He talked about the importance of stories we tell about time. When we fall into fatalism, believing that the outcome of the future is inevitable, we hand our power over to strongmen who have no qualms about deciding the future for us.

I believe that astrology is experiencing a resurgence because astrology can teach us what it means to live with freedom.

Learning to speak a symbolic language like astrology opens your mind to possibility. We are used to working with languages in which each letter and word means one thing, but symbolic languages force us to deal with webs of interconnected ideas without distilling the web down to a single thing. Talking about Venus without narrowing down the thousand things Venus can mean helps you realize that uncertainty is just another way of talking about potential.

The difference between uncertainty and potential isn't just a matter of semantics. It has deeply important implications for how you move through the world. If you can sit with uncertainty–acknowledging that a Venus transit could (and probably will) mean this and this and this–you move beyond the reach of stories of inevitability and fatalism.

How can the future possibly have only one outcome when the present isn’t even only one thing?

When you believe the future isn’t fixed, it is easier to believe that your choices matter. You begin to notice options that you wouldn’t have seen before. You notice that many of these options can't be distilled to simple “right and wrong” but conflicts between valid stories about what's important. It is when we choose to live from that place, seeing our lives as stories in which we are acting out our values through our choices, that we are free and become ourselves.

I know this is true because I have lived it. I know the comfort of believing that I know the inevitable story of the end of history, and I know the pain of freedom. I have had to choose between freedom and loyalty, singing my daughter to sleep and talking someone off a ledge. It is painful to realize that being a good person can't be as simple as always making the single right choice, but uncertainty and potential is the other side of hope.

People can live without a lot of things–but not hope.

Astrology can help us liberate ourselves from a future that is bound for inevitable collision, but it only has this power because it can be used to hand over our freedom, too.

We can use the cyclical nature of astrology to tell a story in which the past and the future orbit each other in an unending plot we are unable to change. Demoralized by fatalism, we fail to act, and the future we fear becomes true, reinforcing the narrative of powerlessness we have attached ourselves to.

Or, we can see the past as a map of a single path through an infinitely branching web of potential. We can choose to walk over the footprints of those who have walked before, or we can choose a different way and write a new story with the infinite variety of options the astrological language of time presents to us.

#Narrative Astrology

When Justice Fails: Libra and Scorpio Aspects and Transits

The signs don't exist in isolation. They have relationships with each other. They agree or disagree, help each other or fight. Each sign is a reaction to and correction of the blind spots and excesses of the previous sign, which means that signs that are next to each other on the wheel don't get along easily.

When a planet is traveling through a sign you like, the transition into the next sign can feel like whiplash. It helps to imagine that the planets are trying to solve problems the way we do. As they travel around the wheel, they observe the world from each sign's perspective. They try. They get things wrong. They try again another way until they find the technique that works.

The relationship between Libra and Scorpio can be especially difficult.

Libra is the sign of the peacemaker. Scorpio is ruled by Mars, the God of War. Their disagreements are the highest of high drama. Literally matters of life and death.

Astrologer Robert Hand says that Mars resorts to war when diplomacy has failed. The battlefield isn’t Mars’s preferred place to hang out. It’s what happens when Mars has been backed into a corner and has no other options.

Sometimes, when a planet moves from Libra into Scorpio, it’s because diplomatic possibilities have been exhausted. The institutions and systems that are meant to create justice have fallen apart beyond repair.

Libra is a particular kind of justice.

Libra justice sits down two opposing parties and listens to both sides with the belief that the truth will come out if both parties are heard equally.

This strategy can be effective, but it requires certain things from the participants. Truth telling. Respect for the rules. A fair judge. If any of these things are missing, the process falls apart. When the process falls apart, Libra has nothing else in the proverbial toolbox to set things right until the parties involved agree to participate honorably.

Sometimes, you can't wait for people to come around. Sometimes, they will never come around. Sometimes, you're dragged into Libra's courtroom and the odds are stacked against you because other people refuse to play fair. Sometimes, "justice" is about who is stronger or smarter or more resourced, not who is right.

Scorpio is what happens when systems of fairness and justice break down.

Scorpio has the right toolkit when you can't assume that everyone has good motives. When you need to hunt for the truth like an investigative journalist. When you need to deal with the reality of power dynamics. When you have to look evil in the face. When you can't just talk it out because your would-be conversational partner is out to destroy you.

Scorpio times can be difficult, but they can also be satisfying. When Libra breaks down, the world can feel kafkaesque or like Alice in Wonderland, like everyone is talking in absurd dialog and nothing is allowed to resolve.

Scorpio breaks through the witty banter to the truth no one wants to face and forces us to keep looking at it until we deal with it.

The end.

#Libra #scorpio

Career in Astrology: Escaping the Pyramid of Privilege

One of the biggest challenges of being an astrologer in the 21st century — aside from the strange looks I get when I insist that telling stories about stars is my real job — is inheriting a framework that was originally designed for ancient Roman aristocrats.

I’ll admit, this isn’t a problem for all astrologers. Celebrities are infamous for consulting astrologers. Princess Diana’s astrologer was her confidant. Robert Downey Jr. wrote a cover blurb for one of astrologer Steven Forrest’s books. And there’s a legend in the astrology community that Ronald Reagan got his “Teflon president” reputation because an astrologer helped him schedule his bad news press conferences for times when they would do him the least harm.

I, however, am not a celebrity astrologer. My clients are ordinary people. Most of them are going through some kind of transition. They don’t need a mental health practitioner, but they need help, in the words of Mary Oliver, finding their place “in the family of things.”

Helping you find your place in society is exactly what astrology was designed to do. It is a wonder that we’ve been using the same model (more or less) unchanged for over 2000 years. It’s even more startling that the same techniques work for Princess Diana as Joe the Plumber. It says a lot about the influence of Roman society on ours. Namely, we’ve inherited a lot more from Rome than roads.

Still, working with a system that is at least 2000 years old has its challenges, and one of the biggest challenges involves career.

The Pyramid of Privilege

Geometry is the foundation of astrology. As an astrologer, I spend my day finding meaning in angles, triangles, circles, squares, and lines. The shape that is most relevant to career in a natal chart is a triangle I call the Pyramid of Privilege. The pyramid is a highly simplified picture of how things got done in Roman society.

The bottom of the pyramid was made of the wealth and slaves who propped up the Roman aristocracy at the top of the pyramid.

Slaves (and women and some young men) did all the menial labor and messy stuff necessary to make the lifestyles of Roman aristocrats possible. They cooked and cleaned and harvested the grain. They weaved cloth, conquered new land, and protected Roman claims on land that had already been conquered.

Free from menial obligations, the aristocracy at the top of the pyramid wrote plays, argued in the senate, and meditated on Stoic philosophy.

When the Romans talked about “career” in the context of astrology, they weren’t talking about the labor performed by the people at the bottom of the pyramid. They were talking about philosophy, government, and the arts — the things the aristocracy were able to do because they were free from what most of us call work.

The Evolution of the 6th House: We Are All Servants Now

In the 20th century, the way astrology talks about career changed radically, and that change centered on the 6th house.

Young astrologers are taught that the traditional name for the 6th house—one of the points in the Pyramid of Privilege—is the “House of Servants.” They are told that in ancient times, an astrologer might consult this area of the chart to help a wealthy landowner understand why the grapes didn’t get pressed on time.

Today, by Roman standards, we are all servants. The Senators who genteelly argued finer points of rhetoric in Rome are called public servants today. Billionaires—the 21st century equivalent of wealthy Roman landowners—brag about their 100 hour work weeks. Today, astrologers consult the 6th house to help us find our inner servant, to discover what abilities we might refine and convince someone to pay us for.

The 10th house, the area at the top of the pyramid — the part the Romans called the “House of Career” — is better understood as the house of vocation. It is our higher calling, the reason we are on this planet, the meaningful stuff we would do if not for the need to work and eat and clothe ourselves and care for our families.

The Race to the Top of the Pyramid

In astrology’s model of society, the bottom of the pyramid is meant to support the vocations of those at the top. This model worked easily in a world where astrology was a domain of the privileged and the masses weren’t considered to have a vocation (or a “House of Career”) at all.

The reality today is much more complicated. When a client comes to talk to me about their career, I almost always hear about conflict between the top of the pyramid and the bottom of the pyramid.

That conflict is not because my client is a union member engaged in collective bargaining — though, I hear those stories, too. It’s because a modern understanding of astrology sees every individual as participating in every level of the pyramid. The division (at least, in theory) is in time, not in socio-economic class. We spend our work lives worrying about the bottom of the pyramid and our precious hours off thinking about the top.

Workaholic billionaires aside, the American dream is the dream of becoming a Roman aristocrat. This is the promise of The 4-Hour Workweek and the FIRE movement. Success is escaping the bottom of the pyramid, achieving freedom from concerns with money and menial labor in order to pursue a vocation and accomplish a Great Work.

Life Off the Pyramid

If you have finished the race (or were born on the top of the pyramid), congratulations. I hope you use your powers for awesome.

But what if you’re struggling on the bottom of the pyramid with the rest of us?

A lot of people consult astrologers because they are burned out on the struggle, and they are hoping that astrology will help them reconcile the Pyramid of Privilege in themselves. There are times when I can have strategy sessions with clients in which we talk about vocation and how my client might find a way to reconcile their need to complete their Great Work with the need to eat.

More often, I don’t see a Roman aristocrat trapped in the life of a real estate agent. I see a person whose work on this planet has nothing to do with career — or vocation — at all. They’re here to learn how to live with courage or relate to others with diplomacy. They’re here to raise children or tend to things that grow. They’re here for travel, to widen their minds with cross-cultural experiences, to read Marcus Aurelius and make YouTube videos about it.

None of these activities would be worthy of being called a career to Roman aristocrats, but when my clients and I explore the many different ways of finding meaning in a life, they find relief in having the deepest desires of their hearts validated.

Most of us aren’t here for the pyramid. We’re here for a life.

#6th house #10th house #career astrology

Uranus in Gemini: Making Space to Think

Three days after Uranus went into Gemini, I stood in an empty field in Montana. There is a particular kind of silence you only find on land that used to be at the bottom of the sea. The summer sun was piercing and blisteringly hot, yet there was a part of me that felt like I was in the frigid deep, searching the darkness for lantern fish and giant squid.

The silence was literally deafening. My ears ached for sound, but my soul soared over the plains, tracing the ridges of the distant mountains towering over the grasslands in every direction.

I only had a few days in Montana before I had to turn around and make the two-day drive back home. But in that small slip of time, I experienced eternity sitting on the porch sipping coffee, soaking in the sunshine with an abandoned book on my lap.

One of the great joys of a vacation is the way your perspective shifts whenever you step away from the keyboard. I always return to my writing and my astrology practice with a fresh sense of purpose, excited and full of inspiration and plans.

When I got to Montana, I knew that I was desperately in need of a new vision. While I enjoyed the hours spent thinking about nothing in particular, none of the clarity I was looking for came to me. All I had was silence. And an enigmatic dream about a Native American man who gave me a hooded falcon and told me not to take the hood off until I left Montana.

I thought of that dream as I drove home, across the border into Idaho, through the Craters of the Moon, around the round grassy hills of Eastern Oregon until the Columbia River cut through the landscape like a silver knife. No vision, no revelation, no clarity. Just silence. Silence that felt so necessary, so like home, I felt like a stranger walking in my front door.

I knew that things couldn't stay the same, but I didn't know what needed to change. No clearer on the answer, I cried the night before I went back to work.

In the morning, I returned to my usual routine. After breakfast and a nervous meditation session, I picked up my phone to craft a social media post. I opened Threads, and I recoiled at my home feed, my mind filled with a silent scream as piercing as a falcon's.

Only connect… but how?

When people talk about falcons in Oregon, they typically mean the peregrine falcon. Peregrine is an archaic word that means “alien or stranger.” In astrology, “peregrine” is a technical term that describes planets that have no dignity or debility. They are exiles, strangers in a strange land, entirely dependent on their hosts for their survival. Planets in their rulership, exaltation, detriment or fall get all the attention, but most planets are peregrine most of the time.

Astrologers started using the term “peregrine” for planets in the Hellenistic period, a time when people’s relationship with the land was changing. Before the conquests of Alexander, people were deeply connected to the places where they were born. To leave home was to leave the protection of gods and family, so it was avoided as much as possible. Alexander’s empire connected people from different places and cultures into one big kingdom, and it became more common to travel.

With this new freedom to travel, it also became more common for people to complain about feeling alienated. There was even a back-to-the-land movement that emerged from the longing people had for the simplicity of the past and the desire to return to their small hometowns.

Uranus in Taurus found us in a similar place. Rebellion took the form of leaving the big city to start a farm or work remotely and refusing to return when employers started making demands. Spiritualities with a close connection to the land like witchcraft and Paganism increased in popularity as people looked for a connection with the ground beneath their feet.

And yet, we are learning that the geographical cure isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to physically remove ourselves when our minds are inhabiting the same old spaces. How do you connect to the land or the people around you when you’re used to living in a big city where wearing headphones outside can be vital for your survival? How do you build community with the people in your local area when it’s been generations since your people knew how?

When I got back from Montana and opened Threads, every post I read was from someone who was hurting, sending their pain and frustration out into the world like a message in a bottle, hoping that someone would find it and send back solutions or empathy. As far as I could tell, nothing ever came.

"This is not okay. We are not okay," I said to myself and put down my phone.

Uranus is the planet of the rebel, and Gemini is the chattiest sign in the zodiac.

When we talked about Uranus in Gemini before the ingress, conversation orbited around the idea of rebellious words. Punk rock is going to return! Edgy will be cool again! The neo-Victorian thing we’ve been grappling with off and on since the 90s will finally die, and people won’t be afraid to tell the truth!

I may be a bit biased. (As a teenager in the 90s, I unironically wore a t-shirt that said “Punk’s not dead!”) But I don’t think we have a difficult time with edginess in our communication. Coming back from Montana wasn’t the first time I stepped away from social media and felt like I was falling into a mosh pit when I got back.

We know how to scream. We know how to tell the truth. What we don’t have is the sense that words are capable of doing anything.

When we type out a post and press publish and that post gets other people to nod along, we feel like we’re part of a movement. But nothing ever actually changes. One post at a time, the energy of frustration that might lead to change is siphoned off. No longer under such intense pressure, we relax just enough to dutifully go back to work.

As Uranus goes into Gemini, we don’t need more words. (We had more than enough words when Jupiter was in Gemini last year.)

In the days after I came back from Montana, I thought hard about why I use social media, what I’m trying to accomplish. I knew that I didn’t want to contribute to the collective thrashing around, and I had an instinct that the silence that I found in Montana was somehow the answer.

I remembered what political theorist Hannah Arendt said about the rise of totalitarianism. At the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, she was surprised to find that he was a simple bureaucrat, not a comic book villain. His ability to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity came from the simple fact that he was unable to think.

How well can we think, really? How much of our ability to cope comes from the way that we use noise to fill the silences that would force us to face the reality of this moment?

I noticed that all of the content creators I admire behave like mystics, pointing through words into silence and peaceful embodiment. As a Taurus, the idea of peaceful embodiment in particular appealed to me. I thought I could do the same. I created a reel on Instagram that was a thinly veiled attempt to convince people to stop scrolling and breathe. It felt deliciously subversive.

Then, one by one, every single one of the creators I admired announced that they were going on sabbatical. The one exception was the poet Andrea Gibson, who had the audacity to die.

Was this a call for me to go on sabbatical? I wanted so badly for the answer to be, “Yes,” but I knew in my heart that the answer was, “No.”

Uranus in Taurus taught us to unplug. Uranus in Gemini is teaching us how to bring the nourishment of rest back into everyday life.

The reason I’m not being called to go on sabbatical right now became clear, ironically, while listening to a podcast episode by Asia Suler about how to take a sabbatical.

Asia said that the purpose of sabbatical is to create space. You may go into sabbatical with a project in mind, but the essential work is to create the space. Sabbatical allows you to have the openness you need to be flexible and respond to the deepest needs of your soul.

Times of sabbatical are necessary, especially for creative people, because these are the times when we journey within. Like Joseph Campbell’s hero, we step away from the ordinary world and return with the life-giving wisdom our community needs.

The wisdom that feeds our souls should feed our art, but it has become the norm that we step away completely to recover from an ordinary world filled with fear of the future and of the stranger. When we return, we are unable to bring with us the treasures of silence because we don’t know how to connect with those who never left.

In his book Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino speaks to life in this predicament. The protagonist Marco Polo is speaking to the Great Khan about the fear of the future. Khan wonders if his society is headed for the abyss. He wonders how to live if that is the inevitable end of the story.

Marco Polo says that Khan shouldn’t be worried about the future. The end times he is afraid of have already arrived. We are all living in “the inferno.” The answer, he says, isn’t to leave the inferno. We can’t. Inferno is just life, the pain we cause just by living with each other. Instead, we must “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

If sabbatical is all about creating space, the real challenge is to create sabbatical in the everyday. It’s to remain present with the real problems of the real world without becoming lost in the noise and unable to think.

I hope that the artists I love who have stepped away from us will return to our world with wisdom. Even dear Andrea. But some of us need to stay here and keep the fire going, so there will be a place for them to return to–and people able to hear what they have to say–when they get back.

#uranus #Uranus in Gemini

The Four Questions in Narrative Astrology

As an astrologer, I attempt to tell validating stories, but my stories will not entirely resonate with you. They aren’t meant to. The stories I tell are my stories. They come from my mind and reflect the world I want to see. But you can take my stories and change them and make them your own. Using astrology to change our personal narratives is the practice behind Narrative Astrology.

I would like to introduce you to one of the tools of Narrative Astrology: the Four Questions.

You know it’s time to use the Four Questions when you hear something that makes you feel emotional dissonance. For me, emotional dissonance is something I feel in my body. It’s like the churning in my belly when I smell food that isn’t quite right. Or the vertigo of going down the first hill of a rollercoaster. Emotional dissonance is like the squeaky sound the brakes on your car make when they’re wearing out. It’s a warning that the story you’re hearing is unstable, and something needs to change.

Maybe there’s something wrong with the story. There are times when you need to make like Thomas Jefferson and tear pages out of a sacred text, but sometimes the thing that needs to change is you. Sometimes, a story holds up a mirror and shows you something about yourself that needs care and attention, or maybe there’s a story you’ve been carrying around that has blocked in ways you don’t need to be.

When you’re emotionally fraught, the lesson in the emotional dissonance you’re feeling can become lost like your reflection in the ripples in a pond. The Four Questions help you to calm the ripples, so you can see yourself more clearly.

Question 1: How does this story make me feel?

We begin by going within. We are experiencing emotional dissonance. We know that stories run on drama, so the first step is to cut the emotional gas line and deprive the story of fuel. Emotionally disconnecting ourselves from the story is necessary to get enough distance to really understand it, but it’s important to recognize that this also kills the story.

Stories are living, breathing things. Killing a story to understand it has the same problems as killing a frog so you can dissect it. You might be able to understand the structure of the frog’s veins, but you’ll never get to the heart of what a frog is when it’s dead.

With a story, though, we cannot know it at all without detaching ourselves emotionally. We must disconnect to observe.

The problem: Stories are like parasites. They cannot exist without a host. They cannot exist without a brain to think about them, a heart and nervous system to be activated by them. They are the emotional ride they take us on.

So, we can’t just get cold and turn off our emotions when examining a story. The story disappears without them. The trick is to be in our feelings and observe them with as much clarity as possible, at the same time.

You may find that it helps to describe what is going on in your heart or in your body with words: My cheeks feel hot. My fingers feel numb. My lower back hurts. I feel angry. Eventually, you will feel yourself getting quiet or wandering away from your feelings about the story. You’ll find yourself saying things like: I smell my neighbor’s delicious curry. I see a child walk by the house with a red umbrella. You will feel peaceful and centered. (If you don’t find yourself wandering off like this, stop the exercise and try again later.)

When you feel peaceful, centered, clear-eyed, and safe, you have heard what the story needs you to say, and it’s time to move on to the next question.

Question 2: What does this story say about me and the world I live in?

In Question 2, we shift from observing our reaction to the story to analyzing the story itself. Our goal in Question 2 is to understand the story in its ecosystem. Stories cannot exist on their own. They need people to tell them, and they need to be in relationship with other stories. The alliances and conflicts between stories bind them together into political theories, philosophies, world views, and, ultimately, the collection of all these things that is the zeitgeist.

When we look critically at a story, we ask ourselves: What role does this story play in its ecosystem? What feeds it? What threatens it? What does it contribute? What is it keeping alive? What does it threaten?

You will likely find Question 2 easier and harder if you have a liberal arts degree. If your degree taught you critical thinking, you should be able to recognize cognitive distortions and fallacies in the things you read, which will help you disconnect from attempts to hijack your emotions and understand the biases and weaknesses in arguments. But you may have also gotten very good at labeling and categorizing things you read.That use of the Other must be a reference to de Beauvior, which means she must be a feminist with a romantic attachment to existentialism. It is easy for categorization to become a sophisticated form of disengagement. When something has been labeled, it’s easy to think that our work is done, and we don’t have to think about it anymore.

We don’t want to get emotionally entangled in the web of stories while we are working with the Four Questions, but we do want to go beyond labeling. Labeling is useful only if we are considering the implications of the label itself. What are we really saying when we talk about “feminism with a romantic attachment to existentialism.” What does that philosophy assume about the way the world works? The way it should work? What is that philosophy trying to accomplish? Do you agree with those assumptions? Do you also desire the world the story desires?

In some ways, going with the simplest reading makes things easier. A question like, “I think this person thinks that people like me are assholes” (and the questions that naturally follow, such as “Why?”) can be a rich and informative place to start.

Question 3: How can I make this story better?

Once you understand what the story is trying to do, you can start to think about whether or not you want the story to succeed.

In Question 3, we begin the process of revision: What changes can I make to this story to make it support a world I want to live in?

We aren’t talking about reality here. We aren’t trying to be pragmatic. Question 3 is all about desire. It’s about the world as you wish it was, so feel free to follow fiction in the direction of the absurd.

You know that you have finished with Question 3 when you feel hope.

Question 4: How can I make the good story true?

In Question 3, we put on our idealist hats.

In Question 4, we get to that pragmatism I asked you to put aside in Question 3.

You start asking yourself what needs to change in yourself and in the world if that revised story you’ve created is going to be able to exist.

It’s really easy to walk away when you reach Question 4, especially if you followed my advice and allowed yourself to get absurd. But Question 4 isn’t about becoming the emperor of everything and bending the world to your will. It’s about finding the next practical thing you can do to support the world you want to see. Probably something small, like finally putting that candy wrapper on your desk in the trash.

A version of this article appears in my ebook the Leo Risings Guide to World Domination.

#Narrative Astrology

Narrative Astrology Is a Summoning Spell for Stories

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on a group of horary astrologers. They were arguing about which of the signs rules juniper trees. As people do when they’re arguing about something only fifteen or so people in the world care about, the conversation got really emotionally heated. It was a good thing there were no weapons around because they were ready to go to war over juniper trees. As far as I could tell, they never agreed on an answer to the question, but I’ll never really know. I eventually got bored and wandered off.

I remember that conversation, though, because it changed the way that I see astrology. I realized that astrology isn’t a weird occult discipline that talks about stars. It is actually a box that contains every single thing in the universe.

And it always has. The Mesopotamians had 12 signs and 7 planets. We have a whole system of houses and thousands of named asteroids. Yet, the Mesopotamians weren’t forced to say less with astrology just because they had fewer symbols. Astrology’s “box of stuff” has always been as big as the sky. We’ve just divided it into a greater number of compartments, and each of those compartments is, itself, as big as the sky.

How is that possible? It is because each astrological symbol is a branching tree of associations.

(It’s a box and a tree? Yes, I know. Stay with me.)

Each symbol branch starts with abstraction. It divides and divides, getting more and more specific until there are paths leading to every entry in every person’s collection of specific experiences that are associated with that symbol. Each person’s association sets are created over a lifetime, and there are billions of people creating those association sets alive right now.

So, how do you know what you’re seeing when you look at an astrological symbol? When you see Mercury, are you seeing a messenger god or a metal that is liquid at room temperature?

The truth is, you’re seeing everything. You just don’t know exactly which face of Mercury is going to appear in your place at your particular moment.

The rest of the chart can help you narrow things down. If Mercury is in Pisces, for example, you’re probably not looking at a database. But you can’t look at a symbol and narrow it down to one thing. I might look at Mercury and see a god, and you might see a metal. In astrology land, we are both right.

Astrology is a subjective discipline. We keep the little circle at the middle of the chart to remind us that this is where we stand: at the center of everything. The reader of the chart is reading with a particular set of eyes, in a particular place, at a particular place in time. The reader’s subjective particularity makes the world. It determines what will come out of the box when we reach into a chart and pull out Mercury.

And this is where the stories come from. Each astrological symbol is a branching tree of associations. Each branch gets more and more particular, mapping a lifetime of stories about specific experiences that we have with each associated thing.

You can’t spend your life reading astrology cookbooks or lists of delineations and claim to understand it. Experience is where the real wisdom of astrology lives. That’s why astrologers look at our watches when we witness a disaster. We are mapping a story that we have personally experienced onto a chart. It is through the stories of our lived experiences that we truly understand how the symbols dance with each other.

I don’t know what sign rules juniper trees, but I can share my experience of juniper with you by telling stories.

I can tell you about the time I went to Central Oregon and found a park that was covered with juniper trees. Until that day, I thought I knew about juniper trees, but I had only ever experienced juniper trees in pieces. I had only ever eaten juniper berries and burned juniper wood to cleanse and heat a house.

Maybe you’ve never experienced juniper trees at all, but I can share some of my experiential knowledge of juniper trees by telling you a story about how hot and dry it was under the juniper trees that day in the park and how thirsty I was and how my mouth filled with saliva when I took a juniper berry off a tree and chewed it and how it magically made me feel more calm and subdued even though I was standing in a place that I couldn’t survive in for long without lots of technology.

Even if I say nothing about it, that experience in the park hums through my words every time I talk about juniper trees, even when I’m sharing the book-knowledge that juniper trees have become an invasive species in the high desert, drinking all the water. My stories about juniper trees taste like juniper berry mulled wine and juniper berry tea. They’re filled with how good a juniper wood fire smells.

Narrative astrology is a summoning spell for stories. And the only thing stopping me from summoning stories about juniper trees from a chart is that I don’t know what box to look for them in.

This essay is from my Narrative Astrology course Storytelling With Astrological Symbols.

#Narrative Astrology

Neptune in Aries and the 9th House: A Guide for Leo Risings

Since 2011, we have been living in a world of dreams.

Neptune in Pisces has filled our minds with visions of utopias. With Uranus, planet of innovators and revolutionaries, in earthy Taurus, most of our dreams were simple. Real, healthy food. A safe and stable home. Enough time to make art or music or quietly work on a favorite hobby. A lifestyle that is closer to nature, less busy, more agrarian, that includes animals.

We have repeatedly encountered situations that have nudged us to get clear about what we value and what we really want. The pandemic forced many employers to experiment with remote work, allowing parents to spend more time with their children, liberating unhappy city workers from urban centers of power, and forcing everyone to get back to the basics, as we struggled to find staples like eggs and bread.

With Neptune in Pisces, collectively, we’ve been getting more spiritual—as we’ve seen from the meteoric rise of astrology—and we have become impatient with the limitations of the known world.

That’s just the way the world is isn’t good enough anymore.

What is Pisces like for people with Leo ascendants?

As Leo risings, we have been having a somewhat different experience of Neptune in Pisces than everyone else. For us, the dreaming of Pisces has been happening in our 8th House of Death.

Some of us have had literal brushes with death. Our connection to the other side has revealed psychic or mediumship powers we didn’t know existed. Our ability to believe in a purely materialist world has been shaken, and we have wrestled with the question of what it means for there to be something in the human soul that survives death.

But our journey with death has been metaphorical, too. We have been given a clearer vision of what in our lives (and in society) has outlived its purpose.

In the final days of Neptune in Pisces, it is time to identify the undead we are here to banish when Neptune goes into Aries. What zombies and vampires need to be slain? What ghosts need to be gently guided toward the light?

The signs of Neptune and Pluto in your natal chart can help you figure out where your battles are.

Leo: Flattery - We are expected to bow to tyrants. This should not be.

Virgo: Martyrdom - We are expected to make real sacrifices for the comfort or convenience of others. This should not be.

Libra: Selfishness - We are expected to sacrifice our relationships with the people we love most for our individual ambitions. This should not be.

Scorpio: Generational trauma - We are expected to neglect our psychological healing and pass our wounds on to the next generation. This should not be.

Sagittarius: Fundamentalism - We are expected to pick an ideological side and make enemies of people who don’t perfectly conform to our beliefs. This should not be.

Capricorn: Corruption - We are expected to turn a blind eye to systemic oppression and the tyranny of the dead over the living. This should not be.

Aquarius: Dissociation - We are expected to lose ourselves in an algorithmically-generated nightmare, heads-down, lost in a screen, disconnected from our bodies and hearts and the people around us. This should not be.

It’s time to learn to wield your anger.

If I’ve done my job, you are feeling amped up reading the list of things we have to fight when Neptune goes into Aries. Maybe, you’re feeling a little angry. I’m sorry if that’s uncomfortable for you, but I would like you to embrace your anger and learn how to wield it.

While Neptune is in Aries, he is wearing the mask of the spiritual warrior, and we are being called to step into that role with Neptune and fight.

Fighting requires emotional energy. Anger, properly applied, is that energy. When Neptune is in Aries, learning to channel your anger with intention will be your most valuable spiritual practice.

This is an extremely sharp shift from the last fifteen years. When Neptune is in Pisces, our spiritual teachers teach peace, universal love, and understanding. When Neptune is in Aries, our spiritual teachers carry swords and teach us how to use them with the precision of surgeons.

This article is an excerpt from Leo Risings Guide to World Domination.

#neptune #aries #9th house

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Ada Pembroke