As we witness, organize, and resist against the descent into the hell and heartbreak that unfolds before us each and every day in Minneapolis, Iran, Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and beyond, it’s natural to want a simple directive — a “how to get out of this seemingly never-ending, evil dumpster fire” field guide. We want a step-by-step manual. We want to know when it will be over, and we want it to be soon.
When people come to me for a reading at the end of a particularly brutal transit (or period of time), I’ll admit that a part of me is always a little relieved. I love telling people that the hard thing they’ve been living through is wrapping up. I love reflecting on all the “lessons” that were learned.
Hindsight is a privilege.
Unfortunately, it’s one that we don’t have right now. In fact, I’m here to tell you (and remind myself) that we are at the very beginning of a period when everything is up for grabs and life as we know it is undergoing a massive transformation. We have entered the chapter in our history that demands we all get involved or go to our deathbeds regretting that we squandered our time on Earth. If we sit on the sidelines now, we let the other team win the game and write the story. And forfeiting is absolutely unacceptable, reprehensible, and a non-option.
The good thing about giving someone a reading when they are at the beginning of a life-altering (and shattering) portal is that, together, we get to do a tremendous amount of prep work. It’s the moment for pep talks and resourcing, mind-mapping and battle plans. To know (roughly) what’s coming and how long it will last is to accept reality as it is — no frills, no spiritual bypassing, no outs. We go all the way through it. We can’t skip a step or get out of the work if we want to come out better for having had to deal with it at all. When we have foresight, we can grieve our misconceptions about what we thought our lives were going to be. And in this case, grieve any illusions of what we thought this nation-state or this world was.
So, to situate us in our collective reading: We are currently living through Pluto in Aquarius, and the Pluto return of the Haitian, French, American, and Industrial Revolutions. We are also living through Neptune in Aries and Uranus in Gemini, and both the Neptune and Uranus returns of the American Civil War. Add to that the Uranus return of WWII and the creation of NATO.
We are also headed for a once-in-36-ish-year conjunction of Saturn and Neptune in Aries this February. The last time Saturn and Neptune made a conjunction (in Capricorn) was during the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We could say the overlaps are eerily similar.
Just like you and me, every country, revolution, and major event in history has an astrology chart — and when those charts experience a planetary return (when a planet circles back to the exact location it was in) of a slow-moving planet (like Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto), we know that we are in a moment that mirrors, rhymes with, or repeats the major themes of the last time the planet was there. When we are in a time where all of the slow-moving planets are changing signs at once, all referencing past periods when the world reshaped itself, we know we are in it.
These transits that we are in, these planetary signatures, take substantial swaths of time to play out. All told, the shortest one lasts around three years (Saturn conjunct Neptune), while the others last seven years (Uranus in Gemini), 14 years (Neptune in Aries), and close to 20 years (Pluto in Aquarius) — so we know that these shifts will span more than one election cycle.
We’ve only been in these transits for about a year.
That isn’t bad news, but it is sobering. This is the end of one thing and the beginning of everything else. World history and its astrology are rhyming with this moment, but we can refuse to repeat past mistakes. The thing about understanding just how disruptive a period of our lives will be is that we get to make space for it, give up everything that never really meant anything, double down on everything that does, and mourn so that we do not despair. This is the time to lock in and link arms. To refuse business as usual. This is the time to abolish ICE in all its forms, the world over. We can embody our collective power en masse, repeatedly, until we reclaim our world and dreams for the future. Because we know that what they do in Palestine, they do in the Twin Cities. And we know, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that it won’t stop there.
These are the alarm bells the most reserved among us have been waiting for.
It’s too late to be held captive by your fear, and it’s past time to get engaged. I don’t say any of this lightly, and I don’t take any of the losses we have and will encounter for granted. Change comes at too high a cost, but the alternative is too great a price to pay. We all need to find a political home, get rooted in our neighborhood Signal groups, run for office, get involved in our communities, cancel our subscriptions with the corporations complicit and compliant in this terror, boycott the businesses funding these evils, learn what it takes to sustain a general strike, and make sure that no matter where we are, we are building networks of care that are as resourced as possible. So when this threat comes to our door, we will not be scrambling to respond.
We are all we’ve got.
