Mythopoetic Astrology

Shadow ‘scopes are horoscopes that hold space for the darker side of your life, and find the redemptive value in the daily awkwardness & agony.

ARIES

Aries: Your enterprising nature tends to favor impulse over detail, and this New Moon comes as a rebirth of an orb of light out of the bowels of the underworld unto your desire to spin the wheels of new territories of knowledge. But whispers of scandal predominate: shreds of paper and documents from your past diplomatic failings are brought to the surface by ladies with upturned, hooked noses, and within the ridges of their noses your secrets of ill-spoken words run along in parchment spells.

Fear not, for these are the whispers of poorly made horror films presenting you with the void of primitive terror. You can only know the passion for fresh enterprises if you equally meet your most primordially fearful self —initiation through horrified encounters with gossip and shreds of detail you usually wouldn’t want to handle. The way to the grail of your fresh enterprises arrives through this encounter with forces that make you shudder, with chattering banshees shrieking about your scandals behind your back.

The trick is to know that there will always be all kinds of beings in every project you choose to undertake under any circumstance, and you will always find a fool. Know the fool that you are. Able to swim in the detail without becoming lost in your head, your pioneering spirit’s new inquisitive encounter with your weaknesses and vulnerabilities bolsters you.

TAURUS

Taurus: Money, money, money, graces you in a urgent way, especially the questions surrounding it, this New Moon, Taurus. It seems to make your world go round as you’re led into a den, a bed with velvet sheets surrounded by courtesans asking you where your values really lie. What do you value? You discover that everyone is too busy being chatterboxes to fully enjoy the fruits of your earnings with you, or that some lingering question around lack, the need to gather, and scattered resources, prevails in your psyche. How to stop the noise and settle down enough to fully enjoy your values?

Just as these lingering questions start to boil over into insight, a clown bursts in, throwing confetti all over the place, opening a trapdoor that shows you to what end your life is imploding and where it may head. The showering confetti tickles you, sending vibrations through your whole person, and it’s clear that this is no minor event: what began as a tiresome question surrounded by attractive gossipers culminates in a swift-shake-up forcing your head to turn in the direction of the true values aligned with the current density of your earthly person. While you don’t tend to like the swirling wheels of chaotic information, with a little bit of time and space for your mind, you will make the scattered-ness and the turbulent movement your bed into treasured pleasure.

GEMINI

Gemini: You may feel as though you’ve been like a dragon with human hands standing at the edge of a cliff, wringing away at washcloths, your fingers cracked and dirty with old blood. All the wringing out you’ve been doing, the labor with those hands and the even quicker labor with your notoriously quick mind, is really an initiation you’ve been going through to join heaven, earth and the lower depths. Your ability to transform and do what seem to be thankless, trivial tasks wearing the face of superficiality, actually represents a much larger struggle to gather divine energy into the sisterhood of which you’re an integral part. All the bullying and the lack of credit makes your dragon face downcast, looking lonely at your washcloth.

But don’t fret, for your guardian force lurks in the background, waiting to shoot its light into your place. At the tip of your finger is the new life script, which you alone hold the responsibility to write onto the sky to orient all who care to look. Your job is to feel love for even those who have not realized the extent of your sweat and toil—they haven’t realized it because, ever light-on-your-feet, you make it look so effortless. Big shifts come as a result of the blisters on the palms of your hands. Even if they don’t recognize that dragon-self, watch them be floored when on this dark moon, you make a full transformation into the sky-writing dragon, cleaning house of world view and writing a new script of how people will discern their views and information.

CANCER

Cancer: This New Moon, you’re shot through space toward a swampy, stinking wood full of fog. In recent weeks you’ve been the one responsible for helping other loved ones swim, and this time you’re forced into the rocket of your own psyche, suddenly flying and floating independently of your own volition, acquainting yourself with your dream life. Dreams are important, for it’s only possible to swim in the outer realms and manifest care for other if you can also swim in the interior planes, which are sometimes shocking. When you come to a clearing, a hairy, wild creature with a rounded back emerges from the pits and roars at the sky.

Within the roars you decipher, as though recollecting something you’ve long forgotten, the greetings of people from deep in your past, especially through the line of grandparents. Each plea, yelp and grunt contains a unique greeting for you, and while it’s hard to hold back your tears in this moment, it’s important to let them see your response, as they’re the ones that taught you how to swim.

As you make your response transparent (read: feel your feelings in response to the strange imagery going on in your dream and waking life), you see large fire-people dancing with hats far in the distance on the outer edges of the marshy forest. Recognizing them, too, as ancestors, you dance around the perimeter together and see that caring for others and self doesn’t mean locking yourself into a particular trajectory. It’s multidimensional and spiraling, and includes feeling weakened at times, too.

LEO

Leo: In the throes of laughter and stumbling dance moves within your friendship circle in a little lonely house, a dark figure enters and crashes the party. The dark figure announces he had just struck the hard ground with his staff, releasing thousands of pigeons and doves out of the ground and into the air. Suddenly, as he speaks, the doves form around your house, and you realize that the chatter you had engaged in with your friends was illusory; that you weren’t talking about the real thing with real people because everyone had skirted around the central topic: their wishes. You wondered why it hadn’t truly felt like you had been around your friends all this time: you’ve missed your heart’s desires, which now return to you in the doves encircling your house.

The doves send coos of love and beg you to let the valiance of your heart back in during your confinement, and in letting this valiance back in, your friends will reappear, your wishes transparent to you anew. You feel uneasy at the juxtaposition of a dark sorcerer and a dove crashing your ruminations on who your friends are and what you want in life, but sometimes, contrary to your spirit of total trust and loyalty, it takes a shady figure to let the river of devotional love rush back in through the barriers. Your home ground is instantly moistened as the resurgence of your wishes vitalize you; a red river floods your space of dejectedness and solitary drunken dancing with illusory friends, and you sound your lion’s roar to all shades and all doves, proclaiming that out of your intoxicated wishing arises the sustenance of the fraternity of humankind!

VIRGO

Virgo: Taken by a corn mother’s hand, you walk down the mountain and into the streets. Who is this mysterious old woman holding your hand insistently? In charge of crop and harvest, she wears rags and wrinkles of experience on her dry skin under her flowing silver hair. At first, you’re not sure you can trust her. She takes you quietly through the streets, and the only noise you can hear is your slowly-forming realization that she was once your mother. Perhaps, too, once your wife. The mothers are looking for quality time with you, she says. Between you and the old mothers has stood an angry child somehow, making you sheepish about spending time over lunch in a dark bar with anyone maternal in an older generation.

But as you enter a lounge smelling of stale beer and she lights up a cigarette across from you, demanding to hear all the gossip, you swallow your embarrassment over the accumulated, wasteful anger over the years, knowing that this embarrassment is healthy. Anger with older generations is not in itself wrong—it actually provides grist for the mill of your stepping into your executive functioning.

Like a razor, or the snapping open of a beer can, you harness your anger to carry out leadership tasks, and you greet your embarrassment at raging against the past mothers with a touch of humility: it’s ok that there’s an invisible screaming red-faced baby on your shoulder. When invited onto the cabaret stage, you sing an homage to all the mothers and fathers throughout time. Thank you for giving me anger, thank you for giving me embarrassment, thank you for mediating these two forces with humility.

LIBRA

Libra: Shot out into a light apparition of the scales of balance that you treasure, you nestle into one side of the symbol etched with light and find that a round-bellied, pointy-hatted professor cuddles up next to you. The feeling is warm, but unexpected: why are you cuddled up in this corner of the scales of justice with an affectionate academic, and are you trapped or was this by choice? Not to worry, he tells you—the reason we’re here is because you’ve stuck yourself in a particular idea of balance, tipped to one side of the scales, and now need to bust out of that construct with a burst of laughter through light.

As he speaks to you, mice appear from under your feet, rolling over each other, chatting, tickling your ankles. You and the professor laugh in high-pitched tones, and you feel some kind of mind-bubble burst: noise and laughter can come through too, what a relief! Balance is never static, wow! You begin to chatter with the mice before flinging them against luminous walls within the confines of the symbol in which you’ve trapped yourself, and as you and your beloved academic both clean the floor, you find yourself in a new place, on new ground. The floor is incredibly dirty, but the soles of your feet insatiably skate across it.

The chatter of all those critters, your laughter and the professor’s pointy-hatted giggles were all the vibrations needed to tip the scales in another direction. Or perhaps it was medicine to knock you off firm ideas of right and wrong altogether. The professor takes off his hat, reveals all along that he was a laughing drunkard, and you lick your own dirty feet.

SCORPIO

Scorpio: This New Moon awakens you to the smell of death, and you find yourself wandering around a charnel ground. While no immediate gore is in sight, you’re familiar with this particular stench, and you’ve been known to grow frustrated at how uncomfortable the rest of your human kin are with it. Not to fear: this time, though in the immediate vicinity of death, you are the sole live human in the area, and animals accompany you. A large black bird, a raven-stork hybrid, spreads its wings and lands in front of you. Two more join it, followed by wolves and jackals and dogs, forming a circle around you in which each whisper tender odes to your willingness to lie down on traces of decayed organs.

This place feels familiar to you, and while it would make sense to assume these animals could eat you, there’s a strong sense of protection. The animals grow human hands and remain in their formation around you while walking you further along the path, before telling you to descend once more and lay on your stomach. They peck and lick residue along your spine, and the confusion about what they want to show you becomes more clear: your solidarity with the hungry animals at peace with the arising and cessation of life’s appetites balances your bitter clutches to solitude in the human realm.

It’s less a moral lesson and more of a reminder that when frustrated with your human kin, your true brethren within the embrasure of carnality lies with the protective, guiding animals.

SAGITTARIUS

Sagittarius: A beautiful lover appears before you in a vision, in fact an amalgamation of your past loves, demanding to dance with you. You tend to have your eye on the next area of exploration, including people in your life, but the challenge here is to meet the synthesis of the unique energies of everyone you’ve loved (hint: this includes you!) and to harness this tantalizing mixture as the next step in your dance.

With a light touch on this amalgamation, aloneness poses no problem, for your lovers remain alive and present in your heart and memory as the ethers and vapors of your dancing body. As this potent mixture of lovers in beautiful human form appears to you, you dance into a kitchen full of eggs hatching baby chickens, and seeing the creative fruits of all your exploratory quests might seem a climactic pride-trap—but the beloved facing you insists that your focus remain on the dance as they take you deeper into a cave. You hear a resounding echo telling you that despite the fights and the bickering, you must not only attend to your self-satisfaction about how far you’ve traveled in the past, but remain attentive to the seemingly-stagnant heat of the current creative partners in front of you.

The message is that the supreme value lies not in the heat of what’s brand new, but in the reflective relating of energies of everyone you’ve loved from the past into the present. This reflective synthesis opens the gates to deepened creation, and even the road of boredom, bickering and confused dancing with self and partner bores the way into a different phase of your quest.

CAPRICORN

Capricorn: A new beginning in work and health, and of you diligently forming a rhythm toward the fruits of your labor, feels blocked by all the noise in the factory: the whistling smoke, the drones, and the yelling workers behind masks. Your colleagues,  squarely built laborers, speak to you in deafening tones about the needs of not only your workplace, but work in general. They yell, “what is work to you?” You can’t tell if the deafening tones and the orange hues of the fire, screeching work instruments and smoke are irritants or sources of delight in tasks that have swept you up in their forceful speed.

You sometimes like force, other times like speed, but not always together. The fast rhythm delights you when it is comprehensible; the force delights you when it is yours to wield. In this case, power doesn’t feel entirely yours and the speed takes you into foreign territory that makes your brain and ears bleed. It’s a new initiation into relating with a more horizontal, less hierarchically satisfied form of power unfolding in a rhythm that constantly encircles your persistence and wants you to participate in it.

It’s not always important that you understand the work that you’re doing, but it is important that you revel in the irksome nonsense of the noise pollution around the construct that is work so that you can own both the problems and the virtues of your ambitious heritage and roll up your sleeves to bring the collective ethos of work into a new stage of evolution.

AQUARIUS

Aquarius: You find yourself in a desert, yearning for a party but with no friends around and no connection, when a giant bird takes you on its back and brings you to a mystery place. There’s an implicit understanding that it’s taking you to where your friends or siblings are in some paradisiac environment having a ball, but the exact inhabitants of the destination aren’t yet visible to you.

The bird drops you head-first into the chimney of a house in which a gathering takes place, and you listen to rollicking laughter, thinking it must be the sounds of the people you yearn to touch. They hear you cough, ask you to sing, and the sounds of your voice carry through not only that house but through the entire city. 

After lonely, sooty singing for hours stuck halfway through the chimney, you land on the house floor, and it turns out they weren’t the ones you thought they were, but neither are you: in fact, none of you are who you were to each other or to yourselves. All that exists is the strength of your voice echoing through the streets as you sing the song of what it means to celebrate now, alone but together, intimate strangers. Everyone soon follows your lead, inverting themselves into chimneys and singing through all the dust in their throats.

You, Aquarius, are the one to teach us that in order to rejuvenate our social order and social lives, we must invert ourselves and understand that solitude and not knowing are the prerequisites for the song of friendship to truly move our species.

PISCES

Pisces: This New Moon finds you inside a swamp of memory gossip, like those nights when zombie-scrolling through old faces of people who inspired, loved, wounded and betrayed you seems the only option to pass the time or cope with the loneliness. You now have the opportunity to feel the edges in those memory lands between passive chatter and active participation, laughing with those voices, arguing with them and engaging in playful banter with the masks of lost life. The past becomes a carousel for you to ride before you realize that your horse isn’t stuck in the circle—it moves in concentric circles, out into territories where the masks of the old can re-emerge in a new way, confirming the nobility of your past pains and the good-willed nature of your journey.

An ogress-mother reaches out of that memory swamp, gossiping with the horses and masks that carry the momentum of that carousel of the past. She’s chortling over you, your resentments, and your should-haves. Most importantly, while whispering to those phantasms, she reveals where she hid the keys for you to discover that you’re not caught in that circle of memory alone. Since you, oh so perceptive, eavesdrop on this ogress-mother, you take two keys from inside the nostrils of the profile picture of the old elder who betrayed you, and ride your horse into a new moment that lets bitter memory coexist with freshly-bloomed flowers whose names you don’t yet know.

Shadow ‘scopes are horoscopes that hold space for the darker side of your life, and find the redemptive value in the daily awkwardness & agony.

ARIES

Charging with anger-in-denial toward the undersurfaces of the beds, spears pointed with red-hot tips spewing embers into the air, you roar, attempting to dig for the coins and inheritance documents underneath all of the incestuous moans. The crescendo of gasps coming from chthonic embraces of great grandparents, brothers, and sisters from other lives, doesn’t phase you, but it irritates you enough that you need more time to process the confusing information in these last wills & testaments. They all seem to be written in a secret code. How will you decipher this cryptic language written for a particular form of intimacy that your pioneering nature can’t always translate? You tend to blaze into new territory knowing that you’ll find riches there, but you now find yourself needing to bend over. You’ll find that it’s not about waving the hot spear in front of you, but looking deeper into all the intimate bonds that create the resources you so need to reach the peak of appreciation of the place in which you find yourself. Rolling around in the incestuous, moldy undergrowth with the other bodies reminds you that you’re not only a newborn babe freshly exploding onto the world stage—multiple, overlapping cycles of fate carry you, and it’s time to acknowledge them as part of the depth of the resourcefulness that’s contributing to your current strength.

TAURUS

It seems stability and autonomy within your own skin is on shaky ground, and it’s a prime moment to remind yourself that instability can be delicious. The shakiness first hits the lavender-scented pillows and velvet sheets you’re tempted to melt into during quarantines and post-coital embraces. This full moon most immediately stirs the “relationship” part of your life. Who is the towering bird-woman with bulgy eyes CAWing at you to get your hands, face and arms dirty in the soil of relatedness, thereby resuscitating the soul of your relationships in the world? This doesn’t only apply to romance, but to anything in your life existing as a dyad: how can the two hold hands, sob, laugh, rhythmically breathe with the bursts of thunder in the sky, and meet the bird-woman’s charge? Approaching her throne with a thumping heart, you meet her as the compost of all of your hoarded autonomy. You surrender all of your possessions kept out of fear and lean forward (leading with your heart), repeating, “instability can be delicious.” If you assume that lightning won’t strike you hit, sleeping in a thunderstorm can lead to a tragic fall; if you’re pretty sure you won’t be struck, the same sleeping arrangements can be edgily comforting. Walking this edge of change, vulnerability and release, yours is the kingdom of earth and all of its delights.

GEMINI

Wandering around the cafeterias and porcelain floors of the monastery, you may find yourself out of your element this full moon in Scorpio. But in another sense, you’re right at home, as you’ve always known that applying ideas in a serviceable way is the method to bring your data-hunting and idea-gathering to its full peak of fruition. In your characteristic ability to fast-forward to the final result, you feel transformed into a witch on a broomstick, cackling nervously through the sky and flying forward into the place where service becomes transcendence. But it’s an isolating adventure, and you thrive on social interaction. Don’t fear: your mingling now consists of gazing in wonderment at the walls and ceilings, rag in hand, swearing you see some never-before-translated hieroglyphics on the beautiful ceiling before a custodian barks orders at you to continue the journey of bleaching your current quarters. Wipe the monastery down and see the isolation as a gift. The acidic companions, commanding that you put your information to use lest it all fades into irrelevance, give you the creative tension of service and self-visibility. No longer valued only for adding levity to the party, the free-electron can now be both server and seen unto themselves entirely. From the cackles to the unglamorous elbow-grease of cleaning (physical and ancestral), you sound the low hum of how solitude transforms human awareness into a keen perception of each being’s uniqueness.

CANCER

It seems you’re the only matriarch of the family able to swim in the deep waters flooding the foundations of your home. As you struggle to hold the pack afloat, scandals of past illicit affairs leak in through the walls, forcing open the window blinds and airing your family’s dirty laundry to the whole village.  Even if it seems everyone’s distant and nobody’s listening to you, this started as a chance for you to teach them all how to swim. It ends as an opportunity to realize that it’s not only about the welfare of the small clan; it’s about the whole community gathering the might of their resources, combining their values tangibly in the anticipation of a mass voyage. The reminders of unwanted sexual consequences, rejected children, and outcries of unmet needs that everyone tries to blame on you, are the components of an overture to the epic drama in which you gather everyone aboard the ship destined to sail across a course of many churning waters. Your ability to swim and protect, while not over-hardening your shell, strengthens the ability of your family and village to coexist. You must hear the cries of the rejected fetuses as music in order to swim in the ocean we’re all about to face, and you are called to teach everyone how to do it.

LEO

Just as you’re ready to bask in the pleasures of creative juices made visible to the public, phantasms of the dark mom-and-dad parental lions startle you, messing with your stage lighting. Their eyes shine so brightly within their dark manes that they destabilize your sense of presence, stoking the fires of your anger by interrupting your time in the spotlight. But this Scorpio full moon invites you to enter the oneiric portal to your roots, crossing into a turbulent void. Imagine that instead of a solid “you” existing in the limelight, the stage contains no center, and instead your awareness drifts toward the act of tumbling through the past. While you, Leo, are susceptible to motion sickness when it’s not all about you, there’s no need for queasiness when gravitational movement alone offers itself as a focal point. Monuments to your childlike nature feel by turns grandiose and destabilized, but the darker lions at the bottom of the cellar bear snarly gifts.

VIRGO

With your band of brothers and sisters, you stampede toward the temples and new sites of knowledge, insatiably lusting after new food for your mind and medicine for your soul. The sunset, or dawn, shines on these places of knowledge and the birds arrive with their songs. Tongues of devotion lure you in, the horizons themselves promising not only an endless supply of inspiration for your acts of service, but also a den of love-aplenty. When you enter the temple, gossiping sisters try to convert you into their likeness, and listening to their competitive bickering, you’re suddenly seized by a desperate need to have no wrinkles and appear flawlessly in harmony with the elements. You’re tempted to skin yourself, and this temptation serves as the first transmission of knowledge you receive here: crossing the realms into the dawn of knowing requires the desperation to violently dispose of all of your skin until you’re nothing but entrails. Yearning to serve the wrinkle-less order is your specialty, but the trick is to feel that longing without destroying the perceived imperfections of your current vessel. What would the cosmic order be without your wrinkles?

LIBRA

You fancy yourself perfectly in control and ready to serve the whims of the diplomatic order of the day, but this full moon you acquire resources from unidentified beings in less identifiable flying objects. At first, it seems the old fruits are rotting away just when you need them to last you the longest. But when you look again, the ground lights up: a thousand ground flashlights point you toward the undercurrent of more fruit on its way to ripening. Perhaps when you looked away the extraterrestrials placed the lanterns on the ground in a flash. But even though you’ve never tasted these fruits and you’re uncertain how much you can trust the entities from whence they came, you feel an undeniable power in their presence. Rather than indulging in drama over the devastation of the rotten avocados and the drained, delayed accounts, better to be silent, listening to how to eat and preserve what’s newly gifted to you. Your skill at diplomacy needs to include a diplomatic attitude toward adapting to new experiences, including those that take appearances that don’t immediately meet your criteria of the Good and the Beautiful. Right after you feel the temptation to indulge in the devastation, silently lean into the novel power.

SCORPIO

You find yourself thrusting out into the world in a belligerent shamanic frenzy, gifted with just enough madness to move your gonads forward into creative autonomy.  But suddenly your eyes roll into the back of your head. Even though at first it seems both sides of your body are on board to step into a newer, freer view of the world, there’s a lot that’s been left unsaid. You’ll need to gutturally sputter your way to silence, retracing the steps that led you to this perspective, in order to rejuvenate your self-confidence. Letting these forces from underneath hack your brain and tear your fingernail will show you that despite the interruptions, your true power remains indestructible. Rather than suppressing your odors, gurgles and vulnerabilities when expressing your emotional autonomy, you now see that these are instrumental and that the foibles are what make you vital. Riding the back of a giant scarab, you realize that in order for your intuition to carry you forward you need the company of your most intimate friends and partners, and part of this celebration of the foibles is to let them take whatever shapes necessary.

SAGITTARIUS

This full moon might make you feel like a child bumbling through a cliffy terrain leading to a hall of ghosts that have just escaped prison. As you amble along, a country bumpkin cartoon within your own mind, the ghosts make feeble attempts to scare you, bulging their eyes at you through space. You realize that this was all catalyzed by a magician’s golden fingertip shooting starseed back into the sky. After a warlock extends a webbed foot toward your body, you realize that pie-in-the-sky naiivete won’t carry the day, but that you can make space for yourself in the floating hall of ghosts. Awareness of both your solitude and your foolishness is therapy for you on this lunation. Sink into rock-bottom while also in space! Forge a profound scripture from all of the anguish of the ghosts and their stories! The knowledge you’re seeking hasn’t yet been discovered until you’ve served those raging demons and helped them tell the epic tales of their aeons of isolation.

CAPRICORN

This full moon, you’re responsible for glimpsing the new blueprints of what monuments to humanity-in-friendship might look like. Your raw material: the ashes from the razed skyscrapers, the vulnerable faces of the city’s masses, and the rebirth out of those ashes of the burned-down parts. You are the sign of the monument; the song to the crystallization of those structures that celebrate the toil and clarity of human force. But to what end are those monuments created? Can you be sure that humanity will erect monuments that catalyze meeting in public; a creative ‘third’ off of which the radiant light of the populace bounces? Now, with all of the current structures burned down, it’s up to you to unveil the integrity of the foundations, showing that it’s not all about gatekeeping and power, but about ways of being together. There is something beyond mass tragedy, and as the ritual elder the task is yours to show humanity that monuments reflect the light of the camaraderie that remains after burying so many loved ones. Being both in the fire and in the post-devastation is a tall order, and may take an emotional toll, but if anyone can handle it, it’s you.

AQUARIUS

Remember that time you walked in on your caregivers copulating—only to discover that in fact, they were having an orgy with their secret commune that you had no idea about? Remember how that time disturbed you immensely but also, though you love to deny it, spoke to something at the core of your life mission? The fruits of these labors of recollection now begin to show their moldy undersides, recalling the shaky past, making your memory tremble. They skyrocket you into embracing what the leaders in your life have given you through oppression, violence and the opening of the gates. Seeing the unbearable tyrants in your past and their intimidating cloaks, you feel the uprising of your contact with the generative life principle. Your effectiveness in the world depends upon your rebellion against tyranny, and if these authority figures hadn’t disturbed your powerless self and asserted their dominance in those dark, communal hallways—crescendos that recede into the private hallways and clogged bathtubs of your memory—you might have nothing to rebel against. A tip of the hat to the devouring or absent parents is in order, as is a treading on the edge of disturbance and arousal. Here lies your resistance, and the potency of your natural uprising.

PISCES

You dream of far-off lands holding transcendent wisdom. This full moon, you also secretly desire to burn the institutional authorities sourcing those faraway places to the ground, overthrowing the dogmatic powers-that-be, and then stealing the crown hidden inside the church. In this dream, you resurrect all of the wounded children under the floorboards and find yourself held up by many who depend on your dance of longing toward sacrifice. You are sweating, tired, weeping, and for once, you have the opportunity to feel supported and suspended in the air by your soul-brothers and sisters. They hold you under the sunlight, shaking the dark residue out of your pores; you release the tears for the blisters and murders inflicted upon the world’s children by dogma. There’s no need to feel guilty about that power-grab in which you overthrew the power: sometimes overpowering the conquerers, and robbing the robbers, is the necessary move to restore the sisterhood able to see outside the claustrophobic vessels of power into the wider landscape of paradise. Everyone, including the ghosts of the corrupt, kneels and suspends your body in the air, weeping, offering their catharsis for the ability of every living being to be seen within their dreams.

“Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.” 
― James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare

As I write, the whole world grapples with trapped, anxious, and desperately speculative states of mind about all outcomes, including death. In the operatic match between Life Force and the Living Dead Unknown, taskmaster Saturn and wild-card Uranus challenge humanity to reclaim the fluid display of libido, erotic self-expression and panic.

Saturn and Uranus happen to rule the next 2300 years—the Age of Aquarius, an age that demands mass celebration of gender, sexuality and sensuality. The Age of Aquarius values freedom, desire, exploration, and androgyny; our part masculine, part feminine, half-desiring, half-panicking selves that move fluidly between life and death.

This week, mid-pandemic, Mars and Venus tango onto the scene with the refreshing yet chilling breezes of libidinous zeal and dread. How could these eternal lovers breathe words of ardor and orgasmic sighs on their bed under Hephaestus’ net while mortals suffocate with COVID-19? A week of grotesque epiphanies, tiny deaths, and mass death, stories of “love in the time of Corona” take taboo and morbid turns. Within human dreams of grim conditions and the close proximity of our thoughts to death, the week gifts us with an epiphany of the god Pan (“all”), who holds space for erotic desire and death simultaneously.

Mythology sings the praises of Pan, like his father, Hermes (the astrological Mercury) for his quick movement. Hermes guides the soul from the upper world to the underworld; Pan chases nymphs and revels in nature’s reflexes. Half goat, half man, Pan visits us during panic attacks, the hauntings reminding us of our status as bumps in the earth subject to its predators. But Pan also enchants mortals with revelry, ecstasy, music, and the cosmic joke that we, too, are predators—if we can celebrate that we’re half-and-half.

So, too, are we humans double, triple or more in the realms of gender and sex, and the week hints at the necessity of becoming comfortable with this complexity. Headlines on the horizon include tributes to lovers’ eccentricities, gender reveals, gender-bending, or character assassinations rooted in botched consent. We’ll see virtual ways to participate in group sensual encounters and reflection on our personal experiences of gender’s kaleidoscopic nature. At the strangest apparent timing, scandals about world leaders’ helplessness to control the spinning wheel of sexuality will come forward in the news.

‘What do love and sex have to do with a plague?’ we may ask ourselves. The courage to invite Pan’s lust for primal rhythms into our cells—not only in the form of literal sexual acts, but in the forest’s roaring silence and the plant’s soil—no matter what our proximity to death, bear profound and liberating lessons that transition our unconventional geniuses forward into Aquarian self-empowerment.

But we cannot afford to skip over the “panic” component of this forward momentum. The freedom of limitlessness and anxieties over letting-go both hang in the air, reflected in Luna’s turbulent connections to Saturn, Mars and Uranus in her waning cycle. Agricultural gods both, Saturn and Mars thrive when exerting themselves and laboring within specific structures. Saturn rules the mythological Golden Age, a tranquil, abundant time; Mars wields the power to blaze ahead, discovering new territory. But both forces, while essential for all forms of cultivation, in excess induce claustrophobia and ire. With Luna’s visit to these loosely conjunct planets this week, we feel impatient, agitated, and clingy. Equally, we may begin to let go, only to compulsively label new discoveries as our own in an attempt to possess them.

Part of sexual attraction and being in love—with a person and with the world—is the ability to let go and play, but equally prevalent is the proclivity to grasp, possess and dominate the other, panicking that the object of our desires will slip away. This includes life itself: panic over death is the wish to eternally possess the status quo of aliveness. But it’s the Age of Aquarius, and the more we insist on owning the beingness of persons and world, the more backlash occurs. As erotic demands tug on our physical and psychic bodies, can Libido coexist with Panic, and if so, how?

Whereas Neoplatonism and modern psychology sublimate Venus and Mars to symbolize Diplomacy and Assertiveness, the lovers now undress and resume their primordial status as amorous love-in-motion, a kinetic mode of desire. The interplay between letting go and claiming ownership is part of what the free-radical, kinkily bantering signs of Aquarius and Gemini offer Venus, Mars and the world this week. In this sense, they ‘cure’ humanity’s deer-in-the-headlights anxiety plaguing the world’s present moment: it seems even during a plague, there’s room for joy and sensual pleasure.

How can humanity put one foot in front of the other this week in a way that allows that razor’s edge of panic and joy without literally dying? Luna’s stint in Capricorn and Aquarius early and mid-week suggests that if we can recognize where mold grows upon once-reliable ground, our limits will transform, enabling our forward motion. Luna’s message encourages the expansion of our emotional flexibility even within apparently limited courses of action—those limits are transforming, and once we accept the past, our capacity to expand beyond obstacles increases.

What makes you jump out of bed, transcending all lethargy, with an awareness of your power? Whether it’s a piece of music, the voice of someone you love, a painting, an image from a film, a letter, a message, this week asks you to strengthen that connection. During times of panic & sickness, even when death demands contemplation, a connection with these reminders of life force ask to be consistently reinforced so that they’re rolling from within and with less effort. As Pan instructs, panic and vitality can and do coexist. In this sense, even if ninety-nine percent of your body’s in crisis, that one cell soaring in response to what reminds you of your joy alone protects you and makes all the difference. Even if you feel weak and paralyzed, know that the other side of panic is nature’s orgiastic dance of which you’re an integral part, so you’re exactly where you need to be.

Italian classicist and philosopher Giulia Sissa, in her book Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion, writes, “Culture happens when sexuality is transformed into sensuality.” The driving forces behind the Age of Aquarius might add, “and there are as many sensualities as there are persons—just as with deaths.” Sensuality and death dance with us, and the way out of freezing in Death’s apparition as a terrifying construct lies in recognizing how much each of these parts of life affirm our utter uniqueness. Each of us treads a path: “My sensualities and my deaths.” Also: “Our sensualities and our deaths.” Also: “The world’s sensualities and its deaths.”  

What we need are strong hearts, strong stomachs, senses of humor, and lots of trust through the pain. Toward liberation we all go.

As I write, the sirens outside my Brooklyn apartment remind me of the complicity between bones, blood and government. With a rare planetary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto—one that hasn’t occurred in thousands of years—overtures sounding new judicial dynasties now begin to form on the bones and blood of many generations. The week of March 29^th  roars in with ambulatory blares transmogrifying into the smoky omens of a nascent city-state, a form of government in a liminal realm as yet unclear, appearing as a fragmented cyber-image too fleeting to hold any certain guidelines about our situation. Without reliable long-term direction, the smoke signals challenge us to create boundaries that hold action-streams bearing light and regeneration. How is it possible to lead with the vital enthusiasm for mental and physical exercise instead of the morbid masks passing through our dreams and the news cycle?

The iron-pumping fighters for love and justice transform into apotropaic maneuvers against primordial terror: exercise this week shows up as rest (for the privileged), struggles for survival, anxious waiting, terrifying phantasms, and strength-gathering. Discipline and frenzy coincide on parallel streams or parallel time-tracks, or with one in time and the other in the timeless. But who administers our action-flow? To what extent do we possess agency over this administration? And if unexpected realizations about going forward arrive, can we go forward spontaneously? The need to make peace with structure while not feeling trapped characterizes the tension we experience in domestic, interior and bureaucratic spheres.

We feel this tension acutely this week, culminating in a conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto, with warlike Pallas Athena and tyrannical Saturn close by. Jupiter, harbinger of expansion and growth, meets Pluto, lord of the Underworld, overseeing the light that shines through the ashes of post-death transformation. An autonomous force beneath the decay casts a luminous beam to the side of our view, which, if aimed directly at our eyes, would blind us. But some sorcerers swear they’ve heard Pluto himself whisper this promise: if a mere mortal gazes upon the heap of decay long enough to receive the side apparition of the light beam, the antidote to loss-aversion graces their soul.

In mythology, Jupiter and Pluto are brothers: Jupiter the life of the party, Pluto the most powerful. Nobody, not even Jupiter, overrules Pluto’s chthonic judgment. A culture in monotheist-materialist death rattles polarizes this pair with Jupiter (Zeus: “shine,” “lightener”) on the pedestal and Pluto in the gutter, or in the shudder. It’s up to us, now, to help these brothers support each other instead of running on independent agendas, which is no small task, given that a keyword for astrological Jupiter is “growth,” and late capitalist New Age self-development looks upon growth in an uncritically positive light. But as revolutionary psychologist James Hillman reminds us, “When you have too much growth, it’s cancer.”

Growth serves as a reminder of light—growing seems to equal happiness—but the accumulation of happiness-reminders falls short of its light-bearing source. Whereas the growth of the happiness-reminders only leaves the pull of human longing with a pile of hapless relics, witnessing decay and grieving the dead opens the way for the life-giving whir composed from the collaboration of Jupiter and Pluto to enter. If we fail to bear witness to the cinders of corruption, growth goes manic, forcing the heavens and the underworld to forge an aggressive light that pierces through the happy-hapless-densities of earthly comfort straight into our retinas.

“Stay in your homes,” they say. Whether literal homes or interior, psychic space, resting in a nesting base is important. As red-eyed warrior Mars moves into Aquarius, nudging up against taskmaster Saturn, it’s a week to love the holding power of a container large enough for the invigoration of steady, constructive impulses within their structure. But uncertainties broil and freeze: will we be masters of our own domains? Will we be dictators? Will we live in servitude to outside despots?

The answers depend on the degree to which we bear witness to the form of the container itself: Will we stay home and administer our energy? Will we feel the power of stillness? And perhaps most important of all, will we remember the natural clarity of our bodies? There’s a desperate need to reclaim skeleton and blood, a necessity that makes a contentious bedfellow with speedy cyberspace. While the internet inspires structure, reminding us that that we must stand in solidarity to defeat inner and outer enemies, the task of claiming foundation, bearing witness to the ashes of those lost, and administering our virtuous action through rightful channels, belongs to bones and blood.

Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto last joined forces in the sign of Capricorn in 1894 BC, the year of the founding of Babylon, which began as a tiny village in the middle of a vast planet. Babylon soon became a dynasty that transformed world justice and human rights.  The rare 2020 conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn, occurring for the first time since 1894 BC, sets the stage for the seeds of a city-state unlike any other in history, existing now only as a dream image of a floating vessel too fragile to confirm. News about cyber-currency, including proposals for the digital dollar, suggests this seedling government will unravel online, its first iteration a cocktail of solidarity, sadism, dark eros, hypertrophied information and propaganda. It’s possible that the new face of bureaucracy has become so commonplace it’s right at our fingertips.

While embracing the surges of internal innovation that the vitalized beings on the front lines of this future source of human collaboration bring, it’s important to remember that the true roots of any revolution of hierarchy structures lie in the blood and the bones—of ourselves and of our ancestors. Let us bear witness to the decay through which their light may shine.

Shadow ‘scopes are horoscopes that hold space for the darker side of your life, and find the redemptive value in the daily awkwardness & agony. This week they’re especially weepy, with the Pisces New Moon.

ARIES

Warriors with eyes all over their heads gaze on the sunset, plundering forward into their new territory thirsting for fresh blood. Looking back behind their shoulders, they can’t help but look upon the blood already shed over the ground from the battle hard-won. The question is whether there’s still a larger war to fight, to use all of the energy of freshness and boundaries that limit-giving Saturn affords you during this time of conspicuous new beginnings. Sounding the cry, the resonance of your voice could lift the sun out of the belly of the underworld itself. As your strident cries carve out the boundaries of this fresh start and your followers shake in awe and terror, you must take stock of the balance between sunset and sunrise: starting something new and reflecting melancholically aren’t mutually exclusive; they feed each other and must hang in balance. Allowing people to grieve their losses, you march forward, grieving a few of your own while holding your arms out in front of the sun. Take a breath. You know building a new village on the land is possible.

TAURUS

As you gaze over your shoulder, little relics from deep within the past seem to emerge out of the sea behind you: jewelry boxes, splintered chairs, hand grenades your grandparents used in the war, bottles of Scotch. The detritus of addiction moves into your orbit as you see all of the fresh starts within the hidden stories of your ancestors coming toward you to help you realize the hidden sources of power that you possess in this moment. Though you may feel lost at sea, and may feel at times that you’re drowning in the hiddenness of what was possible and what was actual, and what IS possible and what IS actual, you’re actually becoming more able to discern what you can use from the flotsam. Instability and disorder have been the beginning of your initiation during the last couple of years, and as you continue to lean into the disequilibrium, you discover paradoxical balance: the sniveling inner gremlins begin to drink from the old family stories so that those stories are no longer power-drains on you.

GEMINI

You discover this New Moon that you arrive at a party of your circle of friends only to discover that the circle itself has turned into a group of wild beasts. The lions, tigers, bears and serpents demand that you dance with them, and with your light-hearted, harlequinesque nature, you dance joyfully, gliding across the currents of transformation. But there’s dread lurking in the background: wherefore did this transformation occur? Something arises out of the middle of that friendship circle, a new beginning of an initiation into your primordial animalistic nature. The sores of civilization, including disease, allergy, and plain old city soot, seem to be coughed out of the center of this group dynamic, and only your light-hearted curiosity can expel any of its lasting impacts from hanging over the clan. The initiation lies in shedding the armor of civilization and being at once light-on-your-feet and guttural, lower-body, in your connection with the earth. You all roar together, and within your respective domains, you breathe fire, knowing that you will only gain the collective insight if you’re willing to temporarily leave behind the civil trappings you once held dear.

CANCER

When you arrive at your temple, and when your focus presses upon the building, underneath the stone, dark hands cause cracks in the foundation. It seems the old king and queen, overthrown, reach up to rise again, disturbing the already-claustrophobic atmosphere. But this is not an atmos-FEARic situation: you find yourself standing serene within the temple and it becomes a vessel for your indestructibility. You endure the quakes of the foundation with an ease you had not previously known. The old, dead despots are demanding that their mission in the world (as it had existed in their old lives) be seen anew during this time. They want the boundaries of how their contribution had benefited society expanded, so that people can see their legacy in a fresh light. Hint: this has to do with you and your contributions as well. You might have done certain things that can’t be undone, but the way people see your contributions and the way you view your mission is due for a fresh start. This cosmic coup and rise of the dead royalty is the beginning of reframing the value of your social contributions, and after falling through the cracks of the structure, your vessel carries you to a new land where your unique contributions are unwaveringly valued by both yourself and others.

LEO

You want it all, and your mask of power lands you in an ivory tower surrounded by heaps of dusty books, seeming to counsel you. In the moment when a ray of light pierces your chest and you find yourself staring into an apparition of a new land, you wonder what it’s all about. The sweat on your brow begins to melt your pride away. All pie-in-the-sky pronouncements from the past echo in the air, and when you travel downstairs to see that on the throne sits another King, Queen, or Qing, you run away from your domain, finding that the only thing left to do is to go toward the apparition of the new land that you saw earlier. You travel faster than your legs can carry you, and, hint, hint: the labor and the toil of the journey is what counts. Though the dust and light were gateways, the fresh start you were looking for wasn’t in the collection of the books,. The fresh start was what those artifacts catalyzed in your mind and spirit: the eruption of pride, the sweat of wanting to do the real work of fleeing fossilized sources of fake strength. Now, you venture forth toward the true nobility of humility and fresh mind.

VIRGO

Frequently ill-at-ease with new bold starts, this New Moon you crawl toward this unforeseen territory on all fours in a deep trench during a thunderstorm. In the trenches there’s an unexpected drop-off, and you find yourself thrown into a ceiling vault that requires more crawling in order to reach the light. Once you reach the light, a smoldering lover appears—or is it an ex-lover?—cross-legged, with a wry smile, asking you to unbutton their blouse. Complying makes you excited and uncomfortable: how could claustrophobia, survival, and bodily intimacy be so intertwined? The simultaneous expertise about the body and discomfort with raw physicality is an ongoing paradox that makes you charismatic and puzzling, Virgo, but it’s okay: going down there to discover merging, you discover you like the hag and the gnomish version of your ex-lover, too, and that it’s just these grotesque appearances that empower you to get primal with them. Maybe that shape-shifting source of temptation down there isn’t a person: maybe it’s an object, an account, a bill, or the fertile soil of your imagination itself, but either way, after you’ve kissed it, the light carries you both to a new place you need to create your life.

LIBRA

Rivals and jilted lovers with pouting lips and swords pop out of the shadows and start speaking to you in invented languages, and it seems at first as though they’re offering to take you for a ride. A ride with your rival? Hopping on a train with an ex? The scales seem to tip toward a fresh perspective on those who don’t seem to be balanced people in your life, but who thrust you in the direction of quick, direct, fiery independence that is the counterpoint of your comfort zone. When you hop on board with these flaming enemies or frenemies, it might seem at first that you’re descending to the ninth gate of hell, but you’re actually careening toward the balance that you truly seek: a fresh geographic look at the way you can be and live with others with passion, leadership and diplomacy. You might create a new home together, with plenty of space to joust, or you might discover that you can live in the middle of the ring of fire anew, quietly while they try unsuccessfully to accost you from the outside. If you can apply these ideas toward arguing with yourself this week, the empty side of the map of your soul will start to fill in.

SCORPIO

In the middle of your daily routine there is a schism when time seems to stop and a new impassioned approach to time seems to begin. It’s a gap, a reddened void in which integration is obliterated and only the unknown prevails. If you are able to short-circuit the tight control around your daily sources of power you hold dear, this gap becomes your friend, and teetering on the edge of the day’s schism and its order gives you strength to charge forward. When you lean into the schism of the order of the day you might find sobbing hypochondriacs, laughing nurses, used containers for bodily fluids, post-surgery smells, all the while knowing that the whole time, a reset of time’s hierarchy is available to you. If you can cry with the cries and find a new frequency in your voice, if you can laugh with the laughs and discover a fresh depth of laughter independently of the claims of healthful hierarchy, if you can curiously contact used containers without immediately sanitizing them, the breakage in time turns you toward the right outlet, that of the edge of dirtiness and collapse. It is only on this edge that the creation of taken-for-granted routine becomes possible, and once that daily order becomes fossilized, the ground opens you again to the sniveling rejects of absolute power.

SAGITTARIUS

All the children you didn’t realize were yours stand in a line holding shot glasses full of whiskey and demand you pay attention to them. You don’t love being held down, so thinking of your offspring wasn’t exactly high on your list, but those born with your DNA running through their bodies and souls offer you the opportunity to take a fresh perspective toward what has grown as a result of your creativity. It’s not an opportunity for you to escape, but to notice anew—bursts of reflection, phantasms, inner beings and creatures that show you what the consequences of your actions and creations look like. They appear on a patch of land that had been previously hidden to you, and it’s through your willingness to clink glasses with them—with those born as a result of your actions—that the boldness to climb the next mountain arises. It’s wise to listen, to feel Youth-As-External, rather than hoarding eternal youth into your own mindset, so that your perspective can be humble, fresh, and other-directed, rather than self-centered. Your past creativity causes joy and pain, and the discomfort of feeling the dissonance of joy and pain as a result of your past risks is what propels you into new territory now.

CAPRICORN

All the family critters climb out from under the bed, some of them young, some of them old, but all of them dipping into the pond of your murky memory-bank, almost as if fishermen trying to catch the one recollection from the school of fish in your memories that will give both them and you the key to nourishment. The nourishment they’re seeking from catching of the fish of your memories is that which will nourish you and the generations to follow. Reaching into the dark waters of your bloodline, the swarms of fish encircle your desire to catch the emotional anchor. It will not be easy, they tell you, for we all come as one, and you will need to take all the agents of feeling into account before you go ahead with your agenda. The discovery of this school of fish, of this ecosystem of recollection, is what you need to spend time with, growing some gills yourself. The new pieces of clarity emerge from the willingness to be surrounded by those immediately reaching into your emotional space and those deep within the transparent vessels of feeling from the past. Your ability to hold both of these, while being in the center and in your center, invigorates your strength as a leader and protector.

AQUARIUS

Brothers, sisters, and lapses in communication, wires going haywire, sparks flying and missed connections and deviously misinterpreted words bring your consciousness down into a knot of cords, but it’s in these cords that you find out how to untangle yourself, Aquarius. It’s only in inhabiting the discordant, tangled space, an exaggeration of your state of being curled up in a ball of ideas, where you untangle yourself and feel spacious in your world again. As you see the overwhelm of all the messages trying to get through, and recognize the space of disorder, you are able to toss the pine needles, little by little, off the bundle of knotted wire and hear each message clearly, determining what is worth addressing and what isn’t worth your energy right now. First curling up in a fetal position at the center, then splaying out like a Vitruvian man, clarity arises and your fraternal connections, as well as the fraternity of all the units of communication show you gratitude.

PISCES

Some goods feel stolen, some relics seem to have grown mold and dust; either way, your possessions feel not-quite-yours, Pisces. But something underneath the material things that had previously defined a certain aspect of your life comes to the forefront of your awareness: the space around those objects, and the ability of your psyche to see the territory available to you to discover new births and the thrust of your being toward the anticipation of the next instance of harmonious surges of creation with the world’s tides. It’s as if you stand as a new ruler, standing over your corrupted possessions, but you are not a ruler of egomania. Rather, your arms extend to the rain and lightning, which kiss your fingertips. The abundance of wiggle-room in the world’s creation place propels you to discover the moment after your customary dissolving: recovering the sight of the fertile land and its potential, knowing that resources can regenerate with the help of your compassion and inspiration. Though a tinge of sadness strikes you as you gaze at your items, you harness your power of empathy for the rest of the world, and your connection to true resources knows no bounds.

A curious and driven hero wanders around a rising tide, thinking he can befriend it. The water seems to invite him in, but right now he’s just looking, unsure if it’s dangerous, unsure what it wants. He climbs up on the rock pile so he can have the best view of the ocean. Suddenly, a pang of longing enters the hero: he yearns to go forward on the journey so that he can return to what makes him human again, so that he can return to his home and hearth.

But he doesn’t know the boundaries of the ocean well enough. He waits, alert, on the rocks near the shore. And like this hero, as Mars sextiles Sol and Neptune, we find ourselves burning the fuel of what inspires and magnetizes us. We might be drawn to go into some deep, dreamy waters, and feeling as though self-interested judgment is suspended, we’re not sure how much of the sea is friendly and how much is monstrous. All we know is the strong pull of the lover at home.

Does this strike you as wrenching grief, as with Odysseus? Or as with Orpheus, do you find yourself driven to play music on your seashore rock, feeling that there’s a creative act to be done that requires courage and that redeems what you thought was lost? In either case, the need to speak with the flotsam emotions and invite the radioactive realization into your home presents itself.

This week brings a view of possible navigational directions, taking stock, weighing the consequences of directions taken from a distance only to be surprised by what presents itself at the current stop-gap base. With Luna on her waxing cycle toward fullness, there’s a rhythm and ethic of growth, of preparing for peak and release, and of the necessity to confront how the blooming of what’s been planted meets the emotional environments of power, authority and justice. The dangers of these charged ghouls are alluring and unknown. There’s a notion of moving into uncharted oceans or paths, resulting in situations that are easy to dream about but hard to see clearly. The scope of the sea, its surfaces, wombs and death-traps through which we voyage and that give boundaries to our journeys are endless in their depths even with the best view. No route is free of storms, ambushes and secret undertows.

The word “navigation” comes from “ag”—to drive, draw out or draw forth, move. To go or to stay? And what is doing the drawing of the drawing out—from the perspective of the force that’s drawing us out, are they therefore drawing us in? Just as a heroic quest to move out there prevails, so too does an irresistible magnetism toward ‘we-know-not-what. ‘

But we sure want to know: as Mercury the trickster continues in his retrograde motion, he regresses into Aquarius, in which we grow impatient at the massa confusa of the tempting forces pushing, pulling and trying to communicate with us, converting the desire into a focus on clear ideas. Messy feeling, scattered all over the place, turns into dissociated thinking. The cacophony of emotive experience turns into intellected, truncated fusion for our sense of individuality not being able to bear the lack of focus. Swimming against the current of psychedelic moods and poisons infecting our concentration, the mercurial force lusts after the whirlwind of airy focus that it hopes will result from intellectualizing all the wet confusion.

A grounding question through this mental-emotional maze might be, “How do your ideas about the journey you’re on help each person express who they are as individuals while still participating in a collective?”

Mid-week, with sensual Venus squaring task-master Saturn, there’s friction between the part of us that’s seduced by the possibility of forging ahead into the erotic mysteries, and the grindstone in front of us that needs attention. Old, cold and dry figures threaten to stomp out the fire, compressing and contracting heated ambitions. But when Venus ingresses into her home, Taurus, on Thursday, she nears a conjunction to wild card Uranus. It’s as if electricity suddenly courses through the limiting grindstone Saturn had only moments before forced upon our sensual drives as an object of toil and labor.

This jolt could lead to unwelcome surprise, or conversely, an over-confidence in our sensuality, an over-trust in the endurance and feel-goodness of material resources to see us through the tasks at hand. On one level, we may feel that we’ve moved ahead when in fact we have stayed put. On another level, we might have thought nothing had progressed and that we’re stuck, only to find out there’s something growing and ready to surge in the very place that seems most familiar.

It’s as if the week rhymes: just as Mercury’s retrograde motion into Aquarius tries to gather the moody debris into a windy cylinder of concentration, the dynamics of Venus, Saturn and Uranus sideswipe love’s restless drive to move ahead into more creative paths with a sudden jolt and realization that we have yet to complete our reflective journey toward epiphany in the place where our sensuality currently treads.

It is these concentrated swirls and jolts that enable us to glimpse the rest of the journey—its dangers, joys, and demands for completion, the deception of unexplored territory, and the ability of our immediate surroundings to ceaselessly surprise us with everything we need.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
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• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.