July 5th, knife-throwers hit large dirt mounds with their rolling daggers that whistle in the air and release hundreds of butterflies after the dusty old ridges crumble. The foundations of our leaders’ bad dreams, where messes and inconsistencies show and shine in the light, expose themselves, and through opening, our transformed selves emerge ready to fly. This doesn’t mean it’s easy: watching corruption die and experiencing corruption as burning questions and ruthless, scathing self-interrogation doesn’t feel like flying in a state of transformed liberation, but a simultaneity occurs, allowing us to hold the tension between past toxicities and timeless songs to the world. Visions of the ruthless knife-thrower prod at our emotional hotspots, paradoxically saving us from writhing in agony for too long by demolishing the selfish pedestals. The collapsing buildings and new environmental scans, the dance of Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus leaping forward and back, boil the spirit-blood, blazing the trails of human craftsmanship—now in a dark womb, soon apparent.

July 4th, lunar eclipse in Capricorn, our urge to somersault down the muddy paths and land in a swimming pool clashes with the need to stay close to a cozy hearth’s sacred flame. Rolling through the hills on a warthog’s back, our steed sniffing the town square with cheerful abandon, we’re eager to see the whole world and to be the figureheads of newly discovered liberty, joy and justice. Monuments to abusers dissolve, burn or topple over in floods. But just as we think we’re only innocently swimming in a pool, ambiguous phantoms with lack of clear moral boundaries plunge toward us from behind carrying spears, and we suddenly need to seek the protection of exquisite goddess Vesta. Stay next to the inner fire, she gently but firmly warns us. Out there it’s volatile. It doesn’t mean cannonballs into the refreshing water were mistakes; only that further contemplation of the inner flame is necessary to establish clear counsel, vigorous life force, and rejuvenation powers that transcend the daggers chasing each other’s backs.

July 3rd, the goddesses emerge out of a roiling orb in the sky for a descending day of reckoning down on earth. They hold up flags as orienting goalposts so that we might see how to create boundaries around ideals of justice, strategy and harmony. But we’re in a dizzy fog. Those same goddesses have given us a homeopathic dose of wrath so that we do not tread too hastily, but observe the things for which we are bearing burdens, what responsibilities we carry. Screaming, war-like, toward a swirling sky, they warn us that the movement through the fog is not for the faint-hearted, as all kinds of illusions of harmony, justice and reasoned methods forward may pop out. *The methodical alone is not the way*, they say. *Only cracking open the fringes of passion in which the entrails of your failed daily schedules hide out is sufficient*. Everyone’s a wearily heroic laborer today, essential, discerning and contributing through dirtying the hands and opening the heart.

What stodgy old foundations and monuments are coming off of these pedestals in your inner and outer world?

How is the drive to go toward things erotically, mentally, emotionally or politically showing up in your life? However you’re feeling it now is relevant to new territories for you over the rest of this year.

Where are your curiosities, drives and impulses (imps giving you a playful push) right now? Are there any inner beings showing up trying to resist them and preserve comfortable forms of status quo?

What ideals are you following?

What ideals are you *blindly* following?

What are you longing for? and how can you feel an invisible thread pulling you toward it?

What is confusing you or creating that foggy feeling/brainfog?

How are you relating to intoxicating substances?

What prescription drugs are you taking?

How are you transforming poison into medicine?

In what way are you escaping or numbing yourself to reality?

What are you seeing through rose-colored glasses? (As the old storytellers said, when you’re seeing through rose colored glasses, all the red flags are just flags.)

These are some Neptune Retrograde questions. What are some others you can think of?

Summer solstice, solar eclipse in cancer, from a long line of floods, fires, plagues and sinking calamities, is brought in with the sticky heat and trumped-up, sweaty fanfare.

The battle of all battles, footsteps stirring up a cloud of dirt and smoke around startled horses’ hooves. From within once-congealed systems of justice we find insidious betrayals: saboteurs go rogue, cackling through their intent to break ties either for good or for ill.

The whole (or hole) point is in the unraveling of the threads of “good” and “ill” each moral judgment’s current use representing a false foundation being tested, crying for mercy at the clutches of the oncoming melted glaciers.

Gods, villages and quadrupeds weep, but the catharsis comes over quiet meals for some: apocalypsis, or revelation, is right on the plate, right in the possibility of tears lubricating an endless encircling of gratitude for each other—the pumping heart of humanity, the high tide of sisterly love, the flame of collective life force, the only thing that matters.

June 20th, as the status quo gets zapped like a potbellied connoisseur of laziness in an electric chair, our busy minds whirl around each other, each one thinking they’re on the ultimate happy-juice & that only they can deliver the essential hot take. Looking out the window, our minds are really more like the cars and buses spinning around leaving skid marks on the street, the drunkards blowing proclamations through their lips standing in the sunroofs as their once-dignified grandfathers convert to anarchy behind the steering wheel. Diplomats, eager to party and shoot themselves into outer space, gather round a table, prematurely integrating all the voices into one presumed compromise: how can we diplomatically, as a species, find the right terrain toward revolutionizing human values? The question is more important than the answer right now, and the counselors who burst into dark stardust in their seats couldn’t handle the pressure. They’re not like the rest of us: we will endure and heal through fulfilling our duty to radicalize the values of the material plane.

June 19th, news and gossip spread through the streets, crescendoing upwards toward the windows on fire, while the bankers and bosses sweat bullets to make sure everyone gets paid—or indulge wicked cackles in the name of some perverse, greedy vengeance. Keeping wits about us, light on our feet, knowing that in order to value ourselves and to love our lovers, sometimes robbing the robbers is necessary, we leap and skip across the pink thresholds of beauty, undercutting the corruption by not buying into its trap of somber coagulation. Conspiracies from within the halls of prescription pills, mind-altering drugs and judicial robes plot against heads of state whose feathers crumple upon the scales of justice. The levities of psychedelic colors, fickle feelings, messengers and gossips save us from the rotten snotball of narcissism.

June 18th, As Neptune prepares for its retrograde movement, we feel a sleepy rumbling in the depths: the man with the trident is crying, roaring and belly-laughing across the stormy sea, flinging alcohols, poisons, and medicines into sky and ocean as humans whisper over their dinners. The rays of the sun know their celebratory visit is temporary, while a storm that both threatens and liberates hovers underneath and overhead. Plunging into the wet abyss to meet the moods, the sea creatures greet us, and it’s a relief to see all of our viruses, bacteria and fungi as party favors when under water. What matters most is solidarity, quiet comforts, embraces, and the echoes of laughter across skies between people’d islands.

June 17th, we retreat into our shells, not knowing the extent of food or the extent of the need for family protection, as Mercury stations retrograde and the thinking is muddled: how to communicate in a nurturing way? How to walk backwards into our shells, turning on the light of intuition about how we nurture, with red lips and earrings and fantasies of purple futures where scarcity isn’t at the forefront?

Supplies, recipes, laughing over tables and nests, or grieving the losses of what once were our tables and nests, initiate the thought process behind appreciation of life and its demands and its gifts. Shifting in the human family over to remembering the grandmother and grandfather wolves, how they went after food, and the beauty of our animality even amidst the shifting of the way values are expressed in this human realm: can these contemplations hold our hands through the struggle for survival? Can nourishment, protection of love and intuition yield the light of new value-patterns?

Growls of hunger, longing and lack hold deeper truths.