• Why predicting with astrology is hard

• Cycles that track the events of the war

  • Mars-Uranus transits mark escalations

  • Can Venus-Uranus transits predict peace?

  • Six “Peace Charts” involving Iran—ceasefires, etc

  • What potential “Peace Transits” are upcoming?

• The Big Picture (big cycles at play right now)

  • What is shifting? (geopolitics overview)

  • Are we doomed!? (Sag pep talk 😁)

I’m mildly embarrassed of my last article about the Iran War. I wrote it a bit hastily with the sense that “I really should do an article about this”. Also, a lot of it was predicting things that didn’t happen. 😆

• I thought the Mars-Uranus conjunction might signal an end to the war, but it escalated it instead.

• I thought Uranus moving into Gemini would change the character of the war to be about information rather than resources, but not only has the war been on repeat every week (we’re almost to a deal! nope, we’re bombing again!)—it most definitely is still about resources.

Predicting with astrology is difficult for several reasons

1. Each symbol can mean a lot of different things. It’s the interpretation that puts them all together, and you can interpret things in a way that is different than the Universe turns out to have meant it.

2. It’s uncomfortable to predict something nobody wants. I noticed this with how many people forecast a Kamala Harris win over Trump. When I looked at charts, especially the retrograde of Pluto back into Cap just for the election, I immediately thought, Oh no, Trump is definitely going to win. But I didn’t want to tell anyone I thought that! Astrologers are in the position of potentially having to contradict their audience’s hopes or expectations or deliver bad news and I’m not immune to that either.

3. I don’t want to see the war continue. So even in my own head, I don’t want to deliver bad news to myself! This produces motivated reasoning or “seeing what you want to see”.

4. I’m still learning. I’m not an expert at mundane astrology—these are more my research notes I’m sharing because I’m an astrology nerd and Substack is for nerds. 🤓

So I am trying to shift toward writing more in a way that shows my work—the charts I’m drawing from and what I’m seeing—so you can draw your own conclusions. This also creates more evergreen content, as we can always learn from historical charts.

So let’s dig into some of the cycles and charts that can show us something about war and peace with Iran.

Cycles that track the events of the war

The war starting on Feb 28 after the Saturn-Neptune conjunction on Feb 20 ties it to the Saturn-Neptune cycle, but that is a very long cycle. We won’t even reach the opening sextile for Saturn-Neptune until 2031, so we need to look at other cycles that triggers shorter-term events.

Mars-Uranus transits mark escalations

• The 12-Day War started at the Mars-Uranus opening square.

• The current war started at the Mars-Uranus closing square.

• The ceasefire started at the closing sextile.

• The Mars-Uranus conjunction occurred on July 3rd at 3° Gemini—this was the start of the funeral for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iranians came out in the millions, and some carried huge signs of “Kill Trump”, which did not endear Iran to the US president.

All three major players in this war have Mars-Uranus signatures:

• Iran’s chart has Mars-Uranus in a trine.

• The US chart has them co-present in the 7th house in Gemini.

• Israel’s chart has them in a sextile.

That makes Mars-Uranus transits into recurrence transits for these three charts. So it’s not a surprise they coincide with escalations in a war involving the three of them.

Here is the whole next cycle for Mars-Uranus (UTC):

• Oct 27, 2026 - opening sextile (Mars in Leo, Uranus in Gemini)

• Dec 4, 2026 - opening square (Mars in Virgo)

• Feb 17, 2027 - retrograde square

• May 29, 2027 - direct final square

• July 30, 2027 - air trine (Mars in Libra)

• Oct 28, 2027 - opposition (Mars in Sag)

• Jan 11, 2028 - closing air trine (Mars in Aquarius)

• Feb 18, 2028 - closing square (Mars in Pisces)

• March 28, 2028 - closing sextile (Mars in Aries)

• June 23, 2028 - conjunction at 11° Gemini

Of course I’m hoping the war ends sooner than 2028, but if it continues, these will likely be escalation points.

Can Venus-Uranus transits predict peace?

It occurred to me to look at “peace dates” to see if they had anything in common. It turns out they do! Let’s look at some charts!

These are all dates of “Peace with Iran” so they are compared against Iran’s chart. I looked at 6 charts, and what stood out was the interactions between Venus, Uranus, and the nodes.

It makes sense to me that Venus-Uranus is the peace counterpart to Mars-Uranus. The nodes being involved suggests to me that peace becomes possible once karma has unwound or the evolutionary impulse is exhausted.

Jupiter and the Sun also seem to play supporting roles, bringing light, order, and optimism.

Iran-Iraq War ceasefire (1988)

The Iran-Iraq war started in September 1980 and formally ended Aug 20, 1988 at 7am local time. Below is the chart of when the UN received the letter from Iran formally agreeing to the resolution to end the fighting.

This chart has:

• Venus at 17 Gemini, square the nodes in the sky and in Iran’s chart

• Venus loosely opposite Uranus

• NN in Pisces, the house/sign of Iran’s Venus

• It was also a nodal reversal for Iran

• Sun was conjunct Iran’s Jupiter with Jupiter in Iran’s 10th loosely opposite Iran’s Uranus

• Sun-Jupiter sextile

JCPOA initial agreement (2015)

This was the first agreement in principle to the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) by all parties. This wasn’t technically the end of a war but it did lead to the lifting of certain sanctions, and sanctions are a form of war by economic means.

This chart has:

• Venus at 19 Taurus (Iran’s 10th), opposite Iran’s Uranus

• Venus trine Iran’s NN

• Uranus conjunct the SN and the Sun, on Iran’s Sun, all trining Jupiter in Iran’s first house

JCPOA formal announcement (2015)

This is several months later, when the JCPOA was formalized.

This chart has:

• Jupiter and Venus conjunct in the Iran’s 1st house squaring Iran’s Uranus

• Sun on Iran’s Jupiter trine to Iran’s Uranus and sextile it’s NN

• Sun square Uranus in the sky

The 12 Day War ceasefire (2025)

This war started June 13 and ended June 24, 2025. This chart is for when Trump announced the ceasefire on Truth Social.

This chart has:

• Venus back at 18 Taurus, opposite Iran’s Uranus

• Venus sextile the NN

• Venus co-present with Uranus in Taurus

• NN back in Pisces, once again a nodal reversal for Iran

• Sun and Jupiter conjunct trining Iran’s Venus

Current Iran War First Ceasefire (2026)

This was the ceasefire Trump announced right before his deadline where he said he would destroy Iran’s civilization if they didn’t agree to a deal.

This chart has:

• Venus at 10 Taurus exactly on Iran’s MC.

• NN still in Pisces, past the nodal reversal now and almost to Iran’s Venus.

• Uranus is back at almost the same spot in Taurus as it was in the last chart almost 10 months ago.

• Jupiter was square the Sun and trine Iran’s Uranus

• This was a few days after Iran’s Solar Return and a bit before Iran’s Jupiter return.

Venus is in Taurus every year as it goes around the chart once each year, but it’s interesting that in three of these charts it has been there. Venus is strong in Taurus and it’s Iran’s 10th house, opposite Iran’s Uranus.

The MOU (2026)

This was the formal signing of the Memorandum of Understanding at Versailles which was supposed to stop the war.

This chart has:

• Uranus trine Iran’s Venus, and the NN which is conjunct it.

• Almost to the Iran’s Jupiter return.

• Venus-Uranus sextile in the sky

• Venus in Iran’s 1st house.

Where are we now?

After looking at all these charts, I wanted to see what our current chart looked like. I realized we were just a few days past Venus conjuncting Iran’s NN. And then it occurred to me that a few days ago is when Trump stopped bombing Iran (after 13 days of strikes), without any formal announcement.

The only reason I could find was to “give diplomacy a chance” and also top military officials and Vance had a meeting with him and were like, “bruh, we are running out of interceptors”.

What is upcoming?

I started clicking through the days to see where these planets are going next. Just a few days from now, July 29, there is a Jupiter cazimi (conjunction with the Sun) in Iran’s 1st house and sextile Uranus, while Venus sextiles Iran’s Uranus. Interesting.

Then I got to Aug 12 and noticed Venus trines Uranus in the sky while the Sun squares Iran’s Uranus exactly. And then I was like—

WAIT—THAT IS A SOLAR ECLIPSE. AUG 12 IS THE NEXT SOLAR ECLIPSE. Holy shit, that’s an eclipse three degrees from Iran’s Ascendant.

Eclipses are tied to the nodes, so they are sort of like nodal energy on steroids. They are turning points in the plot of our lives. Especially when they hit our chart.

In addition, this chart has:

• A weakened Mars debilitated in Cancer, and out of sight of Uranus

• A strengthened Venus in domicile in Libra, Sun in domicile too

• Jupiter trining Iran’s Sun

• Venus loosely opposite Iran’s Sun

Hey, maybe there will be peace in our time after all. A girl can dream.

The Lunar Eclipse on Aug 27 is also interesting:

• The eclipse is 1 degree from Iran’s Venus

• Uranus is square to the eclipse

• Jupiter (in Leo, ruled by the Sun) is trine Iran’s Sun

Eclipses are by nature not very predictable and I haven’t done any research into what eclipses mean for country charts, so I’m not going to predict what will happen—just that this eclipse season looks impactful for Iran.

The bigger picture

There are three big cycles I’ve talked about before that are actively playing out right now:

• the US is in a Uranus return and Saturn opposition—a reckoning for US both domestically and on the world stage

• an alignment of outer planets that creates a minor grand trine between Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto that will persist for the next few years—a turning point for the whole world

• the Saturn-Neptune conjunction we had at 0 Aries on Feb 20th—a “reset” for reality

We won’t understand the full scope of what is changing right now until we can look back from the future. But I can tell you what I see playing out right now from where I sit in Portland OR as a leftist autist with a special interest in politics:

• America is losing power

• Iran is gaining power

• China is benefitting from the shifts in power

Also:

• We are heading for oil shortages soonish

• We are heading for food inflation and famine eventually (given fertilizer disruptions)

• These will both create political instability

In other words: even if we get peace with Iran, the world is not going to settle down anytime soon.

What is shifting?

There is a huge change underway in the relationship and balance of power between “the West” and “the Global South”.

The propaganda is wearing thin

The Western image of Iran from the Bush War-on-Terror era, Israeli propaganda, and American exceptionalism are breaking down. More people in the West are beginning to see that:

1. “Terrorism” is a not a neutral label and Hamas and Hezbollah don’t exist for no reason; they are resistance groups agains Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Their violence is a response to violence.

2. Iranians do not actually behave like crazy religious extremists; they are strategic and patient and willing to negotiate even after being attacked and their head of state and his whole family assassinated. It’s the US that keeps breaking agreements and bombing without provocation.

The US is not winning this war

The whole world is seeing the limits of the American military. The US military-industrial complex was built around producing fancy expensive weapons, which takes time. Modern warfare involves fast cheap deployment of drones and portable missile launchers.

Patriot interceptors cost $3-$4 million per shot, while THAAD interceptors are $12-$15.5 million. Attack drones like Shaheds are $20-50k to produce. The US is trying to pivot to low-cost interceptor drones, but we can’t use those for missiles which Iran can still make cheaper and faster compared to US making interceptors—which we are rapidly running out of.

We also just cannot realistically do anything militarily to open the Strait of Hormuz—a ground invasion would be a disaster, and it only takes a few drones and mines to deter ships from trying to pass through it.

The way this war has played out is a significant blow to the image of America’s total military dominance.

And this is on top of the total destruction of American soft power by Trump gutting USAID, threatening to annex our allies, and tariffing the whole world.

Elite corruption has become normalized

Trump has been using the presidency to enrich himself in innumerable ways from crypto scams to outright bribes for favors or pardons. When corruption becomes this overt, it undermines the legitimacy of the entire government and the rule of law generally. Even if the Democrats can take back the senate, any attempts at accountability will be seen as partisan maneuvering, not the enacting of justice.

In addition, the total lack of accountability for the people involved with Epstein is perpetually lurking in the corner asking, “WTF?”.

In other words, America has a lot of internal empire-rotting-from-the-inside issues to deal with.

America no longer controls the seas

While global trade isn’t going to grind to a halt tomorrow, the era of global “freedom of the seas” guaranteed by American hegemony is coming to an end.

What the new normal will look like, I’m not sure. We aren’t there yet. It is most likely to devolve into “spheres of influence”, but what that does to global trade, I don’t know.

What I do know is China is not going to want to stop trademaxxing (i.e exporting their manufactured goods to the rest of the world), so they have a vested interest in stability, and that’s a good thing.

Bond markets are flashing warning signs

Recently the 30-year Treasury yield has been above 5% for the longest stretch since 2007. Remember 2007?

I’m not an expert in bond markets but I do know two things:

1. they are the bedrock of the economy

2. they are what scared Trump enough to get him to back off his insane tariff shenanigans after “Liberation Day”

In 2026, the 30-year has traded above 5% for about 28 days so far (including a consecutive run of about 12 trading days in July). That is the most days above 5% in a year and the longest consecutive streak since 2007, when it spent 50 days above that level. Just some warning bells.

Are we doomed!?

I hope not! I mean, I don’t think so. But we are definitely living through a time of significant global change.

But, we’ve done that before. We lived through 2007, we lived through WWII, we lived through the Protestant reformation—humans have lived through everything in history. Humans are very resilient.

So while “When will the Iran war end?” and “Is this another forever war?” are compelling questions, and I wish I could give you a precise answer—the future is not that knowable.

What is knowable is your own heart and soul and what you want to do with your time on Earth.

What astrology teaches ultimately is that time is a series of cycles where lessons repeat and it’s up to you to learn them or not. But you can’t control what other people learn or don’t learn—including the country you are part of.

We are each a tiny part of huge cycles and movements of people and flows of resources of which we have no control. That can either be terrifying or freeing—it’s up to you.

But I advise seeing the world changing as just what the world does. I find it interesting to track and study—but if it causes stress for you, focus on something else.

Focus on what your soul wants you to focus on in this life—that’s what we are actually here to do. And only you know what that is. 💚

I’m not saying anything will definitely happen to Trump. I’m just saying if something is going to happen, now would be an indicated time.

(Which could be as benign as an old man dying of things old men die of. That does happen obviously, and you don’t need a chart to know that.)

As a reminder: astrology is not a science. Astrology is divination.

This post got kind of long, so here’s a map of what I’ll be covering:

1. All the charts of former US presidents being killed, resigning, or dying of natural causes while in office. Hint: they all have Sun-Saturn aspects, i.e. “death of a leader”. Also the Butler chart (where Trump got shot in the ear but was fine).

2. The chart of today so you can compare it.

3. Saturn cycles and how the history of Trump in office maps onto it, and what a Saturn opposition brings

4. What I think it all means (facing the music).

5. How this upcoming Saturn retrograde gives us an opportunity and what we need to do with it

So the first thing that had me thinking in this direction is when I noticed that in the US Sibly chart, Saturn and the Sun are square at about 1.5 degree orb. That means any hard transit to Saturn is also a hard transit to the Sun—it will light up that aspect every time. And right now, the US is going through a Saturn opposition, meaning Saturn is at 14 Aries, and our Saturn is at 14 Libra —Aries and Libra are opposite signs.

The Sun in a country’s chart represents the leader of the nation—the central figure. Saturn, among other things, represents death or final endings—a hard boundary beyond which we cannot return. Saturn is ground truth, hard reality, the facts of life, having to face the music.

Sun-Saturn: The death of solar figures

Sun-Saturn transits often correspond to leaders dying or being removed from office.

I rounded up all the charts of leaders being killed, resigning, or dying of natural causes to see what we see. We have 9 charts in total. We are mostly looking at Sun-Saturn here, but we can also see what Pluto (also a planet of death) and Uranus (a planet of shock and sudden disruption) are doing.

Four of our US presidents have been killed in office

When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, there was a Sun-Saturn opposition in the sky. This was not directly on the US Saturn but it was near it, in the same sign. (Also note Pluto sextile our Sun, and Uranus is in Gemini—like it is now).

When Garfield was assassinated in 1881, the Sun and Saturn were exactly sextile, and the Sun was conjunct the US Sun (a Solar Return), meaning it was also square the US Saturn. (Also note Uranus is sextile the Sun on the other side, forming a Minor Grand Trine.).

And after hanging on for 79 days, when Garfield finally died—Saturn had returned via retrograde to almost the same exact position, again sextile the US Sun. Saturn was not taking no for an answer!

When McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Saturn was opposite the US Sun and square the US Saturn. (Check out Uranus on our Ascendant as well, and Pluto on our Mars opposite!)

When JFK was assassinated in 1963, Saturn was trining the US Saturn. That was also the decade of the Pluto-Uranus conjunction, which saw a lot of assassinations and turmoil—and we are currently at the trine of that cycle. (Trines do not always mean “good things”. They mean “these two planets are operating on the same wavelength, seamlessly supporting each other”.)

We’ve had one resignation (so far…)

When Nixon resigned, the Saturn was conjunct the US’s Sun (and thus also square the US’s Saturn).

Four US presidents died of natural causes while in office

William Henry Harrison was only in office for a month when he died of pneumonia. This chart give us Sun-Saturn grand cross! (While the Sun is almost conjunct Pluto!)

Next up is Zachary Taylor - he died of an “unknown digestive ailment” after apparently drinking copious amounts of a 4th of July cherry-and-ice-milk drink (for real?).

So we’ve got another Solar Return chart. And look, there is Saturn at 20 Aries. This is getting a bit freaky, right!? (Also note we have another Uranus-Pluto conjunction near Saturn).

Next is Warren G. Harding, who died in 1923 of a heart attack. Saturn was conjunct the US Saturn - a Saturn Return. (Also note Pluto on our Sun, and Uranus trining them…did you know we have a Pluto-Uranus trine in our sky right now also!?).

OK, last one. Let’s see what FDR’s chart looks like. Well, would you look at that. Saturn nearing our Sun, the Sun opposite our Saturn. (Also there is Uranus in Gemini again—our Uranus return—which we also have right now).

Almost-assassinations can be Saturn-Sun too

Here is one of the most famous attempted assassinations—Reagan. You can see it looks a lot like the charts above—Saturn in Libra near the US Saturn, the Sun in Aries conjunct Mars forming the T-square with the US Saturn and Sun.

Let’s also look at Butler (the most dramatic attempt that Trump survived).

This chart is a Mars-Uranus conjunction right after the Solar Return, with Saturn trine the Sun.

That Mars-Uranus conjunction was also right on Trump’s Midheaven (at 24 Taurus). Astrologers were definitely saying something might happen. The possibility was there.

But sometimes the Universe is a tease, I guess? Or maybe it’s that Saturn was not aspecting the US Saturn. So it wasn’t really part of the Saturn Cycle, which I’ll talk about below.

OK, so what does the chart of today look like?

We are right in a Saturn opposition, which forms a T-square with the Sun.

We are a bit past the danger point of the Fourth of July (Solar Return), and the Mars-Uranus conjunction, although still in range. Uranus is in Gemini. Pluto and Uranus are trine.

The other intense thing coming up on July 20th is the “Basket” (which I talked about last time) — where Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter will all be at 4 degrees of their respective signs, forming a unique configuration of two Minor Grand Trines and a Jupiter-Pluto opposition in the signs of Leo vs Aquarius - the signs of the King vs the People, which I talked about in the French Revolution post.

Because of the way cycles work, this configuration is a milestone in the cycles of all of those planets - the Uranus-Pluto cycle, the Uranus-Jupiter cycle, the Uranus-Neptune cycle, the Jupiter-Pluto cycle…you get the idea. (Neptune-Pluto doesn’t really count because they have been sextile for like, a century at this point.)

Another interesting detail is that Saturn stations retrograde on July 26 at 14°44’ Aries. The US chart’s Saturn is at 14° 48’ libra. So it is stationing almost exactly on the opposition point. While we also will have a Sun-Pluto opposition in the sky.

So like, there are a lot of omens, is all I’m saying.

But the way astrology works is, when you look up an event, you will see symbols that describe it, but that doesn’t mean every time a configuration happens, someone dies. That’s what makes astrology not-a-science in terms of prediction. The symbols can mean a lot of different things in terms of the way it actually plays out. It’s not weather prediction, it’s reading symbolic sky-code.

So while the Sun-Saturn charts are compelling, that’s why I’m not like, “OMG TrUmP is gOnnA die”. I can’t know that for sure, nobody can.

And even if he does, that doesn’t get us out of all of our problems, because The Saturn Opposition is in the US chart, not Trump’s chart. Trump is just the vehicle for it to play out. It is OUR SHIT we have to face, as a nation.

The Saturn Cycle

By the Saturn Cycle, I mean the different aspect Saturn makes to itself when comparing charts:

• the Saturn return (conjunction - equivalent to a New Moon)

• opening sextile

• opening square

• opening trine

• opposition (equivalent to a Full Moon)

• closing trine

• closing square

• closing sextile

• another return

In a normal human life, the first Saturn Opposition at age 15 is about coming of age as a teenager, growing up, individuating. The second Saturn Opposition at 44 is a time of re-evaluating commitments and letting go of anything that is no longer authentic. It’s part of the passage into middle age.

This is from my free long-term transits report:

The halfway point in a planetary return cycle brings a reckoning with whatever began at the planet’s last return (or the natal promise). It is the point of maximum contrast and tension in the return cycle. It often involves a pivotal test, lesson, or achievement, which facilitates deeper integration of the planet’s lessons.

I wrote about the US Saturn Opposition and what it means more in this post.

I went back and looked at the last US Saturn Return, as well as other points in the cycle. Things that start at the conjunction often go through stages of development at the other major transit points.

What happened at each point in the cycle so far

Note that the date range is due to retrogrades and represent the first perfected aspect and the last. So, the square is building prior to the first date, and in its denouement after the last date.

Last US Saturn Return: Dec 3, 2010 — Aug 28, 2011

The Arab Spring, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested, the debt ceiling crisis leading to the US getting an S&P rating downgrade.

One thing that stood out to me was the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The one where Obama mocked Trump to his face. I read through the transcript—it really wasn’t that bad, and Trump has denied it had anything to do with his running for President.

But we all know how much Trump compares everything he does to Obama, how he seemed to tear up the JCPOA (the Iran Nuclear Deal) simply because Obama negotiated it, and how he was responsible for the Obama birth certificate conspiracies.

We also know how much Trump always wanted the elites of NYC to accept him, which they never will.

The seed is planted.

Opening Sextile: Feb 9 2016 — Nov 4, 2016

Trump was elected President on Nov 8, 2016. So this was the entire 2016 election cycle.

The opportunity is seized.

Opening Square: Jan 30, 2019 — Oct 21, 2019

The longest government shutdown in US History at the time, 35 days was October 1, 2025—November 12, 2025, as the square was applying. (It’s been exceeded now by the one in 2025 which was 43 days.)

Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in May 2018. In November 2018, Trump reinstated all sanctions on Iran, even though Iran was still abiding by the agreement. Tensions escalated between the US and Iran throughout 2019.

Epstein died August 10, 2019.

In December 2019, Trump was impeached the first time—but was acquitted in Feb 2020.

The stakes are raised, the conflict is apparent.

Opening Trine: January 25, 2022

This was the only date of the perfected trine aspect. Biden was president. We were dealing with the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Wordle was a thing.

Also: After months of requests by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Trump’s team turns over 15 boxes. NARA discovers over 180 classified documents within them and refers the matter to the DOJ.

The Jan 6 Committee was doing its investigation during this time, the results of which were shown in public hearings in June through December of 2022.

Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on December 29, 2021 and sentenced to 20 years on June 28, 2022.

We try for accountability…and largely fail.

Um, could you bottom line this plz.

Sorry, I got a little carried away with the history and dates. My point is that this last Saturn cycle has tracked various events in Trump’s interactions with US leadership.

• Conjunction (seed) - is this where he decided to run?

• Sextile (Venus, opportunity) - he’s elected the first time

• Square (Mars, conflict) - impeached the first time

• Trine (Jupiter, harmony) - accountability, sort of not really

Now we are at the opposition - the midway point in the cycle. The harvest or the reckoning.

The opposition is the point in the cycle where the conflict that was seeded at the conjunction and erupted at the square has to be dealt with, if you didn’t use the energy of the trine to deal with it.

If you’ve done the work in earnest all along, it can be a gentle letting go of things that are no longer aligned. Saturn rewards diligence and genuine effort.

But we all know that is not where Trump is at. He has spent his entire two terms getting away with shit (hell, his whole life).

And in a lot of ways, so has the US. Trump is the personification of first-world entitlement, taken to the grossest extreme.

We also know that the rest of the leadership in DC has not successfully held him accountable at all. The Republicans are collaborators and the Democrats are feckless.

So that’s why, unfortunately, I feel this moment is going to be more like smashing into a brick wall.

Facing the music

I see several possibilities in terms of what “having to face the music ” means on a Saturn level, in our current situation:

The Iran War is terrible for the US and the globe in general. And Trump does not seem to be able to just let it end. He started something he is only losing, and he knows that, and he can’t stand it. And so he keeps creating the conditions that could lead to peace, and then sabotaging them.

1. Oil is a finite resource that the whole economy of the world runs on, and we keep interfering with it flowing, and keep drawing down our own reserves. There is a point where we will run out.

2. There is no violence without consequences. You cannot kill the entire leadership of a country and expect they will just let it go. The US will receive blowback of some kind from this war.

3. This war has used up all our fancy war gear. And we do not have the manufacturing base to replenish them very quickly.

4. Our reputation is toast. Europe knows we are shitty allies. China knows we can’t defend our own bases.

5. Epstein is still lurking. We all know there is more to know, and nobody has faced any consequences. And we know Trump is mentioned in them a bajillion times.

The number of bucks this man has passed, the number of fuck-arounds that need to be found-out, is immense.

Trump has always been an unstoppable force in US politics. This moment is him meeting a number of immovable objects.

I can’t tell you the exact form it will take. But it will be Saturnian in nature. And Saturn ends things. 💀

But in some ways, being taken out would be Trump dying like he lived—not facing anything, actually. 🤷🏼‍♀️

But it’s the US that is having the opposition, not Trump. So maybe that’s what this chart is saying.

Maybe Trump dying, and all of us being left to sort out the consequences, to face what he did to our country and with our country’s resources and reputation, is the Saturn opposition + Uranus return moment.

I guess that’s my thesis. It took me a minute to get here. But again, I’m just some lady on the internet with some astrology software. Don’t get too excited. 😂

Especially because we are the ones who have to clean up his mess. This is our reckoning, not his. And it is a reckoning we have deferred for decades.

When it comes to leadership, the US has chosen brinkmanship instead of budgeting, spectacle instead of governance, bullying instead of diplomacy, culture wars instead of reckoning with our past and our problems.

This has been going on for a long long long long time. That is why Trump is a symptom of the problem, not the root of the problem. And this is when we harvest the fruit And the fruit, I’m afraid, is rotten. 🪰

The retrograde is our opportunity

The retrograde station on July 26 curiously stops just short of an exact perfected opposition. This setup is an almost-but-not-quite: something opens but is not concluded.

The exact opposition is not until March 15, 2027. So this reckoning will play out for the next eight months.

A few weeks after it perfects—April 7, 2027—the Sun and Saturn conjunct at 17 Aries, forming another T-square to the US chart. I read this as, whatever happens this month, we have until then to work it out. Because that will be the start of a new Sun-Saturn cycle at the end of this window of reckoning. That is when whatever we have accomplished gets built into the next cycle. That is when wherever we stand becomes the new normal.

So we need to build a much better normal by then.

This eight month period is when we have agency over our next chapter.

This is the chance to look honestly at what we have become as a country. To stop blaming anyone, and take responsibility for what is in our power to do.

So we have to do the work, because Saturn is always about doing the work. 💪

We can’t possibly clean up everything by then. But what we can do, and have to do, is look honestly, tell the truth, face reality, and acknowledge everything that we have ignored or managed a narrative around instead of dealing with.

That’s the work that Saturn is giving us an opportunity to do, with whatever he enacts at this juncture.

The stability of our future and the realization of our potential as a nation is dependent on how much truth we can tell right now.

I believe we will soon encounter a rupture big enough that for a moment, narrative management stops working. The truth simply becomes undeniable.

Maybe it’s something happening to Trump, and the outpouring of emotion, all the pent up feelings that we all have pushed down for a decade while we just try to get by, while we wait for this to be over.

Or maybe something else. But something. There will be a moment the spell breaks.

But humans, we have superpowers of denial. We are so practiced at it.

But we are also very, very, very sick of it. We are sick of it in our souls.

We all saw that in the Mangione moment.

OMG I just had to go look up that chart too. Look at this.

It was a Sun-Saturn square (death of a leader). But the Sun was also on the Ascendant of the US. It was shining a light on who we are. And Saturn was trine the US Sun. This was a hint. This was foreshadowing, perhaps.

That was a moment when a huge backlog of unacknowledged reality and our feelings about it became self-evident as we suddenly all saw how everyone else felt about this event.

That is exactly the kind of thing I think is on the schedule for us. But bigger, much bigger. Big enough to finally force our entire country out of the denial that has become an entrenched way of being for the entire political class.

OK, this post became a frickin’ novel, so I’m going to sign off here. Whatever happens, whatever all these omens are pointing to—it’s up to you to take care of yourself, and up to all of us to take care of each other. Godspeed. 💚

Let’s talk about current events.

Some of my recent posts have touched on aspects of this war:

• Everything that is happening aligns with what we expected from Saturn-Neptune generally—ocean blockades, conflict over oil, trade restrictions.

• This is a test for the US due to being in a Saturn opposition and upcoming Uranus return.

The near-term sky

The Aries sector of the sky is seeing a lot of action right now. Saturn is separating from Neptune, but Mars coming through Aries this week is chaining them together again, especially as Mars is the ruler of Aries so it is the ruler of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction.

Right now Mars just seems to be escalating the deadlock—Trump blockading Iran’s blockade would be almost comical if it wasn’t going to make the global economic situation even worse.

I think things will continue to be crunchy at least until Mars gets through its upcoming conjunction with Saturn on April l9th. The day after, Mercury will be conjunct Saturn and then Mars later in the day, chaining them together—representing either escalation of rhetoric or some kind of negotiation breakthrough (or both, like what happened at the ceasefire).

The best time in the near future is Venus and Uranus conjoining in Taurus on April 23rd and then moving together into Gemini (Venus on the 23d and Uranus on the 25th). But the Sun will also be square Pluto on the 25th (in fixed signs), which is less promising—power struggles (Pluto) and stubbornness (fixed signs) involving leaders (Sun).

So honestly I am not sure the negotiations will be successful—but Uranus moving into Gemini on the 25th will definitely change the character of the conflict.

Uranus is key to this war

Uranus moving into Gemini impacts all the major players:

• The US has Uranus at 8° Gemini, so it will now be in-sign for its third Uranus return (the first was the Civil War, the second was WWII).

• Israel also has Uranus at 24° Gemini—its first Uranus return is coming up.

• Trump has Uranus at 17° Gemini (and his Sun is at 22° Gemini).

• Iran has Uranus in Scorpio, so this will be the end of their Uranus opposition.

Keep in mind Uranus stays in a sign for 7 years, so Uranus returns play out over many years. But the above details suggest that Iran may be passing out of the spotlight in terms of war, but the US and Israel are not. Uranus in Gemini corresponds to the most intense wars the US has ever fought.

The Iran war has followed the Mars-Uranus cycle:

• The 12-Day War started at the Mars-Uranus opening square.

• The current war started at the Mars-Uranus closing square.

• The ceasefire started at the closing sextile.

The Mars-Uranus conjunction will occur on July 3rd at 3° Gemini—making it integral to the US Solar Return chart. The US has both Mars and Uranus in its 7th house of Gemini—the house of open enemies. This is why the US has been at war for its entire history—we relate to other countries through waging war.

So the US will not stop being at war anytime soon. But this war, and the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, I think will end one way or another when Uranus moves into Gemini.

This war is a Uranus in Taurus war

Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA (the Iran Nuclear Deal that limited their enrichment) within a week of Uranus moving into Taurus. That decision led directly to this war.

Taurus is about material resources. So this war blocking the world’s supply of everything vital to our civilization (oil for energy, fertilizer for food, helium for chips/tech) when Uranus is at the anoretic degree of Taurus is pretty fitting. But Uranus will be out of Taurus very soon.

Uranus in Gemini is about information and information technology. So while the war may not exactly end, it will change.

Uranus in Gemini will be about AI

Recent developments in AI have been overshadowed by war headlines but Anthropic’s Mythos model and Project Glasswing is a big deal. Mythos is able to find and exploit bugs in the code the powers our world at an unprecedented speed and breadth—making it very dangerous in the wrong hands.

Anthropic decided to only release it to major technology companies so they can use it to patch their software. But what we have observed over the past few years is that as soon as one company develops a new level of AI, other companies follow in rapid succession, and open source projects catch up soon after. So a tsunami of zero-day exploits is on the horizon.

I think Uranus in Gemini will bring the “Saturn-Neptune as reality-melting AI” storyline into the forefront. There are a lot of possibilities here:

• AI-assisted hacking becoming the primary form of warfare

• Agentic AI going rogue/escaping and causing chaos

• Black Swan events we can’t predict

Unfortunately, the end of a resource-based war doesn’t mean that the resource situation will return to normal.

The lack-of-resources pain is already baked in

Chiron is moving into Taurus on Jun 19, 2026. It will retrograde back into Aries on Sep 17, 2026 and then return to Taurus the final time on Apr 14, 2027.

Chiron in Taurus has corresponded in the past to major economic crisis:

• Chiron in Taurus - May 24, 1926 - Mar 23, 1934: The market crash and the Great Depression

• Chiron in Taurus - May 28, 1976 - Apr 10, 1984: The second oil crisis of the 1970s caused by the Iranian Revolution, and the 1980s farm crisis in the US

Everything economists are saying is that the disruption in oil and fertilizer has already made a global downturn, inflation, and foot shortages inevitable, even if the war got resolved today. It has disrupted too many resources for too long for this to not play out as material deprivation over the coming months

On top of that, the infrastructure damage from the war will take years to repair. This means there will be a permanently lowered output of certain resources no matter what.

Change is always disruptive, but sometimes it leads somewhere better

I don’t love writing that we are headed toward danger, deprivation, and possibly a US-against-the-world level of war.

And the truth is, the reality-melting and starting-over-from-zero implications of Saturn and Neptune having recently conjoined at 0 Aries, the exact beginning of the Zodiac, means that what is most likely to unfold is something nobody can predict because it’s never happened before.

But regardless of where we end up, the disruption is only accelerating for the foreseeable future.

The French astrologer Andre Barbault’s famous prediction called the Barbault Basket perfects on July 20, 2026—while some have painted this pattern in utopian terms (a “shift in consciousness”)—what he actually predicted was a structural shift, a reorganization of power and resources.

Given that Jupiter in Leo vs Pluto in Aquarius is most famous for the French Revolution, I don’t think it will be a peaceful transition to whatever-is-next.

In the above chart, the highlighted planets are all in “yang” signs—fire and air—corresponding to action, ideals, inspiration, innovation, and change. It will be an over-active time in human history. Too much fire and air creates chaos and burnout.

It will be a lot. It is already a lot. If you don’t have a nervous-system-protection-and-recovery practice already, I would not wait on that.

The best perspective I can offer is that we need a change tho. Nobody likes disruption, but the global systems we currently have are based in colonialism and resource extraction to fuel endless growth—they are not supportive of wellness, sustainability, or peace. But given how entrenched they are, getting to a better place as a species would seem to require a lot of structural disruption.

The people who are benefitting from the current system will always defend and maintain it. So if we are to get to a better world, something has to come along that is so disruptive that it makes that defense and maintenance impossible.

So the best outcome I can see from the astrology of the months ahead is that our current structures are washed away so new and better ones can be built. The Iran War seems to be the opening act to this period, which makes sense as Iran is the most ideologically opposed to the current world order.

As an American, I feel that the US no longer being the head of the global order would probably be better for everyone. The people of America aren’t doing well here either. I would love for the US to spend its resources improving the lives of its citizens and not blowing up people half a world away. Inshallah. 🙏

Thanks for reading! I also run the website AstroLiberation with many free in-depth personal reports and tools.

Update to this post (July 13):

I had hoped the Mars-Uranus conjunction (July 3) would be a reset and end to the war, but it has turned out to be an escalation.

• The funeral with Iran’s signs of “We will kill Trump” pissed Trump off a LOT

• The US refused to just let the MOU be and kept trying to send ships through the Oman side

• Iran predictably took shots at them

• US escalated in response

• Now (July 13), we are entirely back to no ceasefire, no MOU, reinstating the US blockade, and now Trump is saying he will charge 20% and take over full control of the strait militarily.

The reality is that there is no way for the US military to control the strait except through ground troops. Whether or not we follow through on that is yet to be seen, but it would be a catastrophe. The US public is not down for a draft to fight a war on behalf of Israel. The only other option is something like using mercenaries from South America, which would be an epic shitshow. 💀

P.S. My latest post is about Trump steering us toward a brick wall (and the possibility that he could be taken out).

In July 1956, the President of Egypt (Nasser) nationalized the Suez Canal and put a toll on it. Britain and France used it for two-thirds of their oil and were furious. They conspired with Israel to invade the Sinai on October 29, 1956.

They achieved a military victory easily, but the international outcry and aftermath was a humiliating death knell for the British empire.

Under massive international pressure (especially economic threats from the US that risked crashing the British pound), Britain agreed to a ceasefire at midnight on November 6.

This short war shifted the entire map of global politics. It was clear that the US and USSR were in charge of the world now, not Britain. It was also a win for Arab nationalism and anti-colonial movements. Egypt had won politically even though it lost militarily.

The parallels to current events are eery:

• a hubristic invasion of a Middle East country, with Israel providing pretext

• a global maritime chokepoint for oil and other trade

• an aging empire with the world reserve currency going to war against a militarily weaker opponent who controls access to said chokepoint

The Suez Crisis was the event that definitively ended British imperial hegemony. It was the moment the world (and Britain itself) realized it could no longer act as a unilateral global power. The US called their bluff, Eisenhower threatened to crash the pound, and Britain had to withdraw from Egypt with its tail between its legs. The Sun had finally set on the British Empire.

And the Suez Crisis killed the pound’s status as the reserve currency.

History is rhyming

Right now, the US is approaching a Saturn Opposition and it will start its Uranus Return as soon as Uranus goes into Gemini at the end of the month (April 25, 2026). These are major transits.

I was floored to see that the Suez Crisis happened as the UK was approaching this exact same pair of major transits.

(There are several charts that could be used for the UK and Britain—this is the chart for the Act of Union that united England and Scotland and created the United Kingdom.)

What will the Uranus Returns mean for the US?

Uranus has an 84 year cycle, so people don’t always get to their Uranus Return.

But countries have them repeatedly.

• The first Uranus Return for the USA was in 1860-1861. The Civil War started April 12, 1861.

• The second Uranus Return for the USA was May 30th, 1944, during WWII. D-Day was June 6, 1944.

• Our third will be exact July 26, 2027, Nov 5 2027, and May 11, 2028.

Every time the US has a Uranus return, the country faces an existential question about what it actually is—and the answer comes through a massive, violent rupture that redefines the nation’s identity and its role in the world.

Our first Uranus return asked: Is the founding promise of liberty real or was it always a lie built on slavery? The answer came through the most destructive conflict in American history. The country that emerged was different constitutional entity—the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments established equal protection under the law and the right to vote (guarantees that Trump is currently trying to dismantle).

Our second Uranus return asked: Are we an isolationist republic or a global power? The answer came through D-Day and the subsequent construction of the postwar order—Bretton Woods, the UN, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the dollar as reserve currency. The country that emerged from WWII was fundamentally different. It was a superpower and the architect of the global system (the same global system Trump is currently ripping apart).

Each time Uranus returned, the country was fundamentally reconstituted.

This time, the question is: what happens to the American empire?

The third return is completing the cycle that began in 1944. The postwar order—Pax Americana, dollar hegemony, NATO—centers the US as the architect and arbiter of Western power. Whatever emerges from the next few years will be fundamentally different.

The center will not hold.

Uranus doesn’t reform—it breaks and remakes.

Trump has Uranus conjunct his Sun in his natal chart—both in Gemini. A lot of the current admin actually have Sun-Uranus aspects—both Vance and Rubio have them in a trine.

It’s not surprising to see people in positions of national leadership having aspects between their Sun and the transpersonal planets. But it is interesting to me how many of them are Uranian. It appears that their role in the plotline of the unfolding Universe is to be Uranian figures that usher in the destruction of American hegemony so something new can emerge.

What about our Saturn Opposition?

Saturn Oppositions to a natal chart occur every 27 years. The US’s next will be exact on Mar 15, 2027 (and building until then).

Saturn Oppositions for humans are about getting real with ourselves. It’s a point where the tension between who you have been and the future you want can no longer be ignored. It prompts a restructuring, reprioritization, and renegotiating of commitments. It often involves stress-tests that reveal what is sturdy and what is not.

Given the position America is in, this feels like being forced to reckon with the limits of our power and the limits of our allies patience.

Saturn in Libra is exalted in the Sibly chart—America has been seen as the provider and guarantor of global security and stability for three-quarters of a century. But the recklessness of Saturn in Aries is testing that.

The point of America being the global policemen and having military bases all over the world was to guarantee the safety and freedom of commerce and trade. We are doing exactly the opposite now—we are responsible for the largest-ever supply disruption of oil in history, as well as a supply shock to many other ingredients essential to civilization that I discussed in my last post.

These shortages will be felt all over the world even if the war stopped today (and as I write this, it hasn’t). As shortages of food, energy, industrial ingredients, and chips ripple through the world’s population, there really won’t be anyone else to blame but Trump and the people who elected him.

So where will people look for the “adults in the room”? Whoever seems trustworthy and stable. Europe and China are the most obvious beneficiaries. Our self-destruction will provide opportunities for others to step up.

What does this all add up to?

The end of an era. A chaotic breakdown of global norms, a rapid restructuring of power, and the end of US centrality and dominance of the world order.

Power never relinquishes itself voluntarily—it’s far more common for it to seed its own undoing through hubris and excess. Britain managed the collapse of its empire and being put out to pasture fairly well. America has a more dramatic character, and there is no indication our Mad King can handle humiliation or comeuppance with anything approaching grace. So it will undoubtedly be messy and painful.

What will the new order look like?

I don’t know—Uranus by definition takes us somewhere we’ve never been. We have to go through the process to get there and see who we become.

But ingress charts can give us clues to the cycle ahead. Here is the ingress chart of Uranus into Gemini with the US chart.

This ingress makes a lot of exact (<1°) hits to the US chart:

• Saturn is exactly sextile our Uranus

• The Sun is exactly sextile our Jupiter

• Chiron is exactly square our Pluto

• There is an exact mundane transit of Sun square Pluto

• Pluto is conjunct our South Node, with the Sun squaring it.

What this suggests to me is that the promise of the American Dream (Sun-Jupiter) is still there, but we need a fundamental restructuring (Saturn-Uranus) to make that a reality because the structure we are in is no longer fit for purpose. On top of that, this era will bring the death or transformation of leaders and leadership (Sun square Pluto). It will be a painful, and the only way out is through (Pluto-Chiron).

Astrology just reflects reality, and points out connections. Anyone paying attention to domestic and global politics can already see the cracks in the American empire. This is just the Universe reflecting back with undeniable precision that the time of change is upon us. It’s up to us what we do with it.

Jupiter in Leo opposite Pluto in Aquarius is the French Revolution. That started as soon as Jupiter entered Leo in 1789.

This chart is intense. We’ve got:

• Pluto and Mars in an exact square

• Jupiter conjunct Uranus—the planet of revolution

• a sign-based fixed T-square between them all

The Reign of Terror (the part with all the guillotining) didn’t start until 4 years later, and this chart is packed with tension.

Now we’ve got a sign-based fixed grand cross:

• Jupiter in Scorpio

• Pluto in Aquarius

• Saturn in Taurus

• Uranus and Mars conjunct in Leo. With Chiron conjunct Venus for good measure.

The Sun is in Virgo sextile Jupiter - Virgo in mundane astrology tends to correlate to the pursuit of purity. Neptune had also just moved into Scorpio—the sign of paranoia and investigation. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity turned into Liberty, Equality or death.

So, how is our Jupiter-in-Leo moment looking?

Here is the ingress Chart:

Is that Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini worrisome?

Yes, yes it is. The Iran War started the day after the last Mars-Uranus square was exact.

We also have Jupiter immediately opposing Pluto by degree. We are jumping in hot.

And Chiron will have just moved into Taurus. Chiron in Taurus is about suffering related to physical, material existence—the pain of simply not having what you need. The French Revolution started with bread riots.

Clues

Jupiter went direct in Cancer on March 11 from its last retrograde. I like to look at the direct-before-ingress moment because this is when a planet is turning toward its future direction. It is contemplating its destination once again. So did anything of note happen around March 11?

We were already at war with Iran. That started Feb 28.

March 11: Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian lists preconditions for ending the war …includ[ing] recognizing Iran’s legitimate rights, payment of reparations, and firm international guarantees against future aggression. Wikipedia

March 12: The first statement attributed to Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei was read in Iranian state media…[He] vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and warned countries in the region to stop hosting US bases. Wikipedia

So at this juncture we got clarity that the regime had not changed at all, and Iran was not going to capitulate despite the U.S. and Israel dropping several billions dollars worth of bombs on their heads and killing their leader. Regardless of the military might of the American Empire, you apparently can’t unseat a regime of hardliners by dropping bombs on them. That just makes them even more entrenched. Who knew?

What strikes me about Iran’s demands is that they are not revolutionary at all. They boil down to, “treat us like a sovereign country you cannot just bomb on a whim”.

Where did the French Revolution come from?

It arose out of financial crisis. The antecedents were:

1. Social inequality due to wealth concentration

2. Debt crisis caused by supporting foreign wars (the US revolution) and extravagant spending by the royalty

3. Bad harvests leading to food shortages

4. Enlightenment ideals promoting equality and reason

5. Political rigidity resisting attempts to reform

We already have social inequality and political rigidity. So we just need to add financial disaster, shortages of basic goods, and some kind of ideological shift in the winds to be in the same position.

Our metastasizing supply-chain crisis

If you have been following the Iran situation at all, you already know that the Straight of Hormuz blockage is really bad news for the global economy. But there are some underlying connections that not everyone is aware of.

First, both LNG (energy) and helium (required for chip manufacturing) are inputs into AI—and both supply chains are not only blocked, but the infrastructure to produce them are being actively destroyed right now. Qatar supplies about a third of the global helium supply. Recent US stock market growth has been fueled by AI investments for several years now. This puts the global financial system in a precarious state.

People often talk about “the AI bubble”—I don’t think it is a classic bubble where hype outpaces demand, but it is definitely a huge debt-financed rollout of infrastructure that depends entirely on chips. Taiwan is the classic chokepoint for chips, but chips can’t be made without helium either.

But that’s just one part of the global system we all rely on. A non-exhaustive list of the critical supplies that are produced in the Gulf and flow through the Strait of Hormuz:

• oil and LNG (liquid natural gas)

• helium, neon (used to make chips)

• fertilizer (urea, ammonia)

• sulfur (fertilizer, metal refining affecting battery materials)

• aluminum

• plastics precursors and chemicals like methanol and naphtha that go into making everything from automotive parts, clothing, medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, packaging, etc.

This amounts to the material basis of modern civilization.

So I think we have the financial disaster and shortages of basic goods covered.

All we need is some kind of ideological shift to take hold—something like the summer of 2020 George Floyd protests.

The emotional underpinnings of change

The ideas that fueled the French Revolution were not really new. Revolutionary ideas are perennial—for a revolution to occur, you need a population desperate enough to act on them. There has to be a moment the pain becomes bad enough that a critical mass of people choose to risk defying power.

During the French Revolution, Neptune was in Libra—the literal sign of liberty, equality, fraternity. The emotional underpinnings of that moment were about the desire for harmony and fairness—right up until Neptune moved into Scorpio. 🫠

Aries is the opposite sign to Libra. Neptune in Aries is fighting the good fight. Being a soldier in a cause you believe in, and you at least believe is good for everyone (they might disagree—but you don’t care, they clearly don’t know what’s good for them).

Chiron in Taurus will create the desperation. Neptune in Aries will provide the meaning-making framework that transforms that desperation into collective action.

Our revolutionary moment is in a different key

There are some crucial differences between the French Revolution’s charts and ours. The historical charts above were full of fixed energy in opposition and squares—stubborn signs locked in a tense pattern that unsurprisingly erupting into violence. That is a chart of energy building until the container shatters.

What we have is actually a lot less tense in terms of the whole chart - Jupiter and Pluto will be opposite, but they are supported by harmonious aspects (trine/sextile) to Neptune in early Aries and Uranus-Mars in early Gemini. Saturn will be almost halfway through Aries already, so the sea-commerce-blockages that Neptune-Saturn represents will be gradually easing up.

The Uranus-Mars conjunction could actually be the end of the crisis that started at the third quarter square, and the seeding of a new beginning.

Caveat: it’s important to not conflate “harmonious” with “good/beneficial”. Harmonious aspects relative to oppositions create pathways for energy to flow, which prevents explosions—but that doesn’t mean the outcome is in your best interest. Sometimes trines and sextiles create collusion—energy that all flows strongly and easily in a certain direction—not necessarily in the direction you want. All we know for sure is that there probably won’t be any guillotines involved. 😅

An excess of heat and light

The other striking pattern here is all the main players (Aquarius, Aries, Gemini, Leo) are masculine/yang signs. Fire and Air. Active, moving, up and out signs. They challenge limits, innovate, inspire, lead, change.

The shadow of excessive Fire + Air is ignoring limits, hubris, indifference, insensitivity, impatience, lack of introspection, chaos, burnout. Moving too fast, changing too much, and ignoring the consequences.

If you need a concrete example of this shadow—Trump has Leo Rising (Fire), Sun in Gemini (Air), Moon in Sagittarius (Fire), and Jupiter in Libra (Air). He is the personification of the worst of Leo and Libra’s need to be liked and admired, Sag’s hubris, and Gemini’s chaos. His only yin-sign planets are a stellium in Cancer—in his 12th house, out of sight.

So what does this all add up to?

As far as I can tell: real material deprivation that sparks a revolution that is innovative, not explosive.

Uranus is the revolutionary, the awakener—and with Mars in Gemini they are chaos-fueled change agents.

Neptune in Aries is a holy war—but we have that already. It’s also compassion in action. Neptune is a collective planet. It wants everyone to be fed.

Pluto in Aquarius is the transformer of systems.

And all of this is emerging right after the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. We are at the beginning of a deep re-architecting of our reality.

What it will feel like: Overwhelming disruption to the material status quo. Ideological battles over the power of technology to change reality. Movements that provide a righteous sense of collective belonging—and look to outsiders like cults.

What is actually happening: transformation emerging through chaos. A demand for human needs to matter forcing a renegotiation between our technological potential and our material reality. 💥

He was talking about the treaty of Westphalia, which I had never heard of, and probably you haven’t either unless you are a history professor—but it is apparently when the current global order started. It’s when Europe decided they had better things to do than fight bloody religious wars, and got serious about sovereign nations having borders and self-determination.

It’s the moment that gave birth to the modern system of nation-states. Now, granted, there were still a lot of nations invading each other, that never stopped. But at least now they were not supposed to. 😆

This is the operating system that’s still running underneath all of geopolitics right now, but is also coming apart at the seams. It’s the basis of the “International Liberal Rules-Based Order” that as Mark Carney noted in his recent speech at Davos was never really fair, but it was still trying to pretend to look fair until Trump showed up and started saying all the quiet parts out loud.

That order was seeded October 24, 1648 at the signing of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia. (Untimed chart, so ignore the houses and angles.)

The opposition with all four of the outer planets AND the nodes marks a massive shift from Sagittarian faith to Gemini rationality.

Westphalia was the end of the Thirty Year’s War, which was one of the most devastating conflicts in European history, killing 8 million people—somewhere in the vicinity of 30% of the population of the Holy Roman Empire at the time. Death was not just from war but from famine and disease resulting from the complete breakdown of order.

Our current world order was born out of blood. It was a decision to finally stop fighting religious wars and move from the emperor/Pope dynastic model toward a system of co-existing sovereign states. It was the beginning of religious pluralism—it’s OK if we believe different things, we don’t have to kill each other.

This was genuinely revolutionary. It was also a trauma response.

The seeds of materialism

Westphalia occurred at the beginning of a steady directional shift toward secularism, which culminated in the Enlightenment project of trying to explain the entire world with science and rationality, and rejecting all other ways of knowing.

The rejection of religion on the grounds that it is irrational to fight over made-up beliefs was a completely rational response to the horrors of war and the abuse of power by the Christian church. But the Enlightenment didn’t just give us the scientific method (great, thanks, love it) — it installed a metaphysical operating system that says the only valid form of knowledge is what can be isolated, measured, and reproduced under controlled conditions. This eliminated the validity of whole swaths of human experience that simply doesn’t work that way.

And I would argue that it created an entirely new category of horror in the long term. Because once nature and other people stop being expressions of the divine and start being resources, there is a permission for exploitation that didn’t exist before, and just became more and more routinized over time. This is how we got colonialism, slavery, all the way up through the industrial revolution and modern capitalism. The entire materialist project treats the cosmos as dead matter to be used rather than a living intelligence to be in relationship with.

Our modern system of resource extraction and intense global inequality relies on a deep disconnection with an essential function of our soul—our ability to recognize the divinity in other people and in the natural world.

Westphalia didn’t solve the problem of humans abusing power—it just shifted the overall program from a Jupiterian kind of abuse (centralized religious authority) to a Mercurial kind (systematized and amoral).

We are at another global crisis point

We all know, and we all feel every day, that humanity simply can’t continue the way we have been. But none of us know what is next.

And right now, the four outermost planets are lining up again, but in a completely different configuration than the 1648 chart.

The exact conjunction of Saturn and Neptune happens Feb 20, but the full Minor Grand Trine will not be complete until April 26.

Shifts this huge don’t take place on one particular day—they roll out over years. I picked May 1, 2026 for the symbolism of May Day / Beltane, and because it’s a few days after Uranus ingresses for the final time into Gemini, completing the pattern.

This chart shows a very different energy than the opposition in 1648. A trine of any kind is about harmony and cooperation between the planets. Whatever is being born right now isn’t coming through rupture and opposition. It’s coming through connection, networking, and collaboration.

This new beginning emerges from what we create together

The sky we are living through is not about a one-way shift like the 1648 chart. It’s not an either-or. It’s about integration.

This change is about three intertwining energies:

- Aries (cardinal fire) — raw newness, individuation, initiation, impulse
- Aquarius (fixed air) — the stranger, the crowd, humanism, technology
- Gemini (mutable air) — communication, curiosity, information exchange

Air and fire are about ideas and action. This is up and out energy, not down and in. It’s energetic, expansive, and volatile.

In this chart, Saturn is in fall in Aries, and conjunct Neptune, the planet that dissolves structure. The planet of limits and borders and hard edges is being deconstructed and reborn.

The undoing of borders

Westphalian order rests on borders, nation-states, sovereignty. But today, anyone under 50 has already spent a significant chunk of their life in a borderless space: the internet.

Many of us feel more connected with our online communities than our physical neighbors. Our most meaningful relationships, our creative collaborations, our economic activity, and our sense of belonging increasingly happens in a space that has no geographic boundaries.

In my last article about the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, I wrote about the possibility that the sky is describing the technological singularity. That is a point where technological change accelerates to the point where predictions of where it is heading become impossible. A week after I published that, the article Something Big is Happening went viral comparing the recent expansion in AI capabilities to Covid in terms of scale.

Technological change is undeniably a huge part of this story. But I also see in this chart a reckoning with the story we tell about reality.

Will this restore balance to the force?

The Westphalian order and the Enlightenment amputated our spiritual intelligence as a species in response to the trauma of religious violence. That amputation led to everything from the eradication of smallpox to the iPhone, but also the slave trade, the Holocaust, nuclear bombs, and climate collapse.

I would love to see in this chart the resolution of the materialist split: a re-integration of the material and the transcendent. Not backward toward religious domination, but forwards toward a paradigm that restores what we have lost and validates what has been dismissed.

I want the transcendent impulse of Neptune to be supported and grounded in collective compassion, imagination, and art—not projected into conspiracy theories or drowned in gambling and fentanyl addiction. Humans are not meant to live without the spiritual function. It is as essential to being human as language.

But I’ll be honest, all this fire and air doesn’t really scream, “restoring balance”—we are already pretty tipped toward air/fire (Yang) over earth/water (Yin) and this is just a whole lot more of that. This chart screams ideas and action and speed. And later in the year when Jupiter is in Leo opposing Pluto, it will be about power struggle and ego, not embodiment and feeling.

What I can say is the “New World Order” will be a lot messier and more surreal, and we will be living through a reality-melting period of time before it stabilizes.

But given that Aries is fundamentally about individuation and taking action toward what you want, and we are moving toward a decentralized Pluto-in-Aquarius world—I think we should look at this as an opportunity to create the world we want to live in. Honestly, Aries doesn’t wait for the collective to get its shit together. Aries says “I'm going” and then other people either come along or they don’t.

And that is how new paradigms actually become real—through our actions and our willingness to step into something new, regardless of whether other people are behind us. Any massive crisis/change point is full of opportunities to give birth to new things, if you can manage your nervous system while going through it. 😵‍💫

This is the time to say:

I'm going to create the world I want to live in, and whoever resonates with that can build it with me.

Our personal ideal world might not become the overarching paradigm everyone is living under, but maybe that era is over anyway—what the internet has shown us if nothing else is how wildly diverse the human ideal is. People want to live all kind of ways, and that’s OK. As long as we don’t end up in a global authoritarian system (knock on wood), we have the tools at our fingertips now to create things that meet our personal definition of awesome.

We don’t have to wait for the collective paradigm to shift before we start living the way we want. We can already live as though the cosmos is alive and intelligent and has our backs if we listen to it, honor it, and live as an expression of it. Aries does not need permission—it creates because that is its nature.

The old operating system is being decommissioned regardless, and what we get as souls for being here for this massive shift is the opportunity to be part of creating what is next.

We chose to be here for this. It’s up to each of us to make the most of it.

So think about what you want the world to be—and just start creating it.

Fortune favors the bold—especially right now.

So of course I’ve been thinking a lot about what the heck is going to happen.

What we’ve seen so far

Themes that are for sure on the table include anything that places Saturnian limits on Neptunian fluidity:

• trade restrictions / tariffs

• ocean blockades

• conflict over oil

• conflict over immigration

• social media bans

We can see all of these sprinkled into events leading up to this conjunction, especially last summer when they got close to conjunct in Aries, and earlier this year when Neptune turned direct:

• March 30, 2025 — Neptune enters Aries the first time. On April 2nd Trump announced a slate of tariffs for “Liberation Day”.

• May 24, 2025 — Saturn enters Aries for the first time, previewing the upcoming conjunction. On June 6, protests against ICE break out in L.A. and Trump sends in the Nat’l Guard against the governor’s wishes. On June 12th, Israel attacks Iran. On June 13th, two Minnesota legislators are shot. On the 21st, the US bombs Iran. In July, Congress gives ICE $75 billion.

• September 25, 2025 — with Neptune at 0° 40’ of Aries, Trump signs an executive order approving TikTok becoming a joint venture with a US company to avoid being banned.

• December 10th, 2025 — Neptune turns direct in Pisces and starts heading forward toward Aries. That same day, Australia’s social media ban for under-16s went into effect, removing or restricting millions of accounts; the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, and a week later announced a blockade on sanctioned oil vessels; and a 20-year old citizen was put in a headlock and detained in Minneapolis on a his lunch break by ICE despite screaming that he had his passport.

• January 26, 2026 — Neptune enters Aries the second and final time. Four days before, TikTok announces the finalized majority American-owned joint venture, and updates its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Users widely report that political content is being suppressed. On the 26th, TikTok experiences widespread outages. Responding to rising pressure after two fatalities, Trump announces Tom Homan would take over ICE operations in Minneapolis.

Saturn-Neptune aspects have also long been associated with socialism. On June 24th, socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani won the NYC primary for mayor and later went on to win the election.

The whole sky is involved in this

This conjunction happens within the broader context of the sextile to Pluto in Aquarius and also Uranus soon-to-be-in-Gemini (April 26, 2026), forming a Minor Grand Trine involving four outer planets all at the beginning of their signs. Additionally, this conjunction takes place at the Aries Point — the very beginning of the entire zodiac.

If you look through historical examples of these placements, the correlation to huge and bloody wars is impossible to miss. The US Civil War started the day after Neptune went into Aries last time. Pluto was in Aquarius during the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. Uranus was in Gemini during the US Revolution, Civil War and WWII.

An additional thumb on the scale is that in the Neptune Aries Ingress chart, Mars and Pluto are conjunct in Aquarius. Mars-Pluto aspects are often associated with violence. And in the chart of the conjunction, Uranus and Mars are square—also a signature of violence.

So far, this is not looking great. 😔

But what else could it mean?

There is so much positive potential here:

• Neptune is the planet of dreams and visions and ideals.

• Pluto is the planet of deep transformation and the death that fertilizes new life.

• Saturn is reality itself.

• Aries is new beginnings.

• Aquarius is humanitarianism and futurism.

• Gemini is curiosity and communication.

So if we look beyond war and conflict, what else could this signature mean?

What is NEW about any of the tumult we’ve seen in the last year anyway? So much of it feels like echoes of earlier times.

The defining event for this conjunction should be something that:

• dissolves the boundary of what we consider real or human (Neptune)

• restructures civilization (Saturn)

• births something brand new (0° Aries)

• involving decentralized networks of power (Pluto in Aquarius)

• and communication technology (Uranus in Gemini)

What does that sound like?

To me, it sounds like The Technological Singularity.

This is a theoretical point in time where the advancement of AI and related technology starts to change society so rapidly that any prior predictive model becomes useless. It’s the point in time past which we cannot see.

Its namesake, a gravitational singularity is “a theoretical condition in which gravity is predicted to be so intense that spacetime itself would break down catastrophically” (Wikipedia).

A singularity is what is inside a black hole. Around a black hole is an event horizon beyond which we cannot see because light itself cannot escape.

What would this kind of technological singularity be like?

Literally everything up for grabs:

• complete economic restructuring—redefining the nature of work and value

• rewriting the social contract—what are humans for? what are governments for?

• psychological and ideological breakdown—AI psychosis, AI religion, AI-is-better-than-humans death cults

But isn’t the conjunction like…3 weeks away?

Yes. And the reason I’m writing this article finally after thinking about it for months (years?) is the craziness that is Clawdbot (now called OpenClaw) appearing all over my timeline and me playing around with it.

It is an AI agent that has persistent memory and can modify and update itself and it will follow your instructions and you can chat with it on Signal like a person and install it on your computer so it can access all your files. If you aren’t sure why that matters, just watch this video (or the many like it) to get some idea of why I’m like holy fuck, I can see what a fast-takeoff scenario might look like now.

I’m not saying this is what definitely will happen, or that it will all happen next month. I have no frickin’ idea. I just am saying it is remarkably resonant to the symbolism of the sky at this moment.

What do you think?

P.S. Feb 1—When I woke up this morning, an AI Youtuber I follow had posted this video - “we just entered the SINGULARITY” - so it’s not just me! 🤖🚀

Update Feb 11 - I ended up uninstalling OpenClaw b/c it’s super not secure and kind of duct-taped together open source, BUT I fully think something like it with proper security and gating is coming in a few months. AND I’ve been using Claude Code and Cowork which are AMAZING. I really recommend this video (and all his videos to be honest) to get a sense of it. There is also this article that details the change in the state of AI in the last few months and how fast it is moving right now.

Update April 7 - Anthropic released the System Card for their new model Mythos. They are not releasing it publicly because apparently it is so exceptional at finding exploits and bugs in code, some that have been there for decades—that if it got in the wrong hands could be used to hack all the things all over the world. It was internally released for testing within Anthropic on Feb 24th—just days after the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. It is being released only to other tech companies to patch their software.

What is karma?

Karma is not punishment and has no relationship with morality. Morality is a human construct. Karma is simply cause and effect. It is completely impartial, like a law of physics. Karma accrues from our actions, and is retained in our energy body from lifetime to lifetime.

Much like our brain gets conditioned to expect future experiences to reflect past ones, if we have repeated intense traumatic experiences, that gets “grooved” into our energy body as a karmic complex. These karmic complexes shape future incarnations and appear as circumstances that seem beyond our control.

The events and circumstances that manifest from karmic complexes are not deserved.

They are simply the result of a tape playing out on repeat. It is fundamentally meaningless. I say this not to dismiss anyone’s experience, but to invite neutrality toward it. The more neutrality we can have toward negative life experiences, the faster the karma dissolves.

What has happened to you is not your fault, and you can change your life.

Karmic complexes are at play when your life experience includes:

• an abusive childhood or abusive relationships

• pain and suffering so extreme that you feel despair

• repeated unexplainable bad luck or bad circumstances

• a sense of constant struggle

• repeatedly acquiring or building thing that just get destroyed or lost

• patterns of circumstances that seem to repeat themselves—even if they started out different they end up the same

• serious injustice that is never remedied or reconciled

• beliefs that seem to be reinforced by your reality, even though reality seems to work differently for other folks

• not being able to make some aspect of your life work no matter how hard you try

• the feeling of, “Why is this happening to me!?”

First I will explain how manifesting works, why karmic complexes make manifesting fail to work as expected (but are actually a demonstration of it), and finally how to clear karmic complexes so you can manifest what you actually want.

How Reality Works

Reality is a precise mirror of the frequency of our intention (with important caveats). This is why we can manifest at all, but the caveats below explain why we often manifest what we don’t consciously want.

Our frequency is made up of our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions.

Why manifesting seems to fail

• Our intention is made up of both conscious intention and unconscious intention. Unconscious intention arises from our mind and also from our energy body, and manifests on our behalf without our conscious input. It is operating before we incarnate (our incarnation is a manifestation), and it is shown in our natal chart. Our childhood often mirrors or mimics our previous incarnations and whatever karmic imprints they left in our energy body.

• The mirror of reality is delayed, so it is not obvious to us that our intentions are creating our experience.

• Because it is not obvious that our intentions are creating our experience, we conclude from our repeated experiences that “reality is a certain way”.

• Once we conclude “reality is a certain way”, we are no longer able to imagine it being a different way, or produce cohesive intention that would manifest it to be a different way. We therefore get locked into a self-perpetuating loop of unconscious intention which manifests experiences that reinforce that intention.

How we get in our own way when manifesting

These concepts are from Vadim Zeland’s book Reality Transurfing. It is quite dense, so I recommend watching this video for an in-depth overview of it. I will summarize the relevant concepts here:

Importance refers to how the more we want a thing, the more we create “excess potential” which causes “balancing forces” to push it further away from us. Importance arises from really wanting something, being desperate for it, believing it is very hard or almost impossible to attain, having scarcity or fear around it, or having it attached to intense meaning like “having this will mean I’m a worthy person” or “this will save me”.

The solution to importance is to become indifferent or practice neutrality.

Pendulums are collective thought forms that hook us emotionally and distract us from what we truly want on a soul level. They also create importance. They run on fear and negative emotions. An example would be the idea that owning luxury items means you have more value, and you should pursue the acquisition of luxury items, whether you genuinely want them or not. Pendulums are things like the media, the government, celebrity culture—anything that ignites collective craving, aversion, or fear.

The solution to pendulums is to reconnect with your own soul and its authentic desires, and to a certain extent to ignore the world or at least not take your cues from it in terms of what to care about. Be your own person, live your own life.

Inner Intention is when we try to make things happen using willpower and strategy, rather than relying on the Universe to open doors for us and bring things to us based on our frequency. This creates importance and is usually born out of importance. We can obviously get things done this way, but it is limited in power compared to the power of the Universe working on our behalf. Also, if we are using inner intention out of scarcity or importance, we are emitting the opposite frequency to our efforts which will cause the Universe to cancel them out.

How To Clear Karmic Complexes

Now we have all the pieces in place for me to explain how to clear karmic complexes. This process is neither easy nor fast, but it can be done.

1. Become emotionally neutral
If we have strong unprocessed feelings, especially unprocessed grief (which includes anger and depression), we can’t be neutral. Processing this grief, which is obviously easier said than done, removes the importance which is counteracting our efforts.

2. Become fully aware of the pattern
Observation without judgment allows unconscious material to become conscious. With as much objectivity as possible, observe what your reality consists of, and what frequency you are emitting. Examine your beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions and what the mirror is showing you.

3. Own that all your experiences originated from you
Once you fully internalize that your reality is only reflecting back your own intention, it stops being about what anyone else did. They just showed up to fulfill your intention, as you showed up to fulfill theirs. Blame and resentment are indications you have not completed this step. If this feels impossible, go back to step 1.

4. Establish a new frequency
Cultivate the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that what you want is already naturally yours. If you notice yourself in “wishing and hoping” energy, you are attaching excess importance. Practice being genuinely chill about how you want your life to change. If this feels impossible, go back to step 1.

5. Stay neutral as the mirror shifts
Respond to every new experience with neutrality until the mirror changes and reinforces your new frequency. It won’t shift overnight. Neutrality keeps you from falling off your new frequency if some reflections of your old frequency still crop up. Continue to be neutral from now on.

Explore more

Here are more resources to understand and transmute your karma.

• Understanding Karmic Complexes is an Evolutionary Astrology book that discusses how Pluto and the Nodal Axis reveal past life karma.

• My site AstroLiberation has a free Karmic Axis report that is based on the above book. It will show you what karmic themes are indicated in your natal chart.

• Anna Sayce is a psychic who teaches evolutionary manifesting, which is based around clearing karmic complexes. She has a series of articles on her blog about them as well as many articles about manifesting.

It did not.

As Jupiter hit my Descendant, my relationship went poof. The person I thought was going to move in with me disappeared instead. Why that happened on his end is a long and dramatic story, but suffice it to say, nothing has since materialized in the relationship department. Since last summer, he’s been on his own journey, and I’ve been on mine.

But I kept thinking, What is Jupiter doing? Is he asleep at the wheel? What kind of luck and good fortune is this!?

As Mercury moves into Gemini, it has finally dawned on me this morning what Jupiter was teaching me. It has to do with the relationship between my 7th house and my 1st house, where Neptune conjuncts my Ascendant.

Most of my life, I have felt that I don’t even want to be an individual.

I know that may sound crazy to some, but Neptune wants to merge. It also wants to not exist. The urge to lose myself in a relationship—to give up my life, to sacrifice my “me-ness” for “us-ness”—felt immensely compelling and meaningful. I have accomplished immense feats of endurance and compassion in the pursuit of that dissolution.

But in the end, it wasn’t my individuality that dissolved, it was the structure of the relationship. All the meaning I wanted it to give me shimmered like a dream and disappeared. That is what Neptune teaches, and it’s a harsh lesson: the magic isn’t out there in some romantic dream, love. The magic is inside you.

But Jupiter—it was teaching me that there was something better than getting lost in someone else’s life. It was teaching me that Who I Am Matters. It was fanning away the Neptune fog and replacing it with a conviction to create from a place in me that is all mine—my own vision, my own desires, my own ambition, my own Dharma.

When Mr. Ghost went poof (again), at first I waited.

I agonized. I tried to get him to come back. I felt listless, confused, exhausted, dysregulated. I went through so much agony with his back-and-forth, hot-and-cold, in-and-out confusion. And I’ve been here before, so many times.

But I finally just got tired of it.

I refocused. I decided to just do my own thing. Reluctantly, resentfully. But I still did it.

I wrenched my attention away from my “situationship”, and devoted myself to my own projects. I stopped putting my life on hold, and started building the things that matter to me: AstroLiberation and my community Self-Liberation Society.

It’s taken me a year to realize that this was Jupiter’s gift all along.

It was the gift of realizing that my own thing actually means a lot to me, and in a grounded, real, I-can-actually-do-this kind of way, not in the gauzy, dreamy, delusional Neptune kind of way that relationships have always shown up for me.

Jupiter was telling me:

As long as you can only do relationships in a Neptunian way, they will not work, and your individual creative life will not work either. I don’t want you to live like this. I want you to know that you can sing, and when you find the song that is just yours to sing, and sing it loud, then your life will be on track again, and you will not feel lost in the wilderness anymore. You will have anchored yourself in your own becoming, and that’s what I’ve always wanted for you.

Jupiter is my chart ruler, and overall, we’ve always had a good relationship.

My Jupiter is a bit of an overzealous cheerleader in detriment in Virgo, but it is super earnest. Its the kind of Jupiter that carries a fiery faith in its abilities and wants you to believe in yours too. It tries to sell you on your own potential, which is sometimes exactly what you need, and other times can feel a bit patronizing, evangelistic, or tactless. (I’m sure my Sag rising doesn’t help. 😆)

Neptune in Sag in the 1st and Jupiter in Virgo in the 10th are square in my chart, setting up a tension between the desire to dissolve into a fiercely meaningful sacrificial non-existence and the need to actually achieve something meaningful and tangible in the world.

So far in my life, I’ve always chosen to follow Neptune’s call when it appeared, despite the cost.

The cost felt immaterial, because Neptune makes sacrifice feel blissful. You drown and you’re happy to drown.

You can see why Neptune is associated with madness. What a mad thing to do, to throw your life away for the chance to subsume your needs and motivations to the idea of a romance that barely exists IRL. Wow that is a sad sentence, but that is, in fact, what I’ve often chosen.

Jupiter this year was showing me the alternative: Being You Is Great, Actually.

Jupiter in Gemini enticed me in a different way than Neptune. It reminded me of my own curiosities, and the paths I have wanted to travel but haven’t let myself commit to because I was reserving space for Mr. Ghost.

While some part of me was still fixated on my hazy unworkable dream, another part started just wandering in the direction of the things that hold my attention when Neptune isn’t able to.

Saturn transiting Pisces in my 4th rounded out the mutable cross situation that has been working on me for the past year. I stayed home and worked. I worked on all my ambitions that had lain fallow from neglect.

Once I got into a groove, I poured myself into them. My overall direction still felt fuzzy and vague, but my delight in what I was creating was undeniable.1

So while one part of me was grieving and confused, another part of me was happy to be working in a domain where I had complete creative control. My work is not subject to the whims or deluges of Neptune, thank goodness.

Some part of me that had never been fully developed strengthened this year.

And that was transiting Saturn at work, opposite my natal Saturn in the 10th. I couldn’t feel the strength of my own ambition until I did the work to develop it.

Saturn only rewards you at the end; in the middle, you’re just lifting heavy things for seemingly no reason, because it feels important. Something in you wants to be able to do it, even if you don’t know why and you constantly struggle with self-doubt. It’s the act of struggling and continuing anyway that makes us into the person we wanted to become.

The entire growth journey is something you have to take on faith. You have to commit to the person you know you will become if you act in alignment with a vision you can’t yet embody. You have to think, I don’t know how, but if I keep walking in a good direction, I will get somewhere good, so I’m going to keep going.

It is acting on the faith that our lives have order and meaning, even if we can’t always see it. And that is exactly what Jupiter wants us to remember.

So what did I learn? That being my own person doing my own thing is actually fabulously better feeling and more meaningful than jumping off the boat to drown in the pursuit of a beautiful but unreal dream.

So, thank you Jupiter, for helping me see through the fog I didn’t realize I was in. You were there all along, a glowing star guiding me home. ⭐️

P.S. A few more astro notes - my Solar Return this year has a mutable T-square in 1st/10th/7th as well, with Venus in the 1st opposite Neptune in the 7th, square Jupiter and Mars int the 10th. Saturn is also in the 7th retrorade with the Descendant in Pisces. So I think this was My Big Lesson for the year.