Written horoscopes are on pause. Listen on Spotify to hear my voice note audio updates on the current skies.
Here are some general thoughts on time and creatures: astrology and you.
I’m fully immersed in a worldview where time isn’t only a quantifiable thing. It has qualities. It has flavors.
It makes sense to me to that the planets would stretch and change the qualities of the time we experience as they come into and out of geometric alignment with each other. They have mass and velocity and are part of the system that we find ourselves within. They are worth building into our awareness.
Einstein taught us that time is relative to the pace we travel. Time wouldn’t exist to us at all without the velocity and mass of our planet’s situation. Space-Time has contours. It flexes and tugs at the unfolding of things in the world of matter.
And our solar system is, well… a system. The planets tug and shape the nature of experience inside the spiraling of their patterns with each other, their relationships.
Time doesn’t just quicken and slow. Time bogs us down and sends us soaring. It sharpens and thrashes the flow of reality itself. It has storms of overlapping cycles. With a little looking, you’ll find that they map quite nicely onto the peaks and falls of historical tensions and eras of art, among other things.
Truly, the planets are just the largest most easily noted keepers of these massive cycles. The ingredients of meaning-making cluster around them. But of course those same archetypes are made anew in every art form, in every way of knowing, in every healing modality.
Time is our environment. We live inside it. Just as with our living ecosystems, time relates back to us through many different qualities. Beyond clocks.
There are parts of you that never forgot that time is full and alive and describable, that it’s not an empty mechanized thing. Parts of you feel its features and characteristics, the patterns and pockets of relative retreat.
From the smallest cells of our individual mundane lives all the way up in scale, we respond within the confines of our own little (big!) universe at the time we were embodied.
We carry the configuration of the skies we were born from. We are children of the whole thing; our own center as the hub of one particular universe. The collective responds, and we each have our own personal variation on that theme.
We are all experts in our own lives by necessity. We hurtle along, our makeshift rudders navigating the changing rapids of the cosmic flow, positioned in different stretches of current.
When we think back on our own timeline, it is filled with our qualitative experience. There were eras of craggy peaks where harshness and resolve were easier to find than softness. There are eddies of confusing emptiness and distracting mirages. There are times where grief is easy and comfort comes through. There are moments of relief and times of action. Time can teem with life and richness and pleasure-inducing capabilities. It can also dry and harden and close things down. It is organic and breathes with spirals of elegance and imperfections and change.
And you. You were born into this shifting stream at a very particular point. You are part of it, made of it and from it. The push and tugs of the moment you were independently embodied is your baseline, the footprint of your reality.
Your footprint in the world is a gangly thing. It holds every person you’ll meet and every condition you’ll experience. Yet we can see it abstracted in your natal chart, broadly sketched out in symbols and relationships between planets. Astrology charts are maps; symbolic graphs of reality. That should be exciting. We have a map!
Your lived experience is the source of your knowing and it’s filled with the miraculous specificity of life. And even through all those details, you HAVE mapped your invisible web. You know how your world works.
If Astrology were just a way to help organize our minds as we peer at the patterns of life, it would still have some value. But it goes far beyond that.
Planetary motion is a vast and practical divinatory tool.
Astrology brings a timeline to things we’re already working on. It doesn’t do the work for us. But it does light up the pattern. It helps us to name the shape of the work we’re already doing in the world.
You wear the weather of the time you were born without trying, already dressed for the particular warmth and the challenges that go with you into each room or relationship you enter.
And that’s amazing. You belong. We all do. The world weaves with us and we are woven into the world.
You may not recognize the traits and channels that are unique to you until it’s pointed out. But what feels normal to you is often a specific expertise.
You are always unfolding, always living out the potential shapes of the universe you carry within you. Because it’s an organic shape, these qualities flex and change and cycle back in living spirals. Like your projects do. Like all of your patterns. Like your quest towards you-ness.
And of course, we do not move through time alone.
There are others around us with their own shapes and footprints. And there is always the big river of time itself. The events and people who arise around us when Venus squares off against Mars in the night sky are different from those described when Venus and Jupiter are in alignment. Desire hits differently when Venus rises as an evening star. Things change when she is completely obscured by the light of the Sun. It matters when she’s moving more quickly or slowly in relation to us on Earth.
This study of omens used to be commonplace. It has taken centuries of violence to separate and mechanize this many peoples away from their felt sense of the planet we live on.
Historically, separation from the simple magic of natural cycles was a key tactic towards oppression:
“Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalization of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action.. Magic, moreover, rested upon a qualitative conception of space and time that precluded a regularization of the labor process. How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky and unlucky days..? The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior. Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work.” (Federici, Silvia; 2014)
When we think of natural cycles, we think of seasons. We may think of the moon. I want you to include the planets in there from now on too.
But here’s another thing: Astrology is only as reliable as the astrologer who translates it. Astrology can only speak on subjects the astrologer has encountered. And it takes years to become adept at interpretation.
But more importantly, Astrology has been used to advise dictators and presidents, slavers and eugenicists. Its relationship to reality is very real. Yet it is a tool and a language with cultural norms imposed on it. It’s not radical by nature. It needs significant queering. But more on that another time.
Just remember: you belong to rhythms beyond the polarized and flattened world. You are a unique and embedded miracle.
To every single person who has shared their chart with me, thank you for helping me to speak this language better. To the fullest extent that is possible, the Astrology I practice will always be a commitment to liberation and care. Every experience of real complexity that you share makes this a better tool and makes me a better Astrologer.