By the time you read this, I won’t have followed my own advice.
I always advocate doing less during eclipse season (in this case, all four weeks of Aries season), but especially on the day of the eclipses (in this case, March 25 and April 8). Part of the reason I do this is because life during this time is extremely unpredictable and unstable. Power surges abound, life events accelerate, and there is a general increase in change. Why add to the chaos? Why not be the calm in the metaphorical storm?
Even our company, CHANI Inc., will be closed the week of March 25 (this first solar eclipse neatly aligns with our annual office-wide closure for spring break), but life had other plans for me this year. Instead of taking this time to ground and rest, my routines will go out the window and all kinds of upheaval will occur.
We all have to live our lives.
As I enter this period of irregular everything, with a toddler in tow, I’m trying to prepare by getting as far ahead as possible on my work and having extremely low expectations. Almost none. I practice accepting whatever comes my way and expecting things to get a little turbulent. I’m clearly not going to succeed in this. A lot of. Like, most of the time. I’m going to try to have low expectations here too. Maybe I’ll send myself a few calendar invites: “Check Your Expectations” on March 25, or “Be Kind to Yourself for Having Expectations When You Said You Wouldn’t” on April 8.
Skeptics of astrology often say that one of the things they don’t like about its design is the belief that everything is predestined. They don’t want to be controlled. To that I say: neither do I. To be honest, I’m a pretty wild person. I was born of two contrarians, people who prided themselves on being defiant rule breakers. They are my tree; I am their apple. However, I have tested the effectiveness of astrology long enough to be humble and trust the weather forecast.
Skeptics also like to tell me (unsolicited) that astrologers always predict doom and gloom. I partially agree. That’s the information they’re likely to receive from the media and the algorithm – because that’s what gets the most engagement within tech capitalism. But I’d like to dissect some things here about astrology and this current eclipse season x Mercury retrograde (reminder: Mercury will be retrograde from April 1 to April 25). The main function of astrology is to tell us about the quality of a particular time period. If we lived in a world that was just and fair, and we encountered a difficult astrological moment as mature, kind, critically thinking adults who refuse to be complicit in systems of supremacy, challenging astrology would manifest itself in very different ways.
The doom and gloom is not the planets. It is this repetition of our existence.
The fact is, many of us are just beginning to do the hard work of becoming aware of all the ways our world is run by a war machine dressed up as progress. Even if we knew this before October 7, we could more easily distance ourselves from it en masse. However, the past six months have broken the facade of ‘business as usual’.
Recently I looked at astrology from the mid to late 1960s. I started doing this because friends of ours in our 70s kept saying that the current movement for Palestinian liberation seems similar to the anti-war movements of the 1960s. So I started digging. Astrologically speaking, there are many striking similarities, some of which Thea Anderson, Eliza Robertson and I discuss in the latest episode of Down to Astro. One is that in the late 1960s the North Node was in Aries and the South Node was in Libra (this happens about every 19 years). That means the eclipses of that time pick up the same themes as this time. Namely war and peace.
The last solar eclipse we had near the South Node in Libra occurred on October 14, 2023. It was the first of three to occur in a year. The second of these eclipses takes place on Monday, March 25, harkening back to what happened in October. These two moments in time are different, but connected.
Like us.
Astrology is useful when we use it as a technology, like a mirror. It provides a reflection, a context, a point to meditate on. When two events are connected over time (whether now and last October, or now and the 1960s), we look for parallels and progression: Is there an ultrasound? What has been the ripple effect? What has changed since the first event? What happened as a result? One of the changes, one of the consequences that we can From the last eclipse season to this season, many of us know, far more than before October 2023, that our collective liberation is the only thing that will save us – and our activism has an impact.
In recent weeks we have heard Chuck Schumer – a long-time supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu – calling for the replacement of Israel’s prime minister. And now the United States is calling for an immediate and lasting ceasefire. This is a turning point that is far, far too late and far, far too little. All this death and destruction was avoidable. However, in these incredibly bleak and horrific times, these two events are signs that our protests are having an impact.
There was a huge cultural shift in the late 1960s, and there has been a huge cultural shift since the last solar eclipse in Scale. May we be strengthened by this. An awakening is taking place and we must work with the momentum we have built to move our human story away from so much unnecessary destruction. Scale is the sign of Libra, justice, equality, harmony and beauty. And over the past six months we’ve focused intensely on what these concepts mean in real terms.
I hope we use this time, this crucial moment, to rest when we can and celebrate the victories that are coming, the shifts we have made and the progress that has been made collectively since October, so that every day, when we returning to work At hand we are fueled by the knowledge and evidence of our collective power.
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