I can’t stop crying. None of us can. There are oceans of sadness rolling in at any given moment for a multitude of reasons. It is difficult to think, plan or construct a complete sentence. As I write this, the Los Angeles area remains in acute crisis. The wind has not yet passed, the lack of rain looms, and the electric current of fear that more untold devastation lies in wait is palpable.
Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out. Altadena, a historic black community born in the civil rights movement, is gone; the Palisades and Pacific Coast Highway charred; wild animals terrorized; and ecosystems decimated. There are toxins in our air that will do god knows what to our bodies, our babies, our food, our earth and our collective health.
If one thing becomes clear in these moments, it is how much we need each other. The way I’ve clung to every word everyone around me says, desperate to know what other people are feeling and thinking and deciding and processing. Who lost what? How many? Who needs a house? Where did they go? They lost everything? They don’t know yet? Who else should I text, call, or leave a voice memo for? It’s certainly a trauma response, but it feels like age-old technology is deeply embedded in us. Reach out. Stay in touch. Check in. Community is how we survive this. By caring for each other we discover the best of ourselves; it is the meaning of our lives. The greatest goal we could ever live for.
We need us. Especially because we are completely unprepared for the consequences of climate collapse. We are in the midst of one of the worst disasters this city of angels has known, and we are in the middle of the inauguration of the next President of the United States, who (among so many other exceptionally challenging things) is a climate change denier. About to ascend the throne is a man who has vowed to open the floodgates to more capitalist, colonial corporate violence.
The current villains of our story are unmasked and unapologetic, proud of the profits they will reap from our losses.
Months ago, when I first looked at January astrology, I grimaced. The opening monologue of 2025, packed with signatures that read like brutal challenges, was not something I was looking forward to. Especially if you know the results of the American elections.
The month started with an opposition between Mars and Pluto on January 2. This is the mark of something grueling, cruel, hard, unforgiving, volcanic, extreme and scarring. It is also a sign of major power plays. It coincided with a week of extreme violence in New Orleans, New York and Las Vegas here in the United States, as well as Trump’s claims that Canada should become the 51st state, that Greenland and Panama should be under US control, and that he would not rule out the use of military force to achieve that.
On January 6, Mars retrograded back into Cancer (the sign in which it is going through an extremely difficult time), indicating a tricky situation that would take months to clear up (it will be retrograde here until the end of February). In Cancer, Mars brings up issues of security, family and home.
At home.
It was, of course, on January 7 that the Los Angeles fires started. The Palisades and Eaton fires, among the largest, immediately caused thousands of people to be evacuated, destroying street after street of homes in our community. Decades of memories, proof of lineage, go up in smoke. And we’re still counting the losses as we prepare for what’s to come. Praying for rain.
The Full Moon in Cancer, which was retrograde along with Mars on January 13 (still within the orb of opposition to Pluto), reinforced difficult themes about home and family. From a distance and from the “comfort” of my vantage point in 2024, this Full Moon looked painful because Mars so often aligns with times that wreak havoc – worse in an underperforming sign, and even more devastating when it goes retrograde. Cancer is a sign that knows how to activate our most primal emotions, makes us swim in the depths of our feelings and makes us want to curl up in the fetal position and cry for mommy.
It was clear that the middle of the month was going to hurt.
But this pain we live in, the extreme loss we experience, is at least partly man-made. I am not saying that fires are not part of the cycles of nature, but the colonial project we live in seeks to dominate and decimate the natural world, rather than respecting its rhythms. The climate crisis we are in is due to the massive misuse of resources that companies have been able to get away with. And war. The greed of a few ultimately consumes the lives of us all en masse. It’s a trap we know we’re all caught up in, and moments like these give us glimpses of the future we don’t want. A future that will surely come if we do not learn from these lessons, if we do not grieve and do not put that grief into action.
We can do everything we can to save everything possible. And everything we save regains a world of possibilities. If major astrological events in Cancer teach us anything, it’s that care is our greatest currency.
The coming week brings us a very different, but equally ominous signature: a Pluto-Sun conjunction in Aquarius. It takes place on January 21 and is the first of its kind in this sign in about 248 years. It is a sign of a new era that unfortunately follows the inauguration of a president who has promised us his vision of plutocracy.
I have a lot of thoughts about this signature and this moment – how bleak it looks, how tough, how extreme and all-consuming, and how weird the technical battles are going to be. But I will leave us with this: when we talk about Pluto in Aquarius, we must emphasize the fact that we are collectively more powerful than they could ever be. We know that, but we have to act on it. Every day, all day. With or without reward. If this is the dawning of a new era, let it be an era that brings us total clarity about what we can change and everything we can save.
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