Satellite of Love

Hi sweeties. I greet you from the collective shock we’re all swimming in. In times like this, as the world is changing in ways we can’t yet predict, I want to offer you some tools. I’m sure you’ve read by now about hand washing and flattening curves, but there’s a lot less practical advice out there about what to do if you’re feeling heartbroken or terrified. How do we teach our hearts to be patient when we’re separated from those we love? When we can’t touch our lovers, when we’re trapped in a house with people we wouldn’t have chosen, when we’re all alone, when we don’t have work to give us a sense of purpose and security, when we have to work despite health risks, when we don’t know how long any of this will go on? It’s a lot right now, and it’s affecting almost all of us.

The astrology of this month is about deepening into the places where we need to heal. On the 5th, as our sweet gay cheerleader Jupiter joins up with brooding and powerful Pluto, we have an opportunity to move toward parts of our experience we normally shy away from. Pluto rules the parts of life we don’t always want to look at—death and disease, trauma and how to heal from it, the cycles of transformation that change everything we know and love. Working with Pluto means accepting an initiation of sorts. Like the famous Dune quote-turned-hand-washing-meme: “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” Only when we’re working with Pluto, the last sentence is more like, “Only my connection to the atoms that I’m made of and my ancestors and all other living and dying things on this Earth and the lifecycle of the planet itself and our entire solar system will remain…” Because when we work with Pluto we release control. Losing control we may lose our fixed sense of self, but we find our connection to everything we’re part of.

One risk of working with Pluto is getting trapped in fear. As Jupiter magnifies what it touches, this could also be a time of increased fear. We’re still feeling the effects of the Pluto-Saturn conjunction in January, which correlates with a longer time of increased fear and restriction. Which is why I’m going off script this month to give you some tools for handling fear.

When we are struck by powerful fear, we literally can’t think clearly. We’ve evolved to turn off the front part of our brain, where we process ideas rationally and can access empathy and patience, in order to quickly respond to something life-threatening. This is helpful in short-term, emergency situations, but not when the emergency is a long. Those of you already struggling with anxiety and PTSD probably find your symptoms ramped way the hell up right now. Those of you who haven’t experienced chronic anxiety may be experiencing it for the first time. And you’re probably already experiencing what’s happening in your relationships when one or both of you is gripped by fear. Empathy, patience, and clear thinking are difficult. This is incredibly ordinary, and one of the few things we can choose to change right now is our relationship to fear.

For this month’s horoscope, I’m offering you tools for your wellbeing, tailored for your Moon sign. If you don’t know your Moon sign, you can look it up for free at www.astro.com or a number of other sites! The Moon in astrology is the part of ourselves that orients toward safety. The Moon correlates with the part of our autonomic nervous system that clicks into rest-and-digest mode. This is what helps us sleep deeply, eat well, absorb the nutrients we need from our food, and reach out for comfort and pleasure. And those processes are what keep us well — emotionally and physically. When fear in the form of cortisol or adrenalin spikes through the body, it disrupts this process. We get insomnia. We get indigestion. We get stress headaches. We run down our immune systems, making it more likely that we’ll fall ill. And you know what? It’s not your fault if you get stuck in anxiety mode. Health is a collective effort, and we’re seeing the dramatic effects of what happens when our governments don’t prioritize our wellbeing. The goal right now isn’t to be perfect, but to minimize harm.

Use these tools as a supplement to whatever else you can do right now to stay centered — therapy, medication, long walks, staying in close contact with those you love. Choose the ones that feel right for you, (especially if you’re not able to figure out your Moon sign!) and leave the ones that don’t.

I’ll be offering a few more resources soon via my Patreon page. You can hear more about those by following me on Instagram, and I’m still giving remote readings, so get in touch if you’d like personalized support right now. Good luck out there (or in your homes) this month. We’ll get through this together.

Moon in Aries

With Moon in Aries, forcing yourself to calm down is not what you need to feel calm. You’ll only really relax when you’ve used up your tremendous energy, whether that means pacing or doing push-ups or ranting or singing at the top of your lungs. You thrive on being active, which means if you’re staying at home right now to protect public health you’re going to need a plan. That might mean home workouts, biking around your neighborhood at night, or queer dance parties on video conferencing, anything that will get you regular doses of working up a sweat. If you start panicking, move your body and turn off your worst-case scenario brain. Focus on the here and now. You’ve got this. And when you’re feeling strong, help out your loved ones and communities by advocating for those who might otherwise get overlooked right now.

Pro tip: There’s a lot of fight in you, which means it’s important to know where to direct it. Rent strikes and other political actions will be far more useful than picking fights on the internet. When physical confinement gets touch, find ways of being active that don’t put others at risk.

Moon in Taurus

Whatever your mind is up to, your body needs slowness and routine right now. If possible, give yourself a loose schedule and try to stick to it. Make sure it includes full meals with vegetables and protein. Make sure it includes pleasure—desserts, hot baths, time with trees, time with animals. If you’re still working, let all your other hours be directed toward restoring your body and mind. If you’re not working, aim for two or three useful tasks a day and let the rest of the time be meditative. Sink into the sweetness of your depths. Remember how to play a guitar for hours, or mix colors, or piece together a quilt. One thread of what’s happening right now is crisis—death, illness, and an overwhelmed system facing collapse. That’s real and it’s alarming and none of us can do much to change it right now. Another thread is that what we must do to protect each other is slow down, do less, and be in those long stretches of time where we wait. In this thread, there is room for joy and prayer and pleasure even as the crisis continues. You may go back and forth between terror and pleasure, but don’t feel guilty when you let the pleasure be part of your experience. Stress won’t keep you healthy—quite the reverse.

Pro tip: Moon in Taurus is one of the stronger placements for not giving in to panic during times of stress—but your tendency may be to go so deeply inward that you retreat from relationships. Make sure you’re still able to be present with those you love, even if being emotionally present takes you into a space of discomfort and uncertainty.

Moon in Gemini

There’s a restless, social, inquisitive energy with this Moon placement that means y’all are happiest when you’re in constant contact with friends or deep in research mode. You may be well-adapted for all the socializing over technology that’s happening now. You could also be more anxious than most if you’re not hearing from people you love every day, or if you end up non-stop scrolling through news or social media. Give yourself some loving discipline around where, when, and for how long you engage in activities that elevate your anxiety. Instead, keep your restless energy satisfied by learning or doing something new every day. Research queer artists of the past 50 years. Or research insects, of which there are a billion species. Or start interviewing your friends and mentors. Feed the part of you that needs wonder and awe right now. On your good days, bring some dazzle and joy and laughter to everyone you can reach.

Pro tip: Keep a few books by your bed so you won’t be tempted to use screens late into the night. Don’t let your routine get too rigid, make room for spontaneity. When panicking, get out of your circling thoughts and into your body by moving around.

Moon in Cancer

Your superpower is being able to feel what you feel. This is no small feat—many people block off their feelings and those feelings become illness. I mean this literally: cascading stress hormones that aren’t switched off create conditions for disease. So if you’re crying a lot right now, that’s a good thing. If you’re angry, let it out (in non-destructive ways). If you’re scared, let someone know so they can be with you through it. Moving through these emotions, you’re keeping yourself able to keep being present with the world as it is. Grief and joy are two sides of the same coin, and for as much as you grieve you’re preserving your capacity to feel joy. This is the gift you have to bring others right now, too. You know how to make it safe for others to feel what they’re feeling. Being a supportive friend, lover, or parent right now means letting the ones you love process what’s happening on an emotional level. Trust that you can also ask to be held through this, as well.

Pro tip: You have the tools our whole damn culture needs right now. Whether you’re working in the health and healing fields or not, you have an intuitive sense of what it means to care for others. Be a little louder right now when you know you’re right. And make sure you’re getting what you need if you’re spending a lot of time in care-taking mode.

Moon in Leo

How well you weather this crisis will have everything to do with how much you can trust that you are loved. If you’re someone who sometimes (or often) doubts this, gather up your courage to ask the people you trust most to remind you frequently right now that they have your back—that you can be vulnerable and messy and scared and sick, and that you won’t be left alone. If you are in a hard spot where you don’t have those trustworthy relationships nearby, reach out across the distance as much as possible. If you don’t have any, your work this month will be about creating them now—though vulnerability, through physical disconnection, but at a time when all of us are reaching our for each other because we know we need each other in a heightened way. When you’re feeling well resourced—able to sleep and eat well enough, able to focus on something that isn’t fear—the strength you can offer the rest of us will come through your creativity. Share your art, your music, your humor, your insight, your vulnerability. Be raw and tender and brave. Remind us what connects us.

Pro tip: Remember to reach out when you need support. If you go into shutdown mode and can’t, let people know you need checking in on once a day—or three times a day, or whatever will help you remember you’re connected.

Moon in Virgo

Ah, my friend. Virgo energy is such a beautiful force for healing in this world—tending, mending, solving, cleaning, clarifying, fixing. With your Moon in Virgo, you feel most at ease when you know you’re helping, and when your environment and relationships are regularly tended to. In crisis mode, this energy for helping can become a fixation, though. Many folks with Virgo Moons want to be able to solve everything, and when confronted with a mysterious, indefinite crisis your energy can get fixated on anything in particular that feels within your control. This might mean a sudden need to get rid of that ugly couch you never liked, or this might mean getting critical of your partner’s choices and needing them to do what you think is right. As much as possible, direct your anxious energy at objects and not people, and especially not at yourself or anyone you’re living with. Instead, use your problem-solving skills to start sewing masks, organizing disability rights campaigns, and figuring out who in your neighborhood needs support.

Pro tip: You need rest as much as anyone else, and you’ll need to learn to leave the crisis outside your bedroom. Only bring soothing tea and fluffy novels to bed with you—or a crossword puzzle if you really can’t stop solving problems. Breathe into the mystery, and focus your attention only on what you can do in a day.

Moon in Libra

Your capacity to visit and hug your friends may be limited right now, but your relationships themselves are still vital. Make plans. Don’t cancel holidays. Find ways of gathering online or with plenty of physical distance (depending on what’s possible for you where you are). If you’re living with a partner or dear friend, your relationship with them is getting tested in new ways. You’ll be discovering a new balance in how to come to agreements, what togetherness looks like, and how to have space from each other. Expect it to get bumpy sometimes, and commit to asking directly for what you really need. If you don’t know what you need yet, you can say that, too. Your sense of safety really relies on being in a state of balance, internally and externally, and I guarantee you this will keep getting out of whack over the coming weeks. Your goal isn’t to stay there, but to find ways to keep coming back.

Pro tip: It’s okay to get angry, but it’s not okay to fight dirty. Fighting dirty includes minimizing others’ concerns, eye-rolling, name-calling, blaming, and avoidance. If you’re too scared or angry to have a respectful conversation, it’s not time to have that conversation yet.

Moon in Scorpio

If you’re being honest with yourself, this crisis may not scare you as much as it scares everyone else. There’s a part of you that’s alway tracking threats, always holding on to the fact or the possibility of trauma and loss. What’s different for you now is that the whole world is waking up to something that you’ve felt intuitively for a long time. Some of you can really thrive in emergency responder roles right now—whether that’s health care or activism or coordinating basic needs for your community. Others may thrive in a counseling role, helping friends or strangers work through the feelings that come up in transformative times. Some of you may just feel plain shut down—whatever was happening in your life before now might have been plenty, and now this is just way too much. All these ways of being are valid. And remember that whichever mode you’re in, you also get to rest and enjoy the springtime.

Pro tip: Your best tools for this time are 1) honesty and 2) containment. Be honest with yourself and others. Sometimes the honest answer is, “I don’t know” or “This sucks.” Containment means that just like you’d take off your gloves and mask and take a shower after getting home from a shift at the grocery store or hospital, find ways to contain fear, worry, and stress so they don’t contaminate your daily life.

Moon in Sagittarius

You have a natural buoyancy that is good at staving off depression, but you usually rely on freedom of movement or dance parties or road trips or spontaneous dates to keep your spirits up. In times like these, you can crash pretty hard. What you’re looking for right now is a path between fake optimism, where you put your fingers in your ears and pretend it all be fine, and crushing pessimism that can sneak up on you when there’s nowhere to run to and you’re stuck with yourself, here and now. You can find that path by accessing a deeper faith—in the future, in humanity, in regeneration. You can dream that future in which this crisis makes us stronger, more creative, more compassionate. You can help us remember that the hard times call for singing, and that love must get fiercer when it’s harder to access. There will be a future after this. We will hug each other, and kiss strangers, and share food, and dance in sweaty, glittery groups. Your job right now is to fall in love with what’s possible in this moment, and in the next.

Pro tip: It’s important to stay honest. Fake joy isn’t going to help you or anyone else right now. That means you’re going to need to grieve, too. Make time for the harder feelings to move through you without steering you way off your path.

Moon in Capricorn

For you, feeling right with the world means knowing what your responsibilities are and being able to do them. If you are still working right now, you’ve got a built-in stress release system. If you’re suddenly unemployed, you may be scrambling on a deeper level than just financially. Of all the signs, Capricorn is most dedicated to having a useful purpose and doing it. However you can, look for things you can do right now that will make use of your real talents. Set aside time in each day that you’ll be making progress toward goals. And whether you’re employed or not, it’s important to remember that you have feelings and you may need to release them before they explode as sudden rage or slip out sidewise as cruel sarcasm. Next time a friend asks you how you’re feeling, instead of replying “I’m fine” and then asking all about them for the rest of the conversation, try just saying, “This is hard. I’m having a hard time.” That might be all you need to say.

Pro tip: Feeling powerless is not a cute look for you, so remind yourself of what power and agency you do have, even in constricted and stressful circumstances. Plan your days. Understand why you’re doing what you do. Have a future in mind that you’re still working toward.

Moon in Aquarius

What you need, my friend, is nothing short of a revolution. You come to life when you get to experience different ways of being in community and in relationship—ideally ways that increase our shared power and decrease oppression. In that way, this crisis could be opening up some beautiful possibilities for you to help create a better world in the ruins of this one. All that 1990s idealism is back again, though with a different weight as Saturn moves into Aquarius. For your personal wellbeing, make sure you get enough space and time to think and breathe and scheme. That means if you’re stuck at home with a lot of people, or even just someone with a big personality, negotiate times when you can have minimal interaction. You need collectivity to access joy, but you also need to know you can escape it sometimes.

Pro tip: Whenever you feel scared of a worst-case scenario, take some time to explore the best-case scenario as well. Imagine it in vivid detail. Make it a place you visit often, not in merely in an escapist way (though sometimes you need escape), but also to start testing in your mind what kind of world you’re trying to co-create.

Moon in Pisces

You, my dear, are a conduit for unconditional love. This is a precious talent to have in this world, and it’s also a scarce resource that many want to hoard for themselves. For this reason, you are more prone than most to overwhelm—your innate generosity leads you to give more energy than you receive, and you often end up in a state of lack. That’s when you turn to addictive behavior or at the very least need to shut out the whole world for awhile. One of the most important tools you can learn for this crisis and beyond is how to set loving boundaries so you don’t end up depleted. It can be really hard to do this when you see others suffering, and when there’s a sense of urgency all around, but it’s necessary for your longterm wellbeing. So turn off your screens at certain times of day, practice saying no when you’ve reached you limit—figure out what your actual limit is!—and make sure you’re reaching for what really feeds you when you’re trying to fill yourself back up. Maybe that’s a walk in the woods, maybe it’s an ice cream sundae, but make sure that whatever it is you feel better afterwards, not worse.

Pro tip: To keep yourself resilient enough to keep giving what you can, you might want to check out some entry-level energetic hygiene skills: shielding, grounding, clearing. If you’re curious, I’ve got a free beginner’s resource guide here

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