Satellite of Love

Many years ago I took a train ride across the country. For four days I slept, ate, read, and generally mulled over my life in a cheap aisle seat that barely reclined. My seat mate and I politely held our bodies within the boundaries of our armrests until, after a few days, that passenger left and the car emptied out enough that I could claim both seats. I lay flat on my back across them, knees bent, taking in the view out the large window. I watched the massive sky as we moved through an endless flat landscape. It was a bright day with giant, dramatic clouds moving over us. I watched them roll, expand, disperse, and merge. I watched their edges catch the sun and fade into shadow. I saw them take on new shapes and reveal different colors of clouds behind them, or within them, as we moved and they moved and the sun moved. After time all these changes seemed to express personalities, emotions, character arcs. I watched them for hours, as if I were watching an opera in a foreign language with no translation. I’m pretty sure I heard the music in my mind. It was a sweet span of time. I felt both solitary and safe in the company of fellow humans. I enjoyed our sleepy collectivity, plucked from our ordinary contexts for an long span of in-between time.

This is the memory that came to me as I thought about what’s happening in the sky this month. Astrologically speaking, Jupiter and Neptune will meet in Pisces this month, on the 12th. Metaphorically speaking, this can usher in an extended period of cloud gazing, of dreaming into the in-between. The Jupiter-Neptune conjunction opens a portal between ordinary life and the non-ordinary. Every twelve years these two get together and do this portal-opening business, but the last time they met in Pisces was 1856, and they won’t meet here again in our lifetimes. Pisces is a powerful placement for them because both call this sign home. Think of this as the right conditions to be with your own visionary imagination long enough that clouds become opera singers — and maybe some of the music you hear stays with you and you record it, and maybe someone you’ve never met hears it and it helps break something open in their heart and they finally feel ready to leave a bad situation, and maybe as they make this choice they inspire their child who was feeling depressed and trapped and who now realizes the world is full of possibility and that while harm happens, healing also happens… Now imagine this outward-rippling movement of art, emotional catharsis, and empathic actions happening throughout the world, in a million of subtle ways we will never be able to track.

This is the spell I invite you to cast with me this month, and the best way you can do it is to take seriously your own need to dream, to cloud gaze, to hear music in your head, to reach out with love to your collectivities, however temporary or provisional they may be. Think of this as you playing your role in an ongoing, multigenerational continuity of art, love, and care. We may experience gaps and breaks in this continuity, but we also get to keep it going.

These are hard times. This influence isn’t going to make it all better, astrology doesn’t work that way. But astrology shows us opportunities to take actions, and this month I invite you to act from your heart, from your imagination, and from your sense of connection to our beautiful wholeness. If you are an artist of any kind, make time for your art. It is important. Even if you don’t think you’re an artist, you can tap into what inspires you and share what you love. Under this influence, our imaginations are potent. Our collective longing is oceanic. Our dreams are navigational. This is a month to dream what is not yet real into being.

And there are some downsides to this influence. If you identify as empathic or sensitive, you may need to work a little harder to hold your boundaries. When the entire collective is deep in the dreamworld, we can encounter our nightmares. Learn how to tap into what you need without getting flooded by what you don’t need. And opening a Pisces portal can mean that addictions and cravings get stronger, staying embodied gets harder, and we might experience a kind of un-boundaried optimism that can lead entire countries to no longer require that simplest of boundaries (a mask) at a time when the pandemic is still not over. That whole thing. So remember not to trust your optimism more than your realism right now, my friends. And for those who are already energetically sensitive, I encourage you to tend to your bodies: Eat solid, filling meals. Say no. Say not right now. Take showers, swim in the ocean. Stretch. Sing. Massage your feet.

And for all of us, may your mind have spaciousness and rest this month. May your movements be slow and beautiful. May your body be held by time. May you be inspired. May you make and do things that contribute to that energetic scaffolding of love, art, and care that is foundational for us all.

And a quick P.S. — the other main event of April is the beginning of eclipse season! We’ll have a solar eclipse in Taurus on the 30th, but we’ll be stepping through that eclipse portal on the 16th. So. many. portals. I’ll talk more about this next month, but a quick reminder that eclipses bring opportunities to learn, integrate, and make different choices in the future. It’s generally best to not make sudden, big decisions till the season has passed, though, which will be on May 30th. Between now and then, keep dreaming into the in-between.

For a deeper dive through all these damn portals, get in touch for personal support and insights. I’ve also got a free resource on energetic hygiene tips for sensitives that’s available on my website. For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. And if you just want to tell me what big or small things you’re doing this month to add to this energetic scaffolding project, please do! I’d love to hear what you’re all up to.

Aries

Dream this world into being: You have time to be with your own depths. You don’t have to be afraid of missing out when you turn inward. You can hush your sense of urgency, knowing you’ll be able to spring into action when the time is actually right. You can follow your instincts and release the need for things to make logical sense. You don’t have to choose survival over togetherness, you get to have both. You are allowed to be mysterious to yourself and you are allowed to be curious about the mysteries (rather than critical).

Taurus

Dream this world into being: You sacrifice not a single piece of your full, complex, beautiful self as you take your place in the larger collective. It makes sense, suddenly, to expect and demand a higher level of empathy and mutual care from this species we all belong to. It makes sense, suddenly, for us all to stop dressing for the job we want and start living for the world we want. Dream a utopia that is not drenched in eugenics or exclusion. Dream a utopia-in-progress, a world that must keep remaking itself but that has the capacity to do so, just as the springtime makes flowers out of frozen ground. It is your job this month to stay whole, even as these times want you to fragment. Don’t get distracted by doom narratives. You get to be whole (even if parts of you are in pain) and you get to be part of the larger whole (even as parts of it are in pain). Wake up into this certainty.

Gemini

Dream this world into being: The world needs your strangeness. Your ambitions don’t have to be practical. You don’t have to squeeze all your unconventional brilliance into some small, pre-defined role. Dream beyond what the world tells you success is. Redefine what you live for. You get to follow the thread of curiosity and restlessness to wherever it leads you. Your process of searching is the point. You get to resist being legible, seeking legitimacy, proving you’re legit. You get to reclaim what some have deemed distractibility as a core talent: You are here to experience the wonder of the world. Keep expanding into possibility. Anything else you do is extra.

Cancer

Dream this world into being: You belong to a larger story than the one you’re currently bogged down in. There are chapters and chapters you have yet to read, twists and turns and sudden revelations, deep love, connections that bring you out of the narrow place of fear and into a larger perspective. Imagine you can have a bigger impact on the world than you usually believe. Imagine we are rooting for you. Find that thread of meaning that’s pulling you toward this future that you get to share with us. We’ll meet you there.

Leo

Dream this world into being: You’re safe enough to say goodbye to what’s been holding you too tightly. It’s okay to let yourself change. We get to grieve what’s over, but we also get to move toward what is yet to come. You find yourself coming back to life when you let go of the need for control. You get to have all the feelings you need to about this. There is a path back to joy, and you are walking it. You are moving toward your next, brightest self.

Virgo

Dream this world into being: You don’t have to do any of this alone. You’re not the only one tracking what’s wrong and what needs to happen. You can ask for loving reflection. You get to know why you matter to the people who love you — why your being matters more than your doing. There is an invitation on your doorstep to completely surrender to the beauty of this present moment and trust that what needs to happen is happening, with no effort on your part. There is a special kind of magic you can do when you hold what is real and what is ideal in your mind at the same time, knowing you are a part of a current pushing the real ever closer to the ideal. Let yourself drift on that current.

Libra

Dream this world into being: You are attuned to your interior landscape and how it poses questions, how you wake up each morning and get to experience yourself anew. You can maintain this attunement even as you turn your attention outward, listening to your friend or lover process their pain or ask for advice. There is a luscious abundance of time to stretch out into, to try to answer the questions of the body, to bring your lovers and partners and dear friends into a deeper intimacy with how we’re all arriving in this strange new world. In short: when you can’t speak, you get to dance.

Scorpio

Dream this world into being: You get to be excited. There’s less need to guard against disappointment or betrayal — not that these things won’t happen from time to time, but that you have the tools for healing from them. You remember how to come back to joy as the default, despite all the pain of the world. And when you forget, you’ve left yourself a map. It’s not even hard work to find the way back, it mostly feels like play. And if this all sounds impossible, tend to the part of you that has decided to stop feeling things. There may be something you need to get out of your system, first, but when you do the map will become clear.

Sagittarius

Dream this world into being: You are at home in the world. On a hillside watching the moon rise with only a thin blanket. In the town where you were born, walking familiar streets. In the house you’ve just moved to, still bearing the imprint of previous lives. In the bed you’ve built into your truck so you can carry your shell with you everywhere you go. Home doesn’t have to be either a trap or an unattainable ideal. In this dream, we all get homes. In this dream, we all get to leave our homes when the urge arises. In this dream, no one has to leave their home if they don’t want to. Carry this collective need for us. Find your own way toward home as you stay fully present wherever you are.

Capricorn

Dream this world into being: Your dream is a collective one: We understand each other. We have room for our differences, in fact we’re curious about them. Surprises delight us. Finding out we were wrong about something delights us, because it’s an opportunity to learn something new. Questions are the new currency. And when we say we understand each other, we mean we are willing to try — with the understanding that so much is always beyond what we can understand, and that we flicker in our beliefs, in our identities, in our ways of showing ourselves to each other. Cultivate hope and desire for a world in which we can be delightfully incongruous and idiosyncratic, in which our inherent mysteries aren’t branded or tailored into résumés but rather admired as we admire a flock of swifts suddenly changing direction mid-flight.

Aquarius

Dream this world into being: You have enough. There is enough time to read, enough food in the pantry, enough yarn to knit another sweater, enough community to feel connected, enough solitude to listen to your own inner voice. In this world generosity is simple and effortless, is the foundation of your life — what you give and what you receive. Now take a breath and remember you cannot single-handedly take down capitalism, or try to live outside it for long no matter how determined your queer land project may be. Remember this world of abundance, interconnection, and generosity as a place you’re trying to create, patiently and collectively. Keep dreaming into how it feels to be there — your imagination will create the map of how to find it.

Pisces

Dream this world into being: A world where you may lose track of time or the thread of a conversation, but you never lose your core sense of self. Empathic connection, deep reverie, imaginative insight; these forces shape you and your intimacies and there may be times when you feel you are larger than yourself or older or have lived many other lives or are highly attuned to how your lover (or cat, or house plant) is feeling — and yet you still return from every flight and find yourself at your own center, knowing if you’re hungry or not and what your truest sense of calling is and when it’s time to stop talking and go to sleep. In short: this month is asking you to show up for your profound talents by centering your own very human needs.

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