In a challenging year, August brings particularly challenging astrology. It’s another one of those once-in-a-lifetime pile-ups of planets and points that hasn’t happened in centuries and speaks to the generally unprecedented pace of disruption and change we’re seeing the world right now. On August 1st, we’re seeing the peak of this pile-up that has been brewing since July 28th and will last a few days into the month but whose effects will last much longer. This one involves Mars, planet of pent-up frustrations and anger, crashing into Uranus, planet of defenestration and direct action, while they’re both amplified and turned up to 11 by the North Node of the Moon. And this is happening in the baffled sign of Taurus, who wants everyone to just relax and have some more ice cream. It’s a recipe for volcanic, seismic activity — explosive and unpredictable currents rippling through the slow and resistant earth.
A lot of astrologers have speculated about what this might mean for us environmentally and politically, but I’m not as interested in prediction as I am in helping you live through these times as an active participant, in touch with what you love and what you believe in, willing to show up for the people who are most in need as all the shit is going down. Through this lens, I encourage you to stay focused on what you love, what you believe, and what you can act on right now. I have no doubt there will continue to be wild shenanigans on the human scale and disruptive weather events on the ecological scale for some time to come. That doesn’t mean that you, or I, or most importantly we, are powerless.
So as this month begins with a bang, I encourage you to pay attention not only to the news but to your own restlessness for change. Mars and Uranus together have the potential to activate strong, powerful drives toward liberation and collective action. Let this be the way you harness the energy of these times. This theme is present all month, as are other energies that turn up the volume on our feelings of frustration and limitation. It’s not an easy time, but I believe we are equal to it. Welcome all the feelings that arise for you this month as useful information, as guides toward what you’re trying to create. And remember, you don’t have to do any of this alone. We’re in Leo season, which means we’re leaning into our hearts and the revolutionary potential of intimacy. Have the courage to be exactly who you are right now. The world needs it.
You can get in touch with me for a reading if you want personal support and strategies, and for more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. Wishing you all creative focus and powerful interventions this month.
Aries
Welcome your restlessness: To create a better situation than the one you’re in now. To shore up the resources you need to feel connected, cared for, and deeply nourished. To prioritize your physical needs. To find a place to rest, if you need it, and to let yourself rest when you are there. To stretch your limbs, to release the tension in your shoulders. To drink deeply from a glass of cold water. To be somewhere that holds you — in your favorite ecosystem, in your favorite season, even if just in your imagination. To remember how much more capable you are after your nervous system has had a chance to disconnect from crisis and recharge.
Taurus
Welcome your restlessness: To dramatically change your life. To reach for what will help you become the self you are picturing, maybe near or maybe far in the future, who has the wisdom, strength, courage, humor — whatever skills you want to pack for the journey you’re on — to face these times and to meet them with your own power and grace. Welcome wake up calls, epiphanies, frustrated crying jags that lead to an emotional opening that leads to clearer ideas. Welcome possibilities you never thought could happen. Welcome the you that says, yes, I can let go of the past and get interested in this kind of future.
Gemini
Welcome your restlessness: To hold all the possible threads of your existence in an interweaving, non-linear, ever-shifting tapestry that helps you know intuitively which way to go, even if it takes you a long time to get there. Welcome your less rational mind, and how it teaches you patience and offers inspiration. Welcome doing less but feeling more. Welcome all the far-flung pieces of yourself that don’t always get along but all have a place together, held by your expansive and inquisitive interest in them. Welcome dreams with messages, and welcome the questions they raise. Don’t be in a hurry yet for an answer.
Cancer
Welcome your restlessness: To act on behalf of the community you believe in, which is bigger than whatever conflicts you’re having with your friends within it. Bring your emotional intelligence to your activism — don’t let the sense of urgency push you past your own limits and boundaries. The more you can model this for others, the more sustainable your communities will be. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need, but do keep track of how your energy is part of the larger group’s energy, how what you say and do and feel creates a shape that ripples outward toward everyone else just as their thoughts and actions and feelings ripple toward you. Experiment with what shapes you can make together that get the current going in a direction that feels good for everyone.
Leo
Welcome your restlessness: To go big, to make an impact, to settle for nothing less than your wildest dreams. To be an agent for change, even when that change means setting off before dawn in a landscape that you no longer recognize. To tell the story of your travels as you go, to be in the myth and the reality at the same time. To invent a world that will answer the profound need we have of it. To do the wild, courageous, loving thing that only you can do. To do it with and for and in collaboration with so many others doing what only they can do. To be both a network and a node. To know yourself.
Virgo
Welcome your restlessness: To get out of your rut. To travel far away. To learn something that makes you catch your breath and hold it for a moment as you rearrange your ideas of what is and what is possible. To expand in all directions towards those horizons that will keep receding, which is as it should be. To delight in how much will remain unknown and unknowable. Welcome relationships that pull you toward new ideas and new worlds. Welcome ideas and worlds that bring you toward deeper insights and wisdom. Welcome your own restless pursuit of needing more and being determined to find it.
Libra
Welcome your restlessness: To crack the ice and dive below the surface. To dredge up from the bottom all the shipwrecks still waiting there. To grieve, to love deeply, to allow change to carry you toward a transformed future. To name what you’ve been pushing aside, to get curious about how to hold yourself differently when you know you’re worth diving deep for, when you find the jewels in that shipwreck. Welcome the safety of a nearby shore, of warm blankets and towels, of friends who are watching and waiting for you to return. And when you do, you will open your palms and show them the treasures you’ve snatched from the deep.
Scorpio
Welcome your restlessness: To know who’s going to be with you through the tough times. To make it official. To say yes. To count your trustworthy beloveds under your breath at night as you fall asleep, as a shield against the darkness. To know that in choosing you are choosing the good and the bad, the changes, the risk of pain, but that it’s more than worth it. Welcome the togetherness that you’ve been longing for. Welcome the new or old relationships that could be or already are what you’ve dreamed of. Welcome the not-knowing together, the grieving together, the talking it all out again and again from slightly different angles. Welcome the certainty that — whether or not you’re romantically partnered — you don’t have to go it alone.
Sagittarius
Welcome your restlessness: To explore the full dimensions of your one, precious human body even when it bores you or annoys you or blocks you from deepening into it. To shift your gaze from out there to in here, from far off in the future to the tempo of your daily life. To notice what kinds of movement answer your restlessness. To notice how you think more clearly when you are in movement — walking, swimming, cycling, or rocking back and forth and humming. To get curious about how much your body knows, and how to be its friend so you can learn some of its secrets. To become the kind of friend to your own body that means you don’t treat it poorly or let anyone else talk poorly about it. To be the event you’ve been waiting for — the falling in love, the miraculous occurance, the one-time-only magical relationship that begins when you start paying attention to how you are filled with breath and electricity at all times.
Capricorn
Welcome your restlessness: To chuck your responsibilities and spend the day playing music, making zines, or wandering on foot all over an unfamiliar city just seeing where your curiosity takes you. Welcome your teenage self, your romantic self, the part of you that wants to burn hot and bright and see what sparks may strike between you and the world. Welcome what this part of you reminds you about what matters—not more than your responsibilities — but just as much. Welcome staying up late re-listening to your favorite albums. Welcome a drifting, aimless current that carries you toward what makes your heart beat faster.
Aquarius
Welcome your restlessness: To dissolve borders and establish boundaries. To create safe spaces for you and your loved ones, and their loved ones, and your whole community, and the people you may not know but wish well. To allow for a deepening into these places that means we get to stay where we want to stay and leave when we want to leave—no deportations, no evictions, no prisons. To tap into whatever homes and families you’ve experienced as places of safety and to lend that warmth and strength they’ve given you to others — or, if you haven’t had those experiences yet, to imagine who you will feel when you do.
Pisces
Welcome your restlessness: To say aloud all the things you’ve been keeping bottled up, even if you didn’t realize the stress they were causing. To have necessary conflicts. To reach for clarity, for transparency, for the kind of honesty that transforms what it touches. To reach for the people you love instead of retreating, even if you’re reaching from a place of frustration. To not be afraid of your anger. To let it be, instead, as loved as a toddler throwing a tantrum and as protected — which is to say, you keep sharp knives away from a kid having a meltdown, so let yourself have your strong feelings without sharpening your knives against yourself or your loved ones. What you are restless for is a space where you are known, in your fullness, including all the uncomfortable and confusing parts of you. Make that room.
“What you are restless for is a space where you are known, in your fullness, including all the uncomfortable and confusing parts of you.”
Oof. I felt that one.