Can you feel a change yet? We’re in that strange transition during the winter when Spring is near, but still feels so far away. In this time of massive global transitions — political, social, and environmental — we’re so primed for the next catastrophe that it can be hard to notice what’s changing. And many people, clinging to the trauma logic of having lived through the worst year, think of “change” as “it will go back to normal.” But the strong Aquarius wind blowing through this month isn’t really interested in normal, it’s interested in different. Given where we’ve been, how can we get somewhere different from here?
There is a liberating feeling with Aquarius, kind of like that moment when you step outside before a lightning storm and smell the ozone in the air—that stillness that’s crackling with potential. But it’s still potential until we use it. And there are many different ideas about what liberation could or should look like. February is always a month when change sneaks up on us, when what is growing and rising in the living earth is still hidden. Many of us are also holding an open secret right now: we don’t want the status quo back. We’re not ready for any semblance of “normal.” And after the traumatizing year we’ve all had, we may not even be ready to trust good news when we hear it.
This is all totally normal. Resist the urge to shame yourself for how you’re showing up right now. It’s about harm reduction and maintaining, as we are still very much in the midst.
Throughout this year, we’ll be facing tension between the old world and the new — between how things used to be (or still are), and how they’ve transformed or will transform. Astrologically, we see this in the challenging aspects between Saturn (status quo daddy) and Uranus (anarchist glitterbomb) that happen three times this year — kicking off this month on the 17th. As these two forces wrestle it out, we’re going to be feeling torn between what we want to preserve from the old, familiar world and where we want to be more free in the future. Or we may feel trapped by the same old Saturnian restrictions (is it safe to see my family yet? Will I ever get to quit this job? How long will this illness last?) while longing for a different life.
It’s not a comfortable time, my friends. If anything, it might feel like we’re getting more polarized this month. In your partnerships, your collective houses, your polycules, your germ bubbles, you may feel a little more tension about how to balance everyone’s different needs around freedom vs. safety. In your solitude, you may feel this tension internally. With Mars in Taurus, we have the goddamn stamina to keep up this fight, too, once we start it. So be intentional about what conflicts feel worth it, and what your goals are for engaging in them. Remember that none of use really knows what’s right for anyone else, we can just keep trying to live by our ethics and ideals. Remember that no one is really getting their needs met right now, so we’re all a little extra. Be generous and forgiving, when you can, and that includes with yourself.
This year is bringing change. We can’t quite feel it yet, but we’ll be building it, shaping it, and learning to name it over the coming months. Keep this in mind as you face the struggles of this time: what are you trying to build through this?
I’m here if you need me, oh queerdos of the world. Get in touch for reading, follow my Patreon for a deeper dive into the astrology of this month, including a new monthly podcast that will be dropping before each month’s New Moon! You can also hear the podcast for free every month by tuning in to The Hum and The Holler, my new podcast with my sister for 2021 that goes into depth on all the spells in this year’s Abacus Corvus calendar.
Aries
Between the old world and the new:
In the old world, you had a different sense of where you belonged and what you wanted to be contributing to the world. You may have had big dreams. You may have been about to embark on a big new passage of your life and seen that cut short. In the new world, your decisions have been so dominated by the idea of safety that for an Aries who loves risk and challenge, you may be feeling particularly deflated right now. It may feel like you can make very few choices, like you are no longer the captain of your fate. The tensions arising this month between old and new are hitting you in the conflict you feel between wanting to stay safe and well, on the one hand, and wanting to be part of what you find inspiring in the world. Challenges come easily to you, but it can be harder to prioritize your own wellbeing. Right now, you’re being challenged to choose what actually serves and nourishes you on a deep level—what helps your nervous system rest, digest, and restore itself. What inspires you will still be part of your life, but you can’t chase it at the expense of your wellbeing.
Taurus
Between the old world and the new:
Survival fears might be strong for you right now, whether they’re based in current conditions or past traumas. During the pandemic, you’ve been coming into yourself in new ways—dropping a social mask, dropping expectations that drained your energy and bank account, and dropping into a sense of who you could be without all that external pressure. But can you keep this up? Part of the tension of this month is whether you’ll be able to bring this newfound authenticity to the world and have it accepted, respected, supported. There’s a visionary energy coursing through you right now that could bring you deeper into your power, if you’re brave enough to step into the spotlight. Just remember that what you offer the world cannot be quantified. You are a unique event, not a product. As such, you don’t have to be perfect each time.
Gemini
Between the old world and the new:
In the past, the unknown was often a source of delight. Research, discovery, a new crush, a new fact about the sex lives of the spotted hyena—all continual sources of delight. But when we’ve been in trauma patterns for a long time—which includes 2020 for all of us, not to mention whatever life history you had before—the unknown can take on a more menacing aspect. The tension of this month is primarily playing out between your sense of the known and the unknown. What will help you heal isn’t actually clinging to the known, though, especially when it includes your anxiety patterns. If you’ve got an anxiety loop playing on permanent repeat in your head, it’s there to serve a protective function and it also blocks you from paying attention to what you might not notice—when the threat is over. What happens if you start telling yourself a brand new story based on the same data? What if your doom-and-gloom conclusions are only one of many possible conclusions? What if the unknown can become, once more, a source of joy?
Cancer
Between the old world and the new:
We’ve all got our emotional wounds, but people with strong Cancer energy in their charts are experts at deeply feeling what needs to be felt. The only problem is when they get stuck in the feeling instead of letting it release and letting the nervous system reset back into it’s humming along merrily mode. Prolonged crisis and prolonged grief can get us stuck in a loop of feeling things without resolution (or refusing to feel things anymore). The tension for you this month is in how to get unstuck without just pushing away or dismissing the reality and strength of what you feel. How do you know when it’s time to turn toward the future again? Are you ready to feel anything like hope? What is between you and your capacity to envision and dream a better world? It might be a lot right now, and that makes sense. Just start digging through it, with the understanding that pain teaches us not to make the same mistakes in the future again—like touching a hot stove and then learning not to touch it. Trauma, on the other hand, can teach us that the future will be just as terrifying as the past. Trauma keeps us stuck in that one bad time, forever. Getting unstuck is a long process, but it will give you your future back.
Leo
Between the old world and the new:
Relationships are up for you right now. Whether you’re partnered, in germ pod, looking for connection, or flying solo right now, you’ve got a keen longing for the kind of love that is bigger than one person will ever be able to give you (or even two or three). Leo energy is here to magnetize love—you are the puppy memes of the zodiac. You are here to melt hearts, and to have yours bursting with love as well. In pandemic times, with such restrictions on easy intimacy, with so much grief and loneliness and fear swirling around, getting that dose of love is much harder. Begin by accepting your need for love, but recognize that it’s always a two-way street. Whether you feel lonely or filled up right now, it’s your responsibility to start filling the world with whatever love you have. Hoarding it will never help it grow. This will feel much harder, obviously, if you’re not feeling filled up, so remember to keep asking for what you need and grieving if your needs can’t be met. And remember that love in action is more than affection and cheerleading, it’s solidarity, listening, material support, and deep recognition. You know how to do this. Start being the love you need.
Virgo
Between the old world and the new:
Oh my dear sweet anxious and well-meaning Virgo friend—you may be doing better than you expected to right now, because you are inherently adaptable. But in wanting to offer up your comparative wellbeing as a resource for others, you’re going to come up against your own limits. This month’s tension arises for you as that pull between what you want to offer and what you need to keep for yourself. This is particularly important if you’ve got an ambitious project in mind, something you finally have the focus and motivation to follow through on—remember that you will still have lower capacity days (and weeks, and months) and that not a single one of us is here to single-handedly save the world. If you’re planning toward something big, you have to be gentle with the ways you’re showing up each day, exactly as you are. Let your capacity determine your pace. And congratulations for finding balance, even if you lose it and have to keep finding it again!
Libra
Between the old world and the new:
This month brings relationships into strong focus for you, but less in a “I’m processing with all my partners and friends and we’re really making progress” kind of way, and more of a “oh my god I just miss getting dolled up and going to a QDP and making out with strangers” kind of way that’s immediately followed by “dear goddexx, how will I ever get over the pain of all the ways my relationships have failed me in the past year?’ In other words, your feelings are big right now and both the longing and the pain have messages for you. If you’re ready to start sorting through (and you may not be, which is legit!), you’ll notice that leaning into joy will keep bringing you through the territory of grief, each and every time. It’s useless to try to untie them, honestly. The best you can do this month is to be present with each of them as they arise, to acknowledge that they are part of a larger cycle of response that is deeply attuned to your world. You are still connected, even when you feel disconnected.
Scorpio
Between the old world and the new:
The way the tension of this month activates you has everything to do with how you were raised. Your family patterns are up for review—for healing, for forgiving (if it feels safe), for purging (if you need to). Everything you learned about love, safety, and belonging as a child is present in your current adult relationships, and you may have noticed that the conflicts of the past year have mirrored a lot of your early family dynamics. It’s tough work, relearning how to love. It’s also hella worth learning, slowly and thoroughly. For you to choose healthier relationship dynamics, you first have to believe that you deserve them. Start with that. Start with a daily ritual of believing that you deserve the kind of love that never scares you. Start with a commitment to loving yourself, completely and without any reservations.
Sagittarius
Between the old world and the new:
It’s been a long time since most of you have felt free and adventurous, I know. And we’re not yet in a world where hopping on a plane and visiting far-away friends is an easy, relatively risk-free choice to make. If travel isn’t your drug of choice, you may have found new ways to expand your sense of possibility and lean into that larger perspective that helps you feel refreshed and renewed. For most of you, though, being confined to the local when you’re used to thinking of yourself as post-borders has been a major, grinding, crushing loss. This month brings you opportunities to face that feeling of stuckness and start appreciating what can be learned in what seems most familiar—your daily routine. This is a year of wake-up calls for you, and your old patterns aren’t going to cut it anymore. For better or worse, there’s something you can’t outrun in your relationship to your body that needs to be noticed, appreciated, investigated, cherished. Get curious about what seems boring. Start connecting the dots between the local and the global, the personal and the political, the ways your experiences connect you to the larger world, even if you’re mostly trapped in a bedroom these days.
Capricorn
Between the old world and the new:
We all know you love to know what your job is, and the tensions coming up for you this month have a lot to do with that pull between doing what you must to make sure you have the resources you need (love, medicine, money, infrastructure, etc.) and the pull to do something creative, expressive, and playful that will help you tap into your unexplored (or languishing) talents. One of the biggest tragedies of capitalism is that it’s taught us only a few people get to be artists and everyone else’s creativity doesn’t matter. Your creativity matters. You don’t need to get paid for it. You don’t need to share it with anyone, if you’re not proud of what you end up making. But you do need to be making things, playing games, getting weird with it, letting the process take you somewhere new. Despite what your security needs might be screaming at you (keep working! no time for play!), your real responsibility this month is to keep showing up for your creative impulses, and to let yourself play.
Aquarius
Between the old world and the new:
This is a momentous year for you, and this month brings a veritable abundance of Aquarius energy. Which means that for a little while, the whole world is vibing on your level more than it usually does. This is also a year of challenges for you, challenges that will mainly ask you how to balance your need for self-determination—being as strange and questioning as you are—with love, belonging, and stability. Part of your mission as a human is to bring something new into this world, even if it’s just a new way of looking at things or offering love and understanding. The world doesn’t often understand what’s new, and often won’t love it until it becomes familiar. It’s your job to keep loving what the world rejects, fiercely and with commitment, especially when it’s aligned with your deepest values. Send a little of that love to whatever part of yourself has also struggled with rejection, with that feeling that you don’t belong here. You do.
Pisces
Between the old world and the new:
You know that you absorb a lot from your environment. It can be your comfort zone—that wordless communion with all the feelings and impressions that happen beneath language, beneath conscious thought. It’s why you can be such an empathic friend and partner. It’s why you often need time and space alone to recharge. And it’s hard to put into words what you feel and sense this way. But the tension of this month is asking you to lean into speaking the kind of truths that you usually just feel. This could be for yourself, or on behalf of someone you love who’s having a hard time shaping the chaos of their own feelings and responses. Just remember that as you start to name things, they will want to wiggle away. That’s okay. You don’t need 100% accuracy, or to be right about everything. Let the words you offer be like opening a door, letting in some light. Knowing it’s okay to start talking about all the things. Showing someone else you’ve been listening this whole time.
As always, I really do love reading these. Thank you!
Oof. Needed to read the Scorpio one (as usual)