Winks and Ripples
One of the advantages of getting older is having the experiences to show you that life happens in phases.
This wisdom makes it easier to get through difficult times. I don’t know a single person that has stayed the same over the past ten years. Sometimes when I look back on my life I am surprised with how much I’ve done in this amount of time. I have lived so many lives. There are also times when I feel frustrated about my lack of obvious progress. I think to myself that there didn’t used to be such a need for improvement. Things always take longer than they should. For all of time, humans have just lived everyday. They didn’t hustle. They woke up and struggled a bit then got on about the day.
When I was little I really loved watching home videos to see how everyone interacted with me and with each other before I was actually aware of all that was going on. There were a few shows on channels like VH1 and MTV that took a look back on the pop culture trends from each decade. I always felt like I was born in the wrong era when I watched them. The deep dive into each decade gave me insights into my parents lives and my oldest sister’s. I watched the shows from their childhoods and I longed for a time before I was born. I felt a sense of nostalgia for the 60s and 70s from just watching reruns of programs that aired in those periods. My childhood car rides were infused with 80s glam metal and 90s grunge rock.
I don’t know what it is about the early 2000s era that bends time but it does. A lot of people completely omit the decade from 2000 to 2010, especially those of us born before the turn of the century. Just think about the lockdowns that began in March of 2020, and how different life seemed back then. That is already four and nearly five years ago. Even talking about it in past tense is sometimes disorienting.
And now I am being asked to sit in stillness outside of space and time. I have collected pockets of these timeless memories. I’ve had this feeling before and its terribly unsettling to be suspended between timelines. It is equally scary to finally blast off onto a new one. That’s probably important to remember.
The Astrology has been incredibly tense lately. I’d recorded for the Mars Uranus conjunction on Algol and mentioned a very standard analysis of the fixed-star placement, using typical taglines such as “losing one’s head” and “a head of state falling”. Those are just classic Algol one-liners. I never posted that recording but the events that coincided with the alignment included an attempted assassination on a former President who has his Midheaven conjunct Algol. The themes were quite visible in his case, almost to a catastrophic degree. The Midheaven is the place in your chart that is often described as the “debut into society”. It falls into this 10th House which is the place in our chart in which we look to see how someone is known in the public eye usually through their career.
For contrast, I have my natal Venus on that very same fixed-star Algol, but for me the House falls in a different place. The placement is in what is called my 12th House, which is often called our blindspot or unreachable places. In other words, the messages that come to me from transits in the Taurus are not always so easy for me to see. They are not as straightforward as events that take place during transits to the 10th House, for example.
What I do have is a lifetime of experience with this particularly challenging Venus placement. I’ve found out the hard way just how much love can make me lose my head. There was a lot that happened behind the scenes, but nothing overtly eruptive. Fortunately “losing one’s head” in the Taurus over the 12th House can also look like emotional eating and crying to movies in bed. I’ve noticed it has felt immensely difficult to create anything during this time period.
Mercury entered pre-retrograde shadow on July 17th, which coincided with the separation of the Mars/Uranus conjunction so we may actually still notice lingering themes from mid-July repeating towards the end of August. At least to the extent that we are discussing them. That might make for an interesting reflection and perhaps it is going to be the highlight of the retrograde cycle this time around… to sort out all the chaos. When Mercury is retrograde we are advised to look inward, particularly with the message we want to deliver. Whether it's something we want to sell, something we want to say, or some place we want to go, there is an emphasis on procedure and protocol. With this Mercury retrograde starting out in Virgo and moving back through Leo, I get a sense of being the recipient of a “Most Improved Award”. It just may take the entire month of August to really reach that feeling of completion.
I’m slowly molding my mind around the charts again. Its a process when you take a break from current transits because it feels like a total reset. I have personally felt the impacts of Mars and Uranus on my subconscious and my ability to create, which is good and bad. It seriously feels like its been nearly impossible to put my thoughts into words. I’m just existing in a relatively quiet place.
