Tag: uranus

Steel in your Spine

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If any of you are true crime nerds, you probably know about the show “I Survived,” which features first-person accounts of the most harrowing experiences one could ever imagine.

Survivors regale us with their unbelievable stories of having fended off a serial killer with their bare hands, or survived a plane crash, or escaped a sinking car while saving everyone in it.

And they often do so with composure and grit right on the surface for all to see. They survived.

The will to survive fills us with a rare strength that sometimes comes out in the most muddied of circumstances: someone losing oxygen or bleeding out, unable to think rationally but operating on pure animal instinct for survival.

It’s that raw power that enables mothers to lift cars off trapped toddlers.

When we survive the throes of chaos, when we come out on the other side of the valley of Death’s shadow, we wind up with steel in our spine that no other experience can give us.

This week’s story presents us with an opportunity to engage with the counter, original, spare, and strange power that emerges out of desperation.

Mars finds himself this week in the sign of his dignity but at the Moon’s southern bending. The southern bending, halfway between the south and north nodes, is the point at which the Moon is at her furthest southerly latitude, 90° from either node.

Planets near the bendings carry out the Moon’s story in their own experience, as they do when they are conjoined the nodes themselves; the Moon’s story at the southernmost point of her orbit is the story of rock bottom, the worst it can get.

Yet when you’ve hit rock bottom, the only direction you can go is upward.

As Mars prepares to square the nodes and bear out this story in his body, Mercury enters the sign of her detriment and her fall, Pisces, where all rational thinking is clouded over in luminous vapor.

Mercury in Pisces has no access to the light of reason, the mountains of data he’s gathered in Gemini or analyzed in Virgo. He must learn to act on faith and instinct, something completely contrary to his toolkit.

He can do so just as powerfully as he can in either of his home bases, but the problem is that he doesn’t believe he can. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work on paper.

Remember the stories of survival: we are at a point where reason fails, and instinct takes over—and those stories don’t make sense a lot of times, either.

This week’s story culminates with Mars’ conjunction to Uranus en route to his Taurus ingress, where an adaptive crisis asks Mars to draw on the strange and wild strength that he carries in his arsenal while in Aries.

Mars will be given an opportunity to recall the steel in his spine because of the way that he has borne witness to the Moon’s story of survival amid impossible circumstances, walking by faith and not by sight.

Uranus is the trigger of triggers, and Mars’ response will call out the best in you as you engage with the impossible odds that the chaos of life’s ebb and flow throws at you. And remember, the best steel is as supple as it is strong.

Be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice and without any time to think it over; instead, open your heart and allow yourself to feel your way forward. You’ve got Jupiter in Sagittarius to help you do this all year, regardless of Mercury’s long slog through Pisces.

Remember: the following horoscopes will probably land more closely if you read them from your rising sign.

aries

The adaptive crisis bears out in your body, requiring you to feel your way into new circumstances as the echoes of challenges past cause the fire of survival to rise in your bones.

taurus

Uranus’ bolt passes unseen, but that does not mean it hasn’t struck its mark. Listen to the soft and subtle voice of silence bringing memories of past sorrows and rejoice that you have survived them.

gemini

Who are you among those with whom you keep company? Uranus’ challenge asks you to take the helm in unprecedented ways, setting the steel in your spine at work to create better fortunes for all those around you.

cancer

The challenge from your professional endeavors asks you to give voice to something that has remained close to your heart, but the time is now—sooner than anyone expected—to release that gift into the wild and allow it to take flight.

Leo

Resist the urge to escape into parts unknown when circumstance raises the specters of old legacies and family stories, who come knocking, unbidden and unwelcome; they no longer have a hold on you anymore.

virgo

Of all the signs this may hit you the hardest, for Mars for you holds sway over all that you fear. But you have conquered fear before and you will do so again as you bear witness to the rich vein of story that your life has given you as a gift-in-kind.

libra

Those closest to your heart will fear for lack, perhaps to the point of despair. Use your vision of beauty to speak of the fertile abundance that you have at your beck and call as you invoke peace beyond understanding.

Scorpio

You, like your Aries siblings, will experience the upset taking place in your body as matters of health hit home, but you’ll find that your constitution has everything it needs to ward off disease and establish itself in strength.

Sagittarius

Uranus wrangles and jangles your children, whether literal or figurative. Remember that they have everything they need to make it and ride the updraft of faith to select in your heart the best outcomes for them.

Capricorn

Social crises threaten to quench the fires of your hearth, but the flames prove all the stronger as your diligent preparation enables you to switch your systems over to autopilot. You’ve been getting ready for this for a while.

Aquarius

Raw and rugged rhetoric on your part has placed you in the position of reevaluating the role of your vocation within your professional communities, but you must remain loyal to your message even when it runs bitter, for you know it to be true.

Pisces

A sudden expenditure calls to mind former, leaner days, but you have earned the requisite monies before through trusting in the abundance that grounds all things and so shall you do again.

On Uranus in Taurus

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A lot of folks seem to be worrying the Uranus Taurus ingress to death. With these outer planet transits and ingresses, we expect big things to occur on the world stage. Uranus’ trips through Taurus have a way of coinciding with major shake-ups to the foundations of society; his last transit of Taurus lined up with that weird and worrisome period between the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II. But bear in mind that Uranus in Taurus was not the only thing happening at that time.

What I want to make clear here is that Uranus’ property is not to create geopolitical crises. His property is to disrupt such that it forces adaptation. Uranus qua Uranus is the crisis waiting to happen, the precipitating factor, the change agent.

There’s a reason that a number of astrologers are starting to refer to this planet as Prometheus. In his myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods as a boon for humanity, but then humanity still has to adjust to the new reality that having access to fire engenders for everyone. All Prometheus did was say, “here you go, now deal with it.”

Uranus queers–that is, Uranus makes things weird. Honestly, I need more astrologers to be talking about Uranus power to queer. Whichever house cusp Taurus lies on in your chart will be queered with this ingress.

Consider what it is that the Fab Five do on any episode of Queer Eye: they come in unexpectedly, rumble around a man’s entire wardrobe, living space, grooming, pantry, and confidence, leaving no matter untouched. And the men whose lives they impact, though they are completely unsettled and jostled around by this process, come out on the other side for the better.

Uranus will draw the elements and qualities of all that which is on the outside, the margins, the unexpected—”All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) / With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;” to quote Hopkins—right to the center, where it will demand adaptation. The power of the Fab Five is not that they come in and teach a man how to wear pants that fit; they teach a man how to make manifest his divine dignity by uprooting his comfort, his ugly-ass dad sneakers, and addressing the emotional baggage that caused that man to become stuck and fixed in the first place. In other words, Uranus will be the sand in the particular oyster that Taurus represents in your chart, as he always is and always does. She ain’t give a damn, hennie.

That’s the gift of queerness. We exist on the margins and when we draw the margins to the center through our presence, we create an adaptive crisis for the status quo. For me, Uranus was transiting my third whole sign house (second Placidus) and so much of the last seven years was about queering my relationship with traditional religion, which is now my day job—as well as learning how to talk about my own queerness and communicate it. There were any number of crisis points on the way that played into the whole theme (which I won’t list here), but looking back, I have a clear view of what it was that Uranus was doing in my life over the last seven years.

This goes to show that even though the precipitating crises Uranus instigates might be tied to specific events, those are amplified points of the overall theme of the transit. Is Uranus hitting favorable aspects to planets in your chart? Be ready for boons you aren’t expecting that still require you to adjust. Squares or oppositions? The same, but those will be tougher.

Regardless of the quality of the transits themselves, whether we experience them as positive of negative, we still have to be flexible, and each of the specific contacts between Uranus and other planets play into the overall story of this transit.

And we can sit around and speculate, but all the while, Uranus transits are by their very nature unpredictable. We can refine the possible manifestations of a Uranus transit by looking at our charts, but ultimately, the odds are that we won’t be able to nail down exactly what it’ll be until after the fact.

Worrying possible transits to death will make you rigid, and rigid can’t deal with Uranus. Better to bend than to break. So, friends, meet Uranus’ transits to your Taurus-placed house with Taurus’ cool head and patience. Think more Ferdinand under his cork tree, less rage-blinded animal charging at a toreador.

So I ask: what are the things that hold you to the ground? What is it that gives you a sense of stability and fixity? What are the material things with which you surround yourself in order to feel a sense of pleasure and peace? Uranus’ transit through Taurus is going to ask you to reevaluate anything that you would root yourself in, and that question is not going to come in the form of a gentle “have you considered this,” but rather, “oh by the way, your house is on fire and your investments are all over the place and your paycheck is screaming and your food is killing you and eat a vegetable and prom’s tomorrow!!”

So, as always, be prepared.

If you’re ready for a given area to be jostled in your life, if you can roll with the punches, if you can abide—and participate in—Uranus messing with all of your stuff, you’ll come out on the other side a reformed person. For our society, so rooted as it is in our relationship with money, this might necessarily mean some unprecedented shifts. And for each of us on our own, Uranus will come wheeling into whichever house Taurus is on and—as Prometheus did in the myths of ages past—hand us something fiery like “universal healthcare” or “cryptocurrency” or “food justice” and say, “well, here you go. Let’s zhuzh it a little.”