Mostly when I sit down to write, what comes to mind are all the lessons that I’m learning from being a new parent. I don’t want to be a one-note writer, but these are the waters I’m swimming in right now. So bear with me.

Last night, I took a long stroll through the Upper West Side in Manhattan. It was quiet and cold and dark. I felt that (now) unfamiliar feeling of having a pocket of time to myself, a momentary freedom. And there is nothing like having a couple of hours to oneself, the right shoes, weather-appropriate apparel, and the streets of this city to roam. I decided to call Sonya and check in — to see how bathtime with our little one went, what I had missed, etc. She filled me in on all the impossibly cute things that had happened in the three hours that I had been gone: the new smile, the new chuckle, the new hand gesture. A lot occurs hour to hour at this age. During the call, I passed folks who looked decimated by capitalism and a city that has been one of the driving engines of it. I thought, as I often do since becoming a parent, “What would the world be like if everyone was as cared for as our child?” Because we are all somebody’s child.

I know this is one of the most basic of sentiments, but it’s more a feeling that overwhelms me than an academic thesis of the inequities of this world.

I can’t seem to reconcile the disparity that I have experienced emotionally since I’ve become a mom. My domestic reality is shockingly different than most of what I see when I open the door. Or my phone. Our child is so doted on, so the focus of our lives and choices, so thought of, so celebrated, and so considered all while so much of our human family is discarded, disregarded, uncared for, sacrificed for power grabs and land theft, locked away, or worse. Our systems make no sense for anyone, save for the egos that maintain them, drive them, and thrive in them — which is so very few of us.

I want us to build a world that treats everyone as valuable and beloved: like they are someone’s child, auntie, cousin, mentor, student, friend, community member. I want to live in systems that encourage (okay, maybe force) the very best in us to come forth, that center the health of our connections so that the communities we build are naturally self-correcting and our trajectory has an arc that bends toward care and protection of the most vulnerable among us. We seem, instead, to be hurtling toward our own destruction with gleeful gluttony, selfies, binaries, and beauty contests.

I want us to live.

And while I am far from above the lure of luxury and (temporary) ease that materialism affords, I’m haunted by my, and our, children’s future if we don’t fully embody the changes we know are needed now. I’m haunted by the material and spiritual cost of our day-to-day living, the hidden toll that access to anything we want, whenever we want it, adds up to. I’m haunted by the cycles of violence that we keep buying into each time we dehumanize and demoralize one another, en masse and online, nation to nation and person to person.

And I am not above being the problem.

To be honest, I am quite often the thorn in my own side. I have every human trait that there is to have. I feel envy, bitterness, hatred, vengeance, neediness, self-pity, love, compassion, frailty, aging, bliss, joy, fear, greed, and genuine gratitude for this endlessly complicated life. I’ve tried to deny the more humiliating feelings on that list, much to my demise. My shadow self is strong and ever the eager teacher, thankfully. I know that each time I get wrapped up in the wrongness of the world, I need to immediately get interested in what I can do to tend to some part of my own life and self. I know that my red flags come in the form of my own fingers, outstretched and pointing. I know that as I change, so too does my world.

The New Moon in Aquarius

The New Moon in Aquarius that occurs on Friday, February 9th, at 2:59 pm PT is a first-in-our-lifetime event — one among many that have and will be occurring in Aquarius, thanks to Pluto’s re-entrance into the sign. As a lineup of planets enter Aquarius (the Sun and Mercury have just, the Moon will mid-week, and Venus and Mars are about to), they will all be greeted by the Dark Lord.

At the top of the week, Mercury makes its conjunction with Pluto. That means that the week begins with some soul-searching conversations, the unearthing of a truth or two, or the deepening of our awareness about a topic that had only been partially unveiled to us. There is always some accounting to be done with Mercury — and with Pluto, that tally is about the grief, the horrors, and the hidden gems of life and of this world. A Mercury–Pluto conjunction teaches us that when we do not name the difficult aspects of life — the sentiments we harbor deep, deep down — they do not cease to exist. In fact, they often become stronger, more burdensome to schlep around with us. The grief we carry must be articulated so that it might transform us and our understanding of what is possible.

In other words, Monday is a great day for therapy, or whatever you have access to that’s akin to it.

Because this week’s astrology is so focused on Pluto’s recent entrance into Aquarius, we can also guess that something will come to light about AI, about tech in general, and about our collective reality or, more specifically, about how it’s changing.

This New Moon also sits in a tight square with Uranus. Uranus is revolutionary energy. It’s itchy, loud, rude, feral, freedom-seeking, riled up, and ready to break with tradition at any cost. This week will be disruptive, disrupted, and in our face. Perhaps it’s a week when we will be the source of someone else’s discomfort, awakening, or reinvention. Hopefully it will be a good mix of both.

In a recent talk with the news company Mondoweiss, Aquarian Angela Davis said: “Now when I see vast numbers of people demonstrating in country after country, it reminds me that these connections across national borders are possible. That Palestine is allowing us to imagine a very different kind of world. And so we struggle for justice for Palestine — not because it is the moral thing to do, which it is. Not because it is the only way we can imagine a future for people who live in that part of the world, which it is, but because it represents a capacity to build new lives and new dreams for people everywhere. It does make us dream of a world in which we will have eradicated racism and anti-semitism, and economic exploitation, and gender violence, so … we deposit our dreams in Palestine.”

This New Moon is about breaking ties with whatever keeps our inner visionary, innovator, and world-builder asleep. It is about grappling with and witnessing the grief that is hidden in plain sight. It is about remembering that we are not too late to make the future better. In fact, this moment is the only place from which we can create change. It’s the only place from which we can learn to love, cherish, and take care of one another, and therefore the world.

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