By the time you read this, I will have not followed my own advice.

I always advocate for doing less during eclipse season (in this instance, all four weeks of Aries season), but especially on the day of eclipses (in this instance, March 25th and April 8th). Part of the reason I do this is that during this time period, life is especially unpredictable and unstable. Power surges abound, life events quicken, and there’s a general uptick in change. Why add to the chaos? Why not be the calm in the metaphoric storm?

Even our company, CHANI Inc., will be closed for the week of March 25th (this first eclipse has neatly aligned with our annual office wide closure for spring break), but life had other plans for me this year. Instead of taking this time to ground and rest, my routines will be out the window and upheaval of all kinds will be happening.

We must all live our lives.

As I go into this period of irregular everything, with a toddler in tow, I am trying to prepare by getting as far ahead on my work as possible and having extremely low expectations. Like, almost none. I’m practicing being in acceptance of whatever comes my way and expecting things to get a little turbulent. I will obviously fail at this. A lot. Like, mostly. I’m going to try to have low expectations here too. Maybe I will send myself a couple of calendar invites: “Check your expectations” on March 25th, or “Be kind to yourself for having expectations when you said you wouldn’t” on April 8th.

Skeptics of astrology often say that one of the things they don’t like about its setup is the belief that everything is predestined. They don’t want to be controlled. To that I say, me either. Honestly, I am a pretty feral human. I was born to two contrarians, people who prided themselves on being defiant rulebreakers. They are my tree; I am their apple. However, I’ve tested the effectiveness of astrology long enough to be humbled into trusting its weather report.

Skeptics also like to tell me (unprompted) that astrologers are always predicting doom and gloom. I’d have to partially agree. That is the information that they probably receive from the media and the algorithm — because inside tech-capitalism, that is what gets the most engagement. But I’d like to parse some things out here about astrology and this current eclipse season x Mercury retrograde (reminder: Mercury will be retrograde from April 1st to 25th). Astrology’s main function is to tell us about the quality of a certain period of time. If we lived in a world that was just and fair, and we met a difficult astrological moment as mature, kind, critically thinking adults who refuse to be complicit in systems of supremacy, challenging astrology would manifest in very different ways.

The doom and gloom is not the planets. It’s this iteration of our existence.

The fact of the matter is that many of us are just beginning to do the very hard work of awakening to all the ways in which our world is run by a war machine dressed up like progress. Even if we knew this before October 7th, we could more easily dissociate from it en masse. The last six months, however, have cracked the facade of business as usual.

Recently, I’ve been looking at the astrology of the mid-to-late 1960s. I started doing so because friends of ours in their 70s kept saying that the current movement for Palestinian liberation feels similar to the anti-war movements of the ’60s. So I began to dig. Astrologically, there are many striking similarities, some of which Thea Anderson, Eliza Robertson, and I talk about in the latest episode of Down to Astro. One of them is that in the late ’60s, the North Node of the Moon was in Aries and the South Node of the Moon was in Libra (this happens roughly every 19 years). That means the eclipses of that time are picking up on the same themes as this time. Namely, war and peace.

The last eclipse we had near the South Node in Libra was on October 14th, 2023. It was the first of three that will occur in the span of a year. Monday, March 25th, brings the second of these eclipses and harkens back to what happened in October. These two moments in time are different, but tied together. 

Like us.

Astrology is useful when we use it as a technology, like a mirror. It provides a reflection, a context, a point to meditate on. When two events are tied together over a span of time (whether it be now and last October, or now and the 1960s), we look for parallels and progress: Is there an echo? What has been the ripple effect? What has shifted since the initial event? What has come to be because of it? One of the changes, one of the impacts that we can see from the last eclipse season to this one is that many of us, many more of us than before October 2023, know that our collective liberation is the only thing that will save us — and our activism is making an impact. 

Within the last couple of weeks, we have heard Chuck Schumer — a long-time supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu — calling for the prime minister of Israel’s replacement. And now the United States is calling for an immediate and sustained cease-fire. This is a turning point that is far, far too late and far, far too little. All of this death and destruction was avoidable. In this incredibly bleak and horrific time, these two events are, however, signs that our protests are making an impact.

There was a massive culture shift in the late ’60s, and there has been a massive culture shift since the last eclipse in Libra. May we be fortified by this. There is an awakening happening, and we must work with the momentum we have built to direct our human story away from so much needless destruction. Libra is the sign of the scales, justice, equality, harmony, and beauty. And the last six months have had us intensely focused on what these concepts mean in real terms.

I hope we use this time, this pivotal moment, to rest when we can and celebrate the wins that come, the shifts we’ve made, and the progress that has collectively happened since October so that each day, when we return to the work at hand, we are fueled by the knowledge, and proof, of our collective power.

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Aries | Taurus | Gemini | Cancer | Leo | Virgo | Libra

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