🌕♑︎: on sanctuary and shelter

Chart of the full moon in Capricorn, showing Jupiter at 29º 56’ of Cancer and Mercury retrograde at 26º of Cancer.

This moon cycle, as the sun traverses the early degrees of Cancer, peaks with the full moon in the sign of Capricorn.

The Cancer ♋︎ – Capricorn ♑︎ polarity in astrology invites us to consider the relationship between protection and ambition, survival and care.

Cancer is the sign of the crab, the protective shell that nurtures the soft, vulnerable creature within it. At the height of this full moon, Jupiter was whiling away its last hours in the sign of Cancer, at the final minutes of its 29th degree. Mercury, also in late degrees of Cancer, just stationed retrograde, inviting us to reflect upon all that has occurred in these wellspring waters as it backstrokes through them over the next couple of weeks, even as Jupiter moves into Leo in the early hours of June 30th.

The sign of Capricorn – Cancer’s polar opposite – is concerned with the structures and systems needed for endurance. The soft belly of the crab is countered by the goat who can eke out an existence upon the hardscrabble mountainside.

In Capricorn, the emotional needs of Cancer take a backseat to the practicalities of survival. The wisdom of this polarity is in its holding of both.

Our need for nurture needn’t stand in the way of our ambition, in a healthy life and a whole society, we can acknowledge that this full spectrum is necessary to thrive, and find a way to hold it all.

This month’s slow tarot spread: the Seven of Pentacles crossed by the Six of Cups in the center, Three of Pentacles (below), King of Swords (left), King of Pentacles (above), 9 of Pentacles Rx (right).

Returning to this Slow Tarot spread, I am struck by how the Seven of Pentacles crossed by the Six of Cups mirrors this Capricorn – Cancer polarity. Capricorn is a sign that takes responsibility seriously, which appears to be role of the Seven’s gardener, too. The responsibility of tending earth, of growing sustenance, of feeding a family from the land. And just above him, the reversed Six of Cups, sweet, vulnerable children in a protected courtyard, given space to play. It’s interesting that this is the only card in which the cups are pictured with earth – flowers growing – inside them. The surrounding earth (Pentacles) cards, with the King on top of the spread, appear to acknowledge our culture’s emphasis on the Capricorn side of life, often times at the expense of Cancer’s wisdom.

Jupiter brings emphasis and expansion to whatever sign it transits. For the collective, Jupiter in Cancer has coincided with heightened periods of white nationalism in the US, from the Japanese “internment camps” in WWII, to the rampant Islamophobia of 2001, to our current period of ICE concentration camps and the federal government’s attempts to ethnically cleanse America. All of these movements seek to protect a core in-group through targeting the “fearsome other.” This in-group / out-group belief system is the root of genocide, structural violence, and marginalization of all kinds. And yet we humans fall for it again and again, seduced by the belief that a smaller, more fortified, more homogenous shell will finally protect us. And so we inflict harm, we build systems that exclude and oppress, and our sense that this world is not safe remains.

9 of Pentacles reversed

This reversed 9 of Pentacles is intriguing me in consideration of this moon. In this card we see a well-dressed woman in a secluded garden of her own, in conversation with her hooded bird of prey on her gloved hand. So much of this card’s imagery – the trellised grape vines containing the field, the snail creeping by at her feet, the bird’s blinder helmet matching the woman’s hat – again speaks to this idea of shelter and containment.

When do boundaries protect and when do they exclude or dominate?

My first reading of this spread considered this card through a more animist and partnership model of relating to nature, as opposed to the modes of dominance and control that are so culturally ubiquitous. In the light of this full moon, with the ongoing sociopolitical emphasis on “protection” through violence, exclusion, and borders,

I am also thinking of this 9 of Discs as an invitation to reconsider our own relationship to safety and security and how this relates to inclusion and exclusion.

This moon cycle coincided with the “achievement” of the world’s first trillionaire, an evocative image for Capricorn culture unchecked and unbalanced by Cancer wisdom. Bottomless greed and wealth-hoarding ambitions are misguided pursuits to soothe unmet needs, at the expense of the survival of vast numbers of people with the misfortune of being on the vulnerable and marginalized end of the spectrum.

Only a society so imbalanced would praise such pursuits instead of pathologizing them as harmful to both the pursuer and the whole.

Many of the wealthiest individuals have bought into ideologies that deem it better for individuals to accrue wealth so that they may “do good” with it than it is for the public to have control of such wealth. Where this ideology falls apart, however, is in the analysis of extreme wealth and the meager charitable efforts that tend to accompany it. While the billionaires claim responsibility for the future by charting it with their technofascist investments, what they’re really doing is allowing their greed to let them betray their responsibility to the present, and our wealth-worshipping society not only allows this, it pedestals them, just as our King of Pentacles is positioned at the top of this spread.

Three of Pentacles

And what is our spread’s wisdom to counterbalance the unchecked wealth of the King? It’s that Three of Pentacles at the root. A card of connection and collaboration, continuing the themes of the Six of Cups, only this scene is three individuals inside a church they also appear to be building. And here we are back again with themes of shelter and ambition, the growth of a sanctuary.

The notion of sanctuary as a site of protection extends back to ancient times. Here in the US, the sanctuary movement arose in 1980 in response to an influx of refugees fleeing unrest and persecution in Central America. Church leaders in the south and west took responsibility by claiming a moral imperative to protect vulnerable, marginalized refugees.

Instead of excluding the outsider to “protect” the in-group, the notion of sanctuary acknowledges that a society is only as safe as it treats its most vulnerable members.

The act of sanctuary, as evidenced by the growth and flourishing of the 1980s movement, extends and broadens community through the honoring of our interconnection across perceived difference.

Sanctuary is an example of a thriving Capricorn - Cancer polarity: social responsibility rooted in protection and care. The brave actions of pastors and congregants who took a stand against oppression strengthened community bonds and created a sense of purpose that transcended divisions of race, nationality, and class, and this is happening again, despite recent state efforts to suppress and punish it. The structures supporting white nationalism and in-group protection through out-group persecution are strong, but ultimately imbalanced and bound to fail.

To counteract the unchecked nationalism and wealth accrual of this moment, with all their harms, this spread invites us to grow down into our sense of shared responsibility for the protection of the vulnerable against these social ills.

This could look like actual provision of sanctuary, a deeper critical analysis of your investments to ensure your wealth isn’t tied up in concentration camps, or gentle work to know and heal the in-group / out-group tendencies that exist inside yourself (a beautiful intention for this Cancerian Mercury retrograde!).

This moon cycle began with the draconian sentences forced upon the Prairieland protestors for engaging in community care efforts to protect vulnerable neighbors against the threat of ICE. The full moon ruling by the US Supreme Court that thinly protected birthright citizenship has resulted in a full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing and eugenics from many leading voices on the right. This slim victory is not settled, if anything, it is galvanizing racist opposition which, if the anti-abortion movement has taught us anything, could last decades or longer until they achieve their hateful ends.

The tension between social responsibility and safety are acutely real in this moment, and something we each need to negotiate within ourselves.

We cannot know where any of this will lead, but what can be known is that in a climate where neighbors are housed in concentration camps and resistors are handed sentences of thirty years for moving boxes, none of us are truly safe, and supporting efforts of violence and exclusion are will not make us moreso. As Jupiter enters the fire sign of Leo, we will be further invited to step into courage and lead from the vulnerable heart.

This spread and the astrology of this moment are inviting us to interweave our desire for safety with our need to care for and support the interconnected whole, without exception. And from this Capricorn - Cancer wisdom, we are given plans with which to build.

🌓♎︎: world as church: the promise and peril of the 3 of pentacles

This month’s slow tarot spread: 7 of Pentacles x by 6 of Cups Rx, 3 of Pentacles (below), King of Swords (left), King of Pentacles (above), 9 of pentacles Rx (right), the 3 of Pentacles is most prominent in this image.

I am writing this on the longest day in the northern hemisphere, as the sun enters Cancer at the peak of the seasonal cycle. The summer solstice is a high point that’s still widely acknowledged in a culture that’s gone mostly linear. It fits nicely into our society’s reliance on growth, forward and outward progression, and light. The solstice is also a turning point on the wheel, the days following it will grow shorter and shorter until the dark overtakes the day. Our collective acknowledgement of these points in the cycle is more rudimentary, focused on maintaining productivity and efficiency despite the shifts occurring around us.

In the linear world mapped out by the King of Swords (reason), and the King of Pentacles (wealth), there is little conscious awareness of the cyclical nature of all things.

We are economically and therefore materially dependent on lines going up, on meanings being clear. Ambiguity, lessening, letting go, decay, death… these are fearsome propositions to linear time, and to our linear kings. This weekend I’ve been listen to a teacher of mine, Josh Schrei of the Emerald podcast, speak of how myths reflect the natural cycles that fractal across the earthly and cosmic planes, from our breath, to the seasons, to the moon, everything rising and falling again, life layering on the death that came before. It is all teaching us, constantly, how to be in alignment and attunement with all that is, if only we could surrender to it.

As I sat with this spread this morning and reconsidered the disconnect between the 7 of Pentacles and the 6 of Cups - something I spoke about in my first reading of this spread - I thought about how so much of this linearity that plagues modernity is an attempt to outrace death and deny its necessary role in supporting the continuation of life. Maybe this fear also lies at the root of the division of mind (swords) and body (pentacles), [hu]man and nature, which was fully integrated through Descartes. The maxim I think, therefore I am fits nicely upon a Swords King who has disconnected himself from nature. Perhaps the disconnected King of Pentacles version is “I extract, therefore I have.”

This split removes us from a consciousness that is connected to all of life, and places our individual consciousness as isolated, supreme, but also under threat of annihilation at any moment. Soul has left the garden and now the crops are simply commodities.

We’ve disrupted the rhythms of nature in effort to dominate her, and therefore disrupted the rhythms of self. In contemplating all of this, I was drawn down to the 3 of Pentacles, underneath the surface of this spread. From this place of disconnection, with the self removed from the larger ecosystem of all that is, organized religion can step in to mediate the relationship with god. It is likely no coincidence that alongside this shift, the iconography of religion shifted too, from the life-giving powers of the female body, paleolithic goddess figurines, to an instrument of torture and death, the cross.

The Saturn-Neptune cycle that began in February tells us, astrologically speaking, that our material relationship to spirituality is evolving.

As I look at this 3 of Discs that falls at the bottom of this spread, I am reminded of how fervent fundamentalism is underlying so much state violence: ethnic cleansing, war, genocide, and genocide enablement. Christian nationalism is rising and being weaponized in a devastating and bumbling effort to create a white ethno-state in America, whose great promise and potential has always been otherwise. Religion can lead us so astray when it is rooted in fear and domination. As the sun enters Cancer today, a sign concerned with protection of the self and group, I am thinking about how all of this is so deeply connected to our culture’s refusal and fear of the cyclic and the soulful. As the moon in Libra squares this Cancer sun 🌓, I am reminded that the tension between self-protection and relational harmony, vulnerability and grace, is written in our stars.

The Three of Pentacles in this spread is not only about the religious fundamentalism of dominator culture, just as the King of Pentacles is not only about wealth. This card invites us to root into the relational dynamics that pattern our lives, and become conscious of their material outcomes. It invites us to see the “greater good” we are building with our lives.

In the context of all of the earth in this spread, this card is a reminder that although our individual bodies are technically separate, we are all deeply interconnected, and all of our actions have material consequences.

So what are we building, together? Through our interactions, our collaborations, our sharing of goods and resources, and our shared stories? How are we re-weaving the cyclical nature of reality and soulful connection into this process of relating and building? How are we making space for not knowing, for ambiguity, for loss and grief? For bodies and minds that are interconnected and therefore sharing in the suffering that is being deployed upon the most vulnerable and least resourced among us? Have we taken a hard stare at our own complicity in these patterns of oppression and dominance? Have we located the oppressor inside of us?

We all know – well, at least most of us know – that our consumptive, extractive culture is living on borrowed time. Our lifestyles cannot hold. Material convenience comes at an existential cost. And this material form of wealth is all many of us have ever known. We fear the changes necessary to maintaining a thriving world, because we’ve been so conditioned in ways of consumption, we cannot really see a way out, or forward.

But what about all we might gain in a world in which spirit and soul are rewoven into place, into community, into social interactions and public rituals and our relationship to meeting our own needs?

A stewardship and partnership culture might be less prone to predation by zealots terrified of the thought of their own demise. Such a culture might redefine wealth as life’s ability to sustain itself through soulful stewardship. Returning to our disconnected Kings, they too would benefit from the reweaving of soul into the world. We can all see that the richest man alive is deeply miserable, and inflicting that misery upon marginalized people in devastating material ways. Our current definition of wealth is empty and hollows out the souls who have the misfortune of acquiring it. This is immediately evident in so many aspects of our current systems collapse.

Systemic collapse presents opportunity for systemic change.

In a re-enchanted worldview, where psyche and soul are not solely confined to the body, we can understand that seemingly small actions can influence the whole. Re-patterning our lives to harmonize with the cycles that hold us, planting soul back into the garden, reconnecting with the world as enchanted, ensouled being, these are invitations for us as individuals, and they reconnect us into a way of being that is collective and interconnect.

A way of being that can make a church out of the world, itself.

🌑♊︎ reading: the earth has secrets to share

Here in Michigan, the earth is alive and buzzing, butterflies dance during the day and fireflies sparkle at night. June is the time that I fell in love with nature in the midwest, and that love is alive for me now, thank goodness, because the world in this moment is confounding and heartbreaking in equal measure.

The spread for this month wants you to fall in love with nature again, too, over and over again. What flowers are you crushing on right now? I’m a little heartbroken that peony season is behind us, but for me, these funky dianthus are catching my eye. I grew them from seed a couple years back, but they are really coming into their own this year.

I began this dark moon reading thinking about the difference between the 7 of Pentacles and the 6 of Cups. In the 7, a man looks upon his thriving pentacle plant despondently, his doubt and concern matching the gray of the sky around him. To me, in this spread, he feels weighed down by responsibility.

There is so much maintenance and care and tending involved in being alive.

And some of that is brought on ourselves, through a dominance paradigm that teaches us that every aspect of our earth can be commodified, tamed, and controlled. It’s as if the centerpiece of our spread this month is exhausted from his hard work trying to produce his fruits, and daydreaming about the days when he was a child whose only earthly concerns were playing with flowers.

We have a lot of work to do if we are to get this world back to a thriving state, but what if we don’t have to do it all alone? What if the beauty and buzzing surrounding us in this season also has ideas about what is needed? We have been indoctrinated for generations into a relationship of control and domination with the wild.

How might our connection to earth shift through a collaborative stewardship model, instead of taming and subjugating? How might hearing the earth's wisdom transform our ideas of wealth and success?

To me, it feels like the Kings in this spread are lonely at the top. The work and responsibility in the dominance paradigm is isolating and exhausting. So perhaps we need to take the weight of this world off of our shoulders, and begin standing side by side with the beauty and fearsome wildness around us. Hear the wisdom on offer, when we listen instead of lead with control. I’m excited to see where this spread takes us this month, but for now,

I think it wants us to get closer to the earth, so close that we can hear her secrets. And so open, she agrees to reveal them.

🌕 Scorpio Moon Reflection: Braving the Torch of Our Rage

The cards for this cycle are Strength crossed by the Page of Wands, King of Cups, 3 of Cups Rx, the Tower, 5 of Wands. Recreate this spread while you listen, sit with it a spell.

The Scorpio full moon illuminated the role of rage in this spread, for me.

A millennia of oppression of our mothers and daughters has brought us to this moment in time. Their rage lives deep inside of us, alongside the memory that societies weren't always hierarchical power structures.

Our blood and bones remember how to live in partnership with each other and all of life.

The Tower falls when we each find the courage to integrate this deep, ancestral rage. Emotional intelligence and self-compassion (King of Cups) helps to shed the false selves conditioned by the patriarchy. Our worth and value are not determined by our looks, our child-bearing abilities, or our usefulness to the white supremacist colonial imperial patriarchal project. This conditioning has shaped us through generations, and it’s time to burn it all away.

Jupiter in Cancer is showing us two approaches to care: one that centers all of humanity as equal, and one that seeks to protect the self through the demonization of the other.

In her research study, Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust, Kristen Renwick Monroe identified these two approaches as core to the moral psychology of the oppressors, the bystanders, and the rescuers, or individuals who sought to protect Jews and other victims of the Nazis. Bystanders and oppressors strongly identified with an in-group, and saw victims as members of an out-group. Rescuers, on the other hand, had an expansive view of humanity, seeing all people as deserving of safety, rights, belonging, and care. Renwick Monroe relates the oppressor-bystander ideology to an individual’s own fear and sense of victimhood.

Cancer is a sign that knows its own vulnerability, and seeks to protect itself, this can be done through a hardening of the shell, or through collective care.

As we see before us, the grievance of victimhood combined with the spite towards the “out-group” of immigrants, people of color, trans and queer folks, and anyone who doesn’t support the over-arching white christian nationalist project of the state, results in the violence of ethnic cleansing and is pitting neighbor against neighbor, today. That old question, of what we would do if we were alive during the holocaust, can be answered through this lens of care and belonging. Do we feel the need to protect ourself by siding with the oppressor against a so-called enemy? Or do we root into our shared humanity, even if it makes us as individuals more vulnerable.

No one is protected unless we are all protected.

It takes emotional intelligence to brave confrontation with our fears, to root into shared humanity and compassion for all life, to protect our neighbors (King of Cups). The life-affirming and goddess-worshipping societies of our deep past are the model, we remember, we remember.

So long as these hierarchical, violent systems exist, there will always be another out-group. Braving the torches of our fear, our rage, our grief, we can light a new way, a very old way. The Pages never know quite how to be skillful with their suit, but they have the audacity to try and the desire to learn. I am looking at these figures in the 5 of Wands as us, many Pages, carrying the torch of our rage outwards, saying no to injustice, to imperial violence here and abroad, no to patriarchal bullshit and oppression.

All of those Towers burnt in the blaze of our brilliant, radical care.

In this reading I reference the book The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler and the Emerald Podcast by Josh Schrei. Music, as always, by Beth Bradfish. Thank you for reading and listening. May you be brave and bold in your care.

An Aries Initiation: What Howls to Be Born?

We are well into Taurus season, now, with many planets lingering in Aries, which has been the site of so much activity this past couple of weeks.

Are you feeling the spark? Are you letting your sacred rage guide you? Are you learning to embrace the chaos?

The spread for this month offers much to work with, Strength crossed by the Page of Wands, King of Cups below, 3 of Cups reversed left, The Tower right, and 5 of Wands above.

Rooting into emotional intelligence (King of Cups) and our hard-won practices of regulation (Strength) can serve our hopeful visions, while things crash, bend, and break around us.

With Uranus in Gemini, things are speeding up and the chaos of our information environment is becoming clear (Tower, 5 of Wands). How can you embrace change (Tower), and stay rooted in compassion and care (King of Cups), without getting lost in the undertow?

We are living through a time of massive change, and at times it feels like too much to process.

The time for superficial relationships, hollow parties, and meaningless busy-ness is behind us (3 of Cups Rx). There is too much at stake now, too much exposed and revealed. To go on with business at usual, now, when so much is exposed and crumbling, is to miss this moment entirely.

What helps you tend to your fears, grief, and anger, so that the fiery, brave part of you can step forward, with a wild vision glinting in their eye (Page of Wands)?

Our work of self-knowing and healing isn't occurring despite the turbulence around us, but in conversation with it. A constant push and pull between self-steadying and outward-facing activity, between grieving the horror, devastation, violence, and injustice, and saying the thing, hearing the call, jumping at the chance to tend to the wound, with whatever medicine you have.

The time is now to stay steady and be brave, friends. Love and reparent the wild creatures within you so they can guide us through the madness.

The more we are regulated and embodied, the more we know how to act and respond in a way that is not our conditioning, but instead, our more authentic being – bold, individual, full of rage, and embodied.

Aren’t you full of rage? I am, I am fucking OVER IT! I am so over pretending that politeness and respectability is more important than shifting a culture where genocides are met with shrugs, where rape academies exist, where Epstein files are covered up, where the billionaire class can kill millions through “cost-cutting” measures, and still be lauded by the media as some sort of geniuses. Where politicians feign shock at political violence as if they haven’t spent a decade stoking the fires. As if American children haven’t encountered far worse for decades.

The normalization of fascism, violence and abuse, the weaponization of nationalism, religion and patriarchy, the marginalization of difference, the devaluation of science, the overt eugenics and conspiracism, it all enrages me! And I hope it enrages you, too.

Because we are being called to birth something from this rage. A vision of what can be, instead. Your vision doesn’t have to be huge and all-encompassing. It doesn’t have to be a single thing at all. The notion that we have to launch a huge initiative to change these systems has its place, sure, but is also perhaps a byproduct of being conditioned by these systems.

Instead, it will take millions of micro-actions, millions of tiny decisions, rooted in collective care, in compassion, in love, in a yearning for a world in which everyone is loved, valued, and respected.

In which everyone is safer from violence, has their needs met, in which these horrors guide us to ensure they can never happen again. A world in which the patriarchy is as reviled as the Nazi’s used to be.

What is howling to be born, in you?

🌓 The Shadow Leads the Way: ♈︎ Slow Tarot

Slow Tarot spread for Pisces - Aries season, The Tower Rx crossed by the Emperor Rx, 5 of Cups, The Star, 3 of Discs Rx, 9 of Swords Rx

The mad king is a symptom, not the disease itself. The Tower reversed crossed by the Emperor reversed feels like the disease to me, the destructive and dominant paradigm that a few power-hungry, violent men are currently perpetuating.

The Tower often represents sudden and forceful change. In its reversed state, we know that this is an ongoing, drawn out process: of systems collapsing, of war and genocide, of the structural violence of fascism, ethnic cleansing, and systemic neglect. This is being carried out by the reversed Emperor, power’s shadow, the rot of patriarchy, white supremacy, and christian nationalism.

The dis-ease is evident and flourishing, its impacts less so. Some are obvious, some are becoming known to us, and others rise as threats and catastrophic ruminations. Many impacts can be ignored until…until when? Until their shockwaves are rolling through the threadbare systems holding our world together. We occupy this precipice, the vast majority of us wanting to stop the wars, to ease the suffering, to redirect resources from endless profiteering to the nurturing of life. It is so devastating to know that despite this, the shockwaves will continue to come.

The Five of Cups and Nine of SwordsRx speak to our grief, fear, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of such ruination. Grief and loss are integral components of life, and yet our society has mostly siloed and institutionalized these experiences, turning them into outliers. Most of us carry acute discomfort around grief and death, not sure what to say or do when it comes near. Common wisdom says grief has linear stages that we work through, to get to another side. We are told it is a temporary dark period, but there are steps and results if you put in the work. Productivity culture strikes again, and we all suffer for it, because, in one way or another, we are all grieving.

Our grief discomfort extends to other shadowy realms: violence, trauma, coercion, oppression, shame, complexity, nuance… When we internalize that these experiences should be linear, we are more likely to compartmentalize our feelings and shove them into the shadows.

Shadows erupt when they are suppressed.

This happens on a personal level, when we deny and aim to control our emotions and our nature, sometimes to devastating effect. And it happens at the collective level, when histories are submerged and denied, in full or in part.

This denial is necessary for the linear path of progress that we have been sold as paradigm. For the world to keep producing, it’s always forward, never back.

But we are cyclical beings, our nature is spirallic.

Our grief and pain are not shadows that we walk through and leave behind, they are experiences that change our shape as they are integrated into our being.

I often think about reversed cards as directing our attention internally instead of outside of ourselves.

The guidance contained in this spread, to me, is an invitation into exploring the ways we try to dominate, suppress, and control our grief.

To shift away from the destructive paradigm of modernity, we have to be willing to inhabit our fullness of being, including our grief, our pain, our nonlinearity with all its shadows and strange creatures.

Understanding that we arrived to this point, in part, due to our shared denial and suppression of pain, grief, trauma, and all that’s unspeakable, what might change when we accept and embrace these beings inside of ourselves?

The Star is a card of radical hope in the aftermath of loss, of regeneration and replenishment. The Star gently reminds us of our dreams that feel unreachable. Hope and grief are intertwined, the Star whispers.

To create space for the fullness of your hopes, you might try creating space for the fullness of your grief, two vessels pouring forth never-ending streams.

The Star

Grief feels bottomless, as if it will swallow us whole. But if you’ve ever let yourself grieve deeply, maybe you’ve experienced the grace that can be found in those depths.

Grace is the healing touch of the infinite, the remembrance that we are not alone, that instead we are united with the mystery: god, goddess, source, the universe, whatever you call all that is. The mystery contains life and death, healing and suffering. In partnership with the mystery, all of it helps to build the way to grace.

The Three of Discs is a card that depicts the building of a sacred structure. In this spread, I’m imagining the three figures of grief (5 of Cups), hope (the Star), and fear (9 of Swords) as our builders. Turning towards our shadows as allies and guides can help us to overcome the paralyzing terror of this moment we are in (9 of Swords).

It is not about dominating our fears and grief, but about welcoming them in, hearing their wisdom, and through this process, learning to inhabit a more spacious, sacred, fullness of being.

Not experiences to get through or emotions to overcome, but partners, allies, and guides toward something greater. We cannot build a more compassionate world if we cannot turn towards our own grief and pain.

Maybe our work in this time is to find places within ourselves for our grief to live, and through this process, we work towards building communities that accommodate and tend to grief, loss, pain, and trauma as part of their sacred fabric, instead of burdens.

Looking at the Star I am thinking, life always finds a way.

I know that our essence as being is not rooted in force and domination, but in love and nurturance of life’s abundance. Reckoning with all that these structural distortions have cost us, and all that we fear they will continue to cost us, helps to guide us home.

Thank you for reading, may you find tender ways to welcome your fear, pain, hope, and grief this week.

May this tenderness with self lead you to grace.

Dark Moon in Pisces: Our Grief Reshapes the World

The cards are The Tower Rx crossed by the Emperor Rx (center), 5 of Cups (below), the Star (left), 3 of Pentacles Rx (right), 9 of Swords Rx (above).

A new spread for the new moon in Pisces, that carries us through Aries season and the beginning of spring. Music by the great Beth Bradfish.

The two upright cards in this spread are watery, grieving cards, the 5 of Cups and the Star.

Allowing ourselves to feel grief for all we've lost and all the destruction we are witnessing returns us home, to our essence, and helps us to remember our radical hopes for another world, one that cares for and nourishes life.

This is our birthright and essence, to love and care for one another, but to return there we have to reckon with and dismantle the over-culture of dominion and patriarchal violence, centered in the core of this spread (the Tower Rx & the Emperor Rx). We are called to work within ourselves as part of this reckoning, to explore our relationship to the myth of toxic individualism (9 of Swords Rx), and find ways to release ourselves from its destructive bonds. This personal and collective deconditioning can return us to more communal states of care, interconnection, and relationality with all life.

I will be working with this spread all month, with prompts and a personal spread for you to go deeper with these collective offerings. Thank you for listening.

The King of Swords meets the world as it is: closing square reading.

This is a reflection on the Slow tarot spread for eclipse season, from the Aquarius dark moon (Feb 17, 2026) to the Pisces dark moon (March 18, 2026).

As the moon wanes to dark again, I return to this spread in the context of all that's occurred these past few weeks. The two of wands crossed by the hermit seems to highlight the tension between the world we have and the world we so desperately need. The Seven of Swords and King of Swords offer to ways of responding to the present: evading the truth or acknowledging it, head on, with discernment.

Astrologically, we are in a time (Saturn + Neptune) where structures can dissolve and reform. Acknowledging and honoring all of the truth of this present moment, tending to our grief for the world we have, helps us to keep an open heart. From this place, we can better seed a world rooted in care and love for life.

May it be so. May we embody the Queen of Pentacles, nurturing the life that is here, rooted in our expansive love for it all.

Lunar Eclipse Reflection: from 1989 to now 🌕

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.” – Rebecca Solnit

The Saturn-Neptune conjunction that we are living through concludes a cycle that begin in 1989, the year the “World Wide Web” was conceived at CERN. Saturn and Neptune joining in the sky is often described as a time of disillusionment and bubbles bursting. Saturn governs the structures and confines of our material reality, and Neptune as an archetype aligns more with the divine ocean of oneness that exists beyond the world of form. When these planets meet, as they are now, all that connects and divides us has the potential to transform. In 1989 their meeting in earth sign Capricorn coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall, among other revolutionary movements. Uranus, the outer planet governing disruption and technology, joined them in Capricorn at that time. From then to now, our world has dramatically transformed through the widespread adoption and innovation of internet-based tech, beginning with that vision of an online network connecting all of humanity.

For many millennials, we were raised in a fever dream of techno-optimism, and became among the first to adopt these new tools as they emerged. Accelerations in tech during this time often aligned with turning points in the Neptune-Saturn cycle, such as Mac’s personal computer launching in 1998 (opening square) and the iPhone in 2007 (Saturn-Neptune opposition). In 2016, the cycle’s closing square, the real-world consequences of this new technology became more obvious through the US presidential election with heavy influence from “fake news” and internet bot-farms.

Now, in 2026, many of us are deeply aware the dire and fearsome consequences of tech run amok: our government contracting artificial intelligence companies to bolster its endless thirst for war and ceaseless quest for total surveillance of its own people.

Driverless cars impeding first responders ability to save mass shooting victims. Our own degraded attention spans, fascism shaped by twitter, betting markets on war crimes, and so many other absurdities and horrors.

This is not the future we were promised, but it is one we were warned about. It is easy to linger in disbelief, it is more painful and terrifying to accept that this is our gruesome reality. This confluence of late stage capitalism, unchecked technological advancement, neoliberal imperialism, and aggrieved white supremacist patriarchy have landed us in a world that is hardly recognizable and whose contemplation easily leads one to madness, rage, escapism, and despair.

This is the disillusionment of the Saturn-Neptune cycle laid bare, and the return meeting of these planets tells us another seed is being planted, right now.

Knowing what time it is on our cosmic clock, as another cycle begins, my heart is heavy. So long as we are held captive in the imaginations of ruthless, egomaniacal billionaires, finding the way through this morass to a living, thriving future feels like speculative fiction. The overarching story is a continuation of the violent patriarchal death cult that has held humanity hostage for centuries. But there are other places to look, too, away from that storyline, and into the crevices, crooks, and cracks from which old ways and new ways are sprouting, still.

Halfway through the cycle of this spread, I hear it asking,

what helps you stay present and attuned to this world, as it is right now? What lifeforms and life ways help you to practice and cultivate hope in the future? What are you seeing more clearly, in this moment, about the world? From this vantage point, where are you willing to travel? What seed are you seeking to nurture into being?

The Lovers card at the base of this spread invites us into a foundation of love – for ourselves, for each other, and for the world. To truly love a world that is being so abused and tormented by our systems is to have our hearts broken again and again. And so we try to distract ourselves from this love, and from the truth of what our societal structures our doing to our world (seven of swords). To love the world is to confront our grief for all that we cannot save, and to acknowledge our own complicity in the systems that are brutalizing this planet.

What would you do differently if you immersed yourself in your love for the world?

The Hermit knows how to walk the path where no one’s gone before. It’s his courage that is necessary, to overturn the technofascist imagination and find our way home to the abundant, thriving future that is our birthright. The Hermit walks a lonely path but this is not work we can do alone. The King of Swords is the clarity of what moral responsibility looks like for each of us. The clarity that the world can be otherwise, if we nurture these seeds. The Queen of Pentacles balances our ability to tend to our own needs with our midwifing of the dream. The King of Swords is clear about the treacherous path ahead, but together, we can find a way.

These technological innovations could be wielded so differently, towards our most pressing crises of climate change, poverty, and social inequality, instead of in profit-driven domination. A reorientation of our systems toward the cultivation and preservation of life seems far-fetched, but so did robot wars 37 years ago.

What seed are you planting, in this gap between the world we have and the world we want? How can your everyday being nurture this seed into the world?

Alysa Liu is love in motion: ♒︎ – ♓︎ 🌓

The Lovers card is the root of this eclipse season’s slow tarot spread.

“When we are taught that safety always lies with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect–to find ourselves in the other.” – bell hooks, All About Love

In the dark moon reading unveiling this slow tarot spread for the season, I spoke about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s definition of reciprocity in relation to the Lovers card. In her essay the Serviceberry, RWK describes reciprocity as the act of keeping a gift in motion, ensuring abundance spreads instead of accumulates or stagnates. This engagement in reciprocity requires us to acknowledge and tend to our own individual gifts, so that we can brings these gifts into the thriving constellation of life.

Through this loving generosity of self, we are transformed, and so is our world.

Alysa Liu’s joyous figure skating at the Olympics, and her authentic love for her competitors following her performance, is a beautiful representation of authentic gift-sharing.

As has been widely discussed, Liu walked away from a lifetime of figure skating as a teenager, only to return after a two-year break on her own terms. She showed up to the olympics completely authentic, not focused on winning but on sharing her love of her art form. Her boldness and joy subverts tradition in the figure skating world, in which competitors are usually poised and staid, sharing polite smiles with their opponents, if anything. Alysa, instead, radiates warmth, ease, and above all, LOVE – for her sport, her artistry, her teammates, and her opponents.

She showed the world that opposition and dominance are not the only ways to be powerful.

Her authentic, loving expression of self is more powerful, more earth-shattering than any of that stodgy old competitive tradition.

This all happened under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, a slow coming together of two antithetical archetypes that became exact on Saturday, February 20, and will continue to influence us for months, as they have for the past year. These planets meet every 36 or so years, with Saturn, a planet of structure, material reality, tradition, and consequence joining Neptune, a planet that represents the highly spiritual notion of our inherent oneness, a concept deeply connected to love.

When these two planets meet, a new cycle begins, our collective reality and underlying ideals shift, alongside much that connects us, including technology and our shared understanding of humanity.

bell hooks was born under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Libra 1953, and carries that signature in her 5th house of self expression. In her lifetime, hooks expanded our understanding of the structures of oppression, and she also expanded our understanding of love. She wrote many books about love and loving, a beautiful, soul gift to this aching world of ours. And she defines a love ethic, which is a way of rooting our action towards others in love. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who was also born under the same Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Libra, brings us home to love as the engine of what she terms the gift economy, which centers reciprocity instead of profit.

Reciprocity is a collective orientation, and individual for each one of us. Alysa Liu swelled so many hearts this week with her gifts, which will keep moving through the collective as others are inspired to show up more authentically and more loving toward their so-called opponents after witnessing her.

May the world being birthed under the extraordinary astrology of this week be one rooted in love,

dreamt into being by the insights of two women who carry within them the vision of more loving structures, bell hooks and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Finally, I can’t resist but include Alysa Liu’s ebullient performance here. Of course I checked, and she has her Saturn in Leo and Neptune in Aquarius, building to opposition. How fitting her light would shine so brightly this week.

Love is the Root and the Way: Slow Tarot for Eclipse Season 🌑

Slow Tarot spread to carry us through this month’s eclipse season, Aquarius ~ Pisces: Two of Wands crossed by the Hermit, the Lovers, Seven of Swords, King of Swords, Queen of Pentacles.

The weeks encompassing eclipse season are profoundly disruptive. This month’s eclipses coincide with the highly anticipated Saturn-Neptune exact conjunction, as well as a Mercury retrograde. While the turbulence and confusion of the present moment may persist, revelations are also bound to penetrate the fog.

We may not have clarity about what’s happening around us, but we can root into our interdependence; love is the lantern that lights the way. 

The spread for this season is centered on the Two of Wands crossed by the Hermit. Both of these cards illustrate vast horizons, with the 2W figure looking out over the globe he clutches, and the Hermit mid-trek on the mountaintop, led by his glowing lantern. The question these cards contain, for me, is

where are we finding our purpose, as the world swirls and convulses around us? 

The Seven of Swords and King of Swords, the horizontal line of the spread, ground us further into this question. These cards seem to be demonstrating two important orientations to this moment. The Seven of Swords is subversive, a thief stealing away with an enemy’s weapons. Resistance to deadly occupying forces and the flourishing of technofascism is of critical need. Equally as critical is rooting into our collective sense of purpose, and the vision of the alternative world we are growing. The King of Swords is this visioner, grounding us in the stillness of knowing our place and purpose amidst the storm. 

So what is this emerging vision, what is nourishing and supportive enough for us to root into?

This is the Lovers, a card of right relationship, reciprocity, and authentic being-ness. In this world, each and every one of us has a purposeful role to play, to keep the gift of life in motion.

This is the glory of the world held in the hands of the Two of Wands. Gift and possibility, gift and responsibility.

Every present moment an opportunity to show up and honor this world in all its being-ness. The rising card of this spread, the earth mother herself, Queen of Pentacles, shows us nourishing the seed of the world we are planting in each moment. Rooting into the Lovers, a love ethic, an ethic of right relationship that must be nurtured through the actions of us all for life to flourish, for an alternative to the extractive death cult of white supremacist patriarchal capitalist imperialism. 

The Saturn-Neptune conjunction that peaks on February 20th is an archetypal and symbolic world birthing, occurring at 0º Aries, the birthplace of spring.

This time we are currently living through is potent and revolutionary; with real possibility of dissolving faulty and corrupt structures, and finding our way home to a more loving world.

This takes a clarity of values and  a willingness to unlearn all of the ways these systems have conditioned within us (King of Swords). It also takes the determination and devotion of the Hermit, the will to traverse the unknown and unfamiliar, with soulful purpose as our guide.  

This otherworld, one rooted in love and care for each other, is a precious dream we can hold in our hands in this moment.

We each have a role to play in its nourishment, from seed to shoot to thriving ecology. Grounding into this vision helps us to act with integrity when our Seven of Swords moment comes, and helps us to sustain the daily actions of care that keep this world healthy and growing (Queen of Discs).

I will be working with this spread all month, follow along on Patreon for free, or sign up for email updates straight to your inbox when new reflections emerge. Wishing you ease and loving connection to orient toward amidst the storm.  

the page of cups asks: how do we hold all of this grief? slow tarot capricorn

The spread for this month, drawn on the Capricorn New Moon: 3 of Discs reversed, crossed by the Ace of Swords, 2 of Discs, 6 of Swords, Page of Cups, King of Swords reversed.

Listen to the initial reading of this spread here, from the new moon in Capricorn.

Last weekend, federal agents murdered another American, Alex Pettri, on a Minneapolis street. I write this with a heavy heart that weeps for Alex’s loved ones, who not only are thrust into the unthinkable grief of losing someone to violence, but also have to defend his honor against their own government, who immediately moved to denigrate his memory. Alex was, by all accounts, a kind soul dedicated to service in this life. The type of service he demonstrated in his final moments is what we are seeing flourish across Minneapolis in sub-zero temperatures: an incredibly organized and widespread movement of regular, kind people taking action to defend their neighbors from kidnapping by the federal forces occupying their city, and undeniably risking their lives to do so.

The indifferent brutality and abject lies defending such horror from our highest levels of government is heartbreaking and terrifying.

Lines are being drawn between reality and violent authoritarianism. Many of us have been trying to draw these lines for years, decades, but the choice point has finally arrived. On one side is a white nationalist, fascist project that will execute peaceful observers if it deems them obstructive to its goal of ethnic cleansing. On the other side is humanity, a collective swell of nonhierarchical organized resistance, the blossoming of a networked web of mutual aid and protection, fueled by collective grief and outrage, but also love and acknowledgment of our shared humanity, of our right to belong, and of the value of each life.

Minneapolis is doing more than staving off an unjust and unnecessary government occupation, they are showing us the way forward.

Maybe they are going so far as to demonstrate the use of different tools than those that built this house, in the famous words of Audre Lorde.

Her well-known quote, “we can not dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools,” is something I’ve been contemplating as I consider this reversed King of Swords. Reading the reports of courage and solidarity from Minnesota this week, and witnessing a city overwhelmed with bodies during their general strike on Friday, it’s as if an alternative to our current power structures is stirring.

Revisiting the speech which birthed this quote, I found so much wisdom that aligns with this spread and this moment. The context is critical. Audre is speaking at a feminist conference, where Black and Lesbian women have been siloed to a single panel, marginalized from the bulk of the collective discussion. Audre is pointing out how the oppressive dynamics of patriarchy are being replicated — consciously or unconsciously — in the very place seeking to oppose this system.

We internalize our oppression and bring it with us, even in the ways we strive to become free from it (6 of Swords).

And so Audre says,

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”

When I read these words, I cannot help but think of the way difference is being weaponized and exploited at this moment. Right-wing politics encourages contempt of difference to accrue power and increase oppression of the marginalized. This has been framed in response to diversification efforts that began to flourish in recent decades – which, as Lorde points out, mostly strove for superficial rather than structural change. The institutional and corporate response to the murder of George Floyd and so many others was an accelerated version of this, in which many of the same organizations now funding fascism moved to increase visible difference in May and June of 2020.

These tepid efforts feel like a fever dream today, only five-ish years later, because they never even pretended to step outside of the master’s tools. The true dismantling of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal imperialism, so necessary if we mean to survive as a species, is a restructuring of our systems to hold difference as the necessary means for creation, in the words of Lorde. This is a restructuring from hierarchy to interdependence (3 of Discs), and Minnesota is courageously and righteously showing us one way of using different tools.

As I read Audre’s words, I see the necessary polarities in the 2 of Discs, the potential of creativity in the reversed three, and the Ace of Swords as our liberation tool. All of us, but white people in particular, class-privileged people in particular, have to undertake the arduous and discomforting work of heeding this call.

We have to truly be willing to sacrifice our own privileges and positions – institutional and otherwise – to dismantle the systems that created them.

It is time for us to question and interrogate all of our assumptions and worldviews, unconsciously internalized as a means of safe passage through an unsafe world (Six of Swords). This is ongoing work of self-reflection and unlearning, self-reflection and letting go. The Page of Cups shows that we can do this with love, curiosity, and even imaginative play sometimes. We do not need to punish or abandon our parts of self that have not known better until now, for that is also a master’s tool. Carceralism is a foundational pillar of this oppressive system, and a practice we in the US have been taught to uphold and internalize all our lives.

But punishment and ostracism do not change others or our own parts of self, only love, belonging, and acceptance do.

This two of discs is also making me think about the opposing sides deepening right now. There are the lying, murderous fascists, and there are all of the people who oppose them. We do not have to achieve ideological purity and universal agreement, the only thing we have to agree on is that we need to stop our neighbors from being murdered and killed, and yes, that means putting our lives on the line.

In finding this common cause and endlessly pursuing it, together, we are also building a transformed world, using our fresh tools.

The truth of our interdependence feels so alive right now. I am so bolstered by hope witnessing the acts of love, care, community protection, safeguarding, and service happening in Minneapolis. Neighbors opening their homes, sharing resources, building networks of solidarity to support one another through a door to door onslaught of “show me your papers” fascist violence.

The only way to beat this system is to build a network of interdependence, rooted in our shared humanity; this is an ethic of love. There is no returning to an earlier form of the systems and structures that brought us to this breaking point.

The only way out is through the deep discomfort of molting, shedding, and transforming.

We don’t have to master another way of being right now, we only have to practice it.

What does a system look like that acknowledges and respects the interdependence of all beings?

How can we return to our home, there?

Questions to sit with, to venture into, to return to, as this month unfolds.

waves of change ~ slow tarot 🌑 28º Capricorn

3 of Discs Rx, crossed by Ace of Swords, surrounding by 2 of Discs (below), 6 of Swords (left), Page of Cups (right), King of Swords Rx (top) 

Our collective has reached an impasse, and this year promises some breakthroughs. The road ahead is treacherous, as demonstrated by the first weeks of the year. But within this morass of state-sanctioned terror, we are witnessing the adaptation of the collective into loving, protective shapes.

There is an eruption of righteous anger and the emergence of something else, too.

As the old system breaks down, we are awash with possibility.

This spread is inviting us to dismantle the limitations that our culture has wrought within our own imaginations. The collapsing systems of modernism refute and segregate nature, but this duality is an illusion. Nature shows us the ever-present mystery of life’s ability to adapt and evolve.

It is time for us to take new and remembered forms, reconnecting our collective to the mysteries of the enchanted world, and finding experimental paths through the intractable tension of the present.

these depths will not consume us ~ slow tarot 🌑 28º Sagittarius

This spread is carrying us through the turn of the year, a time of rest, reflection, and renewal. The Seven of Swords is crossed by the Moon, below is the 4 of Pentacles, to the left is the Six of Pentacles, to the right is the Queen of Cups, and above is Strength. Listen to the reading above to hear my perspective on these card positions.

What’s clear to so many of us, living through this time of crisis-collapse, is that the old modernist stories are myths.

The myth of endless growth, the myth of the human-nature divide, the myth of the prosperity doctrine, the myth of philanthropy. These myths have led us to a time of cascading crises and moral turpitude. People are afraid for their own safety, and in a culture of such weak community ties, we are willing to let our neighbors suffer in an effort to protect ourselves. Deep in our bones, we know that these strategies are futile in the face of the compounding collapse. No one is safe until we are all safe; no one is safe in a culture with such little belonging.

The Seven of Swords is a card of risk-taking.

A trickster-disrupter steals into an enemy camp and runs off with their weapons, dropping them along the way. The Moon crossing this card asks,

What are we willing to risk in a time of such confusion and uncertainty?

If we take risks based on the values and stories of the overculture, we are risking the safety of others for our own. We are okay with the vast disparities in wealth, resource distribution, status, and security – divides that appear to be widening daily. We are putting our heads down, holding our resources tightly, and hoping the crisis doesn’t come knocking, but it is already here.

In a culture like ours, we’ve grown accustomed to limiting our ability to truly feel the pain and suffering of our world. We harden, tighten, and grasp at what is ours (4 of discs), instead of opening to the horror and grief that results from our societal systems. So long as we continue to operate in this way, our current crises will continue to compound. The system ignores suffering and death, but we can no longer ignore it, we must engage in the work of grief so that we might open our hearts to this moment, in its entirety.

The Queen of Cups is a grief worker.

Her lidded vessel illustrates the treasures that arise from engagement with our deepest caverns of self. When we tend to our own pain with compassion and care, we are able to show up to the suffering of the world with that same tenderness. We know that these depths will not break or consume us, but instead serve a connective function; tributaries flowing through the darkness. In our shared pain, we find communion, and we find meaning. We find reason to take bold risks.

Strength is a card of nervous system regulation.

We do not tame a lion through brute force, but from the softness that can only come from a deep knowing of our own triggers and how to stay grounded in times of stress. If you have ever witnessed someone de-escalate a person in crisis, you know the feeling of this soft strength, and how skillful and embodied it is.

Disregulation is contagious. Social media companies have built entire algorithms to foment outrage because it creates engagement. After a decade of this, the current US government has adopted trolling as its official messaging style, delighting in the outrage generated by their abject cruelty, state violence, and white supremacist memes.

Polycrisis is overwhelming to the nervous system, resulting in hyperarousal, disassociation, and collapse (fight, flight, and freeze). In these states, we are confused and reactionary, unable to find the presence to make clear decisions. The astrological weather of 2026 indicates heightened and intense energies, a likely deepening of the polycrisis, and an organized response to broken systems.

In this moment, what is most needed, is for us to deepen our self-care practices, including grief work, and being with the raw pain of this moment in time.

When we no longer fear or avoid the wildness of our own emotions, we a better able to stay regulated and grounded through the wildness of any moment. Safety cannot come through external means alone. By all means, keep your go-bag packed, but don’t neglect nurturing the security that can only be found through greater embodiment and emotional presence.

The promise of this year is that a new way of engaging with our violent systems and toxic discourse will emerge, disrupting the tension of polarity. The Seven of Swords is this trickster genius principle at work, and the Moon reminds us that the duality at work in the world also exists within ourselves. For us to work with the trickster potential of the coming (Uranus in Gemini) cycle, we must be embodied and attuned to our self, and the coursing tides of our emotions.

Attuning to the needs of our own nervous system is a necessary and radical act in this moment.

Our ability to self-regulate is essential as we navigate the year ahead, in all its fiery potential and change-laden promise. Let the Queen of Cups connect you to your own emotional sovereignty by communing with your own pain, and with the grief of the world.

Bearing witness to all that has been lost can break open our hearts to fight for all that remains. Instead of letting our inner lions overrule us, may we stand side by side with them, emboldened and empowered to meet what lies ahead with clear heads and open, tender hearts.

betwixt and between ~ slow tarot 🌑 28º Scorpio

This spread shows Temperance crossed by the Ace of Swords, between the 4 of Wands to the left and the World to the right. Beneath sits the King of Wands on his fiery throne, and above sits the Page of Swords.

A spread to carry us from dark moon to dark moon, beginning with the new moon at 28 Scorpio, conjunct Mercury, on November 20, 2025. This spread is meant for us to sit with throughout this season, coming back to us as this accelerated time in the world shifts, and us with it.

My dear friend and collaborator Beth Bradfish created the music for this episode as she listened to the dark moon reading, what a gift!

This spread shows Temperance crossed by the Ace of Swords, between the 4 of Wands to the left and the World to the right. Beneath sits the King of Wands on his fiery throne, and above sits the Page of Swords.

The feeling I get from this spread, during this Scorpio dark moon, is this betwixt and between feeling. We are in a liminal space, between a world structure that no longer works for us and another struggling to be born. Like the Temperance angel we may have one foot in earth and one foot in water, what Ace of Swords moment might this Mercury cazimi bring?

Embracing this in-between state is more important than figuring it all out right now.

If you listen to the reading above, I’d love to know how it lands for you, and what you’re seeing in the cards and feeling in the world right now. I’ll return to this spread as the moon moves around the sky, and add to the resources below as things happen that feel resonant. Come back by when you feel like slowing down into the present.

🌓 first quarter square: pisces 🌓

11-27-2025

As I sit with this slow tarot spread, I am drawn to how it mirrors the collective astrology of 2025 and 2026.

2025 is a year of transition. The slow-moving outer planets Neptune ♆ and Uranus ♅ began their journeys from earth and water to air and fire signs. All of the outer planets move retrograde for part of the year from our earthly vantage point, so while we experienced Uranus and Neptune entering into Gemini (air) and Aries (fire) earlier this summer, now they have both moved back into Taurus (earth) and Pisces (water), respectively. In 2026, they will re-enter Aries and Gemini, where they will remain for several years. Next summer, Jupiter leaves Cancer (water) to enter the fire sign of Leo, at which time, all five outer, transpersonal planets will be in air and fire signs (Pluto in Aquarius, Saturn and Neptune in Aries, Uranus in Gemini, and Jupiter in Leo). This is an unprecedented, massive shift of energy, nothing like it has occurred in recent history, or will again. We’ve been feeling its onset for a couple of years, and we will soon be living it.

Amidst this great change, Saturn, the planet of material reality and consequence, is meeting Neptune, the planet of formlessness, dissolution, spirituality, idealism, and interconnectedness. These planets conjoin every 36 years, aligning with moments that bend our collective perception of reality: the fall of the Berlin wall, the Red Scares, and moment after moment of uprising and revolution. In February of 2026, Saturn and Neptune will meet at 0º Aries, the point of the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. If the zodiac has a birth point, this is it. Astrologically speaking, we may be in for an awakening, the dawn of a new day.

Then, in late July of 2026, Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter will all arrive at the 4th degree of their new zodiacal home. At this time, they will form harmonious angles (sextiles and trines) to one another, forming a shape known as “Barbault’s Basket,” named after the famed French astrologer Andre Barbault.

Barbault devoted his career to the practice of collective (mundane) astrology, which emphasizes the study of the outer planets. In 2011, he predicted the world would experience a pandemic in 2020. Barbault saw this rare and evocative configuration of 2026 as a possible moment of evolution. Combined with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, Barbault believed these arrangements could herald a more enlightened world, emphasizing themes of progress and advancement for the earth and its inhabitants.

Andre Barbault died in 2019. He didn’t see the pandemic he predicted emerge or the polycrisis that heightened alongside it. 2025 feels like a world that is at its breaking point. From where I sit, fascism and state violence are more entrenched than ever, corruption is rampant, and systems are captured by incompetent and malicious actors. Even if 2026 brings a paradigm shift, it is hard to envision how we might clean up the mess these past years have wrought, not to mention redistribute resources and power from wealth-hoarding, destructive actors to the people.

But, what if this were a seeding moment?

To me, Temperance’s angel, with one foot on earth and one in water, depicts this transition, as Uranus and Neptune finish up their passage through Taurus and Pisces. The liminal space we are in is one of chaos, destruction, violence, and moral rot. It feels like at every turn, we are seeing in grotesque and horrifying detail how those with power and influence have abandoned all principles but profit and conquest.

Is this so surprising, in a society that insists on endless growth, even in the face of its own annihilation? The world of modernity is a world fueled and fed by consumption – a world of uncontained fire. This is the world our King of Wands built – growth for growth’s sake, an ever-hungry ouroboros. Nothing is safe, and nothing is valued if it does not serve the gods of profit. Some of us have always known this world was a false structure (4 of Wands) built on faulty foundations, others among us have only begun to see.

What’s obvious is that we can’t stay here. The forces of change are already upon us.

In a world of extremes, chaos, confusion, a world pushed to its brink, we look up to see a sword, offered out of thin air. This is the paradigm shift. We can keep traveling down this fiery, godforsaken road, or we can emerge out of this morass, more aligned with the World around us.

Earth and water are elements that help us to ground and center ourselves. As we enter this age of fire and air, elements that help us to act, what sustains, nurtures, and centers us? How can we best use this time to prepare for the changes that are coming? When I look at the longterm astrology I see reasons for hope, but these flowing energies of air and fire are very intense. Looking around at what is present, it is obvious that a collective paradigm shift is going to be hard-won. It might entail a swifter collapse of our systems. The energy between all these planets might mean the eruption of even more violence and chaos on earth. The descent could be long and arduous, the descent could also be the portal.

I am seeing this Ace of Swords as our opportunity to liberate ourselves from the destructive path our world is on. This is not divine deliverance, however. A drawback of the liminal state of Temperance (XIV) is that in the flux and uncertainty that follows Death (XIII), we grasp for extremes (The Devil, XV). We pray that salvation will come in the form of a cosmic dance, but that only opens the door. The configuration only offers the Sword, we have to take it.

And that’s how we land at the Page of Swords at the top of this spread, a child without much power, or knowledge of how to wield that weapon. But they have determination, they have grit, and most importantly, they picked up the sword. That’s the path to a more integrated and whole World for us all. That each of us find our own way to values-aligned action. The sword may be accepting the truth of the moment, even when it’s hard and scary; it may be vocalizing what is true, even if it’s unpopular; it may even be fighting to overcome forces of violence and oppression, with whatever tools we have at our disposal.

Fire and air are elements of action. This next year will be a very active one. Acting in alignment with our core values is a way to prevent burnout, to prevent moral decay, and to prevent being swayed by the powerful, seductive forces of uncontained fire that surround us. I believe this spread is encouraging us to take care of ourselves, to habituate the practices that keep us grounded and centered so that we may meet the changes coming our way with as much moral clarity as we possibly can. As Neptune and Uranus conclude their journeys through Pisces and Taurus for the final time in our lives, what changes and wisdom are they leaving you with?

We are not meant to know what is happening right now, and we might not know what is truly happening for a long time coming. The old world is melting away, and the new one is struggling to be born. What anchors you and clarifies the struggle, for you? If a world reborn were possible, what values do you want it to orient around?

What kind of world is worth fighting for?

🌕 full moon update: gemini 🌕

12 - 4 - 2025

This full moon musing returns to the Slow Tarot spread of this moon cycle, from the new moon of Scorpio to the new moon of Sagittarius. This Gemini full moon squares the lunar nodes, representing a turning point for the collective,

do you feel it?

In this episode, I reference the TESCREAL ideology that is underlying the technofascist imaginary, and connect it to our King of Wands and Four of Wands. AI is a flashy new vehicle for a very old fire ethos. This spread asks us to interrogate our relationship to this moment, to these technologies and our systems, and asks what parts of our own imagination are we able to reclaim? This reclaiming, deconditioning process is awkward, and turns us into our sweet Page of Swords. This Page may be unclear about what's happening, but they have their sword,

a sword of ethic and imagination that can forge a different path than what's being laid out for us.

we can choose humanity ~ slow tarot 🌑 28º Libra

A spread to carry us from the Libra dark moon through Scorpio season.

This spread shows the Fool crossed by the 6 of Swords in the center. Left to right are the Magician and the Emperor. Below is the 4 of Swords, and above is the 7 of Cups.

This new Libra moon asks us to attune to what is in the midst of this journey – as we travel between agency and oppression, hope and despair. It calls on us to deepen and recommit to our most deeply held values and feel our desires to see those values enacted through the webs that we are connected to in ways that influence the entire collective. This spread asks us,

how do we accept what is real in this moment, and orient ourselves to the practice of hope?

How do we not become hardened, defensive, and overly protective, based on our desires for safety and certainty? How do we accept the threat and danger that we face and deepen into possibility for a future that aligns with our values, a future beyond our imaginative capacity?

I invite you to recreate this spread with your own deck while you listen, using my words as a beginning point for your own explorations. Slow down with me into this present moment and let’s wander through all the complexity it has to offer.

Libra New Moon

Julie Kelton ~ High Low Tarot

🌓 first quarter square: moon in aquarius 🌓

Squares inherently bring tension. The square between Scorpio and Aquarius is the tension between all that’s happening above the surface and all that lies beneath, unspoken and unseen.

Laying out these cards again today, I was struck by the tense divide that is so evident between pairs in this spread.

The Fool and the Six of Swords: before the journey and in the midst of it. The tension between open and cautious; hope and reality; breaking free and seeking refuge.

The Magician and the Emperor: Interconnection and domination; manifestation (collaboration) and demand; spell-coaxing spell-casting and coercion; imagination and foundation; creation and stability.

The Four of Swords and the Seven of Cups: restoration and dreaming; prayer and possibility.

What I am feeling into right now in this spread is the way it speaks to a process of restructuring our dreams. The world many of us were conditioned into – it was always a facade – it’s collapsing all around us. Some of us have always known the rot beneath the surface, and for others, this is wholly destabilizing. This is a time for questioning everything we assume to be true, for pulling those threads and unraveling the past we know and the future we don’t.

The 4 of Swords reminds me of the restoration that sleep provides, the way our systems take our conscious processing power and direct it towards other necessary ends, opening the way for dreams to emerge while the rest of us recalibrates. As a collective, as we witness and respond to mass corruption, violence, chaos and collapse, we must also make time and space to restore; dropping the narratives that carried us this far, and making way for a new foundation to emerge.

Within collapse, there is possiblity that didn’t exist before.

If the whole house crumbles, we get to build something entirely different, if we so choose. We may have dreams that feel no longer possible, individual paths that were laid that we have to mourn and adapt. None of us want to be where we are, but perhaps from here we can go to places we didn’t even dare to dream. This is the promise of the Fool, that possibility defies expectation.

We know the foundations that those emperors in power are building their ballrooms upon: violence, colonialism, white supremacy, fear, cruelty, extraction… These are rotten pillars, they cannot bear the weight of the future. What shall we build upon instead? Can you follow the threads of your thoughts, the beliefs that guide your dreams, to other values? Our minds have been shaped by the foundations that others laid for us, there is no shame in realizing that and becoming conscious of beliefs that are not our own. The possibility opens when we do the work of letting those beliefs fall away and laying a new foundation in their place. This is the process of the Six of Swords, this is our journey, now.

🌕 Full Moon Reflection: 13º Taurus 🌕

Full Moon in Taurus Update

Julie Kelton ~ High Low Tarot

The full moon in Taurus coincided with a collective expression of values, an alternative path made manifest. We can respond to this moment by rooting and standing firm in our beliefs, instead of compromising. In the face of violence, assault, and dehumanization,

we can choose humanity.

Our collective power comes from our ability to be hopeful in the face of the politics of nihilism, cruelty, and domination. The restructuring force of the Four of Swords is working beneath the surface, as we further decondition from establishment and overculture beliefs. The rejection of status quo establishment compromise in favor of values-based, humanist politics in New York City is a spark that can light radical possibility for all of us.

May we be bold in our ability to act in the face of horrific authoritarianism and remain true to the values we want to see more of, in this world.

This is the way of the Fool, radical hope as a force of disruption and change.

🌗 Last Quarter Reflection: moon in Leo 🌗

This season has shown us collectively the highs and lows of this spread. Moments of hope and change amidst a deepening awareness of state violence and systems collapse. Heeding the call of this spread in this Scorpio season, I am efforting to remain attuned to hope, wherever it arises.

I see hope in the communities of neighbors banding together with whistled codes and resisting bodies against the terror and violence of ICE. I am finding hope in the words of Judges who read poetry and speak to unconscionable actions of masked men. I am deriving hope through the kind actions I encounter on a daily basis as we navigate the incomprehensible, together, and I hope you are, too.

My guess is that this Mercury retrograde through Sagittarius and Scorpio, dancing with Mars and Uranus, will bring more revelations into our collective consciousness. As we continue to see institutions and tepid individuals with power fold and acquiesce to authoritarianism and corruption, may we also continue to rise, individually as needed, but also collectively, meeting this moment by boldly leveraging the power we have, in service of possibilties we can only dream of;

may our dreams continue to grow as we shed the memories of what we once believed to be true.

Slow Tarot Resources

🌔 Resources 🌖

These are timely and everlasting resources that anchor us into the meaning of these collective spreads.

🌑 Dark Moon Reading ~ 28º Scorpio | Nov, 2025 – Dec 19, 2025🌑

Imagination: A Manifesto (book & more) | Dr. Ruja Benjamin

Hospicing Modernity (book) | Vanessa Machado de Oliveira of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

How to Respond to Societal Collapse (video) | Sarah Wilson

Practical Reverence: A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer (podcast / article) | Emergence Magazine

This Episode is FIRE (podcast) | the Emerald

TESCREAL: A Quick Guide to the Mythologies Driving Tech Power (primer) | Radical Futures Institute

The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial intelligence (essay) | Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

The Anti-Christ Playbook: Peter Thiel & the Silicon Valley Apocalypse Hope (video/podcast on TESCREAL) | the Nerd Reich

🌑 Dark Moon Reading ~ 28º Libra | Oct 21, 2025 – Nov 19, 2025🌑

Judge blasts Trump’s Chicago border ‘Blitz,’ extends curbs on use of force that ‘shocks the conscience’ (article)

Rogers Park: Criminal Podcast

Zohran Mamdani’s Acceptance Speech (video) on the Taurus full moon.

Hope is a Discipline (pdf) from Mariame Kaba

Hope is a Discipline (original podcast interview) with Mariame Kaba

Into the Flow: The Grand Water Trine of Oct–Dec 2025 (video) by astrologer Gray Crawford (watch and consider the 7 of Cups)

Why Shame No Longer Works in American Politics (article) by Eric Reinhart (read and consider the Emperor)

Love in a Fucked Up World (video): Conversation between Dean Spade and Mariame Kaba