You get to decide what you remember and where your history begins.

There’s something about December that makes it different from all of the other months. December is the month of the winter solstice. This is the solstice that begins Capricorn season.

For this year’s solstice, Mercury will re-enter Sagittarius around the same time. Mercury enters Capricorn early in the month when the Sun is still in Sagittarius. Venus will be in Scorpio but it will enter Sagittarius late month. Mars will stay in Sagittarius for all of December.

Sagittarius is the sign of imagination. Cultivating a resistant imagination is not a whimsical or naive fancy but a determined duty that we are all tasked with. Cultivating a resistant imagination takes fantasy but it also requires the recognition of reality. When we turn to face reality, we find that our imaginations have not shrunk in fear but grow with purpose.

And the winter solstice, the sign on the precipice of light regaining its body, is about what we need to cultivate said imagination. We need darkness. We need the stories that are untold. We need cover and hiding.

In Chinese astrology, every month is associated with a hexagram. December’s hexagram is number 24 which is called 复. 复 means to return or turn back.

If we are to look around, we might find a couple of returns in the narratives around us. Everyone is talking about going back to normal. Every government in the world is talking about a return back to normal or back to a pre-pandemic state of affairs. Some officials in the Israeli government have been mentioning 2005 as a way of suggesting a return of Israeli military forces to occupy Gaza.

But there are other returns around us if we listen a bit closer. There’s the Palestinian people’s Right of Return which was recognized by UN experts as recently as the last World Refugee Day in June of 2023. So many displaced people continue to keep the keys to their homes because they know they have the right to return. There’s growing support for land back movements. Indigenous people have never forgotten the old roads and places and names. There’s even every living being’s right to a home, a need that is far more significant than any landowner’s right to eviction.

Winter is when you go home. It’s cold outside so you go home.

There’s nothing more political than the concept of going home.

When we narrate the idea of return, we are also narrating home. We are narrating safety, belonging, and memory. When we are told to return to some prior state of normal, we are being given instructions about what to remember and what to forget.

Winter solstice rests at the intersection of Sagittarius and Capricorn. Sagittarius is imagination and Capricorn is history. You get to decide what you remember and where your history begins. None of us are obligated to work with colonial framings of time. There’s histories that began in 1945, in 1948, in 1619. During this deep and quiet time of the year, we will find that the seeds of resistance have already been planted long before our lifetimes. There are scores of stories and poems and research that already resist the instructions that we have been given about what to remember and what to forget. All we have to do is listen for them.

Sagittarius

You’re doing your own thing right now. If your goal is independence, then here’s how you build it:

Eat by your own hand. Make sure that you know where your money and your food comes from. Stop looking for opportunities on enemy territory, especially ones that are time critical, and build your own at your own pace instead. Never do things to justify past actions. Cut your pride along with your losses. Always let love make most of your decisions for you. Never forget that you are responsible for interpreting the debts that you owe your ancestors, your community, and your friends. Be more willing to break your own rules than the rules of other people. Do this out of respect.

Make your independence a listening practice. You have to learn how to surprise yourself. If independence was only self-reliance, then none of us would be that interested in it because we would think that it’s too boring. We are too interested in other people. Many of us are interested in independence because we sense that there’s things we learn from unharnessing ourselves from manufactured dependence.

In December, find a challenge and then apply yourself. You already have the guts. December is the time.

Questions for Sagittarius for December 2023:
What do you have the guts for?
What do you have the means for?
What do you have the guts and the means for?

Capricorn

There’s a huge difference between desire and hunger. Sometimes, we want something and the thing we get isn’t what we want but is good enough to satisfy the hunger. Sometimes, we don’t know what we want and we look for anything to satisfy the hunger. Sometimes, the thing we want isn’t what satisfies the hunger and we are still hungry even after we eat exactly what we want. Sometimes, we’re not looking for satisfaction at all.

Do you know yourself well enough to understand the core of your desire?

If you have never wanted anything but your own originality, then what is your actual desire?

I may be Asian but I’m not a Buddhist. I don’t practice non-attachment. I believe that you know desire best when you let yourself feel it. The center of desire isn’t a void but a core. There’s knowledge in that presence. This solstice, focus on the urgency of wanting while knowing that wanting is action, that it is active and not passive. Desire doesn’t tell you about inferiority or about what you lack. It tells you about what you have enough appetite to tolerate.

Questions for Capricorn for December 2023:
What are you just starting to become hungry for?
What are you tired of wanting?
What do you want?

Aquarius

Safety isn’t a belief system. There is no technique, doctrine, or set of rules that will guarantee you your safety. Your safety is somewhat dependent on whether the people you are around feel safe or not. This doesn’t make you any less safe. It just means that some of the things we are told will give us safety, things like exclusion or hierarchy or incarceration, don’t necessarily do what they’re said to do.

Whenever someone asks me what will make them feel safe, I try my best to ask them what would make risk tolerable. I don’t do this because I like to scare people or make them anxious. I do it because I want people to have other strategies besides safety available to them. When safety feels feeble or distant, we don’t necessarily need to drop everything to hurry up and revive it. We can replace it with something else that is just as important to us.

This solstice, try to think of all of the times that you successfully gave safety a smaller priority than our security based culture wants you to. Think of all of those moments of life and see what you find. Maybe there’s triumph. Victory may be more important than safety sometimes. Maybe there’s passion. You are willing to tolerate risk for desire. It’s alright if there are things that are more meaningful to you than safety.

Questions for Aquarius for December 2023:
When is safety the most important thing?
When is safety the least important thing?
What makes risk tolerable to you?

Pisces

Remember one thing with me—it is never worth your time to argue with anyone over the internet. This applies to arguing with your best friend. It applies to arguing with strangers. Don’t argue with people who have the American flag in their screen name. Don’t argue with people who make aesthetic moodboards. Don’t argue about pointless celebrity drama and don’t argue about things that are important that you do care about. Especially do not argue with strangers about who you are or whether you should be allowed to exist.

Why? Because, even if you were to “win” an online argument it would have no positive bearing on your life.

Now that we have banned arguing with people online, how do you want to use your voice? What precision does your voice require? When does truth feel like a journey and when does it become an obstacle? When you remove from yourself the notion that you owe anyone an argument just because they ask for one from you, then what are you suddenly willing to talk about?

Your voice is not a marketplace. Remove it from the marketplaces that are filled with promotional strategies, condemnation, and manufactured urgency. When you do that, what is left? What honesty does your voice thirst for?

Questions for Pisces for December 2023:
What precision does your voice require?
When does truth become a journey?
What honesty does your voice thirst for?

Aries

If you were to teach a class on something, what would you teach? I’m not talking about the kind of education that prepares us for employment. I’m talking about life as a lesson. If you were to find yourself in the position of teaching anything, then what subject would you consider to be important enough to pass down or away?

How would you teach this vital thing? What kind of conversation would you hope to facilitate? Would you force your students to do anything? Would you suggest that your students do anything? What kinds of suggestions would you take from your students?

And what would make education a success by your own standards?

Regardless of whether teaching is part of your daily life or not, see what comes to mind when you ask yourself these questions. I wonder if anything occurs to you about what you believe to be education and what you don’t take to be education. Life is for the still learning. Cherish education. Real education makes use of the best parts of you. Remember that you are both teacher and student.

Questions for Aries for December 2023:
What is important enough to become education?
How does education happen?
What makes education successful?

Taurus

When we feel like we constantly have to react to injustice, we start to get really tired. We can sustain a movement when we’re scared, when we’re angry, and even when we are sad. But we can’t sustain a movement on tiredness.

You’re good at not reacting in the moment. This is because you can see the potential of what is possible.

I don’t want you to shut up about potential this solstice. Don’t stop talking about what you know your friends to be capable of. Don’t stop talking about what the world is capable of. You’re not satisfied with right now because you know that there can be more in the future. This is why you are such a great teacher.

This is how we resist tiredness—not by collapsing and then giving up but by setting our own pace. We refuse to allow oppression to set the pace of our movements for us. We choose our own continuity. I want you to uplift your patience this solstice. Make your patience a gift that nourishes you and every single person you give this patience to. Never stop giving this patience because you find that you have more the more you give. There is wisdom in your patience, one that is stirred and replenished when it is given.

Questions for Taurus for December 2023:
How do you make the potential that you see known?
How do you make the potential that you known seen?
Who gives you the most patience in your life?

Gemini

Your mind is best expressed not through what you know but by tackling what you do not know. Talking about something you have talked about before is easy. Most of us know the right words to say and who will read certain things in what way when it comes to talking about things on repeat. But isn’t that boring? What about the things that we don’t know?

Most of us know much less than what we think we know. And we’re not ashamed to admit it. There’s even things that we think we know about simply because we hear people reference them again and again. We know much less about those things than we think we do. Some people will talk at length about things they know very little about. Trust me on this. Most books about China are written by people who don’t know any Chinese. Most opinions on social media about economics are from people who have never studied anti-capitalist theory.

But you know what? We keep learning. Learning is a beautiful sensation. It’s like getting fed but through the brain. When we learn, we aren’t absorbing old information. We’re actually creating new information just by talking and doubting and learning. That’s pretty cool. Not only does learning feel really good, it also creates new information.

This solstice, I want you to make a commitment to your innate intelligence. I want you to be realistic about the depth and limits of your perspective. I want you to get excited about the absolute brilliance that your brain is capable of. No other person has a brain that is like yours. No one else knows the exact same things that you know.

Questions for Gemini for December 2023:
What makes your brain feel good?
What makes your brain feel capable?
What makes your brain feel knowledgeable?

Cancer

I want you to spend some time this solstice thinking about what you are willing to do for other people and why.

I love service. Not only is service enjoyable to me, it is also emotionally satisfying. It’s nice to be needed. I’ve always known this but I learned service in contexts (church and nonprofits) that often frustrated me. There’s nothing perverse about doing things for other people. Caring about people isn’t a weakness. However, devotion is never completely dependent. We devote ourselves to things for our own reasons.

So, spend some time with your why. Why do you care about other people? You may have asked yourself this question before but your reasons might have changed. Or, maybe your reasons have not changed but have clarified.

The question of why we care about other people is just as existential as the question of why we care about ourselves. Don’t try to answer this question with a solution. Caring about people isn’t a pathology or a problem so we don’t need to solve it. Even when it caring doesn’t feel great, our reasons for why we care may still be true. And guess what? A lot of the time, caring for other people feels absolutely fucking fantastic. I think that this is understated—how good caring can feel, how rewarding and how satisfying.

Questions for Cancer for December 2023:
What makes caring feel good?
What are you willing to do for other people?
Why do you care about other people?

Leo

This past year, Jupiter has been challenging you through your reputation. 2023 has been about standing up for things, about being perceived, and about representing yourself. This may have brought up questions around value (what you value and who values you) and self advocacy.

This solstice is about your privacy. December will be about depth.

No one is entitled to information about you just because they know your name. No one is entitled to your obedience just because they have an opinion about you or something that you did. This is because other people are not responsible for your ethics. You are.

You nourish your ethics by deciding what kinds of conversations you are ready for and by giving your secrets the privacy they need to transmute. Every conversation about ethics has an overt and a covert layer. Every person who shares a rule also has a fear. All of your dreams, wishes, and fantasies are engaged with your ethics. It is easier to say that you believe in something and much harder to believe it.

Give yourself privacy. Privacy isn’t safety but you are not a public service. Your life is not a broadcast. Your life is motion.

Questions for Leo for December 2023:
What do you fear when engaging in conversations about ethics?
What do you think other people fear in those conversations?
What do you want from your ethics?

Virgo

This solstice challenges you to not just love the place you are from but to love the place you are at. When we talk about the place we are at, we often talk about where we still want to go. Momentum carries a bit of aspiration with it. When we talk about where we are from, we often talk about nostalgia and loss and victory.

What does it mean to love the place you are at? This place is not stationary. You know that you are in transition. To love the place you are at requires that you understand your most recent choices, the ones that you just made.

These choices might seem either dramatic or mundane. Everyday, we make choices like deciding to not get a car or renewing the lease that we have a lot of doubt over. We make choices like staying at a job or learning a new skill. These are the close up choices that define your sense of right now. Loving these choices doesn’t mean that you need to view them as good. Your choices don’t need to be redeemed. They are what makes you.

Questions for Virgo for December 2023:
What big choices have you made most recently?
What small choices have you made most recently?
What do you love about being where you are at?

Libra

Sometimes, the failures of our ancestors are very clear to us as the next generation. This is because we tend to suffer because of those failures. But putting that aside for now, what about the successes of your ancestors? If your ancestors didn’t succeed at something, then you wouldn’t even be here. What did your ancestors succeed at?

I come from a family of idealists. Every generation, someone in my family risked their life for the sake of revolution. You can view this risk taking as a failure but, in some ways, it is also a success because we feel a sense of pride. When we visit the martyr’s graveyard to mourn, we don’t judge or boast. We just tell stories—funny, sad, and nonsensical stories. All success stories are tragic to some extent. All failure stories are comedic. Failed revolution is also a success when its ideas are passed down.

So, look for success in history. Look for tragedy and comedy together. Never look for them separately since they can’t be torn apart. Look for bleakness but look for miracles too. Every family story contains at least one miracle. Look for your own and try to see if you can realize it in your own words.

Questions for Libra for December 2023:
What tragedies do you know about your ancestors?
What comedies do you know about your ancestors?
What miracles came before you?

Scorpio

There’s a myth that many of us hold onto about anger. The myth is that anger is like a substance. We can get rid of it by expelling it, by expressing it and releasing it.

Anger is not a substance. It is an emotion. We don’t feel less anger when we express it more. The more we express anger, the more angry we actually tend to feel. This isn’t a bad thing. Anger isn’t a bad emotion. Anger is an emotion that we feel when we witness injustice.

The more we express anger, the more we are willing to feel into seeing injustice. This doesn’t mean that we’re lashing out randomly or letting the anger tell us how to do things. This means that, to express more deep anger, we have to understand injustice. We have to think dialectically and to hold multiple perspectives. Your anger, far from helpless, also needs you. It needs your intelligence and your intelligence comes only partially out of anger.

Anger has a particular type of intelligence, a clarifying type. It’s not the only type of intelligence you possess. Thank god for that. You’re allowed to feel anger. You’re also allowed to feel other things.

Question for Scorpio for December 2023:
What does your anger help you tolerate?
What helps you tolerate anger?
When does your anger make you smarter?