Welcome to retrograde season. This month, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto all station and begin to retrograde. Two of these planets are in their rulerships, meaning that the backward meandering is more the type of frank introspection you might allow yourself to play out at home than overly public blunders and mishaps. You don’t have to fear this retrograde season, unless you’re afraid of your own image.
There’s so much cardinal energy right now. Cardinal energy is this: it’s about self and other, about the familiar and foreign. In the blink of the eye, the familiar can turn foreign if you doubt its authenticity. Have you ever looked at your mom and wondered how she became a stranger? Have you ever looked at your child and realized that they have ways of belonging you don’t have? Have you ever had a thought that you felt to be inappropriate to who you are?
Have you ever enjoyed these moments more than you felt like you should?
What is family, outside of nationalist, race essentialist, and patriarchal feelings? Is it possible to define belonging outside of representational politics and marketing? The crisis of the world is that of feeling ill fit. With six planets in Aries, Cancer, and Capricorn this month, we know how to arrive but we don’t know how to leave.
I obviously have no answers to these questions but feel that there must be some kind of trick to creating solidarity without holding people hostage.
All this cardinal tension, plus a Gemini Mars and Sagittarius Jupiter at crossroads, makes us feel like we’re screaming even when we’re banal.
I saw a post on Facebook today that says “Shouting “self-care” at people who actually need “community care” is how we fail people.”
The most intense period of this month is the weekend of the 20th. Friday the 19th is the Full Moon in Libra. Right before, Mercury enters Aries. That Saturday, the Sun enters Taurus, conjunct Uranus, and Venus enters Aries. Pluto retrogrades the coming Monday.
If that’s too much astro jargon, imagine the Sun as a highlighter. It’s what we have the spotlight on. Uranus is collective urgency. It’s the shit that we really have to come together to talk about and work on. In Taurus, it’s talking about trust and funds. The Sun on top of Uranus asks us if we trust each other enough to put our money in other people’s hands.
To end this section, I’ll share with you something I learned from a Worker’s Co-op training that I am doing, as well as something I watched on Youtube. In the training, we did one exercise that showed us both how slow working together is and how it creates much more wisdom than an individual person. We were told “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
On Youtube, I watched a documentary about the birth of public relations in the United States, which is really just the application of Freudian psychology to a mass of people. The people, in a democracy, are likened to the unconscious id while the governing forces are to the conscious ego. Public relations sold Americans on the idea that, as a mass, we are as uncontrollable, volatile, and illogical as our own ids. In some ways, we believe that and so we believe in the police state, in being marketed to, and in being controlled.
Learning to trust, learning to belong, and learning to depend on independence is so much more than getting people who look like us in mass media, so that we feel like we belong in this country. It’s more than assimilation. There’s something about trusting the masses that has to do with trusting the unconscious and trusting the shadow self. There’s something about believing in collective wisdom that has to do with believing in intuition.
Aries
There’s a lot of outward relief and release for you at this time, Aries. This may be a month where you release a personal project out to the world. Instead of succumbing to post show-and-tell blues after the fact, let yourself celebrate the fact of you instead. Celebration is a ritual that is more about glorification. It is about defining the limits of what you have been able to do and feeding the appetite to do more.
You’re under a lot more pressure than you’re used to right now. Honestly, the growing pains that you’re feeling right now are meant to be enjoyed. You don’t get to stretch the same muscles, to feel the same burn, and to overcome the same embarrassments again that you get to do in this moment.
If you feel your dreams losing their fantastic flare and becoming more compact and realizable, don’t be scared. There’s too much safety in having dreams that you think you can never achieve. There’s far more risk in knowing that you have the means and heart to go after exactly what you want and get it.
Taurus
There’s a lot more going on for you than you realize, Taurus. It may be time to examine why some people don’t seem to trust you. Really, it’s about feeling out what you trust, or don’t, in yourself. It’s about trusting yourself even when you feel the most volatile, like you’re about to do something you can’t take back.
If you’re always more prepared than you need to be, you may be unprepared for everything except for success. You may be too busy wondering when it will all go wrong to make the plans you need to for when they go right. You may be wasting your time.
You don’t have to change yourself right now. You just have to change the self you believe in. The self you believe in is the one that becomes real, at the end of the day.
Gemini
All the trust issues that you’re dealing with right now are really about longevity. There are things that are formed, drop by drop, without us even realizing it, like love and trust. You may have a habit of brushing those things off unexpectedly, without warning even yourself first, so that when you do miss the things you didn’t realize you had, you don’t know what you are missing in the first place.
According to Dumbledore, it takes much more courage to stand up to our friends than our enemies. This isn’t just because we fear rejection but also because it is far trickier to stand up to someone who we still love and cherish, someone we want to keep in our lives, than anyone who treat as disposable.
Your task is simple and difficult this month. Learn to handle conflict without treating anyone, especially those who are close enough to you to be parts of yourself, as disposable.
Cancer
Right now, what you’re defining is your pursuit. What are you pursuing? Happiness? Love? Safety? If you feel that you are greedy, realize that it means you are healthy. You want to be great things, to be femme, to be masculine, to make great work but to have unlimited leisure as well. You want all these things.
Hunger keeps the noon time demon at bay. However, hunger is about a lot more than just filling a gap the quickest and easiest way possible. It’s about showing yourself that you have the right and ability to provide for your own needs.
Give yourself everything that you need this month. If you crave a hint of thyme with your hot chocolate, get it for yourself. If you feel yourself crave fresh fruit, find it and eat it. If you crave the color red, smear it on your lips and eyes.
Leo
Priorities are pretty simple: you must first decide what is most important. Then, you must decrease the amount of time and energy you spend on things that are not important or less important without increasing the amount of energy you spend on things that are most important. You must trust that the truly important things in your life are the things that you want to do and will do.
Your priorities must always come from your heart. Otherwise, clearing your schedule for them is quite pointless. They must be things that you want to do when you have the time. If they are not, then you are just forcing yourself habitually and unnecessarily.
Priorities must also always change throughout the day. At lunchtime, you must prioritize eating. At bed time, your first priority should be a good bed time story. I leave the rest up to you.
Virgo
What makes a transaction feel inauthentic, from the consumer and producer’s point of view? Someone expects you to give them something for free this month, Virgo. Will you do it simply to create a more authentic feeling in the atmosphere between the two of you?
Is the act of giving something away for free an act of love or are you being taken advantage of? Is love the willingness to be taken advantage of over and over again because you trust when someone won’t let it hurt you? I read in a fanfiction once: the cult of romantic love is the glorification of unpaid emotional labor.
If someone tries to make you feel more coldhearted than you know yourself to be, consider how much that person expects you to give away for free to maintain authenticity of exchange.
Libra
Consider cruelty this month, and how much pleasure you receive from being able to take it very well. April is the cruelest month because it is the easiest month. This month is about shadow work, about the self that you see in the worst parts of society because you fear seeing it in yourself.
There’s a special definition of cruelty. It is possible to be cruel to a helpless thing but impossible to be truly cruel to something that knows how to fight back. In order to accept cruelty in the treatment of others to ourselves, we must first think of ourselves as helpless things.
The ruling over of who is called cruel and who is not is a moral one. Makes your distinctions critically. You’ll always have the chance to backtrack and call it something different, but things won’t be the same when you do.
Scorpio
You can turn any wish you have into a goal, if you simply make a plan. It there a such thing as scheming toward good? Why are schemes so associated with evil? The idea is that people need to be tricked into being bad, while whatever they hold to be good is already something they buy into. People fear you because you’re not afraid of bad behavior, especially when you believe in it.
In order to plan anything at all, you must know yourself well enough that you make room for the person who you will become and do not know yet. One thing that you can never plan for, not pursue, is your own happiness.
If you feel like everything you know is falling apart, consider the chance that it means you can somehow be happy. Happiness is always unexpected, after all, and becoming a person allowed to be happy means balancing a large stack of unexpecteds on one delicate finger.
Sagittarius
Marilyn Monroe once said “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” And Marilyn had no shortage of people who wanted her to become someone she was not.
Glamor is a tricky animal because it is simultaneously about being a you that you already are, and being a you that you never will be. In April, all that you can really do with glamor is play with it. It doesn’t have to make sense for it to be fun.
No one is here to take you at face value, Sagittarius. There are too many social problems for that to happen. Playing with glamor is about playing with the impossible possibility of self love even when no one, not even you, quite knows who the person you are making up will be next.
Capricorn
Are human beings the only animal that works? Or do other animals also shame one another for not doing what they are supposedly supposed to do? April, for you, is about learning to be an animal and not a concept. It’s about urgency and urges.
You may feel an overwhelming amount of urgency right now and you may not know what it’s about. You have enough work at the moment and are proceeding according to plan in terms of career. What’s this anxiety about at this point in your life?
Work has been your anchor for too long. It’s time to find something else to root you to the places you trust but don’t feel like nuclear family must be the answer. Your anchor can be literally anything, as long as you choose it on your own terms.
Aquarius
When you’re far too addicted to one part of your brain over other parts, you rely on selective parts of yourself rather than your complexity and infinitude. You need to keep your brain alive. Things live by change and by using all its parts.
If you rely overly on one type of intelligence over another, on book smarts over emotional intelligence or vice versa, it’s time to find another part of yourself. If you use the internet too much, prioritize a slower and less glitchy pace of life.
Your job is not to be a highly specialized worker in this post-industrial complex. Your job is to be your whole self. Your job is to be useless at times, because one can hardly be useful all the time unless they’re being used all the time.
Pisces
It’s time to stop treating the care you give people as care that you’re giving away for free. When you look at things like that, it’s far too easy to perform kindnesses with a martyrdom complex, to indulge in doing things for other people that do not care for or grow yourself.
Stop thinking of your kindness as the things you do for others. Stop thinking of yourself as someone to be taken advantage of. Start thinking of your kindness as building the community you take membership with, belong to, and are cared by. Start seeing your community care and self care.
Community should not be your escape from solitude. Stop holding yourself hostage in community. Your solidarity should not be based in fear. Learn to live with yourself and you’ll learn to be with others.
