Hi to you!
2023 was a hard and heavy year. It was a year that asked us to sink or swim — and maybe in 2024 we’ll learn to surf or the muscles we need to doggy paddle will be developed. But whether you’ve backstroked for your life or let the tonnage of the water take you under, we are all sharing common waters. We are learning to breath underwater.
The thing about being a person with the capacity for consciousness and choice is even amidst the deepest depths of our darkest Solstice there is the potential for light. It is what we chose to notice. And I chose to notice the multitudes.
So here’s a little round up of things from 2023 that I’m grateful for —
I am grateful that the whirly-swirly Jupiter-Neptune conjunction of 2021 brought us so much excellent cult content this year. Astrologers jokes about this time as the don’t join a cult era. Yet it brought us in 2023 a bounty of podcasts and documentaries for my cult of people who are forever fascinated with cults.
I am grateful to have seen the last of the Taurus/Scorpio eclipses. First, because fuck! that was a really hard 24 months. It’s like the things that you thought would have to be pried from your cold dead fingers were actual yanked out of your still very alive hands. You are allowed to feel grateful when a hard thing is over. Even when you are still experiencing other hard things. And secondly, that eclipse cycle changed people. Changed, rearranged, transformed, evolved, strengthened, alchemized. And to witness someone become themselves is otherworldly.
I am grateful to have has the schooling of the previous eclipse season under our belt. When the eclipses fell in Gemini/Sag in 2020-2021 our homebound bodies were made to juggle and grapple and hold multiple truths. It’s this and this and that and this all at once. And now, in 2023 we’re better jugglers. I think it makes facing the unknown, armed with only questions, feel a little more familiar.
I am grateful that this year, astrologically and otherwise, planted seeds for change. Don’t you feel it? Honestly, it feels ickier than I thought this kind of change would. But there’s been an unearthing. The underbelly is showing. And I have this low rumble of a feeling that we can’t keep going like this for much longer. What that means? Idk. Do you? But what is now will be different. The stars have been aiming us there since 2020. But I finally feel it chattering in my bones.
I guess that leads me into gratitude for Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto is power and this represents a changing of the guard. I’m often asked, will it be better or worse? I don’t tend to think in those terms, but also fuck if I know! Either way, it is the next 20 years. But what I do know is that power rises and power falls and a change of the guard is necessary. A new generation is born under this shift. A new cohort to inherit the earth. A new set of little lives to consider as we forge ahead into the future.
2024 will be different. Better or worse is all relative, but certainly different. Faster. Flowier.
I have a lot of hope for this new year, as I do all new beginnings. Because to begin with hope feels like the right place to start.
May the doorway between 2023 and 2024 swing wide open for you. May you embrace this new beginning with open arms. May you take all the new beginnings you need along the way. May you find the light after a long dark winter. And may you let it in.
Catch you in the New Year with more of your questions, quandaries, and curiosities about being a person in the world addressed through the lens of astrology. Don’t forget to submit your q for an upcoming newsletter.