STAR WANDERINGS

  Saturn and Neptune are back in Pisces, and Jupiter is in Cancer. These planets are engaged in a powerful, long-lasting trine, and together they provide an anchor to a powerful grand water trine in the sky, with faster moving planets coming through the sign of Scorpio.  The water element is feminine in nature. Feminine energy is about emotional sensitivity, boundlessness, flow, and receptivity.  Energetically, we might feel like circumstances are constantly shifting around us. Nothing is solid, things are dissolving and taking shape at the same time, like when we´re walking through a thick fog and we see things in our surroundings taking shape in front of us and dissapearing back into the invisible realm. Coming from October into November, the reality feels like an impressionistic painting, like a huge canvas filled with visible, broken brushstrokes of pure unmixed colors. The resulting image is more about capturing a fleeting sensory experience, the uniqueness of the cu...

We´re back. It seems like the ground has shifted in the past few weeks. We find ourselves in the familiar terrain, terrain that we traversed heavily in the winter and spring of this year. I´ll be dropping dates here and there, but the timeline is not important. What matters is our humane experience. On September 1, Saturn returned back to Pisces. Saturn is bringing back the lessons we’ve taken a break from at the end of May. At the time, it felt like we had reached the limit. We assumed it’s done once and for all. But it’s not. Not yet. A Piscean story in our lives needs some distance and time. And this is where Saturn comes in as the lord of necessity, limits, and time. Time provides much-needed space for pause, reflection, and appreciation for what we´ve been through.  We've been in this space before; we know this, yet it feels somewhat different now. So much has happened in between. New has been a theme of the summer months. We had a chance to enter new, exciting worlds and...

  Virgo lunar eclipse wave has come through, forcing us to purge, purify, and get rid of impurities that settled in nooks and crevices of our bodies. Mercury, ruler of this eclipse, is now retracing his steps, following Venus in the martial sign of Aries.    I want to get back to Venus and look at her separately, apart from her dance lead, Mars that I wrote about last month. At that time, we were at the beginning of Venus's retrograde journey. Now we're really cooking. Venus is stripped naked. Like Inanna on her way to Ereshkigal, Venus lost of all her power and dignity. She's bruised and aching. During her time in Aries, she's been shedding and burning away what's no longer desired.    The healing crisis comes to my mind when I reflect on this Venus retrograde cycle across Aries and Pisces and the symbolism of these zodiac signs.  Aries, ruled by Mars, brings intensity, heat, and inflammation. In this context, we can see Venus retrograde in Aries symbolica...

This month, lunar nodes shifted from Aries - Libra to Pisces - Virgo. After 18,5 years, we have a North Node in Pisces and a South Node in Virgo.    Imagine sitting in a bathtub, having your blissful spa time, candles burning, soft music playing, and water infused with precious essential oils that let you forget about the outside world. You´re just present in a moment, dreaming, indulging your senses.  But then comes the moment when you need to get back to reality, pull out the bath plug and let the water drain. Sitting in the bathtub now feels stressful. You hear the noise of water draining and you see the water level is going down. It feels like your energy is leaking like you´re gonna be sucked into that drain even though it doesn't make sense rationally.  As the water level drops, you start seeing icky stuff that your body left behind on the bottom of the tub. You better get out before the water runs out.    After this divine experience, you have no men...

  Recently, I´ve been to a Nick Cave concert - the Wild God tour. There was everything – grief, pain, darkness, intensity but above it all, so much JOY and ecstasy! It was an impressive light show with breathtaking live images projected on giant screens. It was so colorful and juicy, almost edible-looking, and soft, in contrast to monochromatic shots of Nick and his band Bad Seeds. At one point, he started shouting „You are beautiful“ followed by „STOP“. I realized how this is all so „Venus-Saturn“. I imagined Medusa pulsating in the vast ocean, flowing freely, opening her body, and then contracting it back. Isn´t it how we all move through life, through relationships that are at the core of human existence?     Despite the common conviction that Venus/Saturn contacts are kind of a bummer, I will argue that Saturn and Venus are a life-giving pairing. Grief and heartache open us up to life more than any other experience. Nick´s show felt very much like the planetary signat...

  Since Jupiter entered Gemini in June of this year, we´ve been experiencing some growing discomfort. Having both Jupiter and Saturn in my 1st house, I´m quite familiar with the dynamic of this process. It´s like the Braxton Hicks contractions towards the end of pregnancy that are signaling to the body that it is the final stretch, getting ready for labor. Even though, these contractions often get confused with the real thing, their nature tells us that „we are not there yet“. They are unpredictable and non-rhythmic, they do not increase in strength and they are more uncomfortable than painful. Your belly gets hard, the baby might be in a weird position and you can often feel and see some baby body part somewhere on your belly. It´s pretty cool but at the same time kind of frightening. You know you can´t possibly go back. You know it´s coming and you start freaking out whether you´re actually ready (of course you´re not) and whether you should do something about it. But there is st...

  Saturn is often seen as obstacles, setbacks, delays we have to face, external limits we can´t get past but Saturn also points to limits within ourselves, the difficult and painful experiences and topics that we don´t want to deal with, that are sitting in our stomachs, unresolved. Like Saturn himself we all have our vulnerabilities that we swallowed at some point of our life out of fear that they are going to threaten us somehow.  With Saturn now in a mutable sign of Pisces, we find ourselves in a transitional space. What was the norm until now might not be acceptable anymore. There is a strong discontent with the present moment, the realization that there was enough of THIS already, that we can´t/don´t want to go any further like this even though we don´t know where to go next.  What we´ve built on the shores might be washed into the sea anytime, it is made from sand. There is no stable ground, nothing to hold on to. This feeling of dissatisfaction with the status quo ...

  Dreams, imagination, fantasy… Why is the imaginary sphere of our lives often considered to be useless, redundant, suspicious and even dangerous for us adults? Why is it served to us just as entertainment and/or for „artists only“? Why is the imaginary sphere not taken seriously? Why is there no real space for irrationality in adult world? Why is it only something that is good to stimulate in kids? Why does it always have to be “either-or”, taken into opposition with “what is”? Why can’t the irrational coexist alongside “the real thing” that we are so enmeshed in? Why is it seen as some kind of chimera that takes us away from our righteous serious adult life that is all about tending to our responsibilities? And if it is so “right and good for us”, then why do we so often become desillusioned by this so-called reality? What is reality anyway? I feel like we might not be that sure anymore…. What once felt so firm and solid, written in stone, something we thought is settled, might s...

  I love (Venus in) Pisces season. I haven’t always felt that way. Before I was familiar with astrological symbolism, this time of year seemed kind of weird and confusing. I had a kind of blah feeling about it.  It’s neither this nor that, the mutable nature of this time between winter and spring drove me crazy. I wanted to escape the vagueness of it all. I felt the pull, the expectation, the rising energy, the light that is coming but then came another gust of cold air or a sudden snow storm. All my dreams of springs have vanished and with it came disillusion and despair.t. Pisces season. Winter is still here and spring is just around the corner. There is a lightness floating in the air, it shimmers and moves us to imaginative spaces where everything is possible. Yet, at the same time, we are painfully aware that Pisces season is the  “Spring that never comes”. It is a period of transition and the boundaries are porous. Everything gets easily infiltered. Water does not p...

  We often see Saturn as a hard cold reality, difficult decisions we have to make, elements of our lives that are clear-cut. Our western culture celebrates the Saturnian illusion of realism, matter-of-factness, firm predictable structures that keep a firm grip on chaos… That’s not all there is to Saturn. Saturn stands in the opposition to the Sun, the unifying principle. Saturn rules over the opposition, it is of dual nature, it has two faces. As the gatekeeper between the visible and invisible world, it has a foot in both worlds, the material world of Fortune that we inhabit, the reality we can grasp and explore with our senses.  But Saturn has also access to the invisible world of Spirit, the part of the reality that is elusive, that we can’t put our finger on, that escapes any attempt to be clearly defined, described and categorized. Saturn fills the transitional, in-between spaces, the grey areas outside of clearly defined categories. Mysticism, nebulousness, dissolution, ...

  We can only do so much - research, rationalize, organize, prioritize in an attempt to cover all possible scenarios, to avoid failure but at some point this endeavor becomes pointless. We come to a point when there is no more we can do. We need to hand our dream to the Universe and say “I gave it my everything, I did my best, it is not in my power to decide the outcome of this, I am handing this over to the higher power - I TRUST, I have FAITH, I BELIEVE. Constant doubt is the harbinger of growth, prosperity, of wisdom gained over time. Reason and belief, doubt and trust - eternal tension of Mercury and Jupiter. Mars in Gemini has been tripping backward in its retrograde motion for a while, shapeshifting through Mercury’s territory and setting multiplicity as the current operating mode. You better be ready to act on things when they come up. It is what it is, this is a problem- solving time. Things take twice as much time to figure out and more often then not you’ll have to get ba...

  Walking through the fog, Carolina song humming in my body, tears running down my cheeks. Walking from the movies that night I felt gratitude for the “Marsh girl”. I was deeply touched by her life story which echoed so much of my own life. Thank god for the art and the chance to reflect our human reality through the symbols and archetypes it offers. On my way home I felt like I was hit by a big wave - like I’m flowing in the ocean of emotions, being pulled to the water, being called to dissolve my hard shell and feel all my insatiable longings coming to the surface.  The movie was an ode to Saturn in Pisces. It stirred so many thoughts about what’s going to be initiated in Saturn’s realm of our lives in March of next year.  Are you ready to visit this soft, feminine, romantic place that Saturn is going to call home for the next three years? Imagine your body sinking into water. You’re merging with your environment, you feel it a lot more physically, you feel the movement...

  In Pisces, Mercury sings its wistful song of spring, aching with anticipation. The other day, I´ve heard the birds sing for the first time and it seemed out of place as the temperatures are definitely on the winter side yet. I always feel like the birds are confused somehow at this time of year but obviously, they are a lot better aligned with the natural cycles than I am.    The expected rationality of Mercury is diffused in Pisces. There is no room for cold argumentation. Rather it is about feeling your way through, articulating something that cannot be grasped, described, or measured. You “know” deep inside and that is all that matters. The sign of Pisces - Jupiter feminine, fertile domicile, Venus exaltation, the energy that is conducive for life, growth, and prosperity. Thinking about this time of the year, the abundance of animal babies came to my mind. The light increases and the temperature rises. The warmer days and regular rainfall mean that grass grows well a...

  It has been a long stretch of brown and grey with no sign of green. The ground is bare and hard, yet the light is on the rise. There is something in the air - could it be the spring? Maybe. It is undecided for now. A strange „in-between“, time undefined by the clear boundaries of the distinct season. At this time of the year, I start yearning for spring, for light, for warmth and comfort of seeing the life popping up all around me. It is hard to stay calm when you know „it´s coming“ when it´s lurking around the corner.  I am becoming restless.  I know once spring hits, it will be impossible for me to stay inside and tend to things that need my attention.  I ache for the light yet I fear losing the safety of the darkness. Pisces season is upon us. The sign of Pisces, two fishes captured by an invisible string, swimming in opposite directions. Their journey is of a cyclical nature, it has no destination. It is not about the one or the other.  They are bound to f...