Meddling Norn Astrology, Charleston, SC (2025)

02/28/2025

Just after sunset tonight on February 28, 2025, the cosmos presents a rare and beautiful event: the alignment of seven planets— Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune —forming what is called a Great Planetary Parade. Celestial alignments like this have wonderful potential for those of us who feel called to use astrology and spiritual alchemy as a path toward spiritual fulfillment. This alignment is more than just a rare spectacle. It’s a doorway to transformation, a moment where the heavens reflect the potential for profound change within us.

Astrologically, each planet carries its own unique frequency, with a corresponding metal that helps us to visualize the spiritual alchemical refinement process. Saturn corresponds with lead, representing the initial stage of confronting our spiritual limitations, our heaviness, our fallenness and need for conscious purification. Jupiter corresponds with tin, symbolizing growth and spiritual expansion. Mars corresponds with iron, representing vitality and the determination to overcome spiritual obstacles. Venus corresponds with copper, representing love and harmonization of inner duality. Mercury corresponds with quicksilver, representing adaptability, integration of opposites, and revelation. The Moon corresponds with silver, representing our emotional inner world and our intuition. And then last is the Sun, which represents the culmination of all these others in the process of refinement, resulting in “enlightenment” or spiritual lucidity and wholeness, which corresponds with gold.

What makes this particular alignment even more powerful is its timing with the New Moon in Pisces. New moons are symbolic of renewal, moments new seeds can be planted. Pisces, the sign of dreams, mysticism, and boundless love, intensifies this with an invitation to step beyond the material world and into the realms of spirit and imagination. When the planets align under such a lunation, it feels as if the universe is opening a sacred space for us to listen more deeply to ourselves, to the unseen, and to the rhythms of life we often lose sight of.

The simplest way to use and enjoy this moment is to take the time to sit under the sky, take pause, and listen. Be present to the messages that arise, whether through dreams, intuition, or the quiet knowing that settles in the body. This is a time to feel where you are currently and use your current emotional state to step into your next phase in the process, and not to lean too heavily on analyzation of yourself from your mind, but to actually let you feel the present weight/state of your soul, with the awareness that what is set into motion now will ripple forward. Rituals can be as simple as writing down what must be released and what must be embraced, lighting a candle in honor of this threshold, or meditating on the planetary energies as they align above us. Even without any outward action, just the recognition that this moment is special can be enough to attune ourselves a little to the energies at play.

It’s a beautiful thing to be part of this vast, interconnected dance, and it’s amazing to consider how these eternal energies communicate intimately with each of us on both our individual and collective journies. Let me know how you experienced this special moment in the comments, I would love to hear about it. 💜

02/03/2025

This year, we also have Pluto fully taking its place in Aquarius, bringing the theme of thawing to a worldwide scale. And like we'd expect on a worldwide scale, a thaw at this level is more akin to the thaw of an Ice Age than to a soft transition to springtime. Pluto in Capricorn was glacial. The themes we experienced from 2008 through much of 2024 were those of institutional control, crystallization of authority, the weight of the responsibility of tradition and legacy, and the fear of collapse and scarcity.

Now that we're about to face a major thaw, we'll be faced with the frozen remnants of structures and systems that did not fall, seeing them in a new light. But the thawing process, like the melting of icebergs, is disruptive and chaotic. All around the world, old hierarchies are being replaced. There is acceleration toward both decentralization of power and globalization— a paradox driven by the Aquarian forces at work within our technological advancements, as well as the changes in the way humanity seeks to approach economics and social structures, primarily motivated by (hyper)individualistic pursuits.

Pluto in Capricorn laid the foundation for this by emphasizing power consolidation into the hands of corporations, governments, financial institutions, and transnational organizations (with the individuals involved all being in bed together). And unfortunately, Pluto's transition into Aquarius does not erode this; it only shifts the expression of control into technology-based control rather than purely economic: increased surveillance, efforts toward establishing a global digital currency, AI-controlled systems, digital IDs and CBDCs, "the internet of things."

The response to this is equal in force and opposite in direction, and this takes shape as a decentralization countermovement. Open source technologies and localized economies are being structured to directly counter globalized currency; rural homesteading and revisitation of communal living is gaining traction in resistance to the global shuffling of people into smart cities; decentralized autonomous organizations work to restore anonymity and facilitate peer-to-peer economies, possibly rising up as an answer to social credit systems.

Our role as individuals is to get our bearings so that in the disorienting flood that follows a thaw, we have already decided on our courses of action and, more importantly, what is true concerning the fixed aspects of human and individual identity, reality, and our relationship with nature and Earth. We need to develop, cultivate, and condition ourselves, mind, body, and soul, to be able to withstand great turmoil and confusion. Future generations depend on us to do so in order to have anyone at all to emulate in a world where the possibilities for "identity expression" seem so endless, and yet where happiness is fleeting and hollow and suffering is purposeless. The key is to become able to be adaptable to the situation and the time, not by adapting our values, but by responding to each situation in accordance with our values.

The ultimate lesson of Pluto in Aquarius is this: Self-discipline is true freedom. Humanity will be tested on this principle in the push-pull between themes of freezing, thawing, and refreezing, until the full melting effect of Pluto in Pisces in 2043. It will take radical personal responsibility to thrive, first at the level of the individual and gradually to the level of society, because totalitarian control is ready to step in for all those who are too susceptible to escapism and confusion. But those who have to resolve to continually earn their freedom will never lack the joy of purpose.

If we are part of the movement to decentralize, we each need inner order in order to avoid dependence on external systems of control. Freedom is always established through mastery, and we see it over and over in everything we find beautiful. Just as a musician must first master his instrument to unlock creative freedom, and just as a poet must learn poetic structure in order to skillfully follow and, occasionally, beautifully break the rules, each of us as individuals needs to remember who we are and what we have to offer, and then we must dutifully offer it. We each need to accept and honor our interdependence in order to become truly sovereign. It's my belief that we are not only interdependent in the context of society, but also with the natural world and cosmically, as well.

(Painting: "The Deluge," by Francis Danby; England, 1840; oil on canvas)

02/03/2025

Continuing with the themes of Imbolc, I think it's important to expand a little on the spiritual theme of thawing and the midpoint between winter and spring in the context of planetary cycles, and the elemental shifts that are influenced by them.

In astrology, winter represents emphasis on our internal journeys. We move through Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces, and through these signs, we explore Saturn's themes of stillness and restriction (the deepening freeze), then Uranus' themes of detachment and breakthroughs (tiny cracks in the ice, unpredictable vacillation between freezing, thawing, and refreezing), and finally Neptune's themes of heightened intuition, idealism, dreams, and deep emotion (the ice melting and the bulbs and roots and other life awakening from sleep). We prepare for spring during this time, but we also need to trust the process and allow ourselves to observe, reflect, and surrender a little to the flow.

Try as we may, we can't force seeds into frozen ground, although Saturn's ambitious energy may make us wish we could. But we also don't want to miss our opportunities by passively hoping our seeds will sow themselves or surrendering too much to the flow of time, which dreamy Neptune in excess would have us do. The balanced middle ground under the sign of Aquarius is to take time to watch for areas in our lives that are soft enough to plant new seeds, taking opportunities as they come, and gathering inspiration for innovative ways to handle the upcoming year, channeling the healthy detachment and mental acuity of Uranus.

Are there areas in your life that have seemed rigid/immutable for a long time where old obstacles seem to be giving way right now? Are there areas that have actually been thawed and ready for new seeds to be sown, but which have been overlooked, or which you haven't felt the energy or sense of direction to make use of yet?

(Illustration: "Potato Planters," by Jean-François Millet; France, cir. 1850; pastel and charcoal on paper)

02/03/2025

Hello everyone, and happy Imbolc to everyone who was celebrating this weekend. For my family it felt especially worth celebrating, because as many of you know, we welcomed four new baby goats onto our homestead over the last three weeks. Imbolc traditionally marks the beginning of lambing season and translates to "in the belly," referring to the pregnant ewes. I felt like we were really a part of it in an authentic way for the first time.

Imbolc also marks the midpoint between winter and spring. We welcome the slow return of longer, lighter days and the first flickers of life after the stillness of winter. For a lot of us who homestead, there are other signs of spring arriving, such as the slowly increasing egg production of our poultry; and for anyone else observing nature in my part of the world, some plants are just beginning to bud, and plants like Carolina jessamine are already preparing to flower. Little signs of early foraging opportunities are about to crop up everywhere, such as the tiny, bright green tulip poplar leaf buds, signaling the best places to begin a hunt for morels come March. It's the start of the thaw; from sleep to activity, rigidity to flow, crystallized energy to softness and adaptability.

Traditionally associated with the goddess Brigid, whose domains are poetry, healing, and prophecy, Imbolc invites us to reflect on both where we have been and where we are headed. I thought this tied in well with understanding the Lunar Nodes, which deals with honoring the past in order to shape the future.

The North Node in your birth chart represents the direction of your soul's growth. It marks a path that feels new and daunting, but also fulfilling; the aspects of yourself that you feel called to challenge. Rising up to these challenges feels like sprouting your own little leaf buds through the frozen ground. Following your North Node always gives you a great internal sense of achivement.

The South Node, on the other hand, carries the cozy familiarity of your natural talents, old patterns, and the mechanical habits and patterns you fall into that may represent old versions of yourself or even your parents and other authority figures you sought to emulate in the past. Just like the snow is cold and yet insulating, it feels cozy to lean into the South Node for as long as you can, and yet it is also confining and, ultimately, stagnant. Everything from the South Node is meant to be used to power your journey forward in pursuit of the mission ascribed to you by your North Node.

I'd love to hear about the Lunar Nodes in your chart and which natural gifts you have reflected by your South Node that you are striving to carry with you on the path carved by your North Node! Are there any steps you're planning on taking this year toward fulfilling the lesson of the North Node? Are there any particularly difficult habits you're trying to break from the South Node?

Wishing everyone renewed clarity, courage, and sense of purpose this Imbolc!

(Illustration: "Brigid," by Warwick Goble; England, cir. 1915)

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