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adapembroke · 2 hours

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Taurus in the Age of Pluto in Aquarius

I had a dream recently about an old Episcopal Church with a burial ground attached. While I watched, the tombstones in the cemetery were removed by invisible workers and replaced with smooth river rocks. The bodies buried underground remained undisturbed, but the cemetery was transformed into a Zen garden.

I went into the church and looked for someone to ask about the changes. I found a curate dressed in high church clerical garb with the energy of a priest rushing to get to Mass on time.

The curate was kind to me. They paused what they were doing and listened while I asked them about the garden. I told them that the decision to remove the tombstones bothered me. It felt like an affront to the dead.

The curate assured me that they hadn’t just paved over a cemetery.

“We’ve replaced it with this database,” they said. “Anyone can search for the location of the people who were buried here. All of the information has been preserved. It’s actually much easier to find now.”

I opened my mouth to argue with the curate, but I woke up before the words left my mouth.

I don’t keep a dream journal, but I was irritated enough about being interrupted that I wrote what I would have said down in my regular journal:

There is more to a cemetery than a list of names. There are stories carved in the stones. There are stories in the way the stones are arranged. The weathering of the stones is a story. The stone that has fallen in the mud and cracked is a story. There are ghosts who live in stones, reaching out to strangers when no one else will visit. With no anchor in the physical world, how can they speak?

Even after I vented my irritation, the dream felt important, but I didn’t know why, so I filed it under “things to think about later” on my mental shelf and forgot about it.

One of my great projects as a writer is learning how to be a better archivist. For years, I’ve known about the importance of keeping notebooks, indexing notebooks, and revisiting notebooks, but I struggle to put that knowledge into practice.

I am a future-oriented person. I have always had a natural optimism that insists that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. I spend most of my time living on the bleeding edge between today and tomorrow, straining to reach as far into the future as I can.

Most of the time, this works for me. I am good at coming up with ideas, and I can blissfully hop from one project to the next without retracing my steps. Occasionally, though, I find myself between projects and unsure what to do next. I’m learning to become an archeologist of my own work, seeing my creative past as something that is worth preserving.

As I have become a better archivist, I have discovered that notebooks are like tombstones. Just like the act of picking up a pen and giving thoughts form anchors me in the physical world, the notebook itself becomes an anchor for the person I was in the moment I was writing. My notebooks are haunted by the ghosts of my past selves, selves that are gone (and worth remembering) just as surely as Margery Benet Blythe (1817-1902 “May she live in glory.”)

As I write this, I am in one of those in-between places. Realizing it had been awhile since I’d indexed my journal, I went to work. I opened my notebook to where I left off last time and found the entry about the cemetery dream.

Once again, the dream struck me for reasons I couldn’t explain. Then I turned the page. The following entry in my journal was a collection of notes I’d taken on the book No Logo by Naomi Klein.

This is the quote I recorded:

“Savvy ad agencies have all moved away from the idea that they are flogging a product made by someone else, and have come to think of themselves as brand factories, hammering out what is of true value: the idea, the lifestyle, the attitude. Brand builders are the new primary producers in our so-called knowledge economy. This novel idea has done more than bring us cutting-edge ad campaigns, ecclesiastic superstores and utopian corporate campuses. It is changing the very face of global employment. After establishing the ‘soul’ of their corporations, the superbrand companies have gone on to rid themselves of their cumbersome bodies” (196). (Emphasis mine)

No Logo is a critique of corporations who believe that physicality (workers, factories, physical products, etc.) is a liability. These superbrand corporations believe that people don’t buy shoes, they buy ideas. In the process, they conveniently forget all the customers who abandon companies whose boots fall apart in the snow.

The error of the superbrand corporations is the same as the curate’s erroneous belief that the physical world is nothing but an inefficient means of storing data. The natural end-point for this belief is attempting to upload a cemetery to a database believing that the only thing of value in a tombstone is the data carved in the stone.

(It’s ironic to me that the curate was dressed like a high church Episcopalian. It’s hard for me to imagine an Anglo-Catholic priest making that mistake.)

These beliefs neglect all of the elements of physical experience that can’t be reduced to code. People, of course, can’t be reduced to code, and corporations can only neglect employees and customers for so long before the humans in the equation rebel, but human bodies aren’t the only ones that matter.

Anyone who has ever had the book they need leap off the shelf knows that matter has mind and a will of its own. Like the neglected humans in this equation, the soul of the world doesn’t suffer fools. It’s only a matter of time before the Ents march on Isengard.

We’re in a liminal time in 2024. Pluto is in the early degrees of the air sign Aquarius. When a planet is in the early degrees of a sign, it’s new to that energy. Like a child learning to crawl and feed themselves, the planet is still learning the rules of how to operate in this new world.

In the wheel of signs, Earth always precedes Air, and the jump from the physical to the ethereal is an especially difficult transition to make. More than anything, Air wants freedom, and Earth is like a pair of lead shoes at a hot air balloon party. It’s easy for Air to look at Earth and see nothing but limitations.

In the early days of a new phase in a cycle, resistance to the energy we just left is natural. The longer the cycle, the more we are sick of the previous phase by the time the new phase arrives. We need to kick things off with a rebellion. It gives us the energy to launch into something new.

At the same time, we can’t fully disconnect ourselves from the earth. Even when Jupiter and Uranus leave Taurus, we will need some people to continue wearing lead shoes. Some of us need to visit the cemeteries, keep the physical archives, and relish the smell of the good earth in spring. We need people who will remember that we need to eat physical food sometimes, that we can’t live on data and air.

As a Taurus, I suppose one of those grumpy, earthy people is going to be me.

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#12th house #8th house

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adapembroke · 2 months

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What Is Narrative Astrology?

Humans Are Storytelling Animals

In the book Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind, Dr. Daniel Lieberman tells a story about primate researchers attempting to understand the behavior of chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

When observing animals, humans have the tendency to anthropomorphize. That is, we ascribe human emotions and motivations to animal behavior. Animals and humans are not the same, however, so the researchers attempted to strip all anthropomorphism out of their research observations for two years.

At the end of the study, the researchers had mountains of data, but they couldn’t understand it. All they had were gestures and movements without any semblance of meaning.

“The notebooks full of observations didn’t help them understand the behavior of the chimpanzees until they allowed themselves to think about the chimpanzees in human terms,” Zimmerman wrote, “so that their behaviors became stories.”

Every waking moment, your senses take in a ton of information about the world around you, more than your conscious mind could process in a hundred lifetimes. Deep in your unconscious mind, your brain is working, looking for the signal in the noise. All that sensory data is filtered through stories. Stories literally tell the brain what is meaningful.

Humans are storytelling animals. Without stories, we are able to perceive data, but we can’t understand it in a meaningful way.

Unconscious Stories Create the World

Most of the stories that inform the way you see the world are unconscious. They are like a pair of glasses you can never take off. In the evolutionary history of humanity, this lack of consciousness has been to our benefit. Conscious thought is very slow, and unconscious stories allow us to respond quickly without having to agonize. Unconscious stories are like muscle memory for the soul. If you ever find yourself face to face with a tiger, your stories about predators might literally save your life.

The problem with unconscious stories is that it’s hard to tell when they’ve become distorted.

People who wear physical glasses know that it’s easy to end up with a pair of glasses that doesn’t help you see as clearly as it used to. Slowly, over time, your eyes change, but your glasses don’t. The change happens so slowly you become so used to seeing poorly, and you forget what it’s like to have a prescription that fits. Without regular appointments to get your eyes checked, your ability to see becomes compromised. If you wait too long, getting a new pair of glasses can feel like getting a brand new pair of eyes.

Unconscious stories can become frozen like an old pair of glasses, living fossils, artifacts of a time that no longer exists. Sometimes, life brings you something unexpected that shows you a story that isn’t working anymore, but you don’t have to wait for happy accidents.

Story Hacking Astrology

Astrology is one of the oldest tools humans have for turning data into stories. The discipline has its roots in the work of ancient astronomer priests in Mesopotamia. Each night, astronomer priests observed the movements of the moon and planets, looking for connections between the sky and events here on earth.

Their observations of the sky formed the foundation of modern astronomy, but the stories they told about the data they collected are just as important as their scientific achievements. Astrology is the psychology of the ancients. The symbolic language of astrology uses the planets as a metaphor to model the systems of the human personality and society. In that model, you can observe the unconscious stories you tell about yourself and the people around you playing themselves out.

Astrological symbols are pure data. When we interpret astrological symbols, we are telling stories. The stories we tell come from our unconscious filters on reality, but telling stories raises those unconscious filters to the level of awareness. By examining those stories critically, we are inviting our unconscious filters out of the shadows and into our conscious awareness where we can adjust them.

Narrative Astrology is a framework for identifying the unconscious stories that you use to interpret the world around you. It can help you evaluate those stories to see if they fit, repair stories that have become dysfunctional, and make good stories true.

Getting Started with Narrative Astrology

Getting started with Narrative Astrology is simple. All you need is an astrological interpretation. If you have a basic working knowledge of astrology, you can provide that interpretation for yourself, or you can work with an astrologer, read a book of interpretations, or listen to an astrology forecast.

For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if your interpretation is as simple as your sun sign or as complex as the relationship between your yod and your vertex. In fact, simple interpretations are best to start with because it is easy to hide from the truth of an uncomfortable story behind a fog of complexity.

In Narrative Astrology, when we encounter a story that catches our attention, we examine it using the Four Questions:

How does this story make me feel?

What does this story say about me and the world I live in?

How can I change this story to make it better?

How can I make the good story true?

You can run through the Four Questions in seconds. If you identify a story, feel your disgust with it, and metaphorically throw it in the trash, you’re working with the Four Questions. Quick check-ins like that can go a long way toward breaking the spell of unconscious nonsense.

The Four Questions are deceptive in their simplicity, however. They have the potential to be doorways to deeper interrogations that can help to dig up and revise stories that are particularly entrenched. “How does this story make me feel?” can help you uncover personal or generational trauma through pain that is carried in the body. “What does this question say about me and the world I live in?” can point to systemic shadow stories embedded in conventional wisdom, politics, or the socioeconomic system.

Would you like to learn more about Narrative Astrology? I recommend my course “Dreaming an Enchanted World.”

#Narrative Astrology

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adapembroke · 2 months

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Is Chiron the Wounded Healer or the Gifted Teacher?

When Chiron's wound is discussed in the astrology community, it is usually with a pitying tone. "Poor Chiron, he was an amazing healer, but he was hamstrung by the wound he couldn't heal." At best, it's implied that his suffering interfered with his ability to do his best work. At worst, it's implied that he might not be a great healer after all if he couldn't even heal himself. The Chiron wound is seen as a problem spot in our chart. Pluto wounds can be transformed into a source of power, but Chiron is a gaping sore that never heals. Everything we accomplish in the area of the life where Chiron lives is accomplished in spite of Chiron's influence, not because of it.

I've written before about how there is more to Chiron than the wounded healer archetype. I believe the wound is only a small part of his story, and if we reduce him to the wound we lose the part of the story in which he is the wise mentor adopted by the gods. At the same time, there is valuable medicine in Chiron’s wound, and it would be a mistake to diminish the wound to the point that he is no longer the wounded healer.

What if Chiron's wound was the same as his power?

In the myth of Chiron, we are told that Chiron is accidentally wounded by Heracles. This is an especially tragic accident because Heracles was Chiron's student. In some versions of the story, it is even said that the arrow that wounded Chiron was given to Heracles by Chiron himself.

If we take this story literally, this was a tragic accident, but what if we see the arrow as a metaphor?

It is a common cliche that we stand on the shoulders of giants. A good teacher makes the path of learning easier to walk and prevents students from making costly mistakes. This guidance has the potential to save the student valuable time. They might learn the material faster than the teacher did leaving them time to make their own discoveries and grow beyond their teacher's skill.

A teacher should celebrate a student's success. They should recognize that the teacher themselves went far because they stood on the shoulders of their teachers, and they would encourage their students to go as far as they can possibly go, creating taller shoulders for the generation that follows.

In practice, this isn't usually what happens. Students are pushed to move on before they learn all that a teacher can teach them for the sake of the teacher's pride. Instead of surpassing the teacher, the student is artificially held back, so the teacher will always be seen as superior.

In the story of Chiron and Heracles, Heracles wouldn’t have been able to wound Chiron if Chiron hadn’t been a good teacher. It is Chiron's skill as a teacher that enables Heracles to wound him. It's like that common trope in martial arts movies, the moment when student finally bests the teacher in a duel. His greatness came from his ability to overcome his pride and teach Heracles everything he knew about being a warrior, even if it meant that Heracles could wound him in combat.

What does Chiron’s wound mean to you?

Viewed through this lens, the wound of Chiron looks very different. Painful as the wound is, it is no longer a tragedy or evidence of failure as a healer. It is actually a sign of success as a teacher. Like the Norse god Tyr, Chiron puts his values before his own interests. He gives his students everything he can to see them succeed, even when it costs him personally. In your chart, Chiron points to a place where you have the potential to be a great teacher. Chiron’s house is the context in which you are being called to teach, and Chiron’s sign tells you the lessons you are called to teach. Teaching these lessons might not come naturally. You’ll likely have to face a lot of rejection in that area of your life first, but if you are willing to swallow your pride and give with an open heart, you’ll give a valuable gift to the next generation.

Would you like to explore what Chiron means for you personally? I would love to talk with you about it! Book a reading with me and let me know that you read this article and would like to talk about Chiron.

#Chiron

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adapembroke · 2 months

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You Also Are Psyche: Beauty and the Shadow Self

I was a teenager the first time crop tops and low-rise baggy jeans were cool. In my eyes, everyone in my school was a clone of Brittney Spears, and I felt like a hideous beast. Because I couldn’t go around with a bag over my head, I did my best to hide behind books.

One of those books was Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Orual. Orual was angry and bitter, and she was actually allowed to wear a veil to hide her face. Best of all, since she was a queen, there was no one to tell her not to write an entire book about it.

Till We Have Faces was the perfect medicine for that time in my life. I drank up Orual’s bitterness like illicit beer. I reveled in her self-righteous anger.

Her life was unfair. And she was allowed to file a complaint with the gods!

As she prepared to present her argument, I cackled with glee, convinced that the gods would see the rightness of her cause and... I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to do, exactly. Just the possibility that Orual might be right was enough.

Spoiler alert.

Orual doesn’t get what she wants, exactly, but she does get what she needs. After she is allowed to repeat her rant at the gods over and over again, she realizes that “the complaint was the answer.” She is not actually the righteous victim. The story (and her involvement in it) was more complicated, and she was (unknowingly) complicit in her sister’s suffering. Then she is taken to receive judgement from Eros. Reunited with Psyche, they look into a reflecting pool together, and she sees identical reflections.

“You also are Psyche,” the god says, and that is his judgement.

Orual receives, not mercy exactly, but a lesson in the interconnectedness of all things. She learns that gods and people “flow in and out of each other,” and, so, justice cannot assign blame to a single individual. The ugly sister and Psyche and Venus are one, and their beauty and ugliness and suffering are experienced by each other in the same way a body feels the pain of its hand or foot.

Psyche as the Shadow

As an adult, I have come to realize that Lewis’s version of Cupid and Psyche is about the paradoxical nature of the shadow. When we say “shadow,” we usually mean something ugly or wicked, but the shadow is anything about ourselves we can’t accept.

The difficulty I had with fashion as a teenager was just an outward manifestation of my inward struggle to see myself in my entirety. For whatever reason, it was (and continues to be) easier for me to admit my faults than participate in beauty. Attempts to put my “best foot forward” and present myself “in the best light” feel disingenuous. Like Orual, I am happy to show off my intelligence, but wearing makeup and fancy clothes and sitting in front of a camera feels fundamentally wrong.

It can be more difficult to accept the beautiful in us as it is to accept the ugly, and I get a lot of support from the spiritual community for my position on beauty. In a landscape rendered flawless by filters and Photoshopping and AI, refusing to participate in the beauty game seems humble and honest, but my motivations are anything but honest.

“If I can’t play the game well,” I say to myself, “I’m not going to play at all.”

For me, hiding from the camera is a subtle way of engaging in spiritual bypassing and, in the process, supporting the position that “only the beautiful deserves to show up” that I claim to stand against.

The Astrology of Psyche (Or, You Are Psyche, Too)

“You also are Psyche” is true in a mythical sense, but it is also true in a more literal sense. There is an asteroid named Psyche, which means the Goddess of the Beauty of the Soul appears somewhere in everyone’s chart.

In my chart, Psyche appears in my 10th house, close to my Midheaven, which means that my relationship with the myth of Psyche is an aspect of my soul that is a highly visible part of my personality--visible even to people who don’t know me personally. Psyche is close to my Mercury, giving me a “way with words” and making it easy for me to own the mercurial side of my nature, but Psyche is “close but not close enough” to my sun and Venus making it difficult for me to identify (sun) with Psyche and see her beauty (Venus) in myself.

Being able to see the astrology of a favorite story playing out in my life has helped me to begin the life-long journey of hiking to Psyche’s reflecting pool and seeing her face in mine, and I would like to help you, too.

If you’d like to learn more about asteroid Psyche in your chart, check out my workshop on Cupid and Psyche, or let’s chat over tea!

#Cupid and Psyche

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adapembroke · 3 months

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Astrology as Brain Candy

One of the wonderful things about being a fiction writer is that you don’t have to worry about being right. Telling lies is the name of the game, so you have a license to follow interesting people down the most bizarre rabbit holes imaginable. All that matters is that their mistakes are interesting enough to weave a story around.

I came to astrology as an adult with little exposure to the discipline beyond newspaper horoscopes. There were whispers in my high school science classes about astrology. I knew that some famous astronomers in the past were also astrologers–Kepler, Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe–but my teachers were baffled by their interest, and they taught me to raise an eyebrow, as well. At best, I was led to believe that their interest in astrology was an eccentric affectation. At worst, there were whispers about madness and genius, the inseparable twins.

When I was in my late-20s, I became fascinated by astronomy’s embarrassing estranged twin. Clutching my license to follow absurd ideas to their illogical conclusions, I threw myself down the astrological rabbit hole in search of a story.

I had always been told that astrology was fundamentally based on fantasy. Night sky as Rorschach test: Humanity looked at the stars and told stories about the shapes we found there. This story is true, but it isn’t the whole story. Encoded in the strange occult symbols are philosophical arguments dating back to the Presocratic Greeks. What is the fundamental nature of reality? How does existence come into being? What was the primordial substance air, fire, or water? In what positions were the planets at the first moment of creation? What is the nature of the lifecycle? Is it possible for matter to die?

Astrology doesn’t provide answers to those questions. It inhabits the questions themselves. In astrology, the universe is a clock. Viewed outside of time, the hands point to every possible number. The only answer to, “What time is it?” is, “Yes. As the planets cycle through the zodiac, they adopt different sides of every argument. Observe through enough cycles, and you’ll see what reality is like when each of the possible answers to these questions is true. Meet enough people, and you will meet each of these answers embodied as a living soul.

A chart is not a single answer but many. Every chart is a map of the universe in dialogue with itself. Within the thought-experiment of the chart, the answers talk with each other, argue with each other. The sun thinks the fundamental nature of reality is fire. The moon thinks it's water. Together, they make steam, and from the steam, Neptune is born.

Taken all at once, the system of astrology is tremendously complicated, but it is the complexity of fractals, an endlessly complicated system built on simple rules. Just like complicated molecules can be broken down into simple elements, a chart can be broken down into planets, signs, houses, and the relationships between them. Signs can be broken down into elements, modes, polarities, and the relationships between them. Polarity is binary. Ones and zeroes.

There are people who could happily spend eternity contemplating elegant abstraction. You may be one of them. I’m not a mathematician, scientist, or technical person. I am a poet. When I explore the abstract complexity of astrology’s roots, I’m a diver, wearing specialized equipment, living on bottled air. I dive for the same reason pearl divers dive. I am looking for treasure in the depths. Imagery and metaphor.

Astrology is the difference engine of poetry: Like an organ grinder monkey, you can make music by turning a crank.

An example: Astrology says that Scorpio is the sign of “fixed water.” What, exactly, does that mean?

Fixity is one of the three modalities. Modalities map the lifecycle. Fixed signs are right in the middle between cardinal and mutable. They live like Vitruvian Man, arms stretched equally on both sides between infancy and old age.

Water is an element we are intimately familiar with. We need water, or else we’re dead. It nourishes us and cleanses us. It is the source and substance of life. Your brain is 95% water.

What does it mean to bring these two simple ideas together? In nature, what does fixed water look like?

When I was a young astrologer, I thought the answer to this answer was easy: ice. “Ice” came to me easily because it is unmoving and represents the stubborn unmovingness of middle age. (My sun sign Taurus embodies this quality most of all the fixed signs, so it’s not difficult to see why I chose this quality to emphasize.) Ice can be powerful. I was born on glacier-scoured land. The gently rolling hills are the bones of mountains that were once taller than the Himalayas. The ruins of a mountain range conquered by ice, the land of New England is a testament to just how powerful ice can be. Ice becomes powerful with time and movement, but these qualities are not essential (or even common) to its nature. With encouragement and pressure, ice can do extraordinary things. Without it, ice doesn’t do much at all.

The closer I’ve gotten to the midpoint of middle age myself, the more I’ve come to realize (or hope or wish) there is more to middle age than stubbornness. Middle age should be at the top of a big bell curve between beginning and ending. Under ideal circumstances, life at middle age reigns at the height of its power. It knows who it is, what it is capable of, what its domain is. It knows its limits, as well, and, within those limits, it doesn’t hesitate to act.

In nature, rivers embody fixed water most clearly. Rivers have the powerful earth-carving power of glaciers, but they are water at its most alive, most itself. Water that is unmoving–either because it is frozen or because it is stuck and has nowhere to go–is dead water. Middle age can be like a barren icefield or a swamp, but that is what happens when middle age has gone wrong. A living death at middle age isn’t the way things should be.

Springs, rivers, and oceans are living waters. This is the water of astrology, beginning, living, and returning to the source.

I speak with the confidence of a middle aged astrologer, but the answer to the question, “What is fixed water?” is far from settled. Like rivers, symbols are living, moving things. Attempting to settle a final answer on them is as foolish as building a city on a flood plain. Even within a single person, the answers change. Ten years ago, I ran the question of Scorpio through my natal chart and churned out ice. Today, I returned to the same place and found a river.

I would never claim to have a mind like Kepler’s, but it is no longer a mystery to me why geniuses of his calibur have been fascinated by astrology. It isn’t the answers that astrology can potentially give about the future that makes it so fascinating, it’s the questions it raises, the potential foci for rumination.

Like a child peering into a kaleidoscope, the mind is transfixed, staring into the starry heavens, enchanted.

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adapembroke · 3 months

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How Astrology Helped Me When I Was Lost

My path to astrology was like walking down railroad tracks, following parallel lines that lead to a single destination. One track was intellectual, the other was practical.

I was a novelist…

I was 27 years old, and I had recently finished my first novel and earned an MFA in creative writing. I was trying to find material for my second novel, and I wasn't having an easy time of it.

Second novels are the hardest to write. You put your whole life into your first novel. You pour all of your passion and inspiration into it. When you go to write your second, you find that the well has run dry.

Fortunately, I was warned about this. Most novelists aren’t warned, and they assume that the second book will be easier than the first. They make big promises for their second book (sometimes to publishers) and kill themselves to meet a cruel deadline with no inspiration.

Because I knew this hard time was coming, I was gentle with myself and focused on looking for inspiration for my next book.

That was how I met John Dee.

A true Renaissance man, John Dee was many things. He was an advisor to Elizabeth I and influential in England’s early explorations of North America, but he was also an occultist who talked to angels. He was an astronomer and astrologer, a navigation expert and treasure hunter.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the early modern period, but I loved John Dee. I thought that he was an intellectual who desperately wanted to believe in magic… a bit like me. Thinking there was a novel in the tension between his intelligence and his love of astrology, I set out to learn astrology. I thought it would take me six months to learn.

As I studied interpretations and charts, I discovered that there was more to astrology than I could have possibly imagined from newspaper horoscopes. Astrology is a symbolic language. It has a simple alphabet—12 letters in all—but it is a language. Reading charts reminded me of translating German in graduate school. I spent hours writing in astrological glyphs, hoping that mastering the alphabet would help me crack the symbolic code.

As I studied, I slowly began to realize that there wasn’t tension between John Dee’s intelligence and his love of astrology. Astrology was a field in which he exercised his intelligence.

In the end, I lost track of the novel I was writing because I found what I was looking for in astrology: an intellectual field of inquiry as big as the sky... and a well of inspiration that never runs dry.

And I was lost.

I was 27 when I finished grad school and started working on my second novel. I’d been on my own for years, but, in many ways, finishing grad school was the beginning of adulthood. There is no conventional career path for a writer, and I suffered from the sudden lack of structure. I desperately wanted to get it together, but every time I tried to fix one area of my life, another area of my life would pop up demanding attention.

In retrospect, I recognize my troubles as classic Saturn return issues, but I didn’t know that at the time. I got nowhere until I discovered Emily Trinkaus and her blog Virgo Magic.

In Virgo Magic, Emily wrote monthly about the Full Moon. She talked about the personality of the moon's sign and tied in one or two bits of current astrological weather that altered the moon's default flavor. She ended every post with simple instructions for how to apply the things she'd written about to your own life by reading your natal chart.

Emily's writing wasn't technical instruction like the astrology I was learning from my John Dee-inspired research. It made astrology feel more like a weather report that pointed to things I was already experiencing, refining my ability to work with the energy of the moment consciously.

This material could have been heady and woo, but it always came down to very simple concepts. Things like, “You’re not going to get anywhere with your career until you deal with your dysfunctional relationship with stress.”

Through Virgo Magic, the Full Moon shined its light on a different corner of my life every month for a year. Slowly, methodically, Emily Trinkaus' interpretations helped me to tackle my problems. It gave me the structure I needed to figure things out, one small piece at a time.

Astrology helped me find my way.

It's been over ten years since I began walking the path between Emily Trinkaus and John Dee. Since then, I have become a professional astrologer. (And finally wrote and published my second book.) I teach the practical problem-solving skills I learned from Emily Trinkaus (and others), and I have a job that allows me to work at the edge of my intellectual capacity every day. Bringing these two things together has given me a job I love—a job that makes a difference in the lives of my clients.

I've come to believe that those two early teachers represent two sides of astrology that must stay in balance: The intellectual and the practical.

When astrology becomes an intellectual exercise, the heart and soul are sucked out of it. We lose the ability to connect with people--including the humanity in ourselves. We might have the pride of being fluent in an alien language, but who will we speak to? What will we use that language to say? Why should that knowledge matter to anyone?

When astrology is only a Farmer’s Almanac of the emotional weather, we lose our connection to what Jung calls the Spirit of the Depths, the deep pool of human knowledge that transcends time and space. We become lost, tossed around by the zeitgeist and the feelings of the moment, unable to see our experiences in context.

Emily Trinkaus and John Dee were able to do their work successfully because they walked between the two train tracks themselves, even though their work leaned on one side or the other.

Dee didn't study the language of astrology to feel smart. He gave his knowledge practical application. He used his knowledge of the sky to help sailors navigate better.

Emily didn't just deliver a weather report. Her observations came from a deep, technical knowledge of the language of astrology. She was able to see the symbols playing out in the weather of the moment, understand their meaning in context, and translate that context into language ordinary people could understand.

I can help you find your way, too.

As an astrologer, I’ve followed the example of my teachers, building these two tracks into my practice.

On one side, I run a school of astrology. It appeals to the intellectual side of astrology. It teaches the symbolic language of the craft. Like any good language class, however, it isn't just about learning vocabulary. The language has a purpose: to communicate with others. Through journaling exercises and conversations with other astrologers, students learn to find their own voice in astrology's magical language.

On the other side, I run quarterly virtual retreats where we practice listening to the voice of the moon and intuitively feeling into the energy of the moment. Following Emily's example, though, my moon retreats aren't just about feeling our feelings. It's about giving our feelings names. Then we use these names to help us to recognize patterns in our lives and unravel the tangled threads that keep us stuck and unhappy.

I have learned that keeping the balance between these two sides of my practice is essential for feeling whole. When I tip too far into one side or the other, I feel like I've gotten disconnected from a side of myself.

So, I'd like to invite you to ponder: Which of these approaches to the world is more comfortable for you? Are you a person of the mind, or are you more interested in getting down to brass tacks? And when you fall out of balance, what does that look like? And how can you prevent it?

Are you feeling lost? Not sure how to find your balance again?

Why don’t you schedule a call with me? We can chat about it over tea.

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adapembroke · 4 months

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New Moon in Capricorn: Musing on Dark Ages

When was the last time you took a break?

For me, it had been too long by the middle of December. It had been my intention the entire year to take a significant amount of time off during December to celebrate my baby's first Christmas.

I'm glad I had set that intention in advance. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have taken it. I would have told myself that I couldn't afford to take a break, and that would have been a big mistake.

It's a strange thing, the way human needs work.

There comes a point when you have gone so long without meeting a need that you don't even think you have the need anymore.

People who are starving don't get more and more ravenous. They eventually reach a point where they don't feel hunger. Even if they start to eat again, they can't dive in all at once. They need to start slowly, remember how to eat and digest.

When you go too long without an intellectual rest, similar things happen. Competence wanes. The well of inspiration goes dry. Your work gets harder. The results are sloppier, more and more derivative.

This bothers you, at first. Then it stops bothering you. Once it stops bothering you, you're in a dangerous place. Extreme starvation has its own momentum. It takes an outside force to intervene and keep you from limping along forever.

You might, from time to time, look back at things that you've done in the past with awe the way Dark Age Europeans looked at the ruins of Roman architecture. You know that you aren't capable of those great things anymore, but your curiosity is gone. You don't have the will or the courage to ask yourself, "Why are these things beyond me now? What would it take to get back to my full strength?"

Dark Age Europeans told themselves that the world was once inhabited by giants.

Did some part of them remember that they had been giants once? Did they ever wonder if they were just tired, or if they had fallen into decline?

They couldn't see the universities and cathedrals their children would build. They could only look behind with the certainty that they would never build Roman aqueducts again.

Maybe, they didn't think about those things at all. Maybe they told themselves that thinking about the past was a distraction.

Eventually, we know, they got back to work, meticulously copying manuscripts in a language they could no longer read, because, once upon a time, someone believed the task was useful.

The Dark Ages are a useful myth.

Recent historical scholarship suggests that the Dark Ages weren't as dark as we were once lead to believe, but the story of the years between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance persists because it is an important cultural myth.

The Dark Ages remind us that time moves in a circle and a line.

Rome is gone. Its language is dead, and its monuments are ruins. It is no longer possible to walk across the continent on Roman roads, and Roman tax collectors can no longer compel you to pay for their bureaucracy.

Rome is gone, but you can trace your finger along the arc of history and find empires that rhyme.

Some histories jump through time from monument to monument, empire to empire, but that isn't an accurate picture.

Human energy rises and falls, waxes and wanes like the moon. There are times when we active and growing to new heights, and there are times when we rest and decline.

Often, we are doing both simultaneously in different areas of our lives.

New Moon in Capricorn: Darkest Moon in the Darkest Season

I am writing this just before the New Moon in Capricorn. I am back from vacation, but I am still tired.

In the northern hemisphere, this is the time when the moon's cycle and the sun's cycle align. We are at the darkest phase of the moon's monthly cycle at the darkest phase of the sun's annual cycle.

It's time to be tired. It is time to rest.

Are you resting? When was the last time you really deeply, truly checked in with your heart? When was the last time you really asked yourself what you're hungry for?

I have rested enough to know that these are the questions I need to be asking, and I will be using Moon Mood Workshop to ask them.

If you are where I am, I'd like to invite you to join me.

#capricorn #New Moon #Transit Stories

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adapembroke · 8 months

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Full Moon in Pisces (8.30.23) - Savior Complex

So, the Full Moon is in Pisces right now and my favorite artist's birthday was yesterday, so I'm dealing with a lot of feelings. I was encouraged to share them by @adapembroke and we've been trying to get me to post more, so here's hoping this is the full start of that. I won't get into my adoration for Michael here. That is something I will do in future posts because I have plenty I plan to write on him. This is about the raw emotions and realization that hit me in the last 24 hours. Just know that love goes deep and is unshakeable. Continues under the cut

I have feelings - especially since Michael's birthday was literally yesterday and he has a Pisces Rising (like me) conjunct his Pisces Moon. I spent Monday and Tuesday listening to him - the first day my brother was cooking for school, so we spent the day downstairs listening to his albums and going back and forth on what we appreciated about them. I find his album Dangerous from '92 is a surprise favorite since it's very 90s but even 30 years later still speaks on things we deal with now.

Then yesterday, I watched one of his live tour performances. I was having fun for awhile, but then it hit me just how much I miss and love him and why I fear shining too much as a sensitive person - because I watched one of my idols be destroyed by the world he was in. A person I share all my critical angles with, a person who also has Leo and Virgo placements and a Libra NN, his being conjunct my natal Chiron. He was a star who loved and shared his heart and he was crucified for what he said. That terrifies me. Michael's music was one of a handful of artists' that got me through the hardest times and his death was a changing point in my life. I love him much more than I would ever want to admit - even to myself, which makes that fear all the more real. I don't want to go out like he did. I don't wanna be destroyed for daring to be a voice against the crowd. It feels like all kinds of past life wounds and fears have been dredged up with this moon transiting my 12th and 1st houses.

So that was a lot. I've been really reflective. At the same time as this fear, I found a podcast last night about learning to embrace your voice and I've spent part of today reading the book "My Friend Fear". I even managed writing the characters I've been meaning to write for months this past week. So I don't want to let fear stop me, regardless of how valid. I just need to figure out balancing my fear and my need to use my voice. I think Michael being so relevant right now is meant to help with that.

Another theme that's been prevalent in the last few weeks, but feels pretty poignant on top of what I said is the concept of being someone's "savior". That theme has come up a lot. There's even a song ("Savior") by someone I look up to - Kendrick Lamar - where he talked about how he couldn't be anyone's savior even though people wanted him to be. On another song on the same album ("Mirror"), he apologizes for choosing to save himself and his family and not being that savior - which irked me when it came out (last year) because I never felt he needed to be sorry for that. You can't save everyone. You shouldn't be sorry for choosing yourself, especially when you've already given so much.

And yet, that's what Pisces does. It gives and gives and gives until it has nothing for itself. And it fails to have compassion for itself. It's inconjunct Leo, who healthily does take care of itself. They both have to learn the balance between healthily self-focus and giving compassionately and genuinely. And I've been struggling with that. Michael struggled with it and in the end, the Pisces shadow is how he left the world. I don't want that. If these Leo transits have taught me anything, it's that I don't want that. Sure, being vulnerable is scary, but I've spent my whole life being self-sacrificial and not valuing myself. It didn't get me anywhere good - not in the long-term. So why not embrace myself and who I really am? Why not embrace self-compassion and love while still giving people room to be themselves? I won't allow myself to stay transfixed by my pain. I will continue to dive deep and transmute it into light while exploring my depths and the depths of the world around me - to go underneath the underneath.

I will be me, even in this world that says that's wrong. I don't have a choice. Even if that means confronting what scares me most. I have to live for me.

I'm not anyone's savior but my own. You can't be anyone's savior but your own. The best you can do is lead by example - to be an inspiration, a Muse - the last of which is hilariously on the nose for me since I played a Greek mythology video game called Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical this past week where you play as a Muse who helps solve people's issues by getting them to sing what's in their heart. She can't force them to lie or go against their true nature, but she can elicit and inspire them to express themselves truthfully (to an extent). Even funnier is that the character's name - Grace - is one of the meanings for my nickname irl - Anna.

Michael's asteroid - like Hermes - lies in my 11H in Cap. He's an inspiration, a guiding light, a Muse… but he isn't my savior. He shouldn't have been anyone's but his own. And I won't try to be anyone else's either. Not if I want to make it out of this life the way I want to. I can't fall into the Neptunian illusion or Jupiterian delusion of grandeur. I have a voice and I will share it. If people resonate, they do and that's great. If they don't, that's fine too. It's not my job to save everyone - only to be share what I feel needs to be said and expressed for us to start healing as a whole. To share what I need to to express myself and be of service by doing so. I don't want to lose my faith and magic in this world, my sense of wonder. Michael is one of those that reminds me of that - for good and bad. I will honor myself first and foremost. I won't drown in this ocean inside me.

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adapembroke · 9 months

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Ask Ada: What Is the Descendent?

Question: I don’t know much about the sunset of my chart. It is the 7th house, in Taurus. My natal south node is there. When it comes to relationships, as a Libra sun and moon I am familiar with the other. I think there is more there that I haven’t discovered… besides the relationship piece. How can I get to know this area of my chart better? Venus is the ruler of Taurus and Libra. My natal Venus is in Scorpio.

You are onto something beautiful when you talk about the “sunset” of your chart.

One of the values that modern astrology inherited from the ancient Egyptians is the importance of following the sun’s journey over the course of a day. For the Egyptians, worshippers of the sun, the passage of solar time was a sacred thing. Just as the king reenacted the death and rebirth of Osiris at the beginning and end of life, the sun rose from the underworld in the morning and returned to the underworld at night. Egyptian priests watched the movement of the sun and stars through this journey very carefully.

Every birth chart is a map of a particular moment in time, but that moment doesn’t exist in isolation. The sun is always somewhere on its journey: between sunrise and sunset or sunset and sunrise.

We see the major turnings of the sun in the angles in a natal chart. The sun rises at the ascendant, reaches the height of its brightness at the midheaven, sets at the descendent, and reaches the nadir before rising again.

You were born just after sunrise, which is why the sun is near (but above) the ascendant in your chart. The 12th house is called one of the hidden houses, but because of its relationship with the sunrise, it is actually only half hidden. The sun touches the horizon at the ascendant, but its disc becomes actually visible in the 12th house. Planets in the 12th house are like the cookie crumbs clinging to the corners of a toddler’s mouth: they are visible to everyone except the toddler (or the owner of the chart).

This puts people with 12th house suns in an interesting position. You shine, but you don’t know how much you shine… unless you have the benefit of being able to see yourself in the mirror.

The descendant is the mirror of the ascendant. It is where, as you say, we meet the other. We learn who we are by saying “I am not that.”

Except… If you have the sun in Libra, it’s slightly more complicated. Libra is the sign of the autumn equinox. It is the hinge between summer and winter, the sunset of the year, just like the descendant is the sunset of the day.

Libra is the part of us that knows at our core that “I am you.”

This sense of recognition of the self in the other would be doubly strong for you since your south node is there. You have been on the other side of the looking glass. Like Alice, you know that there is a whole world on the other side of the glass that isn’t (just) a reflection of you.

With one foot in the light and one foot in the darkness, Libra also knows that the line between the known self and the unknown other isn’t as clear as it seems. We don’t know ourselves nearly as much as we want to believe we do. We need to give weight to both sides of the mirror to achieve balance within ourselves.

And yet, while we aim for acceptance and balance, the answer is not to smash the mirror and allow the divided worlds to flow into each other. Equality is not sameness. We need boundaries for the same reason we need skin. Without our skin, we collapse into a puddle of bones.

This is the lesson of Aries (the world on the other side of Libra’s mirror): individuality is difference, and every living thing has the right to fight to exist.

Just like it is essential to keep balance between night and dark, self and other, it is essential to keep balance between Libra and Aries.

We need our mirrors. We need our others. We need our skin.

To the Egyptians, sunset was the death of the sun. Today, we also call that place in the chart the House of Marriage and the House of Open Enemies. This is not a paradox.

A relationship is a dance with the other side of the mirror. We take turns being strangers in each others’ countries. Sometimes, this cross-cultural experience looks like a fencing match. Other times, it looks like a waltz.

Neither is right. Neither is wrong. As long as they stay in balance.

If you enjoy Ask Ada, please subscribe and share it with your friends or ask a question.

#7th house

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adapembroke · 9 months

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Ask Ada: Which Asteroids Are Most Important?

Question: I am trying to incorporate ASTEROIDS into my astrology chart because there are a lot of them between Mars and Jupiter. I understand them to be geared more to the feminine energy. But there are 1000’s! I know the primary dozen or so, but how do you know when you have to go digging? Do you know of any astrologically oriented resources? Do you use asteroids?

Astrologers talk a lot about how much the discovery of Uranus shook up the astrological world, but I think the discovery of asteroids and dwarf planets might be even bigger.

Like you point out, there are thousands of asteroids. If you take them seriously, it’s no longer possible to pretend that we can understand everything there is to know about astrology. Even if you spend your whole life just reading the asteroids in your chart, you will never get through all of them—let alone understand the relationships between them. There will always be mysteries.

No matter what we do now, we are all specialists. Even those who focus on the 7 or 10 “major” planet are specializing in a tiny part of the sky. We know this is true, but the astrology community hasn’t begun to process what that means. We’ve seen the lightning, but we still haven’t heard the thunder.

Don’t take asteroids too seriously.

Between us, I think asteroids are the most fun topic in astrology. I love them because they don’t take themselves seriously. The people who discover asteroids are allowed to name them, so asteroids are named for all kinds of things.

There are the famous asteroid goddesses, of course, but there are also asteroids named Superbus (18596), Monty Python (13681), and Sherlock (5049). There’s even an Ada (523).

Sometimes the insights asteroids provide are as silly as their names. Other times, they hit with the piercing accuracy of a standup comic.

Asteroids are surprisingly insightful.

There is a good chance that there is an asteroid that shares your name or the names of your friends and family. Including asteroids in your chart can give you startling insight into your relationships.

In my chart, my father’s name is in Pisces, and my mother’s name is in Virgo. Seeing this helped me understand the role my parents played in teaching me how to manifest my dreams. My father (Sagittarius sun) taught me about dreaming, and my mother (Virgo sun) taught me critical thinking and the importance of keeping my feet on the ground.

As a polytheist, asteroids have given me a lot of insight into my relationship with the gods, too. I have Apollo (1862) conjunct my ascendant and Dionysus (3671) conjunct Chiron. Studying those asteroids has helped me to understand why I’ve been drawn to healing through theater and words but not a career in medicine.

Where do you get started with asteroids?

Astro.com allows you to choose from 23,838 (look under additional objects), and you have even more choices if you input asteroid numbers in the manual entry box using the minor planet names list from the IAU.

If you are just getting started with asteroids, I suggest starting with play. Look up your favorite people, characters, and snacks. (Potato is (88705). You’re welcome.) And consider what their house placement in your chart means to you.

Don’t worry about whether or not the asteroids you’re interested in are important enough. Your chart belongs to you, and the most important thing is that you find meaning in it. And you get to decide what that means.

If you enjoy Ask Ada, please subscribe and share it with your friends.

Have a question? Ask anonymously on my website.

#asteroids

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adapembroke · 9 months

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Ask Ada: Can You Have a Yod Involving Chiron?

Question: Can you have a yod with Chiron? Is this about a career in the sign/planet it points to?

Note: The yod in this chart is formed by the moon in Aquarius sextile the MC in Aries. Both are quincunx Chiron in Virgo.

Yes, you can have a yod that includes Chiron. A yod is an aspect pattern, and aspect patterns can involve anything from planets and asteroids to more abstract mathematical points like the nodes of the moon.

Yes, your career is one of the areas this yod is speaking to. Your chart has a yod that involves the moon, the midheaven, and Chiron. Whenever the midheaven is involved in something, questions about life purpose (which generally translate into questions about career in a capitalist society) come along for the ride.

Taking your question at face value, that’s the information you asked for. If you’ll humor me, though, I have a longer response to your question. I have a yod in my chart, and my yod also involves Chiron.

I like to joke that I play the game of life on hard mode. My chart is riddled with “difficult aspects.” The yod in my chart is, by far, the most difficult one.

My yod is made of a sextile between Venus in Aries and Mars/Chiron in Gemini, both of which are quincunx Pluto in Scorpio.

It is a little bit like living with an inner Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster happened because energy was allowed to run amok. The engineers believed they had an emergency system, but it was faulty. Pressing the emergency stop button just added fuel to the fire, accelerating the reaction instead of stopping it.

In my chart, Mars in Gemini and Venus in Aries are closely sextile. Sextiles are exciting, and planets that are sextile each other feed off of the other’s energy.

Venus in Aries is the spark of inspiration. The flash of knowing. An entire project appears from nowhere, fully formed in my mind. The beauty of the vision fills me with energy, and I immediately go into Gemini mode. I flail to record everything I can. But the act of recording fails to do justice to the original inspiration. And it triggers a torrent of new ideas. I flail to record these new ideas, too, but fail to do anything but trigger more ideas I flail to record. The intensity builds until I reach the limit of my physical and emotional endurance.

This is not how a sextile is supposed to work. A sextile is supposed to be an easy, supportive aspect. While the initial spark of energy from Aries should inspire Gemini, the exchange between them should be more gentle. An intense tennis match, not Chernobyl.

In my chart, that energetic sextile between Venus and Mars is fueled by the intensity of quincunxes with Pluto in Scorpio. When inspiration strikes, Pluto feeds energy to the sextile, and Pluto’s supply of energy is bottomless.

With Pluto’s assistance, the energy of the sextile builds and builds until Venus and Mars/Chiron are no longer able to handle the intensity. When this happens, Chiron kicks in.

Chiron’s involvement in the sextile feels like slipping on a banana peel at a million miles an hour. This disruption gives my Venus and Mars enough time to realize how tired they are. They collapse, and all of that energy runs down the quincunxes back to to Pluto, triggering a meltdown.

Even though we both have Chiron involved in our yods, your yod is different than mine. While our experiences will likely have similarities, Chiron’s position in the yod would bring with it some fundamental differences.

In your case, Chiron is at the point of the yod, not one of the planets involved in the sextile, which means that Chiron receives the energy of your yod the way Pluto receives the energy of mine.

Chiron doesn’t, however, have Pluto’s ability to feed energy into a system. Chiron is the wounded healer. Not a nuclear bomb. I would imagine that an exhausted Chiron feels more like a deep hole of loneliness and rejection.

I believe that there is no such thing as a “bad chart.” Everyone has the chart they need, even if it isn’t easy to see. Every difficult placement is actually a superpower in disguise. The more difficult the placement, the more powerful the superpower.

If I’m honest, though, finding the superpower in my yod is a work in progress. There have been times when the energy of that yod has allowed me to push far past the limits of my physical and emotional endurance in order to do something extraordinary.

But, this is almost never necessary. As my therapist used to tell me: “Your job isn’t diffusing nuclear bombs. You don’t need to live as if it is.”

It worries me that I have this placement because I wonder what will happen to make me need it.

In your case, I have an inkling that the energy generated by your yod will give you the ability to perform extraordinary acts of healing. Like a neurosurgeon who can spend 18 hours carefully working on a brain.

But that’s only a guess. You’re the only one who knows what you’re capable of.

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Have a question? Ask anonymously on my website.

#Chiron

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adapembroke · 9 months

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Ask Ada: How Do I Create a Character with Astrology?

Question: This may sound crazy, but I’ve been trying for a long time to create myself as a fantasy character (think Dungeons & Dragons). Ideally, the character (me) would be the protagonist in a book that would eventually turn into my memoir. I’ve always related strongly to my astrological signs, so I thought I would delve more deeply searching for the most objective, truthful perspective on myself. I need help in translating my chart into a character and selecting a “class” for myself. I have a number of squares and opposition aspects, which is making it even more challenging. If you could check my chart and let me know your thoughts on what class/subclass would best represent my chart, I would really appreciate it.

I can’t tell you how excited I was to get this in my inbox.

What you’re describing is the essence of narrative astrology.

Narrative astrology asks questions like: If my life was a story, what kind of story would it be? What kind of character am I? What is my story about?*

These are the great questions of philosophy, translated into the language of story, just like you translated the language of story into the language of Dungeons and Dragons.**

Human beings are storytelling creatures. Stories are how we give our lives meaning. Stories are so wired into the way our brains work, we need stories to understand what’s happening around us.***

All of this is to say… You’re not crazy. Or, at least, you’re not any more crazy than Frodo was when he volunteered to take the One Ring to Mount Doom.

I’m using The Lord of the Rings as a metaphor purposefully because your chart reminds me quite a lot of that story.

You have four planets in Sagittarius, the sun in Scorpio, the moon in Leo, and a Taurus ascendant.

In the language of literature, this is the chart of a complex character with lots of internal conflict. There is intense drive in the pursuit of meaning. (Sagittarius is the sign of the philosopher.) Your heart was made for joy (moon in Leo), but you need to feel secure and safe (Taurus ascendant) in order to express yourself authentically. As if this wasn’t enough, there is a deep awareness of the potential for evil in the human heart (sun in Scorpio).

If your life was a novel, some of the themes would be: How do you find meaning in a world full of evil and suffering? How do you find the security in an insecure world? How do you find joy?

That sounds an awful lot like a Hobbit on a great quest against an ancient evil, facing impossible odds. At least, to me.

If that resonates with you, I want to encourage you on your quest. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you you’re crazy for doing something hard. That’s just because they’re jealous.

* We dive into those questions in depth in my course Reading Stories in a Natal Chart.

** I don’t think it’s an accident that the greatest philosophers have also been the greatest storytellers. I don’t know if anyone will be reading Discourse on Method in 300 years, but we’re still coming up with creative ways of telling the story of Plato’s Cave over 2000 years later (see also: The Matrix).

*** Source: Spellbound by Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD

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Have a question? Ask anonymously on my website.

#archetypes

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adapembroke · 9 months

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Mooncast: New Moon in Cancer

youtube

Listen with your favorite podcast platform

In this episode Ada Pembroke and Lauren of Tarot and Chai talk about the New Moon in Cancer.

Highlights

The nodes change signs,

The New Moon opposes Pluto in Capricorn,

Uranus and Neptune kick off an earth-based spiritual revolution.

#mooncast

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adapembroke · 1 year

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Mercury in Taurus: Building a Second Brain

Lately, I’ve been reading the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. A second brain is made up of all the apps you use to store information so your physical brain doesn’t have to. Your calendar, your email inbox, your reminders app, your todo list app, all of these are part of your second brain.

Mercury will be going retrograde in Taurus soon, and I’ve been thinking that the timing of my discovery of Building a Second Brain is very apt. Taurus is the sign of embodiment. Mercury in Taurus is embodied thought, and second brains are made of embodied thoughts.

You’ve probably been keeping a second brain for years, even if you haven’t called it that. We are inundated with information all the time, and our brains aren’t evolved to handle it, so we use apps as tools to extend the capabilities of our memories. Building a Second Brain is about learning to use these tools in an intentional and organized way.

In essence, Tiago’s technique is simple: Capture every bit of information that catches your eye. Like early modern gentlemen hoarding beautiful ideas in the chaos of commonplace books, he suggests saving all the information we find important in apps, allowing the chaos to inspire our creativity.

We naturally muse on things that interest us while doing other things. If we capture the insights we form from those musings in our second brain, we will find much of the thinking and research work already done for us by the time we’re ready to act on it.

His solution to information overload may be high tech–the influence of Uranus in Taurus, maybe–but the technique is still embodied, taurean. When thoughts are recorded, they no longer ricochet off each other ephemerally until they vanish. They are given fixed form, a purpose, and something to do.

Mercury in Taurus: Thinking Slow

Taurus is an uncomfortable place for Mercury in the modern world because it is forced to slow down. When Mercury is in the sign of the bull, it ruminates on information like a cow chewing cud.

Mercury’s retrograde in Taurus makes Mercury extra slow, so slow it seems backward. But Mercury in Taurus isn’t “slow” in the sense of “stupid.” It’s slow in the way slow food is slow. Creative. Made from scratch. Wholesome. Allowed all the time it needs for flavors to develop. Caramelized onions rather than the raw ones that make you cry.

Tiago points out that most of the information we consume is created quickly and just as quickly forgotten. It’s as if we spend our days eating nothing but raw onions.

I’ve noticed that when I am on a “raw onion” information diet, I am emotionally overwhelmed and intellectually depressed at the end of the day. My head is full of information, but none of it intrigues me. None of the thoughts filling my head lead anywhere. I have dreams about living in an airport waiting for a plane that never arrives. I wonder if Samuel Beckett spent too much time reading the newspaper when he was writing Waiting for Godot.

The Benefits of Slowing Down

I have naturally found myself slowing down while Mercury is in Taurus. I am two months postpartum, and I have a lot of quiet time while I’m feeding a drowsy infant. At least one of my hands is always occupied, so I can’t do much but watch TV or scroll through my phone.

More often than not, lately, I feel like I’ve already gotten sick of raw content, and I’m hungry for longer reads that require time to digest. I am reading more books. Since discovering Building a Second Brain, I’ve been reading more with projects in mind, adding a few onions to the pot at every feeding time.

The more I move to a slow-information diet, the more often I find myself just looking out the window instead of looking at a screen. My thoughts are interesting to me. They’re going somewhere. I don’t need to be entertained.

Then, later, when my hands are free, I pick up a pen.

#mercury #taurus

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adapembroke · 1 year

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Rethinking Chiron

I have many reasons to be thankful for Chiron. That may seem like an odd thing to say about the Wounded Healer. Most astrologers would say having Chiron in the 11th house like I do means that some of my greatest wounds will come from rejection by my communities. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Chiron wounds can’t be healed, they say. The best I can hope for is using my experience with the wound to heal others with the same wound.

When I learned this, I got angry. I knew there was something to this Chiron business, but I believe in hope. I was convinced that my community was out there somewhere. I just hadn’t found my people yet. I didn’t care how many astrologers I respected subscribed to that story of Chiron. I refused to believe that my Chiron wound couldn’t be healed. If I couldn’t find a community to accept me, I was going to make one. I was going to build the most welcoming community I’d ever seen.

Before I knew what Chiron was, I had already started doing the work. After college, I spent a year in a community organizing internship. I was supposed to be learning how to rally a community around social justice work. What I actually learned was how to create communities where people aren’t just lonely followers and observers. They are included and actively involved members of the community because they are seen and appreciated for their unique skills and interests.

Using what I learned from that internship, I used Discord to create the community that would eventually become the Narrative Astrology Lab. I wasn’t thinking of it as a place where people with rejection wounds like mine could find a place they belong for the first time. Yet, over and over I’ve heard newbies say, “I’ve never been one of the cool kids before!”

Recently, one of the members of the lab asked me about my experience with Chiron. Mars had just finished spending months activating their natal Chiron in Gemini. I have Mars conjunct Chiron in Gemini in my natal chart, and they wondered if the transit had taught me anything about that Mars-Chiron combination.

I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but that transit completely revolutionized my view of Chiron. I no longer see Chiron as the Wounded Healer. The wound is only a small part of the Chiron story. Meditating on the rest of his story has made my view of Chiron so much richer… and brought massive healing, as well.

The wound of Chiron is a narrative problem.

I have only been physically dragged into a church once in my life. I was in high school, and my youth group was planning a retreat. It was the last night to sign up, and I wasn’t on the list. I had no interest in going. As we waited for our parents to pick us up in the church parking lot, a group of the younger kids begged me to sign up, and I refused. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to budge, the group picked me up like the world’s smallest traveling mosh pit and carried me into church.

My memory of this event is vivid. When I close my eyes, I can still see the white doors of the church getting closer as I yelled, begging to be put down. I didn’t want to spend days cramped in tight quarters with a bunch of other church kids. I wanted to be left alone.

I don’t have an especially vivid memory. It’s rare for me to be able to recall images from the past clearly. It’s even rarer for me to be able to recall a random memory like refusing to sign up for a church trip. I have learned that when my unconscious keeps a random memory cryogenically frozen for decades, the memory isn’t actually random. These oddly vivid memories are artifacts of a personal narrative I’m carrying that is disconnected from reality and ready to retire.

The story I told about that day at church was that it was one of many examples of times when I’ve been rejected by a community I care about. Looking at it now, it’s strikingly obvious that I wasn’t being rejected. They really wanted me to join them!

How could I make such an obvious mistake? Because of my personal narrative.

I’ve always been a weird kid. Wonky knees kept me from running around on the playground. I wasn’t able to participate in gym class. I had to sit on the bleachers and watch. The other kids noticed and acted like my disability was a communicable disease, either teasing me or avoiding me. By the time I was in high school, I identified as an outcast. I told myself that I was looking for my people as hard as I could, but deep down I believed I was–and always would be–rejected by every community I cared about.

The story of being dragged into church should have contradicted this narrative. If I’d been able to look at it critically, it would have, but the conscious mind filters our perceptions of reality to suit our unconscious narratives. The narrative of rejection clouded my judgment, making it impossible for me to see the truth.

All was not lost, though. Like a grain of sand in the shell of an oyster, the memory of being dragged into church irritated me until the day I was ready to recognize it as a pearl.

Chiron’s house is the place where we are adopted by the gods.

A few months ago, I was captivated by an element of the story of Chiron no one talks about. The story begins with Chiron being rejected by his human mother who is horrified to have given birth to a centaur. This is the part we focus on, the pain and horror of childhood rejection. But it’s not the end of the story. Chiron is adopted by Artemis and Apollo.

Today, we know that psychological wounding we get in childhood sticks with us for the rest of our lives, but in the myth, we don’t see him pining for his biological parents. We can chalk that up to ancient ignorance of child psychology, but doing so diminishes the love of adopted families. Being adopted by the gods seems to suit Chiron just fine. He grows up to be a well-respected doctor and mentor of heroes.

What if Chiron’s place in our charts doesn’t just point to a rejection wound? I wondered. What if it also points to a place where we have been adopted by the gods?

I thought back to the times when I have felt most alienated. I realized that those were the times when I spent the most time at the library. Books were my mentors and closest friends, but I wasn’t completely lacking human support. I had teachers who recognized my bookishness and encouraged me to see my love of reading and writing as a way to connect with others.

Who’s to say those teachers weren’t messengers of Hermes?

Planets conjunct Chiron aren’t easy to accept.

If my story was a simple fairy tale, I would say that this realization about Chiron allowed me to see that I had been accepted by every community I had ever belonged to, that my perceived rejection was just an illusion. And then I lived happily ever after.

The truth is more complicated.

On the day I was dragged into church, I had set a boundary with my community. I didn’t want to go to the retreat. I told them I had no intention of going. They physically crossed my boundary and attempted to get me to go anyway.

I wasn’t rejected, but my boundaries were. My community wanted me… but without my Mars.

When I look back at the times I’ve felt alienated in communities, my Mars has been there like a berserker looming over my shoulder. I am not an aggressive person. When threatened, my first instinct is to fawn, not attack. Yet, I’ve always felt like people can sense my Mars like the smell of something feral.

“I feel like I was raised by wolves and am still learning to be civilized, don’t you?” one of my professors once asked me.

When I was a teenager, I was a punk on the outside. It was my way of exercising self-defense. Like a hedgehog, I wore spikes on my skin. Kicking a hedgehog is its own punishment. I hoped that my spikiness would send the same message. Then I went to college with the plan to disappear in the crowded anonymity of Boston. I shed my punk aesthetic for a peacoat and a knitted slouch hat. I wore them like an invisibility cloak. If I had the language of astrology then, I would have thought: There is no reason for my Mars to be here. Maybe now it will shrivel up and fall off.

I suspect Chiron feels similarly about his horsey backside. In myth, Chiron is the token centaur in a community that sees centaurs as brutish barbarians. He achieves an honored place in his community by playing by the rules, continually demonstrating that he is “different than all those other animals.” He is the civilized centaur, so educated and refined he is trusted with the mentoring of heroes. In the process, he rejects the animal part of his nature that is rejected by his community.

Embracing Chiron is necessary healing.

In one of the versions of the myth of Chiron, he does an odd thing. When he is wounded and discovers it is a wound he can’t heal, he takes the place of Prometheus, the rebel being punished for stealing fire from the gods. Seeing Chiron taking punishment he doesn’t deserve, Zeus frees him and puts him in the starry sky.

In other versions of his story, Chiron isn’t wounded at all. He is rounded up with all the other centaurs and killed in a centaur genocide. His willingness to conform doesn’t save him. Neither does his supposed immortality. When his community decides it is no longer willing to tolerate centaurs, no one cares that he’s the civilized one. He is killed, anyway.

I like to think that these two versions of the myth represent different paths he could have taken. Different paths we all could take when presented with the option to wound ourselves in the quest to fit in. And the consequences of betraying an aspect of our nature.

It is only when Chiron is willing to identify with the rebel Prometheus, and embrace the rejected parts of himself, that he is able to take his place among the stars.

The alternative isn’t silent misery. It’s the death of his soul.

#Chiron

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