Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for January 2024

We begin this year very much in the midst, despite this fresh blank page we’ve turned to with only “2024” written at its top. I think there’s something powerful in the ritual of beginning again that happens at each New Year, like the fleeting feeling we get when we see fresh snow that has no animal tracks in it yet. (Or for us city dwellers, that has not yet become dirty slush on the side of the road.) And yet, I find myself struggling to tap into that sense of possibility right now. I’m still holding so much that has been heart-wrenching from 2023. I want to honor what we’ve all been through in 2023, especially since the violence escalated in Israel/Palestine. I want to hold infinite space for how not-okay everything is as we turn to this new, blank page that — if you look closely — is already dissolving into dirty slush around the corners.

We begin in the midst.

Astrologically, we are at a turning point that’s unlike anything anyone alive today has lived through before. This year, Pluto is continuing its ingress into Aquarius, where it will come to rest for the next two decades. It has been moving back and forth over those two degrees — the last of Capricorn and the first of Aquarius — since March of 2023. It will continue to do so until November 19th of this year. We are at the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, and in these transitional times we find monsters. We also find hopeful monsters, those theoretical creatures that represent huge evolutionary leaps. The last time Pluto moved through Aquarius was in the late 18th century, what is called the Age of Revolutions — including the American, French, and Haitian revolutions.

As Pluto consolidates its move to Aquarius this year, we are revisiting the dreams of that old world — the hope people placed in democracy and equality, in the dream of citizenship — and fully immersed in birth pangs of a new world. In twenty years, what seems normal and inescapable to us now may have been entirely transformed. For each of us approaching this blank page, now increasingly criss-crossed with the tracks of ghosts and the dirty slush of history, we can ask ourselves: How can I begin to imagine an unimaginable world? Our future depends on this.

We need to be able to think the unthinkable.

Our collective imagination needs to take us beyond where the 18th century left us. What can we imagine that is not war, is not poverty, is not colonialism, is not climate disaster, is not nationalism? Where can we nurture and encourage those hopeful monsters, adapted not to our current world but to the future we want to see?

If you want to read more about this Pluto in Aquarius, and a massive Year Ahead Horoscope for every sign, join me on Patreon for only $2 a month. I’m also available for readings, so please reach out if you need some help thinking about your place in the world right now. For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram. May you all feel loved and encouraged at this turn of the year.

Aries

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: The courage to name what’s wrong, even when it’s an unpopular opinion. The willingness to stay engaged with the trouble. The vision to see a better world.

Taurus

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: Tools for nervous system regulation. Softness and endurance when everything feels hard and urgent. Pleasure activism.

Gemini

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: Energy, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor. Willingness to keep asking questions and drawing “wash me” signs on dusty assumptions about how the world works.

Cancer

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: Snacks for all. Emotional intelligence. The capacity to distinguish between discomfort and danger. An ethic of revolutionary care.

Leo

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: My voice, my vulnerability, my story. Ways of connecting the personal to the political. My capacity to listen. My love for the world.

Virgo

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: My fierce analysis. Acts of service. Checking on people who may fall through the cracks. Faith in a better world and strategies to try and get there.

Libra

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: Capacity to hold multiple perspectives. A sense of when and how to deescalate, and when not to. Insistence on hearing the voice that isn’t in the room.

Scorpio

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: Ancestral healing. The poetry and spirituality and medicine that can heal our culture’s wounds. Zero tolerance for bullshit.

Sagittarius

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: Everything I have. All my lived experiences, all my analysis, all my intuitive faith in what is possible. Willingness to keep trying.

Capricorn

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: The wisdom of my own successes and failures. A longterm vision that tracks generational impact. Integrity and followthrough.

Aquarius

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: New ways of being human. Insight and inspiration for transforming oppressive systems. Both urgency and revolutionary patience.

Pisces

I’m packing for collective liberation and I’m bringing: The capacity to breathe with the living organism that is our species. Sensitivity and attunement to our whole. Boundless love for what lives, what dies, and what is to come.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for December 2023

A few weeks ago I was on a road trip. I stopped for a brief visit with an old friend who has hella Scorpio in their chart. While we were catching up, shoes off and sharing a dinner of road snacks and rotisserie, I happened to get a large splinter in my toe. My first instinct was to ignore it. I even told my friend “it’s fine” when it clearly wasn’t. They, in finest Scorpio fashion, insisted it wasn’t fine and went to get their wound care kit. I had to laugh because I was living out the metaphor I use with my clients all the time: Scorpio energy insists that we remove the splinter, even if it means more pain at first. I had been in default road-trip mode — endure and keep moving. I was struck by how hard it felt in that moment to admit I needed care for such a small thing. But I did.

I think many of us have been in “endure and keep moving” mode for a long time now. Nothing is fine and most of us have to keep working and buying groceries and making doctor’s appointments anyway, between the grief and the protests and the numbness. Our social fabric feels especially tenuous. Many people tell me their relationships with friends and family are fracturing along political lines. This distrust permeates other relationships. Even when care is available to us, it can be hard to trust it and hard to accept it.

This collective splinter is lodged deep. We are all in some kind of pain. We may lash out online in pain. Pain may prompt us to withdraw and stop interacting. We may end up feeling we need to defend our pain against someone else’s pain. We may feel our ancestral pain as present pain. And pain just becomes exponential when it’s ignored or dismissed. Even if our personal pain seems like a small thing, we are witnessing vast pain. How do we access care around something so big?

Astrologically, Scorpio is the sign that can witness this kind of pain. Scorpio care is unflinching and can cut deep, as it aims to address the core problems. The ones we haven’t been looking at. This may be Sagittarius season (we’ll get there), but Venus in Scorpio this month is bringing a flashlight and a scalpel to all the painful splinters in our relationships. And odds are good that healing can happen — Venus teams up with all the slow-moving planets from Jupiter to Pluto this month, most in harmonious connections. This means we have many opportunities to take a look at what’s going on and find ways to work things out. Courage and care are two words this month asks you to tattoo on your forearms where you can see them every time you’re about to reach for someone or push them away: Are you reacting from a place of fear or courage? From a place of care or dismissal? How can you set the boundaries you need to protect yourself and also reach with care towards people you want to be in community with, even if it feels potentially fraught?

Because after all we are in Sagittarius season — this is a time of gathering and festivity, of lighting candles against the cold, dark nights. Sagittarius knows there is something aspirational that connects us to each other. Scorpio may show us where we’ve hurt or been hurt but Sagittarius shows us how to keep our hearts alive when we’re afraid they’ll break. Scorpio may show us the brutal reality, Sagittarius shows us what we can do differently in the future. Sagittarius keeps a necessary impulse toward faith in each other alive. And Sagittarius season is a time of coming back into spaces of joy together, even if we are also holding grief. As Bertolt Brecht wrote: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes there will also be singing. / About the dark times.” We need Sagittarius to lead us back into the dance of life, of grief and joy, of connection and disconnection, of believing in and trying to shape a better future. May this be a month where you can receive the care that’s available for you.

I’m available for readings so please get in touch. I’ve also got a few cool things I wanted to tell you about: I’m offering Astrograms again—custom artwork drawn from your birth chart — and I’m pretty excited about this. You can get custom designs for you, for you and your best friend, for your whole polycule. And stay tuned in January for my massive Year-Ahead Forecast for each sign on my Patreon! You can also follow me follow me on Instagram for more regular astro content. Meanwhile I’m wishing you warmth and joy and just as much connection as you want this Sagittarius season.

Aries

Accept care: For the part of you that feels like everything is falling apart and you have to keep holding it together, and why aren’t your friends taking these risks with you? For the energy it takes for you to show up to the challenges you face on the daily. For the ways you’ve been changed by the big changes in your life. For the part of you that’s resigned to disappointment. For the part of you that is stubbornly resisting your own need for care, and the part of you that is learning how to reach out for it before the need is urgent.

Taurus

Accept care: For the part of you that wants everyone else to be reasonable and understand what seems obvious to you. For the ways you’ve felt unmet by the people you thought were ride-or-die. For the ways you’ve also failed them. For the deep longing you have to just be able to enjoy your life. For everything you’ve had to give up in order to live according to your values. For the small, nagging voice inside you that feels you should have given up more. For the part of you that is grieving a world that no longer exists (or never did).

Gemini

Accept care: For the ways you work yourself until you’re too tired to care for your body — mentally, physically, or both — often because it is your literal job. For how your social world can feel too small and too large (or at least, demanding) at the same time. For all the many small things in your daily life that numb you to joy and delight, that feel too mundane to complain about. For the poems you aren’t writing and the songs you haven’t finished. For the ways you blame yourself for this, as though you somehow aren’t affected by your world.

Cancer

Accept care: For the part of you that is afraid to and needs to speak out. For the ways you are moving out of your comfort zone and into engagement with things that might have terrified you in the past. For the part of you that worries about centering yourself or taking up too much space. For the part of you that truly needs to center yourself sometimes and is looking for appropriate places to do so. For how big the feelings are. For how few spaces seem able to hold them.

Leo

Accept care: For the part of you that feels very young and unprotected. For the ways you perform competence and cool when you’d rather stay home and stay in bed. For however your family failed you, dramatically or incidentally, when you were learning how to regulate your nervous system — aka feel safe in this world. For the ways that love and belonging can feel circumstantial, like you need to keep performing a self that deserves love. For that part of you that fears what will happen if you stop performing.

Virgo

Accept care: For the conversations you keep having in your head where you say the perfect thing and then someone else finally understands and changes their position. For the pressure you put on yourself to be able to name and notice and debate and persuade. For all the things you’re tracking that seem to be getting lost, flattened, distorted beyond recognition. For your powerful need to be helping and equally powerful doubt that what you’re doing really helps. For the part of you that won’t let yourself rest.

Libra

Accept care: For the part of you that wants both justice and peace. For how much you’re holding that you don’t often speak about. For the part of you that just wants to feel secure in your own life, and the part of you that judges that first part. For the part of you that holds multiple opposing perspectives and doesn’t know what to do about that. For the nagging fear you have that you should be doing more, as though it’s solely up to you to fix all things.

Scorpio

Accept care: For the part of you that needs love to come with honesty and has chosen to walk away from dishonest relationships. For the loneliness that comes from that choice. For the ways others have read you as intimidatingly independent when really you’re looking for trustworthy intimacy. For how long it’s taken you to know yourself as well as you do now, and for how hard it is to forgive yourself for things you did before you knew yourself quite so well.

Sagittarius

Accept care: For the part of you that wants to tune out everything and just go hike the Pacific Crest trail or take an impulsive trip to a country where you don’t know anyone and wander around for a solid month. For all that you can’t hold in your waking mind and need to squirrel away into your dreams. For how important it feels to keep believing in a better future and how impossible it feels to believe in a better future. For what you couldn’t protect. For what you had to leave.

Capricorn

Accept care: For the ways your friends and comrades are disappointing you, even if they’re doing the most not to. For your vision of how things ought to work and the reality of how they’re mostly not working. For the part of you that wants to retreat to cynicism and stop trying to organize or collaborate or come to the protests or public meetings. For the part of you that can’t stop trying. For the ways you can see farther than many around you, and how that’s no guarantee they’ll understand when you try to show them.

Aquarius

Accept care: For all the ways you need to keep hustling and grinding. For the parts of you that wish you could be living an entirely different life, and for the parts of you that take some pleasure in how hard you can work or how much you can accomplish, and then feel uneasy about that pleasure. For whatever peace you’ve made with your own limitations and the part of you that wishes you could push past them. For the part of you that is learning to forgive past you for the mistakes they made so that present and future you don’t have to.

Pisces

Accept care: For the part of you that would rather time travel, smoke weed, or watch a movie than show up to the world as it is right now, thank you very much. For the yearning for a more beautiful existence that once felt much nearer than it does now. For the private world you need to create to come back to center, and how that centering feels harder now than it once did. For the ease with which you reach for escape without it actually feeling restorative. For the ways your intuition or imagination or compassion seem to be struggling like a car running out of gas and you have no idea where the next gas station is. For the part of you that feels alone with all this when you are anything but.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for November 2023

In astrology, Scorpio is associated with crisis response. It’s the sign that helps us access our emotional courage so we can move toward what is scary, ideally to facilitate a healing transformation. Many clients I’ve worked with who have strong Scorpio energy in their charts are activists, therapists, social workers, acupuncturists, death doulas, and one even worked in municipal waste management. Scorpio moves towards what we as a culture don’t want to see — oppression, ecological disaster, pain, illness, trauma, death, shit. The goal is to understand what help we can bring, and to witness and grieve what we cannot help. As a water sign, Scorpio values emotional intelligence. If we’re going to heal, we need to feel. And feeling can sometimes be unbearable.

As we move into this Scorpio season the crisis that is most on my mind and that I can’t escape in my dreams or in the news or on social media is the one in Israel and Gaza. It is rippling out into my communities, grief and pain and fear polarizing people in support of only Israelis or only Palestinians, as though we cannot hold the full humanity of everyone affected. The highest goal of Scorpio is to be able to face what is monstrous in ourselves — the ways we dehumanize others, the ways we perpetuate harm or oppression. In facing our own most dangerous qualities, we have the opportunity to disarm them with care and skill. The shadow side of Scorpio is the need to control, dominate, and retaliate when hurt or scared. In the years I’ve studied conflict work, it is the need to be right and to take revenge that has most interfered with restorative justice. I have no political vision for solving this crisis, but I know that each of us has the capacity to be foregrounding care for the larger whole. As a Jew, I know my liberation is bound up with the liberation of Palestinians. I stand with calls for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation, while knowing both are just initial steps towards real restorative justice. And my grief right now is for all of us.

Scorpio shows us what we, as a culture, don’t want to see. When we don’t have the space or support to emotionally process this, we can easily leap toward the need to be right, to know what to do, to feel that whatever actions we take are justified. I’m taking the actions that feel ethical and important in this moment, but I’m also taking the time I need to process what I’m feeling and have discernment before I act.

We are still in eclipse season until the Scorpio New Moon on November 13th, so remember that your feelings, all of our feelings, are heightened right now and our fear responses are turned up high. When we are gripped by fear, empathy is hard to muster. As much as possible, I encourage you to find spaces to feel your feelings and come back to a place of empathic discernment this month. This doesn’t mean that I’m counseling passivity or a lack of resistance to injustice. You may act in ways that are disruptive, that have high stakes for you and others, but I hope you do this from a place of care rather than fear.

My books are open for new and returning clients this month, so get in touch. For a day-by-day highlight of all the astrology of this month you can join me on Patreon for only $2 a month. I’m also intermittently on Instagram and hard at work finishing the guidebook for our upcoming oracle deck, Wild Chorus.

Aries

Find the courage to let things change. You’re good at making changes when you need to, but not always as ready to witness and participate in processes of change you didn’t initiate. This month is a good time to notice what’s different, what’s over, what’s ending, and what’s in the process of beginning. Just make sure you don’t jump over all those other parts to get to the new beginning.

Taurus

Find the courage to encounter difference without shutting down your heart. Notice what level of difference you can accommodate right now — if you’re feeling scared or angry you may have lower tolerance than usual. Reach for what feels like a growth edge, but not a traumatic challenge. Practice empathy the way you’d practice lifting weights: a little bit every day, gradually increasing the challenge. And remember that empathy isn’t passivity, isn’t taking on someone else’s values, isn’t excusing or justifying their actions. Empathy is merely honoring our shared humanity, our shared capacity for love and pain.

Gemini

Find the courage to do what’s needed. Stress often presses on you to distract yourself, which can be a useful strategy for self-soothing until it becomes its own kind of trap. Notice when you’re at capacity and need to tap out, but also notice when you need to re-engage. Showing up for small, humble, useful actions is where it’s at right now. No need to spin out into all possible futures, or the biggest, grandest gesture.

Cancer

Find the courage to talk about how you’re feeling. It may feel easier most days to have your feelings alone, or with just the one or two people you usually reach to for support. But this Scorpio season is pushing you into greater self-expression. This can seem intimidating, but it may also expand your networks of mutual care. Seek out people and places that are organized around shared grief, and bring what is true for you.

Leo

Find the courage to feel your vulnerability. Notice where you get self-protective, and if what you’re reaching for to protect yourself is actually doing the job. Allow times of retreat and downtime. Find sanctuary. Find your courage to act from the recognition that you, and all of us, deserve safety.

Virgo

Find the courage to speak your truth. Even if it’s only in your journal or to your therapist, there are things you’ve been afraid to say that need to be said. Because speaking publicly right now can feel high stakes, remember that you don’t need to have the widest platform or the hottest take. Start talking in a context where it’s okay to make mistakes and be messy (i.e., not on social media). Let yourself learn as you go. Just begin somewhere.

Libra

Find the courage to prioritize being well-resourced. Know what enough means for you, whether it’s enough time, connection, money, food, knowledge. Know when you have enough to share. You are often quick to over-identify with another’s needs over your own. Remember that sustainable mutual aid requires you to also receive.

Scorpio

Find the courage to know yourself. Know what you love and value. Know what you fear, and how you respond when you’re scared. Know what you’re capable of. Know your history. Know your capacity. Know your needs. Know your boundaries. Know how you feel and how you care for those feelings. Know that you are lovable and worthy in all your complexity. Offer that same love to other messy humans (with whatever boundaries you need in place).

Sagittarius

Find the courage to not know what to do. You like to believe that your politics, your tactics, and your understanding of complex issues are all impeccably correct. There’s a “if only everyone else could understand what I do” kind of despair that may arise when you see people making terrible choices. This month, foreground the profound mystery that is other people and how we manage our differences. Acknowledge and honor the parts of you that you don’t understand, can’t name, that are mysterious and beneath the surface. Allow uncertainty a place on your altar.

Capricorn

Find the courage to be a part of the larger whole. A part of you likes to hang back, assessing and critiquing. That assessment and critique are necessary, but bring them where they can do some good. You are often more comfortable working solo if you can’t guarantee that everyone around you is equally competent — find a way to be part of something larger than yourself right now without taking on more work than your own, and without needing everyone else to have your skills.

Aquarius

Find the courage to be who you are in public. This may be high risk, so be thoughtful and strategic as you do so. Choose your words, choose your audience, have a specific goal in mind. Have an aftercare plan. Your values around collectivity are especially needed right now, and there’s a perspective only you can bring to the people who are paying attention to you.

Pisces

Find the courage to learn more. What’s happening globally, locally, interpersonally, even within you — it’s all more complex than it appears at first glance. Prioritize thought and research. Seek out dissenting opinions. Make room for nuance and complexity. Take time to understand what you can, and recognize what you don’t yet understand.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for October 2023

There is a common misconception about Libra energy that it is “peaceful.” As we move into this fairly dramatic Libra season I’d like to reframe that. Libra is interested in restoring balance. Often, this means listening to the voices that aren’t speaking as loudly as others or aren’t even in the room. Libra’s goal may be peace, but it’s just as likely to be justice. And you know how the protest chant goes: no justice, no peace. When your focus is justice, you may create friction and conflict merely by naming the elephant in the room (or the elephant not invited to the room). At its best, Libra helps us include and integrate what’s been excluded and marginalized. Libra’s favorite tactic is diplomacy: how can we find common ground even in situations where it’s hard to agree? How do we foster a shared willingness to do the hard work together? What happens when we’re willing to listen, even when we disagree? Libra’s super power is always tracking the “we” over the “me.”

We are also in eclipse season, with both a solar eclipse on the 14th and a lunar eclipse on the 28th. Eclipses are a cosmic record scratch, a time when the ordinary flow and continuity of time, as we experience it by the cycles of the Sun and Moon, is disrupted. Eclipses can feel alarming and jarring, like walking into a room where the lights go out suddenly. With the second eclipse happening so close to Samhain/Halloween, I recommend treating eclipse season like a haunted house — things may jump out at you, but they aren’t actually going to hurt you. Eclipses help us see our lives differently and make changes. Often, what surfaces can seem surprising, like a lawn suddenly dotted with mushroom caps after a heavy rain. The hidden world is revealing a part of itself, and often what feels so scary is just remembering how much is always happening that we can’t see or predict.

Ordinarily eclipses happen in opposite zodiac signs, but as we’re shifting from Taurus-Scorpio eclipses to Aries-Libra eclipses, this month we’re straddling the two. Our first eclipse will be in Libra, the second in Taurus. That means both eclipses will be ruled by Venus, who spends this month in repair-oriented Virgo.

As Venus was so recently retrograde, we’ve spent several months this year deep in relationship-resources-creativity-values review. Many of us have ended relationships that weren’t working, recommitted to sustainable and ethical spending, taken an inventory of our true values, and put to rest old creative projects or mediums that were no longer the right fit. This month’s eclipse season won’t undo all of that work, but it will expose any cracks we hadn’t yet noticed. Again, it doesn’t make these cracks. If your relationships are mostly caring and respectful, eclipse season won’t turn you or your beloved into a monster. If you’re enjoying becoming a YA novelist after years in academia, the eclipses won’t rob you of that joy. All they do is help us see more clearly whatever has been hidden. And when I say “help,” I mean jump out of a closet and yell “Boo!” or rather “Boo! And by the way have you considered that when you minimize your real needs in order to keep the peace in your relationship, you are weakening its foundation of radical honesty?” When you learn something new, lean on that Virgo Venus energy to do what needs doing, whether that’s pruning or mending.

My books are open for readings this month, so get in touch for some personalized care in these chaotic times. And if you are an artist, writer, creative, or maker of any kind you may be interested to know I’m expanding my practice to include Creative Coaching.

So many of my clients are brilliantly creative! Often our sessions stray into creative coaching territory, and I’ve found astrology offers unique tools for overcoming blocks, generating material, clarifying your focus, and knowing when to edit. My books will open for a limited number of coaching clients in January, so get on the list now if you’re interested. You can also find me on Instagram and join me on Patreon for a lot more astro content for less than a dime a day.

Aries

Don’t get too spooked: This eclipse season may have you anxious about security — specifically the stability of ongoing partnerships (platonic or romantic) and a generalized low-level doominess about having enough (love, money, healthcare, clean air, etc.). Pay attention to the information coming your way right now, but promise me you won’t leap to unfounded conclusions and then leap toward supposed solutions that fail to take into account the big picture, okay? And even if you do, be kind to yourself about it. Laugh it off and try again tomorrow.

Taurus

Don’t get too spooked: This month’s eclipses want you to love your body more and appreciate its special strangeness without alarm or shame. It can feel nearly impossible to become an adult in this world without learning to hate your body for some reason or another, and this month is shining a bright light into some of your deepest held stress patterns about who you are, how you inhabit your body, and what that means about who you get to become. As much as possible, resist the story that anything about you isn’t lovable as it is. You may feel inspired to make changes for your own comfort, health, or gender euphoria — can you do this without hating what you’re trying to change? And as you consider bigger changes, maybe postpone committing to them until eclipse season is fully over on November 13th.

Gemini

Don’t get too spooked: You are not past your creative peak. There may not even be such a thing. Don’t get too spooked that your best ideas are in the past or that you’ll never have time to play or explore again. Part of what this eclipse season offers you is opportunities to look into parts of your own mind, heart, and history that you usually ignore. Don’t be afraid to get non-linear, to not have a plan, to experiment with how things feel before you know what they mean. You have weird things to do right now, and you don’t yet know what they are.

Cancer

Don’t get too spooked: Just because something reminds you of your past doesn’t mean the past is repeating itself. This month may bring situations where your self-protective drive goes into high gear, but what you’re reading as a cause for alarm may not be what you think it is. That rapping at the window may just be some tree branches, y’know? When in doubt, crowd source. Your community has things to teach you right now if you’re willing to learn.

Leo

Don’t get too spooked: There’s a disconnect right now between what’s filling your daily life and something big you’re wanting to dedicate your time to. The specter haunting you this month is the fear that you’ll never do that big thing that you know you have it in you to do — that the routine chores of answering emails and navigating bureaucracy will kill your creativity by a thousand small paper cuts. But is it the incessant demands of daily life or is it your own fear to sit down and try? What if you start it and it isn’t any good? That’s a fear worth facing this month, even if you have to wake up early or call in sick to carve out some time. Cut the big thing up into many smaller goals, and see how it feels to do just the first one.

Virgo

Don’t get too spooked: Your worth does not depend on you being brilliant, beautiful, or accomplishing great things. If you are fortunate to live a long life, you’ll have moments of brilliance and changing phases of beauty and may accomplish a few great things. And in between, you will be in a messy and slow process of becoming. Let this, too, be worthy of you. Let your best self be less important than your everyday self. This month’s eclipse may scare you by just showing you how far you are from where you want to be, but resist the idea of failure as some final form. You have so much you’re still exploring, give yourself permission to not know where you’re headed.

Libra

Don’t get too spooked: With the eclipse on the 14th falling in your sign during your damn season, this is a month to LOVE your innate complexity. Make room for all of your parts to be present, visible, and loved. Don’t scrunch your nose in disgust at any of them, if you can help it, and definitely don’t accept anyone else’s unhelpful opinions. This may be a time of big revelations and big decisions, and if so be sure to keep breathing and thinking realistically. You’re not going to make your wisest choices when you’re feeling alarmed, so find ways to move through your startle response (or your panic disorder, as the case may be) with patience and compassion on the way to making meaningful changes for the better.

Scorpio

Don’t get too spooked: In general you are more adept than other signs at looking into the shadows and seeing what other people flinch away from. During this eclipse season, you may find yourself needing to pace yourself. Your tendency is to rush in fully or to wall yourself off, but you’re learning that sustainability requires a slower, steadier pace. Be patient with yourself and with any intimacies that are growing, stabilizing, or changing. Listen to your gut but follow that up with learning more about what other people are experiencing — not to negate your own feelings, but to have better info to act on. Love and trust are always a little scary for you, but this month is trying to help you level up your capacity for building trust with trustworthy people.

Sagittarius

Don’t get too spooked: Your innate optimism has a lesser-known and less fun twin, which is the pessimism that sneaks in when you can’t find your way toward actually believing in a better future. Whether it’s climate change and natural disasters, reactionary legislation, or the rise of fascism worldwide, we aren’t in easy times and they don’t seem about to get easier. But for you, the future is supposed to be your best friend — it is the place where the grass is greener and where all the annoyances and suffocating boredom of your present circumstances will be transformed. I’m giving you a hard time, but in reality your capacity to believe in a better future does help you create one. Hold onto that this month when fear narratives try to twist you toward gloom and doom. The future is still unwritten. You can still help shape it. Remember what you love and keep moving toward it.

Capricorn

Don’t get too spooked: This month can feel a little like those dreams where you’re going on stage but you haven’t memorized your lines. Don’t stress, though: you may be in the spotlight, but you have permission to improvise. This isn’t a time for perfection, but for play. Reach for what you find fascinating and it will make an impact. Don’t succumb to the stress-narrative that control is what keeps you safe — rather, this is a month that rewards creative risks. What did you love doing as a kid? How much can you make room for that right now?

Aquarius

Don’t get too spooked: You have an admirable quality of holding wide open borders for who you consider family — collaborators, comrades, co-conspirators, friends of friends, exes, exes’ new dates — your ideals around friendship insist that all these people matter. And yet, where anxiety can seep in this month is around the very human limitation of time and resources. You may not be able to show up well for every single person you love, and that isn’t a personal failing, but just the nature of reality. Give yourself permission to have an inner circle of favorites and to prioritize them.

Pisces

Don’t get too spooked: There’s a swampy feeling to this month for you, kind of a humid Southern gothic vibe, so watch out for your tendency to play any kind of role in someone else’s drama. Trust that any tragedies or farces unfolding around you doesn’t require your participation, and reach for some mirrored sunglasses to deflect anything directed your way. Meanwhile, you’re toying with some interesting new ideas right now and will need to reach out to the right people who can help you take them further.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for September 2023

For me, Virgo season always conjures the smell of sharpened pencils and fresh paper. Maybe there’s an open window with the tang of fallen apples and wet leaves coming in. We’re in the golden hour before dusk, before the world loses color and all crisp edges soften. This is a time of readiness, every sense still awake and alert. I like to imagine the fresh paper in front of me as not exactly a second chance but a return. Whatever was on this desk before has been cleaned away, recycled, carried out of the field of vision. What remains is clarity.

If you can’t tell, I’m a Virgo child of the ’80s and back-to-school was legit my favorite season.

I often describe Virgo energy as being able to see both the real world and the ideal world at the same time — holding one in each hand, as it were, and trying to move them closer together, make them overlap a little bit more. This takes not only vision, but action. Virgo is an analytical Earth sign — theories are only as useful as the practices they inform. A core Virgo question: Is this useful? Another: If something is broken, how can I mend it?

In this time of retrogrades (we begin the month with Mercury and Venus both retrograde, as Venus goes direct Jupiter will move retrograde) we may feel more stuck as we hold our pencils ready, encountering this blank page. We may need to close our eyes and smell the breeze coming in, or even wander outside and lie under a tree for awhile to look at the sky. But because this is Virgo season, we are doing this in service to what we’re trying to envision, create, or solve. The shadow side of Virgo is a kind of non-stop hustling, where each small task accomplished offers a rush of endorphins but doesn’t map onto a larger goal or plan. You can look productive, feel accomplished, but be deeply out of touch with your real ideals and what actions help bring your real world closer to that ideal. From that perspective, these retrogrades are a welcome corrective. Wander out into an orchard, not to distract yourself or forget what you’re working toward, but as a necessary part of knowing yourself. There is much in this world that needs mending, but you are only one of many, many menders. Remember this if you get stuck feeling like you just need to write these last ten emails before you can wander outside and remember who you are. The golden hour is now.

And as we complete this Venus retrograde cycle and begin the Jupiter retrograde, we have the first few days of this month to integrate our Venus lessons (relationship needs, how we think about money and resources, how we create art, how we seek out beauty and pleasure) and then turn the page and start asking ourselves Jupiter questions: What do we believe in and why? Are we overly optimistic and ignoring red flags? Or are we veering towards cynicism and quiet despair?

Belief systems can run deep, and when I talk about belief I’m not just talking about believing in a certain religion or astrology or aliens, all the things people ask about when they say “Do you believe in…?” I’m talking about how you might walk around every day believing that you don’t actually deserve love so you should take what you can get. Or the belief that other people are inherently untrustworthy so you need to watch your back and fend for yourself. Or the belief that a certain baseline misery is the best you can expect from life. You get the picture. We pick out certain experiences and wrap a narrative around them, and then project that narrative on the world to protect us from being hurt. Jupiter retrograde gives us a chance to reexamine what experiences we’re extrapolating from, add new ones to the mix, and rewrite some core scripts.

And as this Jupiter retrograde is happening in Taurus, a sign Venus rules, what we’ve been learning throughout Venus retrograde will directly inform how we reexamine our belief systems during Jupiter retrograde. If you and your partner have been fighting about money during Venus retrograde, Jupiter retrograde is going to open a space for you to reconsider what your core beliefs are about money, or capitalism, or what it means to live “a good life” or to reach for security. If you’ve recently broken up with someone, Jupiter retrograde will prompt an inquiry into who you want to be now that you’re single, and what parts of your own worldview might have been hidden and now need to come forward.

Jupiter retrograde helps us reexamine the meaning we make from our lives. Now is an excellent time to ask yourself: Do I still believe X? What is this belief based on? What impact does this belief have on my behavior and happiness? What new experiences have I had that might complicate this belief? How might I expand or change this belief?

Above all, Jupiter in Taurus invites us into the process with luxurious slowness. Don’t let Virgo season hustle you. Lie down under a tree and let the tangled threads of your thoughts gently loosen themselves.

Before my usual sign off this month, I also want to share that my sister and I have created a new oracle deck called Wild Chorus. We’re currently crowdfunding, and we’ve got great rewards including live and pre-recorded card readings with me. If you’ve had an astrology reading with me in the last two years, I’ve pulled a card from this deck for you. I’m so excited to release this magical tool into the wild and start using it more regularly in my client work. You can pick up a deck and support our campaign here.

And on to the usual sign off! I am available for readings so please get in touch. As always I get into far more astro details, including astro weather for important days all month long on Patreon, and to keep up with all the things follow me on Instagram.

Aries

Offer yourself slowness in: Taking action, especially if you’re anxious. Deep-rooted security needs could be waving their arms wildly at you to get your attention, but what you need to feel safe is NOT to rush around putting out a million small fires. Notice what isn’t actually urgent and treat it accordingly. Give yourself room to experiment, try and fail, try again, and give up for the day. Taking a walk to address your restlessness is a far better idea right now than implementing what seems like the perfect solution from a place of anxiety.

Taurus

Offer yourself slowness in: Getting it right. This Jupiter retrograde highlights both your fear of change and your desire for change, but you don’t like to make big changes unless you’re sure what you’re moving toward will be better than what you leave behind. Seems reasonable, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get it right. Give yourself permission this month to move at a slow enough pace to have a good sense of what needs changing and how to do it, but also allow plenty of room for adjustments and adaptation to imperfect conditions. Most importantly, don’t get paralyzed at any part of the process and just give up on what will improve your wellbeing. It may not be perfect, but it could be a little better.

Gemini

Offer yourself slowness in: Healing from something hard. There is no timeline for this, so don’t bother looking over your shoulder at someone who seems to have a similar experiences — whether it’s grief, illness, existential panic, or anything else that’s cropped up in the last year, give yourself the time and space to mourn and to heal. Be gentle, be patient, and flip off anyone who implies you should get over it already or pretend to be for their convenience. Remember, slowness isn’t the same as paralysis and so much healing happens under the surface and in erratic cycles. Give yourself time to encounter your depths and get comfortable there.

Cancer

Offer yourself slowness in: Creating community. If you’ve felt more isolated over the past year, if you’ve moved and still haven’t found your people, or if you’re surrounded by relationships that sometimes feel suffocating or like you’ve outgrown them — whatever your social map looks like right now, you’re reaching for something new in how you feel togetherness. It’s a long process and you may not be anywhere near where you want to be yet. Best practices as you navigate the need for community include a deep dive into how your needs may have changed, and how you’ll recognize your people when you’re with them. Focus on how you want to feel, and what you want to be giving and receiving with others.

Leo

Offer yourself slowness in: Rushing to critique yourself. You can have high standards for yourself and others, but this isn’t the best time to demand perfection. You may be caught up on definitions of success or accomplishment that aren’t right for you, and this is keeping you from seeing what’s alive and interesting and right in front of you. Stop stressing about living up to your highest potential right now or being your most impressive self, and there maybe be something generative and important in the cracks and failures you find. At the very least, this is a time for deepening into self-compassion.

Virgo

Offer yourself slowness in: Knowing what comes next. You are not, in fact, a train conductor peering into the fog while hurtling towards a blank horizon. Knowing what’s coming up right now may soothe your anxiety, but you’ll be missing out on a kind of creative co-participation in your life — your capacity to look within and understand what direction you’d like to head, whether or not that path seems scary. There’s a larger picture that you’re missing right now as you hyperfocus on possible threats and challenges — it’s how to work with what is glorious and powerful and complicated right here and now.

Libra

Offer yourself slowness in: Rebuilding what’s been broken. You may want to rush over the steps of repair to get back to a feeling of calm, but that won’t do you or your relationships any favors. Really take the time to feel what’s changed, and the pace at which rebuilding can happen without bypassing your needs and your boundaries. More importantly, you’ve changed through this process so what you’re building next will be for your future self, not your past self. Measure and cut accordingly.

Scorpio

Offer yourself slowness in: Building trust. You tend to hold people at arm’s length indefinitely or let them in immediately, it’s hard to find a middle ground. Jupiter retrograde is inviting you to slow that process of deciding you’ve got a new bestie or soulmate or domestic partnership when you haven’t lived into that relationship long enough to see all the different angles of how you two connect. Because intimacy for you can feel like it’s all or nothing, this is a beautiful time to find out how it feels to take things one step at a time and peace out if things aren’t going in a direction that feels good to you. Of course, the flip side is that when you are compatible and you take the time to really build trust together that relationship can withstand a lot.

Sagittarius

Offer yourself slowness in: Wanting to start over. I know the idea of permanence can make you feel trapped, and that stressors can trigger a flight reflex — like you know what would be better than dealing with this mess? Going literally anywhere else. Your ruling planet Jupiter going retrograde can create a little bit of a panic around not being able to move as fast or with as much forward momentum as you’d like, to offer yourself this reminder: You are not stuck, you are exploring, investigating, trying things out and gathering data for making a major decision later. Ideally anytime after December 31st, when Jupiter stations direct.

Capricorn

Offer yourself slowness in: Coming back to life. All the fun times aren’t in the past, there’s still more to enjoy—but you’ve let some part of you heart fall asleep like how your leg might fall asleep if you sit the wrong way for too long. You’re not to blame for this — it’s a necessary response at times when your personal life or the whole damn world feels hard and overwhelming. But this month brings back opportunities for joy, for romance, for mischief, for creativity — for all the fun things that came more easily to you in the past. Find your way back to them, but move at a pace that makes sense to you. There’s no rush, they’ll still be there.

Aquarius

Offer yourself slowness in: Many small moments throughout the day. Your daily life, your home, your inner world are all calling to you right now. Hit the snooze button again on your alarm. Linger over your lunch. Make room for all sorts of internal experiences to swirl and settle. There’s something about how safe (or not safe) you feel at home that needs paying attention to and sorting through. There’s something about your family of origin or your chosen family that can be up for healing right now. Make time to notice what’s changing and cheer it along.

Pisces

Offer yourself slowness in: Understanding your story. Don’t be too quick to jump to easy answers about what’s true for you, and resist the urge to explain yourself to someone who can’t or won’t understand you. Release deep-seated fears about not sounding articulate or smart enough, or needing to be more rational, and let yourself sink into some deep inner weirdness. Get curious about parts of yourself that you haven’t gotten to know yet, and ask them what they have to say for themselves. Their answers may fascinate you.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for August 2023

Leo season is here in all its exuberance. Leo, ruled by the Sun, is a surprisingly vulnerable sign. In these times full of hot takes on each sign, I want to re-introduce Leo energy: think of a burning candle cupped between two hands on a windy day. There’s beauty and warmth and the high drama of that flickering flame— but what will help steady that flame is another pair of hands.

Leo, at its core, leads from the heart and needs connection. And not just any connection, but deep recognition. Leo needs to feel cherished. Are you cringing yet? So many of us try to circumvent this core human need by creating a version of ourselves that others will like. This isn’t necessarily a fake self, but it’s a curated self — what you’d write on a résumé or say on a first date. Curation is sometimes important, but your goal isn’t to stay there forever You shouldn’t be trying that hard with your partner of several years or your close friends. We all need relationships where we feel loved, chosen, and special merely for being ourselves — we feel safest in these relationships when we are able to bring our full selves, warts and all. So while you may think of Leo as big glitter energy, it’s really waiting for you to see through its glamour and love it when its underslept and unshowered. I often think of Leo energy as a puppy: heart-melting merely by being, without being particularly helpful or accomplished. Merely being, and being lovable.

And as Venus moves retrograde through Leo this month, we’re all taking some time to reflect, review, and revise the ways we reach for and offer love. This is a time to heal, release, learn, and replenish that part of you that reaches for connection — and it’s all happening in the sign that asks us to keep being more brave, more authentic, and more vocal about what you really need.

Expect a slower pace for all things ruled by Venus right now — promising new relationships may need time to unfold, you may need to put off big purchases or pleasure trips as you assess your real resources and what you really want. Your goal this month is to notice what’s going on. In what ways are you letting your flame go out rather than asking for help? When do you feel most seen and loved, and is it a good feeling or does it make your deeply uncomfortable? How open is your heart on a daily basis? How’s it all feeling, sweetie?

I know Venus retrograde can feel alarming, like there isn’t enough going on in our lives and our relationships right now. But the key to this retrograde is not to stress about getting it right. With Leo, you’re leading from your heart. If you get lost, look for that sweet, small flame. Bring your hands a little closer. Notice the light on your palms. Look around and see who you can bring this candle to, who may already be smiling in your direction and opening their hands. And most importantly, remember that you deserve love that feels appropriate, specific, and unwavering. Whether you have that from others right now or not, this retrograde gives you a chance to reconnect with what is most lovable about you.

I’m booked up this month as I get ready to launch a big project. Follow me on Instagram to hear about it first, but you can book now for September and beyond. If you want more astro insights, including highlights of important transits for each month, join me on Patreon for as little as $2 a month. Wishing you all a gorgeous Leo season, may we all become what we need for ourselves and each other.

Aries

Release the need to be impressive and be playful instead. Reconnect to the pleasure of playing music, playing games, playing in the dirt, and role playing. Be as enthusiastic as you feel. Let someone know what’s in your heart. Take romantic risks, knowing you’re worth loving no matter the outcome.

Taurus

Release the need to be impressive and don’t even leave the house if you aren’t feeling it. Embrace comfy clothes, comfort foods, and curling up with your closest people (or animals) for long talks. This Venus retrograde offers you deep restorative energy for healing family issues (the ones that can be healed) and letting yourself off the hook for always doing for others. Remember to rest as much as you need to right now.

Gemini

Release the need to be impressive and say exactly what’s on your mind. Find the friends who help you shape your thoughts and challenge you to deepen them. Start from your first ideas, brainstorm, change your mind, switch sides in the debate, let it be a game. Your goal this month is to reconnect to the kind of conversations that help you feel deeply seen and understood, even when you don’t always understand yourself.

Cancer

Release the need to be impressive and remember that your worth isn’t based on anything about you that can change. Not your looks, your intelligence, your fashion, your wit, your health, your productivity, or whether you’re in a good mood. Reconnect to what’s essentially lovable about you underneath all the ways you change. Notice what you need and nourish any part of you that is hungry for care.

Leo

Release the need to be impressive and… risk showing up exactly as you are. Maybe you’re feeling burnt out or cynical, maybe you’ve been wearing the same hot pink bathrobe for days. Remember that your presence is a gift to the people who love you, no matter how messy you feel inside. Reach out when you need support, or if you notice someone else has gone into hiding. Start normalizing staying intimate even when we’re all not okay.

Virgo

Release the need to be impressive and… release all the problems you think you need to solve right now. This Venus retrograde is taking you on a journey through your memories and dreams, and there’s nothing in particular you need to do but notice how you’re feeling. And then, can you feel a little better? Would your dinner taste better with a little more seasoning? Would your bed be cozier with another pillow? Would this relationship feel better with a little more honesty or cuddling or kinky sex? Again, nothing here is a problem, it’s all an invitation.

Libra

Release the need to be impressive and… embrace the beautiful imperfection of community. Whether it’s your collective house or your workplace, your school cohort or your gay kickball team, you are moving within groups that will always have their share of secrets and pettiness and hard feelings. Such it is to be human. Your homework assignment for Venus retrograde is to keep the dream alive of how we could be better together, and to keep a sense of humor about how it really is.

Scorpio

Release the need to be impressive and… ditch impostor syndrome. You know what you need to know, you can do what you’re trying to do. This Venus retrograde may expose some insecurity about others seeing your strength and capacity — or, fears that people only see you as capable and won’t let you be vulnerable. Either way, this month invites you into your integrity and asks you to stress less. Give your energy to what matters most, and give yourself slack for the rest of it.

Sagittarius

Release the need to be impressive and… remember that your life is still an adventure. You haven’t reached your final form. You may not even have a final form. Enjoy the process of becoming you are in, even if you’re scared it might mean changes are on the horizon. Many good things may also be on the horizon, if you keep reaching for them. Choose your own happiness over responsibilities that are weighing you down, especially if you’re making sacrifices for others that they don’t need you to make.

Capricorn

Release the need to be impressive and… release the need to be in control. Good changes are possible right now, even if they’re coming slowly and you don’t quite trust them yet. Spend some time focusing on what you really want, even if you don’t know how to get it. Write wish lists and prayers on scraps of paper and hide them in bird nests or drop them on the subway tracks. There is no rational, linear way forward right now but there doesn’t need to be. You’re still on the right track.

Aquarius

Release the need to be impressive and… celebrate the love you’ve worked for. Some love comes easily, but some relationships get better and better as you work through differences, handle conflict, grow apart, and then grow back together. Whether it’s a partner, lover, best friend, or family member, think of who’s been helping you learn how to love them — and how they can love you — for awhile now. This kind of learning is the most important thing in the world, and something you get to practice more deeply and celebrate more joyously right now.

Pisces

Release the need to be impressive and… merely be in your body. Stretch, nap, snack, yawn, cuddle, dance, sprawl across the back of a couch like your cat. Venus rules pleasure and this Venus retrograde wants to bring you back into what feels good about living in your own skin. Bodies are hard, yes. We’re all in pain a lot of the time and many of us would rather get high or dissociate, thank you. Honor your coping mechanisms, but also see how much fun you can have sober and embodied this month.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for July 2023

I want to send some love to Cancer energy right now, in this political climate that is stripping care and protection from so many of us. In the zodiac Cancer is where we establish fierce protection for our beloved ones, our chosen families.

Each sign brings an array of necessary tools, but I often find myself reaching for words that don’t exist when I’m trying to tell my clients what’s so powerful about Cancer. So let me tell you a story instead: We humans are social mammals. We rely on each other for our survival, and much of what we need to survive is care. We are all here because somebody fed us, cleaned us, and clothed us when we weren’t able to. When we are sick or injured, we need care. When we are old we need care. When we think of ourselves as able-bodied and self-directed, we still need care. In the US we’re fed a myth of being self-made individuals. We’re taught that we can and should achieve without needing care, while ignoring all the care work that goes into supporting people who are achieving. Because our culture doesn’t value care work, we don’t have the language we should about how badass Cancer energy is. We’ve got Capricorn able to pride itself on long-term visioning, work ethic, and integrity. We’ve got Leo preening about it’s creativity and artistic flair. When we come to Cancer, we say: well, you really feel your feelings. How is that a strength, much less a super power?

So let’s talk about why feeling is perhaps the most important thing we can do. When we know what we feel, we inhabit the full dimension of our humanity. We can empathize with others and build bonds across conflict or difference. We can track the emotional and energetic cost of what we ask others to do. This helps us move from a theoretical desire for more egalitarian collectivities to the lived experience of how to make them inhabitable. Cancer energy is what helps humans create safety together, and at it’s best it is always striving to expand the circle of care and protection beyond its current borders. Not just my family, but my neighborhood. Not just my neighborhood but my city, my country, all countries, all humanity, all mammals, all living creatures, the ecosystem, the planet, the solar system, and beyond. There are infinite circles we can cast within the loving, protective energy of Cancer.

As queers, we know how to do this. The tenderness and the fierceness. The recognition of who needs to be taken in and who needs some tough love. As governments are stripping protections, we need to reinvigorate our movements for care and protection. And this month brings a good reminder of how to do this differently this time: Venus is moving retrograde on the 22nd. Venus takes this backward journey every 18 months, and this one will last until September 3rd. Venus is what helps us connect to each other — it’s where we experience love, pleasure, and how we create our values. Whenever a planet moves retrograde it’s a time to reassess, review, and revise how we’ve been using that part of ourselves. As Venus stations retrograde we’re entering a period of slowing down and reviewing all things Venusian: our relationships, our creative practices, our finances, our values, our relationship to pleasure, harmony, and beauty.

Right now, we need each other more than ever and so many of us feel isolated, alienated, and wary. Many of us are experiencing worsening mental and emotional health, and it can feel like there just isn’t enough care to go around. You may be scared to let your friends know how bad you’re doing, knowing it’s hard for a lot of them, too. You may be setting new boundaries with family or close friends who aren’t able to treat you with the care you deserve. You might be doing both, and worrying that if you ask for care you’ll be overstepping boundaries in the way others have done with you. As we continue to face collective hard times, there’s no easy way to repair our fractured relationships to each other and to collectivity. But Cancer season can point us in the right direction, and this Venus retrograde can give us an opportunity to retreat, replenish ourselves, and and revise how we approach connection.

My books are open but I have very few spots left this summer, so if you want a reading before September get in touch. For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram or join me on Patreon for expanded transit information and more each month.

Aries

Retreat and replenish: Your relationship to joy, especially as experienced through romance, flirtation, or creative play. Restore consistent experiences of pleasure. Reconnect with your art supplies, your baking tools, your half-finished novel, your sense of style. Go on dates, platonic and romantic. Collaborate. Remember how to have fun with other people.

Taurus

Retreat and replenish: Your spaces that offer sanctuary: your home, your bedroom, your body. How can you be enjoying these more? Where might you have become too stagnant, too comfortable in something that isn’t actually pleasurable or life-giving? Don’t feel you need to spend a lot of money or time coming back to balance, just pay closer attention to what helps your shoulders drop and your breath slow down.

Gemini

Retreat and replenish: Your social network, especially the people you’re closest to (geographically and emotionally). Weed out activities or relationships that drain you, confuse you, or spin you out away from your center in ways that are hard to recover from. Fall back in love with your own strange ways of seeing the world, and the people who help you locate delight in being here together.

Cancer

Retreat and replenish: Your relationship to security, especially as represented by having (or needing) resources. Have you been spending or giving away too much money and always feeling anxious that you’ll run out? Or have you been restricting joy or generosity in order to hoard money? Are you in any similar pattern of imbalance around food, belongings, clothing, or how rely on others for emotional support? Venus retrograde wants you to sort out what enough actually looks like right now, and how to reach for it.

Leo

Retreat and replenish: Your own desire to be seen and cherished, or to hide and be cherished. The vulnerability of showing yourself to someone and asking to be loved. Step away from exhausting cycles of trying to hard to find the right tone, the practiced yet casual vibe, the “I’m not trying too hard” way of looking effortlessly impressive. Embrace messiness, cringe, and all the ways you are awkward. Jumpstart your project of redefining cool as whatever you happen to be doing.

Virgo

Retreat and replenish: Your inner life and connection to what fills you up. Retreat is a good word for this retrograde in general, but it’s extra critical for you as it’s pulling you away from productivity, efficiency, and problem-solving and toward long afternoons of staring at clouds, walking wherever your dog wants to go today, and being gentle to the part of you that is exhausted from putting out all the fires, all the time. Remember the pleasure of doing nothing.

Libra

Retreat and replenish: Your love for this complicated, heartbreaking, world-in-transformation. Reconnect to your dreams for what we can do together. Notice where you’ve been burned and grown wary of collective organizing, or collectivity in general. Fall back in love with the human species, especially in our capacity to maybe someday be better comrades to the orcas, and to each other.

Scorpio

Retreat and replenish: Your willingness to do what’s needed for the good of the whole. You generally give your all or need to completely retreat, and this Venus retrograde is asking you to find more nuance, a gentler swing of the pendulum, between what restores you and how you show up for your responsibilities. You’re looking for joy, not just satisfaction, in what you do right now. And you’re looking for deep pleasure, not just stillness, in the ways you rest.

Sagittarius

Retreat and replenish: Your vision for the future. Your sign’s inherent optimism is sorely tested during these times of global upheaval and crisis. You are looking for that thread that will reconnect you to your own sense of agency in building a meaningful, beautiful life as you move toward an uncertain future. If you end up in despair, you’ve lost the thread. If you end up in “It’s all going to be okay and I can just keep distracting myself” you’ve lost the thread. If looking for the thread is exhausting, rest for awhile. When you’ve rested enough, try again.

Capricorn

Retreat and replenish: Your capacity to deeply heal. You are good at pushing through, especially in relationships. You often feel safest being the one others rely on, but this Venus retrograde is asking you to step out of that comfortable role and recognize where you need to be more vulnerable: what do you need from love that you aren’t getting? What do you need to heal in order to ask for and receive that kind of love? This is deep work. If you show up for it you can radically transform patterns that have been stuck for a long time.

Aquarius

Retreat and replenish: Your longterm commitments. Any relationship, project, place, or way of being that you’ve committed to is up for review right now. Not in an alarming, “I have to break up with everything” kind of way — rather, you’re being asked to notice how much energy you have for what you’ve said yes to, and how much meaning and joy you derive from those commitments. This is an entirely self-directed review of the emotional work you put into maintaining things, with the goal of letting you take a break or change the terms of anything that’s depleting you more than it’s filling you up.

Pisces

Retreat and replenish: Your enjoyment of the rhythms of daily life. This Venus retrograde is pulling you out of your preferred realm of fantasy, meditation, or other forms of living slightly outside your body and back into your physical form in the here-and-now. But this shouldn’t feel like a chore: rather, the invitation is to find more pleasure and joy in routines that might otherwise bore you. Reach for all your sensual tools: music, aromas, colors, textures, flavors. Play games. Get weird. Your goal is to remember why it’s fun to have a body.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for June 2023

What I love about Gemini season is that when the going gets tough, Gemini gets curious. Gemini energy is acutely attuned to the world as it is, manages to stay light-hearted during hard times, and is always making surprising connections, sometimes thought-provoking and sometimes ridiculously funny. Gemini helps us laugh at what might have made us cry. It helps us shake off stagnation and depression. It turns up the music at the party, gathers everyone feeling socially awkward in the corners and invites them to dance. It’s pretty gorgeous that Pride Month begins in Gemini season, although the Stonewall Riots that originated this holiday happened in Cancer season at the end of June.

As we move from Gemini to Cancer this month, we move from our minds to our hearts. The first half of the month rewards social and intellectual activities, while the shift to Cancer season on Summer Solstice drops us back down into our deepest feelings. And though I am deeply a feelings witch and always want to be in the watery depths of it all, I’ve gotta give it up for all that Gemini offers us. As a mutable Air sign, it’s adaptable, clever, and invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew. Its goal is to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to keep questioning the status quo, to stay one step ahead of tired old stories that can make the world feel like a stifling trap.

And damn if the world isn’t feeling mighty stale right now, with regressive social policies and authoritarianism once more on the rise. Pluto is dipping back into Capricorn right now, reminding us that there’s still more work to do to transform deeply entrenched systems of power — and those who see their power slipping are holding on tight. This Gemini season isn’t going to save us from everything that’s hard in the world, but it can help us see things through fresh eyes, and that can help us devise brilliant and unusual interventions. It can start by reminding us that the future is unwritten, and the present is stranger and more full of possibility that we usually notice.

This Gemini season, this Summer Solstice, this 54th anniversary of Stonewall, I encourage you to tap into the courage and genius of our queer ancestors who have found ways to, resist, adapt, and laugh at cultures that criminalized them. We’re carrying on that work as Uganda increases its already harsh criminalization of LGBTQ+ people, as US states try to legislate away the existence of trans kids, as corporations like Target and Bud Light yoink back their performative allyship in the face of conservative pressure. Pride Month is going to feel different this year for those of us in the US who have grown up seeing LGBTQ+ acceptance steadily growing. In the face of increased repression, its vital for us to keep showing up for each other. Our brilliance, our wit, our compassion, our collective care, our capacity to keep celebrating. You’re holding a necessary piece of this. What are you going to bring to the party?

I’ve got limited summer client hours so if you want a reading so please get in touch sooner rather than later! And as always you can follow me on Instagram or join me on Patreon for more trauma-informed, queer, liberation-oriented astrology.

Aries

What you’re bringing to the party: Fresh ideas. Dad jokes. A book you want to read aloud from. Your new friend who just moved to the neighborhood. A song you haven’t finished writing but will sing anyway. All your unanswered questions.

Taurus

What you’re bringing to the party:  Fresh fruit, flowers, and nice cheese (it can be vegan). Your capacity to make people feel at home (TBH you are probably hosting this party). Your memories, your story-keeping, the continuity you can weave between past, present, and future.

Gemini

What you’re bringing to the party: You know how sometimes when you ask, “What can I bring?” the host will answer “Just yourself!” So, mostly that. But in bringing yourself you are bringing your insights, your curiosity, your history, your vulnerability, your aspirations, your sense of humor, and your keen interest in everyone you meet. These are pretty sweet gifts, so don’t be afraid to actually show up.

Cancer

What you’re bringing to the party: The vibe. Your knack for knowing who wants to talk and who wants to be left alone. Permission to leave whenever you want to. Permission not to cook anything or do any emotional labor. Permission to talk to your favorite people in the kitchen and not meet anyone new if you’re not feeling it.

Leo

What you’re bringing to the party: Your crew. Your dreams of collective liberation. Your summer of 2023 dance mix. Your willingness to keep trying. Your plans for the next party. A circle of belonging that you create for yourself and fellow misfits.

Virgo

What you’re bringing to the party: Your talent. Your lifetime of experience in being you. The unique ways you shine. Your capacity to be a resource for your community, and your understanding of when you’re done and can clock out.

Libra

What you’re bringing to the party: Your vision. Your big-picture analysis. Your hope for the future. Your deep convictions. Your storytelling prowess, especially your talent for bringing the unheard voices into any conversation.

Scorpio

What you’re bringing to the party: All the hot gossip, even and especially if you don’t share it. Condoms and dental dams. Safe words. Your deep knowing of how to transform an experience from something awkward to something intimate and affirming.

Sagittarius

What you’re bringing to the party: Exactly what you said you would bring. Willingness to be the designated driver. A listening ear. Enough self-knowledge to say yes to what you really want to do and no to what you really don’t. Feeling ready to say yes to something big.

Capricorn

What you’re bringing to the party: Supplies. Behind-the-scenes organizing and logistics. Extra snacks. Somatic awareness. Consensual foot massages. Your capacity to make things happen.

Aquarius

What you’re bringing to the party: Costumes. Consensual glitter or, in certain scenarios, attack glitter. Your crush. Your unique style of flirtation. Enthusiasm. Your willingness to be seen and to belong.

Pisces

What you’re bringing to the party: A safe space for introverts. Empathy. Ancestral healing. Excellent boundaries. Permission to go home early, or JOMO if you decide not to go at all.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for May 2023

The first half of this month unwinds like a hijinks-drenched, shenanigan-forward movie where you may be yelling at the characters on the screen: “Why would you say that?” or “You’re only making things worse” or “Just change clothes and tell the truth about your twin sister!” Such, at least, is how I invite you to experience this particular eclipse season, with the upcoming Scorpio lunar eclipse on the 5th. Otherwise you’re in danger of taking the potential misunderstandings and revelations way too seriously. There may be important healing work for you to do this month, and I certainly encourage you to do it, but I also recommend being able to laugh even as you’re cringing. Venus is in Gemini after all, during this eclipse, helping us see the humor in it all.

If you have planets near 15 degrees of Taurus, Scorpio, Leo or Aquarius it’s especially important that you not get spooked by this eclipse, as it may feel a little more personal for you. Eclipses show us what we need to see, and that’s generally whatever we’ve been invested in not looking at. New information can be unsettling and hard to integrate. And with Jupiter in Aries till mid-month, we can be quick to jump to conclusions, act from a place of urgency, and overestimate how much energy we have to tackle things alone. This is the recipe for screwball disasters of all kinds — going it alone and acting too quickly on false assumptions. So let whatever you’re learning right now simmer. Barring real emergencies, give yourself space to think things through before leaping into action. Ideally, talk them through with a few friends who can share different perspectives.

The vibe shifts on the 16th when Jupiter moves into Taurus, a few days before the Taurus New Moon on the 19th that marks the official end of this eclipse season. Jupiter, our cosmic tenderqueer cheerleader, is fairly happy in Venus-ruled Taurus. When Jupiter changes signs, about once a year, our collective experience of faith, hope, joy, and enthusiasm changes gears. With Jupiter in Aries, we’ve been excited about getting things started and taking bigger risks. It’s been a little high-octane, a little caffeinated, and quite a wild ride. As Jupiter moves into Taurus, we’re slowing down and grounding ourselves in the pleasures of embodiment. If Jupiter in Aries is that feeling of flying as you bicycle down a steep hill, Taurus is the picnic in the sun after your bike ride when all your muscles are pleasantly sore and there is nothing to do but eat and nap.

Jupiter will stay in Taurus for about a year, until May 25th, 2024. To tap into its highest potential, your main homework is to learn to love being alive in your body. That may sound like a wellness platitude, but I mean it in its most revolutionary sense: When I say love I mean it the way bell hooks did when she spoke of love as a dangerous and meaningful practice we need to learn, not just a feeling or an obligation. And when I say body I mean trans liberation, fat liberation, the sacredness of Black and brown bodies, the beauty and strength of disabled bodies, the vulnerability and tenderness of all our bodies — I mean learning to love our bodies is going to be hard because the world is becoming increasingly unsafe for us and we will need to work harder to create safety within ourselves and for each other. And when I say hard work, I don’t mean the grind and hustle and stoicism of pushing yourself hard to be the best, I mean the discomfort of being with grief and love as they wash over you, of noticing where you’ve swallowed the poison of dominant culture, of striving to stay present when you want to disassociate or check out. I’m talking about the practice of relaxing a little more and a little more into that discomfort so that it starts to feel more comfortable to be there. And to be here, with us, as you.

Jupiter is a social planet, it connects us to each other. It reminds us that we can link up, share ideas, inspire each other, and enjoy each other. Jupiter in Taurus wants us to experience the lushness of what we can do with our bodies together — not just sex, but all forms of communal pleasure. I’m reminded of queer parties where people eat cake off each other’s bodies, flog each other with nettles and cut flowers, paint each other’s nails while eating chocolate and cheese. We need this vibe as we face all the bullshit that’s coming our way — not as a distraction or escape, but as how we maintain our resilience. And as these are still Covid times, despite the world wanting to pretend otherwise and move on, this transit also asks us to be creative and caring in how we make these spaces for gathering, for pleasure, and for safety.

May this month bring you joy, pleasure, and restoration. I know we all need it.

I’m available for readings this month, so do get in touch if you feel so inspired. For more astro updates you can follow me on Instagram, or join me on Patreon for expanded horoscopes each month and ritual prompts for each new moon, plus the chance to win a free reading with me. And if you want to hear me talk more about this eclipse season, tune into episode 110 of the Mind Witchery podcast, where I talk more about a trauma-informed approach to astrology and eclipses.

Aries

Know when you’ve done enough and can rest — which may mean tiring yourself out so much that you actually want to rest. As much as possible, find green spaces and spacious days where nothing is demanded of you except your absolute presence. Use up any excess energy by tending to plants, cooking food, stretching, or holding an impromptu dance party. And give yourself permission to sleep through whatever fun thing you thought you wanted to do but are genuinely too exhausted to enjoy.

Taurus

Feel the sunlight on your skin. Fill your house with flowers. Welcome Jupiter into your sign like you would welcome a longed-for friend — one who likes to braid your hair or cook you your favorite foods while telling you about what they’ve been reading. This month brings opportunities to drop your shoulders, relax into connection, and find those oases of “it’s okay right now” in the midst of all the not-okay that is the world. Make the time to celebrate, relax, and enjoy something beautiful about your life as it is right now.

Gemini

If you wake up from dreams that you were an animal, light-footed and keen, and you can still smell the night air on your fur — don’t wash your face just yet, don’t brush off that other life as though it wasn’t real. You are coming back to life in new ways, parts of you here in the ordinary world and parts of you only catching up with the rest in your sleep, or in daydreams as you’re looking out of train windows, or sometimes when you yawn at night and half-remember something exciting you wanted to tell your friend—but you can’t piece together the whole story yet. It’s okay. The fragments themselves are beautiful.

Cancer

If this year is a dance party, this month is the moment when you overcome your shyness and either let yourself be pulled out into the middle of the floor or do it yourself without anyone pulling you. You are learning what kinds of togetherness feel right for you now. You may want to go home after just a few songs. You may want to retreat to a dark corner and dance alone. This month says yes to all of this — yes, join the party, yes leave the party, yes have your own party. In any order that makes sense for you. Follow your own sense of what feels good and when you’re done.

Leo

One of the scariest things about Leo energy is how much it asks you to keep exposing parts of yourself that you may rather hide. The goal of Leo is to be truly, authentically seen — ideally by people who understand and appreciate you. That’s a tall order. Many people handle this by crafting an impressive public self of some kind. This month is asking, if this has been your strategy, for you to gently relax all the muscles you’ve been using to hold that pose. There’s nothing more impressive than your own relaxed authenticity. Share that with someone special, share that with the world, share it with just your dog — it doesn’t matter as much as you arriving there and feeling your body hum with relief.

Virgo

You may be at a crossroads this month, but it’s not a maze. You don’t need to search for the one right path that will take you where you need to go. Here, not a single path is the wrong one. Each one will take you somewhere interesting, with the potential for renewal and growth. You can also wander back and take another, your choices aren’t shutting down future possibilities. Explore more. Try it out. Double back and try another if you’re not having fun. Get lost midway and wander off the path entirely. It will be a glorious adventure.

Libra

Extend one paw toward that water glass and bat it gently off the table. It’s okay to let a few things smash right now. This is not the month to be impeccably dressed, ready to impress, or overly polite when something inside you is clawing to get free. Respect your complexity enough to allow for some mess, some irritation, and some confusion as you wrestle with what you need to change. Experiment. Let something end. Be curious about what could begin.

Scorpio

Your strength is appreciated right now, but it’s not what’s strictly necessary. Focus instead on your softness, or on where you may be able to experience softness. No one doubts your capacity to show up for the hard things, to witness, to facilitate healing. But this month begins a time when you can choose to have more stability, more calm, and more beauty in your life. This is especially true in important partnerships, romantic or platonic. Start by setting boundaries — what do you need to limit or insist on right now? When you have a little more breathing room, start considering what you really want.

Sagittarius

A secret you are learning right now: your body isn’t a set of daily chores, or a work-in-progress that needs adjustments, or fixed thing that will remain the same from day to day. Your body is more like a lens that focuses your perception and can also color it — who you are is more dependent on hormones and sleep quality and the last time you ate than you like to admit. And in your restlessness you may always try to outpace your body, like an older sibling yelling “keep up” to a younger one that can’t possibly. But right now the adventure is right here. You don’t have to go anywhere else. Invite your body into a new kind of conversation, one where you’re listening more closely to the beauty and the strangeness of moving through time with it.

Capricorn

Your main question for this month is deceptively simple: How could you be enjoying this more? This isn’t an invitation to ditch all responsibilities, duck out of hard conversations, and dedicate yourself to the kind of hedonism that you’ll later regret. Rather, asking yourself this in both easy and hard situations will invite your body into the collaboration with you. Maybe you really do want to keep writing all night, but you’d enjoy it so much more if you stood up and stretched or got some snacks. Maybe you’d enjoy a serious conversation more if you went somewhere beautiful to talk, or held hands. Pleasure isn’t here to take you out of the business of living, but to invite you in.

Aquarius

A breath of fresh air is blowing in through your bedroom windows. Can you linger here a little longer? In your mind’s eye there is always a world beyond this one — the future or the community or the whole Earth—and they seem to call you outside this ordinary space of home. But this month and especially right now as you read this please come back home to yourself. Wrap your bedsheets around you like a shawl as you rub sleep from your eyes. This is the miracle you came here for.

Pisces

Permit yourself moments of unbridled enthusiasm, unwarranted optimism, and uncharacteristic talkativeness. If you struggle to find the right words, consider: what if your goal isn’t clarity, or sounding authoritative, or having the most convincing argument? What if the feelings coursing through you—lyrical, complex, unnameable — are their own language? What if what you thought were to-do lists all this time were actually poems?

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for April 2023

April brings another wave of astrological intensity, but before you get tense and brace yourself for impact I invite you to just duck under water with me and pause — maybe holding each other’s hands with bubbles rising from our floating hair, just noticing how quiet and gentle it feels underneath it all. Waves will keep moving overhead. Waves will be waves. What matters for us is to make spaces to feel our togetherness right now.

The world continues to be a lot. Overwhelm, anxiety, and burnout are common and appropriate reactions to the scope and scale of alarming change right now. I want to you to hold the astrological details of this month as a mirror, not as a warning sign. The chaos of our world is reflected in the stars is reflected in the world, and so on. If reading about the astrological indicators of this will stress you out even more, I’d say skip this intro and just go to your sign’s horoscope. My goal here is to offer tools, not contribute to overwhelm.

That said, April brings some unsettling energy. We’re entering eclipse season, which can always shake up our sense of safety and certainty (to whatever degree we’re at all holding on to those right now). And this month’s solar eclipse will be a second New Moon in Aries, which is itself a jarring repetition. Last month’s New Moon in Aries happened at the very first degree of the sign, this one happens in the very last. It’s rare, and a good reminder that even predictable cycles can throw us curveballs. And this solar eclipse, happening at 12:12am April 20th New York Time (it’s April 19th in some other time zones), will also receive a challenge from Pluto, newly in Aquarius. I knew you were waiting for that as soon as I started gentle-talking you through the first few paragraphs. “What godawful thing is Pluto doing now?” you were probably thinking, and you were correct to do so.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Pluto the way I love going to therapy and composting. It’s important to deal with the shit that might otherwise pile up and attract flies, quite literally (Pluto rules waste, among other things). Pluto aspects force us to get real and take care of what’s rotten, often by transforming it into fertilizer.

But I would not describe Plutonian times as “fun” or “relaxing,” two adjectives I have been longing to apply to my own life of late. Working with Pluto, we’re working with our anxieties, our pain, our recognition that nothing gold can stay. Working with Pluto, we can quickly move from courage to exhaustion, from interest to anxiety. And during eclipse season, our goal should be to keep calm and keep listening. Eclipses bring us important and sometimes surprising information that arises emotionally first. During eclipse season, your feelings may be bigger than usual and more changeable than usual. I’m a big fan of feeling the feeling and THEN making the decision. This is why astrologers generally recommend that you take notes, do some journaling, and pay attention to what’s arising but don’t take big dramatic steps to change anything until eclipse season is over and you have a little more emotional detachment. This particular eclipse season will end on May 19th with the New Moon in Taurus.

That can be a long time to wait if there’s an urgent decision you need to make, so please trust your own process and that you can make good decisions for yourself, even during eclipses. I’m describing best practices for anything that can wait, especially if it is prompted by new information you’re just learning. Mercury will also turn retrograde the day after the solar eclipse, so I invite you again into that slow, underwater space with me where the waves of the world are crashing above us without knocking us over. There’s a lot of noise going on up there, but you can always come back down here. I can hold your hand while we’re here together. Who else do you want to be reaching for?

My books are open for readings (a slightly less metaphorical handholding) so please get in touch. To know when I offer classes and deals, follow me on Instagram and for expanded horoscopes with each month’s significant dates and how to handle them, join me on Patreon for only $2 a month. May you find your sweet spot, reach out to your people, and most importantly create a calm space for listening this month. Underneath the emotions there’s always important information.

Aries

Get quiet and listen to: your enthusiasm. It may be buried somewhere under the rubble of daily life during global crisis, but it’s still calling to you. It’s not trying to distract you away from what’s serious and important, or ask you to shirk your responsibilities. It’s not being disrespectful to grief, your own or other people’s. What it is doing is insisting that you pick it up again and claim it, as a way of inciting a kind of fire in your own being that can burn away what’s hurting you and what was never yours.

Taurus

Get quiet and listen to: your desire to not be here. It may lure you all day long into daydreams or reading YA novels or doing anything on a screen that lets you forget that you’re here and now, in a body, subject to the rules and conditions of this universe. Or it may be more painfully pulling at you, tugging you toward depression and despair. Your goal, in listening, isn’t to surrender to those feelings. Rather, now is a time to acknowledge and gather up the parts of you that are in pain and need a goddamn break. The parts that wish you had an easier task ahead of you, a more just and kind world to call home. The parts of you that need to grieve. It’s okay to let them. Let them speak loudly enough that you can hear them and hold them. Feel their grief. Then let yourself good read a good book.

Gemini

Get quiet and listen to: a message from your future self. Imagine them shouting to you as though from some yards away—maybe from across a subway platform or from a backyard a few houses down from your own. It’s a little hard to hear, but their tone of voice seems encouraging. Don’t be startled if they wave their arms, it’s not a warning but a celebration—see, they’re giving you a thumbs up. They are grateful to you, standing where you are in the past, facing what you have to so they can celebrate right now. If you can, give them a signal back.

Cancer

Get quiet and listen to: your oldest, wisest self. You as the queer elder you will someday be for the kids, the one you wish you had had when you were younger. Notice what your experience is telling you to remember, which is different from what your anxiety insists you never look away from. This isn’t about hypervigilance, but about all the nuance and complexity that comes back into focus when you get centered in what feels right. Reframe your life history so far through the lens of what it has taught you, what you’ve survived, and what you can now teach to others.

Leo

Get quiet and listen to: your improbable optimism. The voices of panic and pessimism are loud enough, don’t worry about the risk of ignoring what they need you to know. Instead, pay closer attention to where you are improbably and perhaps deliciously being called toward joy right now. It can be a small one, like the joy of being able to walk outside after a few days of being sick in bed. It can be the joy of perfectly ripe grapes, or a phone call with a friend whose laugh you missed. It doesn’t have to change the world, but it will change you. Remember that as much as anything else, it’s why you’re here.

Virgo

Get quiet and listen to: the part of you that hates change but knows you’re ready for it. Somewhere in your life, your metaphorical recycling bin is full. You’ve maybe even balanced things precariously on top of it—a tin can dangling from a bottle neck, an empty plastic salad tub covering them both, all rising architecturally above the bin itself. Your kitchen may or may not look this way, but how you’re running your life right now does. It’s time to get rid of some things that will be hard to release but so satisfying to be rid of. The process may feel messy or uncomfortable, but you get to make choices that mean the past is no longer piling up around you.

Libra

Get quiet and listen to: the voices you’ve internalized from people you love. Not because those voices are more right or valid than your own, but because you need to be able to tell them apart from your own. Whether it’s a phrase of judgment or praise that you repeat to yourself, an anxious reminder you picked up from your mom, a flare of pride about your talents—recognize what you’ve absorbed. Keep listening for what’s underneath all that. Libra energy often discovers its own center through being mirrored by others, so this is a time to listen for the parts of you that need to be seen more clearly, more compassionately, or at all. And yes, you can do this with someone but they also need to promise to listen well.

Scorpio

Get quiet and listen to: what you’re body has been waiting to tell you, either with a polite cough or a full-on tantrum. This means being in a process of attunement over time, with the goal of learning more and more about how you fluctuate and what helps you feel that you and your body are not enemies and may even be (or become) friends. Reach for where you’re hurting with compassion and curiosity. Pay attention to what small changes might improve conditions within your skin. Remember that you are the miracle that your ancestors longed for, even if it hurts to be here sometimes.

Sagittarius

Get quiet and listen to: the part of you that needs this all to be more fun. Something that used to enjoyable may have become a chore lately. Listen to the part of you that needs to feel more energized and less exhausted, and consider all possibilities for how to get that spark back. You can say no to something you thought you might like but don’t. You can change course if your current trajectory is dreary. And remember you don’t need to decide anything just yet, but it’s good to let yourself reconnect to your desire for a different future.

Capricorn

Get quiet and listen to: what the youngest part of you has to say. Whether you cringe at the thought of your inner child or embrace opportunities to reach for care and comfort, this month brings an opportunity to reorient and deepen into conversation with you-as-a-child, you-as-a-family-member, you-as-a-body-that-deserves-care, you-as-a-temporary-ecosystem-with-moods-and-cycles. If the idea of listening to this part of you prompts resistance, start by being kind to the part of you that feels that resistance.

Aquarius

Get quiet and listen to: the conversations happening beneath the ordinary chatter in your mind. What beliefs or fears are scripting your thoughts from backstage? Can you invite them into the spotlight to speak frankly? Your goal is to be better positioned to know what’s motivating you and how that shapes the way you think about your life. You may find some beliefs that are outdated or contradictory, some fears that are overblown. Hearing them more clearly can help you change and heal them. You are more than a set of ethical principles imperfectly applied. You are more than an engine of activism or future visioning. What is that more saying?

Pisces

Get quiet and listen to: the part of you that responds to your fear of scarcity by giving everything away before it can be taken from you. Can you negotiate with this part a little better? Maybe bring it into conversation with the part of you craving the stability of having enough—asking them to get on the same page together, not retreat into feeling irreconcilable. Pisces energy often prefers flow (of resources, of feelings, of time) to containment, but this month reminds you that you may need more containment. It’s okay to fill your own cup. It’s okay to let your cup overflow and fill other cups, as long as it also stays full. It’s less advisable to empty your own cup into someone else’s and then walk around thirsty all day.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for March 2023

As a horoscope writer, I look forward to months that have one big, clear astrological theme in them, one dramatic take-away for us all to chew on throughout the month. Months that are astrologically quiet can be harder to write about. I sometimes wish I could pull a substitute teacher move and say, hey, no class today, we’re just going to watch a movie and then go home. And then there are months like this one, where there is so much happening that it’s more like a substitute teacher has walked into a classroom already in chaos: someone’s crying the corner, people are throwing books out the window, everyone is running with scissors, and ten kids at once are trying to get the teacher’s attention.

So let’s dive into this abundant chaos, shall we? Maybe if we can all settle down we’ll still get to watch a movie.

To begin, this month brings not one but two sign changes for slow moving planets. Saturn will move into Pisces on the 7th and Pluto will move into Aquarius on the 23rd. Each of these on its own could be a headline for the whole year, but we get them both this year and both in the same month. If the stars respected my job they would have spaced this out better. But here we are.

Saturn changes signs every two and a half years, and as it moves through the signs it highlights what we as a collective need to get serious about: where we need to focus, put in the work, problem-solve challenges, and show up for the hard things. For the past five years Saturn has been in first Capricorn and then Aquarius — both signs where Saturn is strong, and that whole journey has been focused on how we move from the past (Capricorn) to the future (Aquarius) as a culture that’s in the death grip of capitalism and facing climate change. These have been fraught, divisive, and fairly heavy years. Trump took office at the beginning of them, and here we are in our current political mess at the end of them. Saturn is always about reality testing and structure — it’s like the engineer of the zodiac, wanting to make sure the bridges we build are stable and strong. But as Saturn enters Pisces, the water is rising up over those bridges. Where Saturn builds, Pisces dissolves. Where Saturn focuses on reality, Pisces swims through our dreams, highlighting our wishes and our anxieties. If Saturn is the cop in our head, Saturn in Pisces is that cop on an acid trip.

This could be a good thing. In the 1960s the US military dosed soldiers with LSD and noticed they couldn’t stay in formation or follow orders — in so much as Saturn represents oppressive forces in our world, this move to Pisces could herald a less lockstep acceleration of violent systems and regimes. It can open the hearts of people who usually disdain empathy. It can defang institutions with historic weight and power to do harm. This could also be a bad thing — I personally don’t want to be anywhere near a cop with a gun who’s having a bad trip. If the powers that be are getting dissolved into the psychedelic soup of Pisces, they may flail about wildly in response. Those who are in power don’t generally respond well to loss of power of or control, even if it’s just a perceived loss.

And Saturn has a lot of faces, not all of them oppressive — it’s also the planet that helps us set meaningful boundaries and be mature enough to show up for our responsibilities. Saturn can speak to our collective willingness to make sacrifices and take responsibility for halting the speed of climate change. As it moves to Pisces, we may struggle to access those part of ourselves that can do the adult thing, behave ethically, and take responsibility when things go sideways. This isn’t because Pisces is an unethical sign, it’s just a place where Saturn can get lost in dreams, fantasies, and fears. Ultimately, though, Saturn’s move to Pisces signals a time when we need to take seriously our culture’s relationship to all things Piscean: collective care and empathy (broken health care systems, more elders with less elder care, the rise of chronic illness among the young, etc), the role of art and artists (what kinds of art are priviliged? who’s making money off our art? will AI make it even easier to steal from us?), how religion and spirituality can help our harm us (up the witches, but I’m also terrified of the woo-to-QAnon pipeline), how drug use can help or harm us (see the opiod crisis vs. the benefits of therapeutic psychedelics), and our collective escapist fantasies (let’s colonize Mars! green capitalism can save us! etc).

Now for the second major headline of the month, and of the year, and possibly other orders of magnitude: Pluto’s sign change. Pluto has been in Capricorn since 2008. If you were born in 2008 as some of my youngest friends were, that’s been your whole life. If you’re in the crew of people having your first Saturn return this year, Pluto has been in Capricorn for half your life. Those of us who are older may remember the financial crises that ushered in this Pluto phase and how we’ve had mass movements focused on Capricornian themes since then: the destructiveness of capitalism (Occupy Wall Street was an early example), ecological preservation (Standing Rock and new waves of climate activism), and preserving the status quo (the January 6th insurrection, among many other MAGA debacles.). You may notice those are two leftist and one right-wing movements — both Saturn and Capricorn are without political affiliation, they just speak to the desire to preserve or rebuild what we consider important from the past. For some people, that’s clean air and water, the Amazon rainforest, glaciers, affordable housing and the like. For others it’s white supremacy, global capitalism, permanent war, and the like. And I want to be clear, we all have helpful and harmful expressions of Capricorn running through us, whether or not we have planets in Capricorn. Capricorn is concerned with our survival, and so much of how we relate to it depends on who we consider “us” and what we’re willing to look at as we make decisions.

You may notice we’ve gotten into some heavy territory. Thank Pluto, the kid in the chaotic classroom who is definitely running with scissors after having given a few other kids unwanted haircuts and made them cry. Where Pluto moves by sign, it exposes corruption and hastens decay and transformation. A lighter way of saying it is that Pluto helps us shed our skin or compost our dinner scraps — it works in service of transformation, but the process can look ugly. Pluto in Capricorn has exposed the nasty underbelly of global capitalism and the reality of climate change, and reminded us that hate groups founded in white supremacy haven’t gone away. As Pluto moves to Aquarius, we’ll be getting wake-up calls and opportunities to transform our relationship to all things Aquarian: technology (AI, quantum computing, tech bros like Elon Musk, etc.), collective liberation (can we unify into a larger “us” without excluding some kind of “them” or ignoring the meaningful differences in our positions? How do we move toward liberation while acknowledging the harms that happen in activist communities, from FBI infiltration to our own scene schisming?), and the whole concept of the future — I’m not going to speak to that one because I imagine there will be so many new ideas and cultural issues throughout this transit that what I’m tracking now might be way off base from where we end up. That’s the nature of Aquarius: it brings in the new. Something about our way of moving toward the future is ripe for change, though.

We don’t know yet what this will mean. We don’t even know yet what Saturn in Pisces will mean, this time around. Astrological weather can point to themes that have happened in the past, but we will always be surprised. In many ways, being at the very beginning of both of these sign changes is like being a kid who’s in a new grade of school, in a brand new school. We don’t know the ropes yet. We haven’t gotten comfortable in a routine. The best we can do right now is keep our eyes open, avoid that kid running around with scissors, and start learning where our locker is and who will be our friends. There can be something exciting about all this beginning, if we think of how much needs to change in our world. And change is always hard, especially if you have planets in fixed signs, any kind of trauma history, or both. Your best way to navigate this month? Stay open to interesting surprises. Welcome what you don’t yet understand. Soothe your anxieties when they try to predict a worst-case-scenario outcome. And look around for who’s going to be your friend in this new place.

My friends, I am available for readings so please get in touch. For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram or join me on Patreon. Remember to stay curious about anything wild going on this month and not jump to the scariest conclusions!

Aries

It’s okay not to know: What the future will look like — for you personally and for the larger world. You’re moving toward taking your intuition more seriously, which may mean facing doubts and doing some reality testing in the realms of the unreal. Get curious about collaborating with the less rational parts of your mind, without giving them license to run the whole show.

Taurus

It’s okay not to know: How to show up for the world without abandoning yourself. How to balance your personal needs and the needs of the collective. How your role will be shifting in coming years as you step more into your power and competence. What it’s time to let go of in your work life, or how you have been holding status in your community. Let all these questions just be alive for now.

Gemini

It’s okay not to know: What it all means. Your beliefs may be changing rapidly, and that’s okay. Your default worldview is expanding, which means you’re needing to reappraise what you thought you knew and what you thought your priorities were. The more freedom you grant yourself to pivot, to be patient, to gather information and sort through it, the easier it will be to find clarity enough to show up for what matters to you.

Cancer

It’s okay not to know: What’s ending and what’s entering a phase of new beginnings. Something is deeply in process, deeply in-between right now, and that’s fine. Decide for yourself what you need to handle uncertainty, which might mean getting clear on timelines and boundaries: How long can you tolerate the discomfort of living into this unknowing? When is it time to make a decision, however provisional? What is your gut telling you about what feels right and wrong?

Leo

It’s okay not to know: If you’re ready to say yes and make a commitment. When at all possible, give yourself some spaciousness and room to experiment when it comes to high-stakes life decisions, especially if they involve teaming up with someone romantically or as a collaborator. Try on how things feel, test the waters, and don’t sign any binding contracts just yet if you’re not feeling 100% sure. And remember if you need to call a time-out that “not right now” doesn’t mean “never.”

Virgo

It’s okay not to know: The ideal balance of daily rituals, rest, and retoration that will grant you eternal health. Whether you’re fretting about your body, your relationships, your work, or the larger world this isn’t the time to try to optimize anything. Rather, pay attention to the anxieties that run underneath that urge: what do you need to be feeling right now? And is it time to reach out for some care and support as you do this? Saturn moving to Pisces highlights all the ways that it’s necessary for you to let go and rest.

Libra

It’s okay not to know: How to express yourself best right now. If you’re any kind of artist, your medium might be changing. If you’re a friend and lover, your love language might be changing. If you’re feeling stuck or confused, ask yourself: What actually inpsires me right now? What kinds of connection actually feel good? You have a tendecy to focus outward on what other people want, this month is calling you back to your innate desires.

Scorpio

It’s okay not to know: Where you belong. Your ruling planet’s move to Aquarius may trigger a sense of dislocation. If you’re feeling growing pains around current communities and friend groups — or even more literally, where you’re living right now and whether it’s right for you — stay with the trouble until you can trace the thread of what needs healing right now. You know how to look at what’s hard, but part of your mission this month is to move what’s stuck toward release and healing.

Sagittarius

It’s okay not to know: Where your ideas will take you. Stray snatches of inspiration, secret ambitions, books that you plan to write someday, even to-do lists — it’s best not to get to restrictive because you’re entering a time when your focus can change, expand, and generally integrate previously unknown and important themes. Stay curious and keep researching and asking questions, especially when you think you already know what you need to know.

Capricorn

It’s okay not to know: What you’re willing to ditch and what you need to hold onto. This month is like a good friend trying to get you to throw away a closet of vintage clothes: first of all, the audacity! But they may have some good points if you’re holding onto to pieces that are moldy and wrecking your health, or that don’t fit your size or gender and just trigger dysphoria. Don’t feel rushed into any big decisions, but be open to purging something that has felt important to you if you realize it’s actually getting in the way of your health, joy, or creativity.

Aquarius

It’s okay not to know: Who you are becoming. As Pluto moves into your sign this month, you may be aware of something in your life that’s ready to change. It may be something you’re been ignoring for a long time, you may feel a little spooked at first, but as you live into what you’re learning you’ll be moving toward more meaningful ways of doing what only you can do. Make sure you’re prioritizing being well-fed and well-rested this month, and take whatever time you can for paying attention to what’s coming up for you.

Pisces

It’s okay not to know: Your priorities. As Saturn moves into your sign, you’re entering a period of adjustment when you may need to reasses your goals and revise your plans for reaching them. Saturn is always concerned with cause and effect, but remember that your goals can include “I want to feel free to float through my days without answering emails.” Remember, it’s your life and whatever compromises you may need to make with capitalism and linear time should, ideally, be on your own terms.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for February 2023

Although the new year began last month, it may feel as if it’s just beginning. That’s because we began the year amidst several retrogrades that had us slowed down, looking backward, and resolving old business from 2022. Now we’re sailing full speed ahead into the dreamiest month of 2023. Apart from a few brief transits, nothing astrologically intense is going down and we’ve got Venus in Pisces for most of the month. It’s important to acknowledge times like this, small oases of relative peacefulness in otherwise turbulent times. If you’ve been waiting for a moment to catch your breath, this is it.

Of course some of us don’t do well with calm. If your nervous system relies on constant adrenaline to keep you going, or if your mind strays toward anxiety in quiet moments, this is a good month to focus on something you want to make happen. Give yourself a project, big or small, serious or silly. February bridges the end of Aquarius season and the beginning of Pisces season — consider what helps you bridge your mind (air signs like Aquarius) and your heart (water signs like Pisces). Both Aquarius and Pisces are interested in connection and collective experiences — Aquarius through a social process of finding like-minded weirdos and creating communities of shared values, Pisces through a fundamental recognition that we are all made of carbon, aka stardust, and that we share most of our DNA with earthworms. Where are you finding connections this month?

I’d also like to nod to Valentine’s Day and the fact that some of you love it, some of you hate it, and some of you ignore it entirely. Whatever your personal attitudes, it’s a time of year when we as a culture can put a lot of pressure on the performance of love. People in monogamous partnerships may feel stressed by expectations, people in poly or undefined types of romances may feel invalidated, and people who want and don’t have romantic love right now may feel unworthy, and people who don’t want romantic love at all may feel invisible. With Venus in Pisces this month meeting up with Neptune, ruler of Pisces, on the 15th, the vibes around this Valentine’s Day are extra sensitive, extra dreamy, and potentially extra disillusioned. Try to keep your expectations realistic, and remember that extravagant shows of love aren’t necessarily proof of healthy love. They can add some sparkle to it, but they aren’t enough on their own.

If you’re already feeling some pangs of loneliness or heartbreak this season, take some time to be extra kind to yourself mid-month. Venus conjunct Neptune opens up a vast well of longing for a kind of love that isn’t entirely realistic. Do what you can to accompany yourself and your stronger feelings, and find ways to channel that longing toward other Neptunian pursuits: making art or music, meditating or connecting to the sacred, and helping others in some way that heals your heart. This is an aspect that happens only about once a year, so make the most of its creative and healing potential!

Finally, if you’re in any relationships where you have a tendency to overextend yourself or give more than you receive, treat this Venus transit with some caution. This is a good month to pay attention to the actual energetic costs your experience when you aren’t setting appropriate boundaries. To quote the brilliant Prentis Hemphill: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

I’m also teaching my first live class of 2023 this month, and it’s all about relationships! In Beyond Compatibility: Better Relationships with Astrology we’ll be debunking some popular myths about astro compatibility and exploring the questions you should be asking yourself and your partners / potential partners. I’m excited to be teaching again and I love geeking out about relationship astrology, so come join us! (Read more and register here). My books are open for readings, too, for you and for your relationships so (get in touch). For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram, and join me on Patreon. Have a dreamy month in all the ways that can heal your heart right now, even if, maybe especially if, that means staying in bed as much as possible.

Aries

Redirect your longing: Let your fantasies be detailed, technicolor, and wild. Write about them, draw them, dream them, share stories with your sweethearts, but don’t expect reality to live up to them. Part of the magic of this month for you is helping you access those parts of yourself that aren’t bound by the here and now, by the constraints of time and space, by questions of what is logistically and physically possible. Whether your dreams tend toward the erotic, the romantic, or the creation of entire speculative worlds, making extra time this month to be in them and enjoy them is time well spent.

Taurus

Redirect your longing: Rekindle your hope for the future. It doesn’t have to be realistic hope, it doesn’t have to have a strategy or a plan behind it. You don’t have to map out how you (or the world) will get there — it’s enough right now to dwell sometimes in the imaginative possibility of a better world. Think of it as a hot bath for your psyche, a place to restore yourself. Draw down from this field of potential some bright sparks to nourish your sense that a better world is possible.

Gemini

Redirect your longing: This is a time to direct all your various senses and satellite dishes and antennae towards a faint voice that is calling you toward your future self: You, but more centered. You, but wiser and more compassionate. You, but capable of things you didn’t thin you could do. You’ll notice, if you pay attention, that this you is much, much closer than you realized. May even be the here-and-now you. Now may be the time to do the big thing you’ve been dreaming about maybe someday doing.

Cancer

Redirect your longing: We all long for basic, simple things — enough love, enough freedom, good health, the resources we need to enjoy our lives. When one or more of these feels scarce, it can be hard to stop circling around that sense of lack — but to be alive is to live through fluctuations and change, to learn how to grieve scarcity while staying open to future fullness. You may notice a longing this month that directs you somewhere slightly different: not just “let me have what I want” but “let me find meaning in my experiences.” You are on a learning journey. Let it take you somewhere new.

Leo

Redirect your longing: This month offers you an anti-stagnation spell. You are longing to get unstuck from a pattern that’s gone on too long, and release is near. What’s counter intuitive is that you don’t have to do much to urge this spell along — the release it offers is less about throwing you a rope to climb up a mountain and more about dissolving the mountain. It can be easy to confuse rest with depression or other forms of stagnation, but this month is asking you to experience the kind of rest and release that actually transforms your life.

Virgo

Redirect your longing: This month’s Pisces energy focuses your longing toward an unreachable ideal of partnership, but perhaps it’s better directed beyond the human world. Your relationships will forever be imperfect, which is fine. Instead of stressing about them, use this Piscean time to fall in love with a forest or a parallel universe. Spill out your devotion to the concept of mutual aid. Leave love notes for the birds that get lost in wander into malls and subway stations. Above all remember that your relationships are always changing but that your capacity to love is yours to keep. Where do you want to direct it?

Libra

Redirect your longing: Have you ever felt absolutely in love with your own body? Maybe inspired by a lover’s admiration of you, maybe inspired by your own joy in how it feels to be in your skin? If you have and somehow lost that spark — or if you’ve never felt that and are frankly shocked that anyone has — this month is beckoning you back into your own body through the lens of unconditional love. Self-love is not easy for most of us, and loving our imperfect bodies even less so. Let yourself dip your toes in the shallow end of the pool and see how deep you’re able to go.

Scorpio

Redirect your longing: Now is no time to be shy about who you are and what you want. Venus in Pisces is boosting your creativity and your confidence. One risk of this transit is merely letting it slip away from how easy it feels to daydream, space out, and do nothing. If your deepest longing right now is to do absolutely nothing, answer that call. But if you’re being pulled toward making art or making connections, don’t let the siren song of staying in bed keep you from finding out what can happen.

Sagittarius

Redirect your longing: What fantasies do you have about an ideal home? An ideal family? Are you dreaming of a rural queer commune where no one ever has any conflict? Or a pre-industrial city with a forest canopy and clean water running through its rivers? This Pisces season kicks up some longing around where you might could settle down and feel at home, if only you could find it. But the magic spell isn’t to start traveling or researching costs of living in various far off places, it’s to create a home inside you for the part of you that always feels like it’s wandering and in exile. Be the safe place you need.

Capricorn

Redirect your longing: If you’re not already writing poetry (or song lyrics, or science fiction, or at the very least creative text messages to dear friends), this month would like you to begin. Instead of longing for other people to get their acts together or for the world to become less chaotic, this month rewards channeling your yearning into a kind of language that you will recognize when you create it. There’s something you need to be saying, but you don’t know how to say it yet. You’ll only learn by experimenting.

Aquarius

Redirect your longing: There’s someone or something in your life right now that you absolutely love. Maybe it’s a friend, a partner, a sibling, or a collaborator. Maybe it’s your house, a land project, a book you’re writing, a newfound feeling of capacity. Whatever it is, this month is asking you to pour your devotion into what’s close at hand and already going well. You get to stabilize here. What you’re planting now will bear fruit.

Pisces

Redirect your longing: Yes you are vast and yes you contain multitudes, but maybe all that vastness isn’t doing you any favors when you’re trying to find your own center. This month offers a kind of homecoming, a love spell for rediscovering your self — who you are now, who you have been, who you’d like to become. As much as you reach for external connection this month, make sure you’re also establishing that internal connection.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for January 2023

Here we are. Still alive on this planet. Stepping into a new year, ready or not. Although January 1st has no astrological or spiritual significance in any of my calendars, I still love it. I love the start of a new year like I love fresh snow or a new, blank page in a sketchbook. It may be entirely imaginary, but I love our capacity as humans to say: that other thing is over and now we’re starting fresh. We call a do over. Our real beginnings and endings are often murky — it’s hard to trace exactly when important phases in our lives begin or end — but this arbitrary calendar tells us: Now. It’s starting now. We’re taking a big collective step into the future. Even in this mess we’re all in as a world, it gives me a thrill of hope. I’m taken back to grade school in the 1980s when we had to hand write the date at the top of each papers. I remember the wonder I’d feel coming back after winter break and writing a brand new year at the top of the paper. Like ordinary time had become time travel. Like we were all about to learn a big secret.

So, I have clearly always been into some deep time witchery, but this year begins with cosmic support for this sense of awe and wonder about the future. Jupiter is in Aries, baby! Yes, Mars is still retrograde till the 12th, and yes, Mercury is still retrograde till the 18th, but Jupiter in Aries does not care. Jupiter is our collective optimism, our willingness to believe in something and to move toward it with a whoop of joy, and Aries is the sign that shoots that starting pistol they use to start races. When Aries says “Go!” Jupiter says “I’m already running!” and when Jupiter says “Which direction should I go?” Aries says “Yes!” which is all to say that we’re already barreling toward some kind of unknown future with more enthusiasm than we’ve been able to muster for most of 2022. For better or worse. The world is still a troubled place, but you and I know that. I’m leaning into the magic of newness and Jupiter in Aries is backing me up.

And, Mars and Mercury are still retrograde at the the start of the month. Jupiter may not care, but we ought to. This is because our optimism and enthusiasm (Jupiter) may outpace our actual energetic resources (Mars) and capacity to plan well (Mercury). At least for the first two weeks of the month, be careful about what you commit to and how hard you push yourself. If you are inclined to make any New Year’s resolutions, I recommend waiting till later in the month, maybe even till the Aquarius New Moon on the 21st — and I would also remind you that self-discipline is not a step toward wholeness unless it’s accompanied by self-compassion and self-understanding. In this time of newness and do overs, maybe focus less on external markers of progress and more on how you feel inside and how you want to feel in the new year. If you want resolutions to strive toward, let 2023 be a year where you strive to stop hating your body, to stop pushing away your feelings, to start developing more self-awareness and self-compassion. And if you’re feeling extra ambitious, recognize that your being is more important than your doing.

As the Sun moves from Capricorn to Aquarius on the 20th, it’s foreshadowing the dance steps Pluto will take later this year as it begins its slow sign change. Many themes of this year will come up on a smaller scale this month. In Capricorn, we’re holding the wisdom of our elders and in Aquarius the unborn worlds of our dreams. Moving from the old to the new, from the practial to the visionary, from the traditional to the revolutionary. But this isn’t just a one-way trip — we’re looking for integration between the two. That will be the deepest, hardest work of this year. For now, though, we can meet it as an exciting challange. A blank sheet of paper. Anything can happen this year.

For my full Year Ahead Forecast with significant dates and themes of 2023 and yearly forecasts for each sign, join me over on my Patreon for only $2/month (and yes, it’s totally okay to join for just January and then drop off if you’re not into it). My books are open for clients this month, so (get in touch). And if you want to generally know what I’m up to you can follow me on Instagram.

Aries

Welcome the new: You’ve been active, engaged, and busy in 2022. You’ve got a new role you’ve been playing, and it’s been an important one. But 2023 invites you back into your visionary self. Welcome a reconnection with your ideals, your activism, your communities and collectivities. Welcome a new perspective on what it means to face the future together. Welcome a different kind of wisdom that you only learn by being with the rest of us, figuring it out together, be willing to experiment and strategize. May 2023 reconnect you to the powerful promise of collective liberation, and the patience to stay with this vision even when it feels far off.

Taurus

Welcome the new: Let 2023 shine a spotlight on what you’re ready to share with the world. Welcome new opportunities to be as smart, as wise, as creative, as skilled as you are. May you be able to offer what is best in you for the benefit of all of us. May you receive gratitude and support for what you are giving us. Let what you’ve been learning in 2022 inform you, but don’t get stuck feeling you’re not done learning. We never are done. But you’re ready to put things into practice. 2023 invites you to show up and let yourself be seen.

Gemini

Welcome the new: You have completed a metamorphosis. Let your old shape, that has been changing throughout 2022, fully fade away like a dream you don’t need to remember. Welcome a new sense of freedom and agency in 2023. Welcome expanding your horizons and building on what you’ve learned. This year reawakens an adventurous part of you and beckons you toward new ways of finding connection and meaning. May you feel your full sense of self this year, staying centered and whole even as you exlore the wild edges of your existence.

Cancer

Welcome the new: May 2023 bring you the deepest forms of healing. You are breaking through a wall, emerging on the other side more alive somehow and more complete. What 2022 has hardened, let 2023 dissolve. What 2022 has demanded, let 2023 transform. Whatever shell you’ve needed for 2022, let 2023 coax you deeper into the warm depths, trusting your energetic protection. It’s a year of taking new emotional risks, but only because you feel ready. Whatever you’re moving through this year, you’re not going to do it alone.

Leo

Welcome the new: You have been through a year of learning and striving, of trying to understand what isn’t working and why. Recognize what 2022 has taught yoy and let 2023 help you trust your new capacities. You know how to adapt and reconsider. Welcome moving toward a clear sense of yes. Welcome deepening into your deepest relationships. Welcome new or renewed commitments. Let yourself and your partners be imperfect, in progress, and also essentially able to say, I choose you. I choose this.

Virgo

Welcome the new: Let 2023 gather in all you creative ideas, all your far-flung relationships, all your impulsive desires and longings and collect them as an herbalist might collect seeds and roots in a basket — safe in one place to sort through, to clean, to process into medicine. If 2022 prompted yearning, 2023 is the year to act on what you’re feeling — to begin the process of sorting, cleaning, steeping, tincturing. Welcome making potential into actual. Welcome stepping into a year of meaningful activity, deeper embodiment, and stronger attunement to healing.

Libra

Welcome the new: May your home be all you need it to be this year, and may that strong home base help dislodge you from crash-position. Whatever your circumstances, you are searching for appropriate ways to expand out of your smaller sphere. Get creative if it feels impossible. Reach for connection. Tap into your heart’s longing and find a way to connect that feeling to an adventure, a romantic encounter, a creative outpouring. Welcome 2023 opening up your heart again and reminding you that you’re part of the larger world.

Scorpio

Welcome the new: Let the doubts, the uncetainties, and the petty dramas of 2022 fade. May this new year establish a place and a community that you call home, and strengthen that sense of mutual care and commitment. Let this year help you create a place where you can let down your guard, wash off the nonsense from the chaotic world, and be deeply fed when you get out of that psychic shower. Welcome a profound sense of belonging — to yourself, to your friends, to the Earth, to here and now.

Sagittarius

Welcome the new: May all your choices this year arise from a deep sense of your own inherent worthiness. May you have all you need to feel protected, nourished, and deeply held. May this foundation support you in reconnecting to the here and now. Welcome new friendships, new reading groups, new ideas, new ways of looking at the old and familiar. Let 2023 teach you how to laugh again.

Capricorn

Welcome the new: May you begin the process of releasing years of hard work. May you acknowledge what’s transformed for you since 2008, and how long you’ve been shaped by the need to keep uncovering and healing. Welcome the begining of the end of your long metamorphosis. Welcome reaching a place of calm, of capacity, where you can trust yourself and your choices. Let 2023 help you rebuild your confidence and strength.

Aquarius

Welcome the new: May you meet 2023 with confidence in your deepest values and the courage to keep sharing them. May you step toward transformation in meaningful ways, consciously and with support. Let your past guide you but not confine you. Let the future lure you and inspire you. You get to be a bridge in time. Let the newest thing be you, beginning a new way of being. Collaborate with your past selves, your future selves, and your loved ones here and now.

Pisces

Welcome the new: Let this be a year when you bring the expansive freedom of your dreams into your waking life. May you have the support you need to do let inspiration flow through you, and may your body be a strong vessel for that experience. May you become better friends with your physical form, or at the very least agree to a peace treaty and mutual protection. You are vast. Welcome your multitudes. Welcome a new conversation between your surface and your depths.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for December 2022

I am always excited about Sagittarius season, even when the world gives me no reason to be. That’s kind of the point. We’re in the dark time of the year, here in the Northern Hemisphere. Our days are shortening. Night falls in the afternoon and the sun hangs low in the sky even at noon. This is the season when many cultures celebrate festivals of light and fire — Channukah candles, Solstice bonfires, Christmas lights. Sagittarius season asks us to tap into our own faith in the world, our faith that the sun will return and we won’t be plunged into year-long darkness. Sagittarius insists on faith, not evidence. This can seem like a dicey proposal in today’s political climate, where so many on the right are treating science as, like, just your opinion, man. So as a worker in the world of the woo, let me take this moment to explain what faith is and isn’t, and why we need it.

1. Faith doesn’t describe reality, it describes our relationship to it.

I don’t need to have faith that my old, beat-up laptop exists — I can see and touch it. So can anyone who sees me typing on it. It’s a non-controversial fact. I tap into faith when I choose to believe I can unplug it and carry it into the next room without its battery immediately dying. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. Faith always arises when there’s a mystery, when something is unpredictable or unclear. I see faith as a choice, a way of being in relationship to the world. My Taurus Moon inclines me to be attached to all my old, familiar tools. I hate having to buy anything new. So when I continue to rely on this laptop, I’m maintaining a relationship through faith. I know this relationship won’t last forever, but it’s good right now and I have every hope that it can continue for a long time. My rational mind tells me to make frequent back-ups and make sure I can afford a new computer when the time comes. But my faith in this laptop’s continued survival tells me that what I love exists and can persist. And this helps me feel present, connected, and safe in a chaotic world.

2. Faith is one part of a larger process.

I can have tremendous faith in my old laptop’s longevity, but I know it can’t run on faith alone. Love doesn’t replace electricity. This is why Sagittarius season is just one month out of 12. Before Sagittarius, we encounter our emotional depths in Scorpio. After Sagittarius, we reconnect to realism and practical actions in Capricorn. There are times in our lives when what we need most is faith, and there are times when faith is the wrong mode entirely. You may need to tap into faith when you are in despair about the ecological future of our earth and the continuity of our species on it. You may need to tap into faith when you read the news and experience secondary trauma from the daily crises and tragedies. You may need to tap into faith if you’re immunocompromised and still mostly isolated while Covid continues to circulate. In these instances, faith is a way of building a relationship with the future you want and need. I believe it can be a conscious choice, and that choosing to tap into faith is powerful. On the other hand, faith may be the absolutely wrong tool for you if you’re enduring abuse because you have faith in the inherent goodness of your abuser. Faith can also steer you wrong if it prompts an “everything will work out” attitude toward climate change instead of spurring you take concrete actions toward creating the better future you can imagine. Finally, faith is absolutely not a substitute for consensus reality. You may have faith that an angel appeared to you and told you that I have to stop drinking sparkling water or the world will end. This kind of faith can cause us both a lot of distress — your relationship to that angel and the demise of our world feels very real and alarming to you, but I’m not in that relationship. Whether I choose to stop drinking sparkling water depends on what my relationship is like with you. Which brings us to the next point.

3. What your faith has to do with my actions (and vice versa) is a political question.

So you’ve just pleaded with me to stop drinking sparkling water because of your faith. If we have a close, trusting relationship I may hear you out. I may be open to changing my ways, even if I don’t believe what you believe. I may even choose to try on your faith, so we can share the same reality. Or I may politely decline, because drinking sparkling water (or my autonomy to drink whatever I want) is a core value for me and I don’t believe in a world where that will bring dire consequences for us all. And here is where faith and science part ways: If your prediction of dire consequences has decades of scientific evidence to back it up, you’re no longer asking me to take something on faith. But if your alarm is about something spiritually destructive that you believe happens when I drink pamplemousse La Croix, you are asking me to trust your beliefs enough to give up my autonomy. I’ve set up this question so far as a voluntary one, a request from one friend to another. But let’s imagine that you aren’t my friend but are, say, a Supreme Court justice. Let’s say you have the power to make your belief into law. This is the alarming territory we’re in, here in the US, as right-wing evangelical movements are using their beliefs to restrict body autonomy for the rest of us. This why it can feel especially difficult, in this moment, to talk about the benefits of faith.

So where does that leave us, in this moment of time, here in Sagittarius season? I offered this digression because 1) my Sagittarius rising likes to get pedantic and 2) I want us to have all the tools we need to face these times, and to know how and when to use them with discernment. I don’t think faith and critical reasoning skills are mutually exclusive. And I believe we need to keep holding collective faith for a better future, even when it feels almost impossible. Luckily, this is a month that supports us in these efforts.

This month begins with a trio of planets moving through Sagittarius, pinging off Mars in Gemini and both Neptune and Jupiter in Pisces. All mutable signs, these conversations are lively and far-reaching but the core topics include faith in the future, wild imagination, questioning, awe, communion with the sacred, and finding ways to tell the story of what we intuitively know (which may circle back to more questioning — do we know what we think we know? How does our intuition give us different information than our senses? And so on…). Jupiter, recently direct, will move into Aries on the 20th and the Sun will move into Capricorn on the 21st, leading us toward a more active and practical final week of the month. But bear in mind Mars is still retrograde (till January 12th) and Mercury stations retrograde on the 29th, so while we may have faith in our capacity to start anew (Jupiter in Aries), motivation and clarity are still lagging behind for a few weeks. All in all, this is a fairly chill time. If this is an emotional or stressful time of year for you, give yourself permission to do less and rest more. If you are in recovery or otherwise paying attention to coping mechanisms you don’t want to overuse, be aware this month can also make it hard to set limits and assess consequences. If you are just in the mood to gather and party (with Covid safety in mind, still, please!), this month will help light the way.

I’m here if you need me right now or are just curious about getting a reading. I’ve also got gift readings for your favorite astrology enthusiasts. For more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. Whatever you are celebrating or grieving this month, may you be tap into that kind of love that helps you have faith in queer collective survival and thriving.

Aries

Choose to believe: That your capacity to draw on your own deepest beliefs is what you need to heal right now, and may be a powerful medicine for others, as well. Express this more in art than in a manifesto, though. You need people to feel what you’re feeling, not hear what you’re thinking. Dig deep into that place where you connect with the magic of it all and see what you find.

Taurus

Choose to believe: That you can release the carefully preserved grief and pain you’ve been holding onto for so long, like a precious artifact. That in its place you can receive a renewed sense of connection to the world. This is very much a receptive act on your part: You don’t have to do anything but let go, empty your hands. You will receive something else, something needed.

Gemini

Choose to believe: That you can say yes to what you want, understanding that it means saying no to many, many other options. That it will actually feel relaxing to ignore those other options. That you will find the value in deepening into this choice, instead of always having one foot out the door or fantasizing about other possibilities. And, if it turns out your desires change or you made the wrong choice at first, you have permission to change your mind.

Cancer

Choose to believe: That you are an unstoppable force of nature, and that you need to take a nap every afternoon, and that these do not contradict each other. Recognize the power you have when your full energy is behind what you’re doing, when you believe in yourself and your visions. Model that real, anti-capitalist self-care means letting yourself doze and daydream when you need to so that you will be energized for the activities that actually give you life.

Leo

Choose to believe: That when you name and notice what’s broken your heart, you are beginning to heal it. That you can do this in therapy, sure, but also through performance art or a shared moment with a stranger at a bus stop or whispering in bed with a new lover. That each time you tell your story, it changes because you change. That you are the healer of your own heart.

Virgo

Choose to believe: That it is possible to prioritize deep rest. That you can be a wave ebbing away from shore, exposing all the shells and seaweed and beach trash, and your mind doesn’t need to catch on any of that. That your partners, your friends, your housemates, your family are all capable of tending to themselves or each other in your temporary absence. Meanwhile, you get to sink down into the sweet watery depths of whatever brings you pleasure.

Libra

Choose to believe: That your local actions ripple out globally in ways you cannot trace. Small acts of justice and compassion, ongoing behind-the-scenes support for what you believe in, what seem like fruitless efforts to explain your values to relatives on a different tip. Believe that while the world crashes in with all its urgency, your daily life only needs to answer to its own pace and scope. Believe that how you show love, your presence and attentiveness, matters intrinsically.

Scorpio

Choose to believe: That you can experience safety and love at the same time. That you can unhook yourself from a pattern of diving way too deep, way too fast. That each heartbreak helps you know how to approach the next big love with more respect for your own wellbeing. Claim your intensity. Relax into it. Introduce yourself with your dealbreakers.

Sagittarius

Choose to believe: That you will get to become all the versions of yourself you can imagine, in big or small ways, privately or publicly. That your life is just starting to get interesting and will become even more so. That the compromises you make to get by in this world won’t crush your capacity to keep dreaming of a better one.

Capricorn

Choose to believe: That your dreams are worth remembering. Write them down somewhere, shape them, give them a little more soil and light and air. Sing to them. Your realism, one of your superpowes, can also weigh you down. This month reminds you to stretch your capacity to imagine what seems unimaginable. First step: imagine a world in which you get to do imagination as a serious activity.

Aquarius

Choose to believe: That you are not outside of the world for which you fight so hard. You belong here, with us. Your ethics and your activism don’t have to equal martyrdom. That you get to be in relationships that feed you, and create boundaries and distance with those that don’t. That in connection, you can draw water from our common well. Stay hydrated. Feast when you can. Remember the word “mutual” in mutual aid.

Pisces

Choose to believe: That you can take material form and have preferences, opinions, needs and even irritating habits like leaving toenail clippings on the bathroom floor, and none of this will in anyway diminish the fact that you are also a whirling spiral of portals leading into all dimensions. You can be ineffable and deeply ordinary at the same time, and both are pure magic.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for November 2022

Halloween may be over, but astrologically we are still deep in Scorpio season. Scorpio is a sign that asks us to confront our deepest fears — those who have strong Scorpio signatures in their charts are constantly navigating their own relationship to worst-case-scenario thinking, whether that shows up as anxiety or as a profound sense of mission to avert climate disaster. Scorpio brings an awareness of how things end, how leaves decay, how civilizations collapse, how relationships turn sour, how we lose the ones we love merely because we are all mortal. Whether those are conscious thought patterns or not, strongly Scorpionic people (which isn’t just anyone with a Scorpio sun sign) use a lot of energy navigating these truths. That’s why Scorpio has a reputation for intensity — there are high stakes for any interaction.

Being aware of how things can and do fall apart — and what happens next — is a superpower that Scorpio season shares with us in this time. The “what happens next” part is something most of us don’t focus on, but Scorpio is essentially a healing energy. After each death comes a rebirth. Scorpio may wield the surgeon’s blade, but it also reminds us that our bodies know how to knit themselves back together after a needed intervention, and that what was causing us pain can be released.

This Scorpio season has a strong emphasis on learning, uncovering, and being ready for change. That’s because we begin in the midst of eclipses in Scorpio and Taurus. Eclipses highlight information that’s been hidden (sometimes hidden in plain sight) and the Scorpio-Taurus axis helps us navigate sometimes scary changes (Scorpio is associated loss, trauma, mortality) while staying grounded in the goodness of being alive and embodied (Taurus themes). Scorpio gives us the courage and wisdom to face the scary situation; Taurus allows us to know when the crisis is over and what we need for aftercare.

November 8th’s lunar eclipse in Scorpio is also activated by Uranus — a planet that portends even more change and instability, but this time with a flavor that is decidedly political. Here in the US, it’s also Election Day. Make wise choices for yourselves this day and expect the same or even heightened levels of chaos as our democracy struggles with anti-democratic right-wing factions. We are living in a historically unstable time as the outer planets align and shift into new signs over the next few years. Part of the Scorpio-Taurus lesson is to learn how to face these times courageously, and where we establish our own personal sense of safety as the world is changing.

If you are feeling scared or depressed about the state of things right now, you’re not alone. This month’s astrology may highlight these moods, but your goal is to learn more about your agency during this time. What does your fear tell you about what you’d like to protect? Have you let yourself grieve changes and loss that you weren’t able to prevent? Ongoing change and loss that is out of your control? Naming what you can’t control, what are you learning about where you do have power and agency? What are you here to defend and protect (Mars retrograde questions)? What fears do you need to face about yourself and your relationships in order to grow (eclipse questions)? Who and what help you ground into your body and feel held, happy, and safe right now?

We move to Sagittarius season on the 23rd — a time to integrate what you’ve been learning and reconnect with passion and joy. This is also the end of eclipse season, so if you’re trying to understand what changes you need to make in light of new information you’re learning, see if you can put off big decisions till after the 23rd.

I’ve got more details on the big transits of this month on Patreon, and you can always get in touch for a reading. I’ve recently expanded my sliding scale options and am now offering a reduced rate for return clients. You can also find me on Instagram, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum.

May what you’re learning this month be healing for you and for the world. May you have the support and space and love to integrate it deeply.

Aries

Be willing to learn: How to greet change with your feet firmly planted. How to do emotionally what your body knows how to do already: digest change, metabolize it, draw nourishment from it, and then release what isn’t working for you. Let the process take time. Don’t panic when it’s a mess. Keep reaching for nourishment, keep releasing what isn’t feeding you.

Taurus

Be willing to learn: What your beloveds are trying to tell you. You may be surprised in an important relationship, and focusing on your surprise will block you from focusing on what they want you to hear and know and accept about them. Process your surprise (ideally without them), process your feelings (ditto), but also make sure that this important person knows that you’re listening and that you care. You get to integrate new information slowly and make your own choices about what you might want in response, but begin right now by being willing to listen with love.

Gemini

Be willing to learn: How to take things very seriously while not needing to know what they are yet. How to let a relationship, a creative project, or a big life transition find out what it needs to be as you live into it. Where you find groundedness during change — in your body, in your daily rituals and rhythms, in the way you can shush your worrying brain by immersing yourself in the here and now.

Cancer

Be willing to learn: How your love for the world can reach the world. What you have that you can share, expand on, and spread out toward those you want to be in relationship with — be those individuals, collectivies, or ecosystems. How to keep your heart open enough to love a world in crisis, while protecting yourself from feeling it’s up to you alone to save or fix anyone (individuals, collectivies, or ecosystems). When to grieve, and how to grieve deeply so your heart also remembers how to well up with joy.

Leo

Be willing to learn: When you can stop trying to impress someone who is never going to see you clearly. How good it feels to bring all that energy back into your own heart, into the connections that do see you and celebrate you. How to heal the part of you that still wants some kind of external validation from a person — especially if that person represents a kind of social power you don’t: whiteness, cis-masculinity, able-bodiedness, thin privilege, straightness, cool kid status, etc, etc. Power hierarchies warp our capacity to see one another, to love and be loved, but you know better than anyone how important it is to keep trying. Allow this month to unhook you from the thorns of needing to be seen a certain way, and invite you into the warm embrace of receiving love for exactly who you are.

Virgo

Be willing to learn: How to create a community around you — not your ideal community, not a perfect community, rather a community that recognizes you are part of many groups and those groups don’t have edges that you get to define. Community isn’t your perfect dinner party but includes people you wouldn’t have chosen but are thrown together with. Community means finding how and when you can find common cause, and how and when you can’t. I guarantee there will always be at least one person in a given group (collective, household, neighborhood, workplace) that you can’t stand. And someone who can’t stand you. What you are discovering right now is that weave of interdependence that means you can’t really separate yourself from them, and that’s a good thing. Your homework is to understand why.

Libra

Be willing to learn: How to feel safe in your body when your body is experiencing stress. What soothes, what recharges, what feeds you when you’re at your limit? Do you know where that limit is? Do you often push past it? Welcome learning a new somatic map of your inner life and how to befriend the animal part of you. You are learning how to ground and recenter not as a retreat from the more stressful changes, but as way of being able to welcome those changes.

Scorpio

Be willing to learn: What you’re being called to become, independent of what your relationships expect you to be. This is a time of radical transition for you, and you are taking your first steps towards a self that isn’t fully formed. Let yourself be curious about where you’re headed, while acknowledging that as you change your relationships will also change — some may grow closer, others may grow distant. Don’t let a core fear of change block you from exploring what you need to explore: you will be loved on the other side of this.

Sagittarius

Be willing to learn:* How to stay present when your mind wants to go deep into the future or past. What helps the here and now feel rich with possibility. How to honor your internal cycles of connection and retreat, planning and making, doing and resting. How to remember that none of this is final, and some if it is quite fleeting. Invite your mind and spirit to settle a little more deeply into what inspires you instead of flitting away toward the next task. Most of all, this month will challenge your sense that you ought to know what’s coming next. Release that expectation and it will be a far more interesting ride.

Capricorn

Be willing to learn: How to indulge your inner teenager — both the rebellion and the idealism. How to access that part of you that still burns and yearns — not to let it dominate you, but to accompany it in a new way. This is a month of getting a crush on your wildest self while being responsible to your wisest self. Something is breaking through, breaking free, and breaking open your shell. Ideally, that something is a part of you that you’ve been missing and it’s time to reconnect.

Aquarius

Be willing to learn: How to accept both the responsibility and the spotlight of being good at what you are good at, what people need from you. Reckoning with how your ego might get in the way, or your desire to hole up at home and not engage, or your focus on just your intimate circle rather than casting a wider net. You are learning how to show up for what matters to you in new ways. In so doing, you are learning what you need to restore and ground yourself. These two may feel opposed at times, but they are fundamentally reliant on each other. Find your way toward that sense of balance.

Pisces

Be willing to learn: How to make meaning out of days that might otherwise blur together — your ordinary (or exciting or tedious) life against the backdrop of major world events. Ask yourself what happens in your body when you read the news. Ask your body what’s happening in your mind when you do something routine. Get curious about how you as a single drop of water can ripple outward and affect a larger current. Accept that you will never seen that final big wave, you can only imagine yourself at its edges. Find your place in a network of water drops, each creating a system of ripples and waves that overlap and plait and make serious change.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for October 2022

I have a confession to make. Although I have a Virgo Sun, and no planets at all in Libra, Libra season is my favorite time of year. Something about the quality of light, the crispness of the air, the sweet, fallen apple smell of the earth — my mind feels lighter and clearer in this time of year. Libra as an energy promises that we can reach agreements together, that all the frantic problem-solving of Virgo season can slow down and give way to a sense of calm, a companionable stretch of time just listening and learning. Libra holds down balance in the zodiac, which I don’t think we credit enough as being serious, hard work because Libra makes it look easy. Holding balance actually requires an awareness of what’s missing, what’s not being said, what voices aren’t in the room and why — and a willingness to gather those pieces up, to demand that they are permitted entry into the guarded enclaves of our hearts and minds. In this way Libra aims us toward justice, and promises meaningful steps toward increased intimacy when we bring this mess of our collective experience to the table and actually consider it together. Libra is the willingness to process, the trust that we can get along if we are invested in learning how, and the interest in discovering our shared values.

With Libra as the energy of mediation, we’re lucky to have a great mediation team this Libra season. With many planets moving through the Air signs (Mars in Gemini; Saturn in Aquarius; and Sun, Venus, and Mercury in Libra at various points) there is consistent support for coming together the talk things out, brainstorm, and better understand one another. Air energy is social, thoughtful, and has facility in looking at situations with a sense of detached clarity — unlike Water signs that sense all the unspoken vibes, Fire signs that are moved by their big feelings, and Earth signs that are looking for pracitical solutions. Air signs have a willingness to keep thinking, to keep listening, to keep trying out different models and experiments for the fun of it. Air energy keeps us all from getting too stagnant, reactive, or overwhelmed.

And we’re going to need this, because October also brings even more big energetic shocks (it is 2022, after all), including the final (almost) square between Saturn and Uranus on the 4th, Mars square to Neptune on the 12th, a solar eclipse in Scorpio on the 25th, and Mars moving retrograde on the 30th. This is a lot, but if you’ve been reading my column or following other astrologers over the last few years, none of this is particular new. Which is all to say, we continue to live through times of major transformation and upheaval, and each of us is experiencing this as both as a member of a global collective and as a specific human facing personal issues around security, health, safety, love, and growth. This month you may want to be especially conscious and careful around how you react (Mars) to perceived threats to your security or freedom (Saturn square Uranus), and offer yourself some gentleness around what you might uncover around relationship healing and trauma healing (Scorpio eclipse conjunct Venus). And remember that until the 29th you’ll always have at least one planet in Libra to help you come back to a place of calm and clarity.

In my youth, when I exclusively pursued high-passion, high-conflict relationships, I got excellent advice from a friend I turned to after one of those relationships dramatically ended. “What you need to look for,” they told me, “is a reasonable chiller.” This is still the best description of Libra energy I’ve ever heard, and I offer you this as a shorthand for my more longwinded meditations on Libra: In this time of ongoing upheaval and exhaustion in our world, find yourself a reasonable chiller to help bring you back to a place of calm and connection. Having a friend or lover who can do this with you is awesome. Finding your own inner reasonable chiller is even better — and no, you don’t have to have any planets in Libra to do this!

For personalized support, get in touch for a reading, or for more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. May you find the calm this month in the storm of these times.

Aries

Find Clarity: Get specific about what you need to feel safe, heard, and held in a longterm relationship of any kind. You’re good at getting out when you need to, but what do you actually need to stay if you want to stay? Learn to tolerate the discomfort of asking for something and waiting to see what you recieve, then assessing what to do next. Cultivtate a sense of safety in yourself: when you trust that you know how to keep you safe, it will feel easier to be patient in a relationship that’s going through changes.

Taurus

Find Clarity: Summon all your resilience and self-love (and a support team, if needed) and take a look at what’s going wrong between you and your body. Not what’s wrong with your body — you may have a long list of grievances and anxieties, but that’s what you’re used to focusing on. This month asks you to focus instead on how to find peace with your body, how to bring up your resentments and fears as feelings to process and transform, not as action plans to “fix” your body. This doesn’t mean you can’t pursue learning about and doing things that help you heal or keep you healthy — this is more of a wake-up call that your relationship with your body is what needs most healing right now.

Gemini

Find Clarity: What makes your heart open? What excites you? And on the other hand, what do you keep doing that is supposed to be fun but usually ends up more stressful than joyous? This month’s astrology is asking you to deeply consider your own desires, your boundaries, and where you want to direct your energy — not even in some larger purpose kind of way (though that’s great if it shows up for you), but mostly in a day-to-day way. Notice what has become an energy drain because it’s not bringing you actual pleasure. Notice what you want to do more of but don’t let yourself because it doesn’t feel “productive,” or because something else always seems more important. You have excellent cosmic support this month for bringing what feels pleasurable and exciting to you into the foreground, for deeming it important and treating it as such.

Cancer

Find Clarity: How do you feel safe when the world feels unsafe? Over the last few years you’ve consciously or unconsciously built patterns of response to all the upheaval (both personal and global). Is it time to revisit any of these patterns? Are you stuck in habits that are supposed to help you relax but instead just help you dissociate, or stress your system more? Remember that Cancer is a sign that has innate emotional wisdom it can tap into — what steps do you need to take to be with your feelings, to let them move through you, to access your calm, inner sense of strength? Get clear, get creative, and above all don’t get caught up in patterns of self-criticism as you approach change.

Leo

Find Clarity: This month the universe invites you to get more specific in your requests and in what you’re trying to share. Instead of vaguely complaining that you want “love,” tell your friends and your dating apps that you are interested in feeling deeply chosen by (and choosing of) someone who delights in your idiosyncracies and who demonstrates trustworthiness by showing up when they say they will, over and over again. Or that you’re looking for a community to belong to, and are interested in how to risk more vulnerability so that all the parts of yourself that you usually hide from others have a chance to be welcomed, too. This is a time that rewards you naming, in exquisite detail, what you want, what you’re offering, what you’re trying to learn, and what you’re done entertaining.

Virgo

Find Clarity: A question that is often difficult for Virgo energy to answer: When are you done? When is it enough? The more prominent Virgo is in your birth chart, the harder it may be to even ask those questions, because at the end of any productive day there is still a to-do list that’s waiting for you tomorrow. And there’s a kind of satisfaction in the doing, it’s not all a slog, but Libra season offers Virgo energy an opportunity to stabilize, to slow, and to draw in nourishment as a tree does — deeply and with little effort. I invite you to take a look at your works-in-progress, your one-day-maybe lists, your relationships in flux, and say: Okay, this is good enough for now. I can relax. Anything you struggle to say that about is something you are allowed to just take a break from engaging with. Now is not the time to give it your energy.

Libra

Find Clarity: Many Libra people discover who they are through relationship. Being reflected by those who love (or hate) you is not the only way but is often the quickest way to locate yourself, to understand your edges and how you are different from those around you. This Libra season, you’re getting an extra helping of reflection from the cosmos and it’s an opportunity to do some deep integration about who you are now, how you are changing, and how you may be more different from your loved ones than you previously let yourself imagine. Let this difference be a good thing, something exciting to learn — not something you feel you need to protect people from. Those who love you in the way you need will only be delighted to learn more about you as you learn more about yourself.

Scorpio

Find Clarity: You know that there are times you need to retreat into an inner world. You probably have a clear sense of when and how, even if you aren’t always able to do it in the moment — although I dream a world in which we can all call out of work to tend to our emotional sensitivities and brooding needs. The clarity this month calls for is a little harder to access: How does the magic happen? What inner processes help shift you from overwhelmed to restored, and why? Getting curious about this will help you take more seriously what you’re doing when you honor your need for retreat — and less likely to sacrifice this need when it’s in your power not to, say, when a friend or lover wants you to stay present with them but you just fully cannot. See if you can put words to what you do alone, internally, so that you can explain why it’s so necessary to you — and even find better ways of doing it, if you notice you’re not feeling restored despite your best efforts.

Sagittarius

Find Clarity: It’s easy to feel a sense of doom about the future right now, and Sagittarius energy is particularly wounded by this. Care and feeding of planets in Sagittarius includes healthy doses of speculative futurism — imagining what better things may be beyond the next horizon, what lives you may get to lead in your next phase of development, what good things are still out there that you haven’t yet experienced. And a particularly Sagittarian form of despair is feeling that you can’t access those things — that the world you wanted to live in never was, or is no longer, and that you’re trapped. This month takes you by the shoulders with a clear, calm pressure and pivots you toward a different perspective on the future: There is still beauty to be discovered, unexpected joy, profound realizations, and all kinds of possibility. But you will find these things in a transformed landscape, and you will also need to experience grief, disorientation, and ongoing commitment to working with the world as it is, as you find it. Both can be true. Believe in your capacity to be with both.

Capricorn

Find Clarity: Don’t be afraid to ask yourself the big, hard questions right now about the path you’re on and if it’s where you want to be. Ask these questions from a place of strength, though — which is to say, from the belief that you can and will get where you want to be if you’re not there now. Asking from a place of anxiety won’t get you the information you need. Also, if you determine you are on the right path, this month encourages you to double down on loving what you do and doing it well, whether that’s energy channeled into your career, your activism, your parenting, your artwork, or whatever else feels central to your strengths and goals. It’s time to recognize what you offer.

Aquarius

Find Clarity: You can get a little lost sometimes in the vast potential and interlaced branching pathways of it all (it all being pretty much whatever you’re thinking about in the moment), but this month supports a sense of focus and purpose. There’s something you care deeply about that it’s time to get serious about learning more rigorously — or it might be your turn to teach something you know very well. Have faith in what feels important to you without too much second-guessing, especially if you have people reflecting back to you that it’s important to them, too.

Pisces

Find Clarity: Start talking about what’s been rattling around in your mind that you haven’t wanted to think about. Every time you get that gut sense that something’s off, every time you notice your mood dropping, every time you’re anxious and don’t know why — this month offers strategic support for surfacing and healing all those vague ickinesses, but it has to start with your willingness to name them. Start small if you need to, by saying (if only to yourself): “That didn’t feel good” and “I’d like to change something about this.” Where you go from there is up to your own sense of safety, support, and pacing.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for September 2022

It’s Virgo season — time to get out a fresh sheet of paper and your favorite pens and brainstorm a dozen or more future possibilities that bring you sheer pleasure. Although it still feels very much like summer where I live, there is a seasonal shift in Virgo season toward preparation for the colder times — a pause to assess, to revise, to find that place of readiness within us for what comes next. The pausing and revision are very much a theme of this month as we have many retrograde planets, including Mercury stationing retrograde on the 9th. Retrogrades are a time to turn inward, to slow down, to review the details we might have missed in our hurry before. This is the quiet power of retrogrades in Virgo season — the capacity to keep with the work, to keep looking, to keep questioning, and to keep revising.

When I was a young artist taking drawing classes I hated to erase anything I’d made. I was attached to every line, every gesture, even if I had measured wrong and they were throwing off the whole composition. I thought I’d never make such a good line again — even if the rest of the drawing was out of whack, I needed to preserve this one lyrical moment of genius, right? But my teachers kept pushing me to be willing to erase and redraw, erase and redraw. They wanted me to build the muscle memory of drawing, to trust that I could make something better the next time if I erased my beloved first (or second or third or eighteenth) try. One teacher told me that each drawing is just practice for your next one — that one in a hundred drawings is worth keeping, and the rest are helping you get to that one.

We often code Virgo as critical, and criticality is a necessary skill in the editing process — in being willing to say “we’re not quite there yet” and erase and start again — but I believe in Virgo season as a time of unbounded optimism. Virgo energy is willing to believe that things can be better, and what is more important, willing to work towards that vision. As an earth sign ruled by the planet of the intellect, Virgo holds in tension the actual (earth) and the ideal (what we can imagine). And in this Virgo season, as its ruling planet Mercury moves retrograde and Mars in Gemini keeps setting off tiny anxiety-spiral explosions, we’re in need of that willingness to keep being with what it, to keep planning toward something better.

This month offers us tools for staying grounded amidst the chaos, for holding a quiet center in which to focus our hopes and our intentions. But I also want to honor the chaos itself: Mars in Gemini is like a champagne cork popping off in a library — the books that get knocked off the shelf might be just the ones you need to read right now. Accordingly, I encourage you to move between times of brainstorming — of being in the chaos of experimentation and creativity, of questioning and risking — and quiet focus — the process of turning inward, slowing down, and fine-tuning what you’ve learned into something useful.

You can get in touch with me for a reading if you want personal support and strategies, and for more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. May this Virgo season bring you both inspiration and the time to map things out and make them real.

Aries

Brainstorm: A rekindling of joy in small, unexpected ways without needing to travel too far from home. Sending brief love notes to your inner circle. Asking questions that open up new questions that open up something in your heart. Finding your affinity with a flock of starlings, rising into the air in a kind of glorious chaos. Admiring your creative capacity to think of so many more things than you can ever do.

Quiet Focus: Underneath it all, your body is asking you to attune more to how it moves through time. Notice what small, repeated changes can do, like more breakfast or just the right stretch in the doorway. Don’t get bored with the small things.

Taurus

Brainstorm: The fullness, ripeness, and abundance of all that holds you in the kind of relationship with the world where you can wake up and say: Yes, this is good. I will enjoy this. Letting grief take it’s place at the table, but not letting it all the food. Finding anxiety a small bed to curl up in and sleep. Focusing, rather, on what feeds you. I’m picturing towers of ripe fruit, a stocked freezer for the winter, jars of honey that you slip into the pockets of visiting children like a good neighborhood witch. Seeing the stuff of your life, the beauty it shines back it you with all its everything, and laying out a clean cloth to place it on. Letting grief be there with you, but not spoiling the feast.

Quiet Focus: And after and before and even during the feast, a quiet desire that’s not yet met — something about your creative life, something about the need for attention and love, something asking you “how?” Keep following that question, trusting that it will eventually lead you to an answer.

Gemini

Brainstorm: Becoming an unstoppable force, claws out like a kitten’s, about to climb some furniture and fly around the ceiling. Having any or all directions in which to aim your wild flight. Landing lightly, leaping again. Letting motion become rest. Letting motion become meaning. Not needing to know what you mean. Becoming a trajectory of joyous, wild questioning that rips its claws through the old curtains that have been blocking the light. Knowing that you mean it, whatever “it” might be.

Quiet Focus: And underneath all the frantic energy, the ability to just as easily curl up and sleep. To make a nest in the crook of a tree or under your arm. Insisting on quiet when the mind is still on a tear. Perfecting your inner lullaby.

Cancer

Brainstorm: How to lucid dream. How to stay in that in-between waking and sleeping state long enough that time unfurls like a ribbon far into the future in the minutes between your first alarm clock and the snoozed reminder. The importance of what happens that stays half-remembered, but the feeling still strong. The importance of how you wake up rearranged, longing for a certain friend or needing to hear a new song. How lucidity is not so much about being able to control the dream, but being able to inhabit it willingly. To taste the cherry, to see the two moons in the sky. Finding yourself where you like to get lost. Letting yourself wander.

Quiet Focus: And the language you need to come back to the waking world, the language you need to describe yourself to yourself, the words you’ve been looking for to help you know if it’s a yes or a no — all this is clinking in your pocket like loose change right now, present but still potential.

Leo

Brainstorm: A network of cords leading from your heart to the future, to many possible futures, to worlds you will help create. Ways that you don’t have to get there alone. Circles of friends and friends of friends and people you’ve only spoken with once but felt that instant affinity, that sense of yes, we’re on the same tip. We’re going to do this together. Each of us the center of our own network, rippling out in laughter and hands catching us when we fall. Find your center, and find the rest of the world right there with you.

Quiet Focus: Underneath the coming and going, feel the solidity of what’s supporting you. Gravity, if nothing else. A good stargazing rock. Your back against it, completely trusting. No one’s going to let you slip off.

Virgo

Brainstorm: A freeform mind-map of all the things you want to build, make, do, learn, share, teach, and show up in service to. Get messy. Get them all in there somewhere. Draw circles around some, add stars to others, start grouping them into patterns that make sense. Maybe you want to put your current calling into the center and find the ways it can branch toward future growth…or maybe you fill the center with the newest ideas, the ones you’ll need to hold most carefully as they become themselves, lest they fall back and become the old ideas again. Resist the urge to clean up the mess too soon, to believe that you know what you need to know just yet. If you get that feeling, try rearranging some things until they surprise you again.

Quiet Focus: Underneath the mental whirling of possibility and future-oriented scheming, notice your spine straightening. Notice that your feet are on the ground, or put them there. Virgo is an Earth sign that often believes it’s an Air sign — remember your embodiment is your truest resource for anything you need to know.

Libra

Brainstorm: How many other lives could you possibly live in this moment? Where can you go, physically or mentally, that will expand your reach and fill you with that special kind of satisfaction that comes from remembering the world is much bigger than you imagine when you’re caught up in what’s familiar. Almost as though encountering that bigness enlarges you, too. Like you’ve found a hidden door in the house of your mind, a room you never knew existed but opens out before you now with vivid clarity, light pouring recklessly through the windows.

Quiet Focus: Underneath this clarity, a desire to release meaning. To dissolve into dream-logic, fantasy, images that have no way of being categorized or commodified. The pleasure of your private world, where nothing needs to make sense.

Scorpio

Brainstorm: What cheerleading do you need to enjoy the cracking of your shell? Like crows rising in the trees, like ice breaking over a puddle where tadpoles below are beginning to stir. What has been holding you still and stiff and numb is ready to slough off, ready to fall from your shoulders with a vague tinkling sound as it shatters into smaller and smaller pieces. How do you get ready to be held by something warmer, softer, and less constrictive? What shape are you ready to take next?

Quiet Focus: Underneath the cheering is the certainty that who you’re moving toward on the other side of this loves you. That you are moving toward belonging, toward a place that knows you and welcomes you. It may take time to arrive, but trust you are on your way.

Sagittarius

Brainstorm: If you are a plant that needs freedom, like a wandering vine, imagine how many branches your arms can hold as you move across the garden. What makes a strong, solid connection? How do you hold tight without strangling your host trees? What happens if you’re twirling your tendrils and only find empty air? How do you constitute yourself through all these relationships — the places your edges meet another’s edge — how can all this be mapped out as a kind of love? Find the relationships you’re willing to keep mapping, keep winding around and letting breathe. Let all these hand-holdings help you travel far.

Quiet Focus: You have a direction, a mission, and it may not be the time to say it out loud yet. But it’s there, glowing like an ember, wanting a breath of air. Offer it your breath, but not all at once, not until you’ve built the architecture of sticks and logs it needs to become itself. Patience is a powerful practice for this.

Capricorn

Brainstorm: Every sensation your body loves. The pump of thigh muscles on long walks, the smoothing on of lotion at night, the sharp juice of an apple, and more than that the ways each pleasure calls to you at a certain time of day or night, shaping a repeated ritual of how to keep this fickle animal willing to do what you ask it to. Find your rituals and rhythms. Multiply sources of pleasure. Get curious.

Quiet Focus: Your mind within the body wants to travel far. Notice a desire for the far-flung, the distant past or future, the narratives that bring you outside of the day-to-day. Notice how tending to the mundane can help you project your mind outward and forward.

Aquarius

Brainstorm: Occasions to throw parties where something is glimmering — maybe candles, maybe bioluminescent algae, maybe body glitter — and occasions within these occasions to be the center of attention in a circle of loved ones who want to know what’s on your mind — the stranger the story, the better. Find ways and means and times and places to come back to life through joyous togetherness — and I must, of course, keep reminding you that we are still in pandemic times, so don’t drop all your Covid cautions just yet.

Quiet Focus: A quieter voice under the raucousness is offering you a glimpse of yourself, transformed. An opportunity to shed an old skin, to step out of it and behold the shape you were, hovering in the air briefly, then dissolving like mist.

Pisces

Brainstorm: Let yourself be a meadow in full bloom, a proliferation of flowers and bees and small burrowing creatures, everyone closing their petals at night or finding the just-right hollow in the earth where all they hear all night long is a steady heartbeat. Let your seeking of safety find many homes, an abundance of arms and night skies to hold you and rock you to sleep.

Quiet Focus: Underneath the loud clamor of activity, a part of you is looking to fine tune how you say yes to longterm love and what that yes entails. Let yourself mull over and find words for emerging needs, emerging boundaries, and patient conversations that weave a strong cloth of connection — not too tight, but not so loose you slip through the threads.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for August 2022

In a challenging year, August brings particularly challenging astrology. It’s another one of those once-in-a-lifetime pile-ups of planets and points that hasn’t happened in centuries and speaks to the generally unprecedented pace of disruption and change we’re seeing the world right now. On August 1st, we’re seeing the peak of this pile-up that has been brewing since July 28th and will last a few days into the month but whose effects will last much longer. This one involves Mars, planet of pent-up frustrations and anger, crashing into Uranus, planet of defenestration and direct action, while they’re both amplified and turned up to 11 by the North Node of the Moon. And this is happening in the baffled sign of Taurus, who wants everyone to just relax and have some more ice cream. It’s a recipe for volcanic, seismic activity — explosive and unpredictable currents rippling through the slow and resistant earth.

A lot of astrologers have speculated about what this might mean for us environmentally and politically, but I’m not as interested in prediction as I am in helping you live through these times as an active participant, in touch with what you love and what you believe in, willing to show up for the people who are most in need as all the shit is going down. Through this lens, I encourage you to stay focused on what you love, what you believe, and what you can act on right now. I have no doubt there will continue to be wild shenanigans on the human scale and disruptive weather events on the ecological scale for some time to come. That doesn’t mean that you, or I, or most importantly we, are powerless.

So as this month begins with a bang, I encourage you to pay attention not only to the news but to your own restlessness for change. Mars and Uranus together have the potential to activate strong, powerful drives toward liberation and collective action. Let this be the way you harness the energy of these times. This theme is present all month, as are other energies that turn up the volume on our feelings of frustration and limitation. It’s not an easy time, but I believe we are equal to it. Welcome all the feelings that arise for you this month as useful information, as guides toward what you’re trying to create. And remember, you don’t have to do any of this alone. We’re in Leo season, which means we’re leaning into our hearts and the revolutionary potential of intimacy. Have the courage to be exactly who you are right now. The world needs it.

You can get in touch with me for a reading if you want personal support and strategies, and for more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. Wishing you all creative focus and powerful interventions this month.

Aries

Welcome your restlessness: To create a better situation than the one you’re in now. To shore up the resources you need to feel connected, cared for, and deeply nourished. To prioritize your physical needs. To find a place to rest, if you need it, and to let yourself rest when you are there. To stretch your limbs, to release the tension in your shoulders. To drink deeply from a glass of cold water. To be somewhere that holds you — in your favorite ecosystem, in your favorite season, even if just in your imagination. To remember how much more capable you are after your nervous system has had a chance to disconnect from crisis and recharge.

Taurus

Welcome your restlessness: To dramatically change your life. To reach for what will help you become the self you are picturing, maybe near or maybe far in the future, who has the wisdom, strength, courage, humor — whatever skills you want to pack for the journey you’re on — to face these times and to meet them with your own power and grace. Welcome wake up calls, epiphanies, frustrated crying jags that lead to an emotional opening that leads to clearer ideas. Welcome possibilities you never thought could happen. Welcome the you that says, yes, I can let go of the past and get interested in this kind of future.

Gemini

Welcome your restlessness: To hold all the possible threads of your existence in an interweaving, non-linear, ever-shifting tapestry that helps you know intuitively which way to go, even if it takes you a long time to get there. Welcome your less rational mind, and how it teaches you patience and offers inspiration. Welcome doing less but feeling more. Welcome all the far-flung pieces of yourself that don’t always get along but all have a place together, held by your expansive and inquisitive interest in them. Welcome dreams with messages, and welcome the questions they raise. Don’t be in a hurry yet for an answer.

Cancer

Welcome your restlessness: To act on behalf of the community you believe in, which is bigger than whatever conflicts you’re having with your friends within it. Bring your emotional intelligence to your activism — don’t let the sense of urgency push you past your own limits and boundaries. The more you can model this for others, the more sustainable your communities will be. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need, but do keep track of how your energy is part of the larger group’s energy, how what you say and do and feel creates a shape that ripples outward toward everyone else just as their thoughts and actions and feelings ripple toward you. Experiment with what shapes you can make together that get the current going in a direction that feels good for everyone.

Leo

Welcome your restlessness: To go big, to make an impact, to settle for nothing less than your wildest dreams. To be an agent for change, even when that change means setting off before dawn in a landscape that you no longer recognize. To tell the story of your travels as you go, to be in the myth and the reality at the same time. To invent a world that will answer the profound need we have of it. To do the wild, courageous, loving thing that only you can do. To do it with and for and in collaboration with so many others doing what only they can do. To be both a network and a node. To know yourself.

Virgo

Welcome your restlessness: To get out of your rut. To travel far away. To learn something that makes you catch your breath and hold it for a moment as you rearrange your ideas of what is and what is possible. To expand in all directions towards those horizons that will keep receding, which is as it should be. To delight in how much will remain unknown and unknowable. Welcome relationships that pull you toward new ideas and new worlds. Welcome ideas and worlds that bring you toward deeper insights and wisdom. Welcome your own restless pursuit of needing more and being determined to find it.

Libra

Welcome your restlessness: To crack the ice and dive below the surface. To dredge up from the bottom all the shipwrecks still waiting there. To grieve, to love deeply, to allow change to carry you toward a transformed future. To name what you’ve been pushing aside, to get curious about how to hold yourself differently when you know you’re worth diving deep for, when you find the jewels in that shipwreck. Welcome the safety of a nearby shore, of warm blankets and towels, of friends who are watching and waiting for you to return. And when you do, you will open your palms and show them the treasures you’ve snatched from the deep.

Scorpio

Welcome your restlessness: To know who’s going to be with you through the tough times. To make it official. To say yes. To count your trustworthy beloveds under your breath at night as you fall asleep, as a shield against the darkness. To know that in choosing you are choosing the good and the bad, the changes, the risk of pain, but that it’s more than worth it. Welcome the togetherness that you’ve been longing for. Welcome the new or old relationships that could be or already are what you’ve dreamed of. Welcome the not-knowing together, the grieving together, the talking it all out again and again from slightly different angles. Welcome the certainty that — whether or not you’re romantically partnered — you don’t have to go it alone.

Sagittarius

Welcome your restlessness: To explore the full dimensions of your one, precious human body even when it bores you or annoys you or blocks you from deepening into it. To shift your gaze from out there to in here, from far off in the future to the tempo of your daily life. To notice what kinds of movement answer your restlessness. To notice how you think more clearly when you are in movement — walking, swimming, cycling, or rocking back and forth and humming. To get curious about how much your body knows, and how to be its friend so you can learn some of its secrets. To become the kind of friend to your own body that means you don’t treat it poorly or let anyone else talk poorly about it. To be the event you’ve been waiting for — the falling in love, the miraculous occurance, the one-time-only magical relationship that begins when you start paying attention to how you are filled with breath and electricity at all times.

Capricorn

Welcome your restlessness: To chuck your responsibilities and spend the day playing music, making zines, or wandering on foot all over an unfamiliar city just seeing where your curiosity takes you. Welcome your teenage self, your romantic self, the part of you that wants to burn hot and bright and see what sparks may strike between you and the world. Welcome what this part of you reminds you about what matters—not more than your responsibilities — but just as much. Welcome staying up late re-listening to your favorite albums. Welcome a drifting, aimless current that carries you toward what makes your heart beat faster.

Aquarius

Welcome your restlessness: To dissolve borders and establish boundaries. To create safe spaces for you and your loved ones, and their loved ones, and your whole community, and the people you may not know but wish well. To allow for a deepening into these places that means we get to stay where we want to stay and leave when we want to leave—no deportations, no evictions, no prisons. To tap into whatever homes and families you’ve experienced as places of safety and to lend that warmth and strength they’ve given you to others — or, if you haven’t had those experiences yet, to imagine who you will feel when you do.

Pisces

Welcome your restlessness: To say aloud all the things you’ve been keeping bottled up, even if you didn’t realize the stress they were causing. To have necessary conflicts. To reach for clarity, for transparency, for the kind of honesty that transforms what it touches. To reach for the people you love instead of retreating, even if you’re reaching from a place of frustration. To not be afraid of your anger. To let it be, instead, as loved as a toddler throwing a tantrum and as protected — which is to say, you keep sharp knives away from a kid having a meltdown, so let yourself have your strong feelings without sharpening your knives against yourself or your loved ones. What you are restless for is a space where you are known, in your fullness, including all the uncomfortable and confusing parts of you. Make that room.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for July 2022

Satellite of Love

I remember being a child at the beach, playing in the waves. I would walk as far into the water as I could while still touching the sandy bottom, which meant when a big wave came it would crest above my head. I could either stand and resist it, trying to keep my footing — or I could duck under and feel it pass over me gently, then come up for air when it had passed. The first game was a daring one, when I felt energetic and defiant. The second game was a peaceful one, when I felt tired of fighting the waves.

As I’m sure you’re aware, we are living in a time of crashing waves. We’ve been out in the choppy sea for a long time, and many of us are just barely keep our heads above water. Some of us have been ducking under and waiting for the waves to pass. Some of us have been resisting them, lungs hoarse with saltwater. Many of us are cycling between resting and resisting and noticing that “rest” isn’t especially restful when you are being buffeted by waves and can’t reach the shore. And yet rest is exceptionally important in exactly these times, because being able to find that still point in your center is what helps you focus and direct your energy where it needs to go.

This year began with a distinct astrological mood when Jupiter was in Pisces, which gave us all a desire to stay underwater and let the waves ripple above us. Since Jupiter moved into Aries the tone has changed, and the rest of the year will be marked by stressful Mars aspects. Now and for the rest of the year, the astrological vibe is one of action and resistance. And the waves keep coming.

Because the world isn’t calming down anytime soon, because we are living in unprecedented times with multiple global crises, because so many of us feel individually powerless and energetically drained — because of all this and whatever personal reasons you’re holding right now, your own illness or heartbreak or mourning, your own crises or transitions — this is a time to learn how to attune to your own internal patterns of rest and resistance. If you are exhausted and overwhelmed all the time these days, give yourself permission to rest more. Resting isn’t giving up. Give yourself permission to do the minimum until you feel energy returning. It might take longer than you expect. And this month, though it brings some challenges along the way, is ultimately asking us to learn how to focus and direct our energy.

Mars is a big player this month, and Mars is innately tied to our drive to make things happen. Mars is the part of us that pursues what we want — creative ambitions, careers, athletic goals, sexual connection, and basically anything that we feel passionate about — and sets boundaries against what we don’t want. Working with Mars means navigating the following questions: How reactive am I? How quickly do I want to take action? What helps me release pent up anger without causing harm to myself or others? How can my pain and frustration pull me toward meaningful activism, collaboration, or shared healing? What have I been stalling on making happen that it’s time to move toward? How can I be in better touch with my sexual desires and boundaries? How do I know when I’ve had enough and need to say no to something?

Many of us have been taught that both anger and sexuality are dangerous, selfish, unreliable impulses. Remember this month that your sexual energy and desires are innately good, and can be aligned with ethical, consensual, respectful actions. Remember that anger is a reasonable, necessary response when our boundaries are crossed or when we witness or experience injustice. Anger can be your friend. The same isn’t true of hate.

Watch out for how easy it is to dehumanize each other right now. Watch out for the desire to feel that you and people like you are good and everyone else is the enemy. Most of the harm caused in this world is from ordinary people who are scared, who trust the wrong sources, who are trying to protect something in their lives they feel is threatened. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, and I would add there is a sense of entitlement in it — I should get to have exactly what I want (security, power, my specific religious values as the law of the land) and I don’t have to consider its impact on others. We as queers can resist this tactic (and protect ourselves from it as best we can) while not picking it up as a handy tool for us to dismantle the master’s house, y’know?

Keep yourselves and each other safe, my friends. May you rest when you need to, rage when you need to, and find ways to focus your energy toward healing and transforming what’s broken in this world.

I’m available for readings and for more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum. If you want to know more about Mars, I’m giving my readers 15% off the digital download of Playing With Fire: Mars Through the Signs. Just use coupon code MARS2022. Good luck out there this month, and remember to keep breathing.

Aries

Focus your energy: Rest as you need to, though you may be more restless than usual. Big changes are happening around you and your goal is to keep touching into a grounding source of stability. What is your home base? What fuels you when you’re drained? Who reminds you to slow down and feed yourself from time to time? As driven as you may feel to make an impact right now and do what needs to be done, remember that you are more powerful when you’re well-resourced. That might mean stop and eat something before going for a run, or that might mean stop and organize with your collective before planning a protest. You can do it alone, but you don’t have to.

Taurus

Focus your energy: Rest as you need to, though it might feel daunting this month. With Mars and Uranus and the North Node moving through your sign, that’s a lot of activity for a sign that prefers some calm stillness. This is a time, though, when you can pull yourself out of whatever ruts you’ve been stuck in. You will have more energy right now for any projects that are aligned with your physical health, your creative ideas, and your longterm goals. Watch out for frustration to boil over though, especially if you’ve been holding anger in for awhile. You may want to plan regular check-ins with your loved ones to air any minor grievances regularly instead of letting them pile up. Be open to learning skills of self-assertion and clarity around conflict that will serve you well for years to come, and remember that you can take a break and rest when you need to.

Gemini

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to, and notice that when you sleep your dreams may be more active right now. Your energy is being called inwards, into your dream life and your fantasy life, into your imagination and deep restorative healing. For an extroverted sign, it can feel counterintuitive to have this much energy and then go off and be alone with it. Yet there’s a lot you can learn about what you’re holding, what needs healing, and what you’re dreaming of for the future. It’s not that you don’t get to socialize right now, but you’ll want to conserve your best times of day for some private reveries. This may mean waking up early to journal or meditate. This may mean going to bed early and watching movies that make you cry. Follow your inclinations and get curious about what they reveal.

Cancer

Focus your energy: Rest as you need to and remember that if you’re committed to social justice, social transformation, or in anyway helping to shape a better future, that to be in it for the long haul means pacing yourself. Notice what causes despair, notice what alleviates it. Take seriously your own wellbeing when you participate in collective projects, and help others take their wellbeing seriously as well. You have a gift of emotional wisdom that is necessary in these times, have the courage to care for yourself well even as you show up for others.

Leo

Focus your energy: Rest as you need to and recognize that you’re capable of a lot this month. You may feel ambitious energy welling up in you to make a big push toward something that will gain you more recognition, and possibly more responsibilities. Follow this thread. It’s time, at the very least, to begin. Recognize your strengths even as you may need to keep adjusting your expectations (of yourself when exhausted or checked out, of the world as it continues to throw curveballs). Keep your focus on what you are trying to create, what you want to make happen and keep finding ways to push that project forward.

Virgo

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to, which in your case means taking intentional time to distract yourself from whatever you’re trying to plan or solve and just playing a game or talking a walk. And when you have the energy, you’d do well this month to direct it toward learning and teaching — you have an opportunity right now to expand how you think and try on new perspectives. You may also find that if you let go of some perfectionism, you’re actually ready to take on the role of teacher or mentor in something you do well. Let yourself be guided by enthusiasm and curiosity this month, not by the sense you “should” be doing anything.

Libra

Focus your energy: Rest as you need to and remember that this month brings you face to face with unsettling truths in the world, and in yourself. If you’re feeling blocked by fear or hopelessness, cultivate a level-headed curiosity about what needs to change and how to change it, focusing on actions within your own sphere of influence. Your romantic life can be especially powerful as a site of transformation right now, which can bring necessary closure or deepening into closeness, depending on the relationship. Imagine this month that you are carrying a flashlight and are fully masked and gloved as you descend into a flooded basement to assess the damage. You are learning a lot right now, and information is power. There will be time to come up with plans, tools, and next steps.

Scorpio

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to and recognize that relationships are high-energy expenditures right now. That may be exciting — you may have a new crush or be ready to connect more deeply with an existing love — or it may be difficult. If you find yourself continually activated in any relationship, give yourself permission to take some space to cool down and sort yourself out. Limits are your friend, especially right now, as you have a tendency to go deep and go hard and this month’s astrology are emphasizing that trait. You don’t have to talk out all the hard things all at once. You don’t have to dive into your deepest trauma on your first day of therapy. You don’t have to go 0-60 in a new relationship. Give yourself the gift of focused, efficient, concentrated doses of all these potentially activating activities, and let yourself deeply rest in between them.

Sagittarius

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to, which for you my dear means let your body lead you where it wants to go. Walking can rest the mind, stretching can rest the body, laughing deeply can reset the nervous system and calm that panicked part of you that’s poised waiting for the waves. And when you have the energy, attune to your body. Whatever level of ability, health, and athleticism you’re currently at, embrace it and revel in what your body can do. Resist comparisons to other bodies, or to your own body at a different time. Your job right now is to love exactly how your body does what it does well. Name it. Do it. Enjoy it. Compliment yourself on it. Feel your strength welling up, feel your power that is both connected to and not at all dependent on your physical form.

Capricorn

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to, and I know you may think you don’t need to, but I invite you to check in now and then to make sure. And when you do have energy, focus it on everything that brings you joy. Buy a damn loom and start weaving. Set aside an hour every day to learn swing dancing, or Yiddish, or to make mix tapes for everyone you’ve ever had a crush on. And if you feel that the world is too serious right now for such self-indulgent shenanigans, remember that if you’re out in the cold with no fire you have to rub your hands together for heat. Keeping this channel open for joy, for play, for romance, is just as important for staying alive.

Aquarius

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to. Seriously! Do you let yourself rest? When you feel activated or exhausted right now, your first thought should be “how can I feel a little safer and calmer?” rather than “how can I push through this?” This month encourages you to take action toward feeling more secure and stable, however you need that to look. Maybe you don’t need to take a big trip just yet. Maybe it’s time to invest in some bedding you really love. Maybe it’s time to save your money if that feels more secure than spending it on some sheets. Let yourself get quiet enough to understand what you can stabilize and protect your energy, then spring into action to make it happen.

Pisces

Focus your energy: Rest when you need to, but resist the urge to isolate. You need friends around you right now, you need to remember that even silly conversations about nothing in particular can regulate your nervous system. Choose what media you consume wisely right now. Limit your time doom scrolling or reading different variations of the same depressing articles for hours at a time. When you read something that makes you scared, overwhelmed, angry, or depressed, talk to someone about it. If no one is around to talk, write a letter about what you’re feeling. Keep a record of these times. Keep track of how your heart is doing. Keep others in the loop. Stay connected.

Satellite of Love: Queer Horoscopes for June 2022

Satellite of Love

Let’s talk about how we hold it together, and how we fall apart, in times like these. We are experiencing more shock, fear, grief, and rage on the daily than our systems can metabolize — all while our familiar forms of collective support have radically changed.

When faced with the impossible, when experiencing profound isolation (or depression, or grief, or fear), we call on all that we love as witness and support. And as this month will be astrologically quieter than recent ones, I invite you to spend June in an immersion of your own choosing: find experiences that will wrap around you with love and help you feel what you need to feel. Call on water: hot tubs and glacial streams and kiddie pools and your morning shower. Call on fire: candles and firecrackers and campfires (in wildfire-safe zones) and the heat of your own hands rubbing together and pressing their warmth over your eyes. Call on earth: the lushness of green living things and ripe fruits and taking off your shoes to wiggle your toes into sand or mud. Call on air: It is Gemini season and we are open to inspiration from the most unlikely sources. Listen to the morning symphony of birds or cars or a neighbor’s radio as you wake up. Write a love letter to yourself in 10 years. Text loved ones you don’t talk to regularly. Make new friends. Get lost walking home as you look for a scenic route. Make room for delight and surprise and surprising delights.

These suggestions may feel trivial in the face of all that is wrong in our world right now, but our goal this month is not to forget or distract from the pain. Neither is it to numb ourselves with routine responses and actions. Gemini season asks us to throw away our ordinary scripts, to be willing to ask questions we don’t know how to answer, and somehow to find ourselves open to joy, wonder, and awe. The only portal toward those states is one that tunnels directly through the mountain of our compacted grief and pain. So I invite you into small, daily immersions to help move what you need to move. There are many ways back into the fullness of your sense of self, and you have willing collaborators in everyone and everything you love. Begin by noticing if you are ready to feel what you need to feel, disentangled from doom narratives or a sense of urgency. Yes, our world needs us to be engaged with transforming it for the better in so many ways. And part of what that requires from us is to look at the world through new eyes.

Notice where we are already beginning. Notice where you are already beginning. You are a part of these times and can help shape the future, however hard it may be to see that. It’s not on you alone, and you may never be able to trace your effects on the world. But when you are able to feel the love, the grief, and the righteous anger in your heart — when you are able to communicate that in any way that helps someone else feel less alone — this is what we’re here to do right now. And the astrology of June is here to help us, especially as Venus moves through Taurus (lushness of the sensual) and Gemini (joy in connection), making a few aspects to the outer planets along the way.

Venus, planet of pleasure, reminds us that fundamental goodness of our bodies and our senses. Venus wants us to remember that intentionally connecting to joy is a sacred responsibility. It is what keeps us able to process and transmute the toxins of despair. Pleasure is not what capitalism tells you it is. This not a buy-yourself-something-pretty-to-fill-that-empty-feeling kind of pleasure. This is not about forgetting or turning away from the pain — this month invites us to be curious about where it hurts and to surround that pain with flowers, to drip honey over it, to sing it songs and offer it the gladness of our living bodies. We exist, here and now, and we have access to pleasure every day. Find ways, this month, to weave this into your healing practices, your relationships, your political work, your daily routine, your envisioning of a future life for all of us.

I wish you these powerful immersions this month. I’m available for readings and for more astro insights you can follow me on Instagram, join me on Patreon, and listen to my New Moon podcast The Hum.

Wishing you all the sweetness this month.

Aries

Immerse yourself in: The reassuring experience of having enough. Savor your meals, and eat until you’re satisfied. Pour your glass full. Block off uninterrupted time to experience a wandering spaciousness within your mind and body. Recognize what you have in abundance, even if it isn’t financial or tangible. Recognize what’s supporting you, even if it’s just the Earth itself.

Taurus

Immerse yourself in: The fullness of your self — all the perfect moments of your life, still there, ready to rise to the surface and burst into song. The choices you’ve made that you can celebrate—what you’ve said yes to that you’re so grateful you’ve said yes to. What you’ve said no to that has lifted a heaviness from you. The certainty that your life has meaning, that your existence matters, that you get to keep making beautiful choices for yourself.

Gemini

Immerse yourself in: The rich, surprising, even chaotic strangeness of your own imagination. Restorative solitude in which you have permission to be deeply weird. Connections in which you also have permission to speak to what’s not being spoken, to take the conversation in the direction of our inward worlds, our deepest longings, our unmet needs. And most of all, immerse yourself in your own connection to what you consider sacred, whether through spiritual practice or secular celebration of what gives you joy.

Cancer

Immerse yourself in: The tidal systems of your own social niche — the ebbing and flowing and whirling of relationships, enthusiasms, separations, collective values, and surprising resonances. The safety of having a tide pool, a harbor, a raft of sleeping otters. Who you get to be because you are part of a larger community.

Leo

Immerse yourself in: Recognition of your accomplishments—whether they are public and visible (a published book, winning a grant) or fairly private (cutting ties with an abusive loved one, continuing to recover from internalized fatphobia). Immerse yourself in a deep and abiding trust for your own capacity, even and especially when it’s easier to focus on what you are still learning. Your strength is not the facts of what you’ve done, but your capacity to keep learning and striving, with self-compassion and patience, toward your next best self.

Virgo

Immerse yourself in: All the books you’ve been wanting to read. All the classes you haven’t had time to take. All the conversations that break open your worldview like the sun rising in a desert land you never know had so many wildflowers. Daily practices of connection to what pulls your forward, toward a future of deepening into learning and teaching and knowing and not knowing.

Libra

Immerse yourself in: Rituals of release for all that you’re happy to be done with. Bonfires of old, toxic beliefs about yourself. Scattering the ashes of what you’ve been grieving. Sending back to the universe all the pain you’re done with. Getting to say goodbye. And in so doing, remembering that when you allow the grief to move through you suddenly there is room for joy.

Scorpio

Immerse yourself in: Your profound inner knowing of who is on your team. The solidity of relationships (platonic or otherwise) built up over time, subject to changes and conflicts and distance, but still thriving. A celebration of the amazing people you’ve chosen, and that they have also chosen you and are still choosing you. Maybe you have dozens of these, maybe just one or two—the quantity isn’t as important as the love itself. You are loved. Let yourself receive it.

Sagittarius

Immerse yourself in: Curiosity and enthusiasm about the body you’re in, right as it is in this moment. Wondering and experimenting with how you like to move this body, how it tells you what it wants and needs. Choosing what helps you feel strong, centered, and self-loving rather than what feels either punishing or like a hollow reward. Shifting your sense of your body outside the gaze of white supremacist beauty standards, of diet culture, of health normativity. Reveling in what feels good about being in your skin.

Capricorn

Immerse yourself in: Reminders of your innate creativity and charm. Music that makes you want to move your body. Flirtations and crushes (especially when reciprocated or on yourself or a nearby tree). Storytelling that reveals a truth you’ve forgotten. Occasions for a dance party, even if it’s a solo doing-dishes-in-the-kitchen dance party.

Aquarius

Immerse yourself in: A blanket fort that extends throughout your house, from bedroom to hallway to living room, from you front door to your best friend’s front door, from this present moment to the best memory from your childhood, from your innate sense of self-protection to your generous willingness to encompass us all within this profound experience of softness, of safety, of intimacy.

Pisces

Immerse yourself in: Questioning the ordinary and routine. Inventing games. Comedy in all forms. The failure of language to ever really say what we want it to, but the possibility of leaning into absurdity as a love language: here is a bouquet of imperfect and ridiculous words. Please accept it with all that is unspeakably tender within me.