Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

So here’s the thing: Mercury Retrograde governs everything related to voting. That’s planning, educating yourself, filling out paperwork, mailing things, making a plan, understanding things. It’s super annoying that the whole period leading up to election date is Mercury Retrograde. But you know what? You know I got you covered, right. Because at Zodiac The Vote, we have created “A Mercury Retrograde Voter’s Survival Guide.” That’s right. It has everything you need TLDR style to vote with confidence and even host your own COVID safe ballot parties. What is that? you may ask. I think you’re going to have to look at the voter guide to get the full 411. And, hey, while you’re there, check out the cocktail/mocktail recipe for your voting pleasure made by Rachel Budde, the lead herbalist and founder of Fat and the Moon. Basically, there’s so much stuff there, you’re just going to want to be a part of it. Zodiacthevote.com.

My Darlings, we have another really important and emotional question to unpack this week. And this is what it says: “I want to thank you for your work; it helps keep me sane in these insane times we live in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I live in Poland, a country that keeps going to the right, keeps harassing the LGBT+ community and keeps restricting abortion rights. All of this terrifies me more and more. But I’m also, for the first time in my life, in a healthy, romantic relationship for over three years now, and I’ve recently been thinking about having a baby with this person that I love. 

There are many things that keep bugging me about being pregnant in Poland, and generally in the world right now. But I am mostly afraid about the fetus having genetic anomalies or lethal abnormalities. I’m almost a hundred percent sure that I would not want to carry such a pregnancy to term, and it may not be possible to get a legal abortion in Poland if our supreme court rules against it very soon. The vote was on October 22nd. 

My question is, is me wanting to have an abortion in case the fetus has severe or lethal anomalies or abnormalities somehow damaging my relationship with the child if they turn out to be healthy and I give birth to them? What does astrology say about this? I am afraid that this is all somehow very conditional. The idea of I will love you only if you’re not too much of a burden for me doesn’t sit well with me, but I also can’t imagine taking care of a person who is severely ill or will die very soon. I know it’s not for me. Is there anything in my chart that can help me to make a decision about procreation? Thank you so much, and please keep my name and birth info private.”

So, absolutely, happy to keep your birth information private. This is such an important question, and I will say that since I am recording this a couple days after the 22nd, according to the BBC, a court ruling in Poland on Thursday banned almost all abortions in Poland. And there are right now protests on the streets. According to the BBC, there’s thousands of people protesting. According to CNN, there are hundreds of people protesting. Go figure. So, basically, what happened in Poland is, with the only exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s health is at risk, abortions have been banned. Abortions carried out in a situation like you’re naming in your question when the fetus is malformed, that accounted for 98% of legal terminations last year, and it’s now been outlawed. 

Just as a kind of fun fact, as Poland bans all abortions, the Trump administration here in the US signed an international anti-abortion declaration on behalf of the US stating, “We the representatives of our sovereign nations do hereby declare that there is no international right to abortion.” That’s some pretty fucking scary shit right there, IMO. 

And before I get properly into your question, I want to just name that a long time ago, on episode 40, I talked about abortion and astrology, so that’s a great episode to listen to on the topic of abortion in general. Also, in episode 47, I touched on the chart of Roe v. Wade in the US, and if there’s interest, I would actually be really interested in unpacking it further on the podcast. Write me messages over at ghostofapodcast.com, and let me know if you want to hear about it.

Okay, so there’s a lot of parts of this, and I want to kind of try to unpack and peel back all of them. The first is you’re in love, and you’re happy, and part of that is inspiring you to want to have a kid with this person. You didn’t mention in your question if you yourself are part of the LGBT+ community. I’m assuming you’re not since you didn’t mention it, but, you know, that might be wrong. So I’m going to just assume that you’re both cis and straight. 

So part of what you’re asking me is, let’s say you procreate, you have a baby, and they are perfectly healthy and well, and life tra-la-las along, will your fear and terror of having a fetus or child with abnormalities, your fear of having a child that will have health issues that you have to kind of like drop everything and be a full time caretaker, will that kind of fear of yours and boundary of yours—the boundary that you don’t want to do it—will that show up in the child’s birth chart? The answer is maybe. Not for sure, but maybe. 

So let me just dial it back for a second here. The question that you’re asking me honestly suggests that you know yourself, and that you are doing a very good job of parenting straight out the gate—parenting yourself and parenting the potential of a child. Most people don’t seriously consider what would I do if something really bad happened. When people have kids they often go into, “I want to do this, so I’m going to do this,” and they go into a fantasy of what parenting or a family looks like. And I’m actually very pleased for you that you are not doing that because that’s part of practical parenting. And, again, not just parenting a child; it’s about parenting yourself. It’s about recognizing who you are, what your strengths are and what your limitations are. 

And that would also show up in your child’s chart—that you know who you are, and you know what you can and cannot do. Would it show up in your child’s chart as the potential for being rejected or conditional love? Maybe. Maybe not. Would it show up in your child’s chart as having a strong-willed mother who knows who she is and has a clear understanding of her own boundaries? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on so many factors that cannot be predicted. 

And this gets us to, in some ways, the crux of your question, which is you do not get to control anything really when it comes to parenting. I mean, you can put your best foot forward; you can do your upmost, but there are so many things that are outside of your control, and now thanks to your government, in the case of your fetus having medical crises, you don’t have any control. It just reiterates this not having control thing. 

So I will say this, you can have a healthy fetus that develops into a healthy baby, and then you can give birth to a healthy baby, and then something could happen, and there could be an accident or an illness, and then you could end up in that same situation anyways, where you have to caretake for somebody who’s really sick or cannot ever be independent or is dying. I’m not predicting these things. It’s not—I don’t see these things in your birth chart. I’m not even looking for them, if I’m being honest. It’s that that’s the deal with parenting. You don’t get to control it. 

Honestly, that’s just the deal with life; you don’t get to control it. Bad luck does not befall the bad. Bad luck is just something that happens over the course of life, and it sucks. But there’s nothing we can really do about it. I can’t tell you how many clients I have who did their job—they had healthy fetus, healthy baby; they raised their child; the child moved out at whatever age they did, and then that adult child ran into some sort of major problem with their health—maybe an addiction issue or a health issue, and then that adult child ended up coming back home and needing caretaking in their thirties or forties. And, so, the parents end up caretaking their adult children, in addition to parenting them through their childhood. It happens. It happens. And it happens a fair amount, honestly. 

If these things make you feel like, “Well, then fuck it. I don’t want to do this.” I want to say don’t do it. If your primary concern is a fetus having abnormalities, then short of moving to a country where abortion is legal for the duration of your pregnancy, I don’t know that there’s anything that you can do safely. But I actually don’t get the sense that that’s actually the wholeness of your concern, although it sounds like a major part of your concern. 

When I look at your birth chart, I see that you have a Moon/Uranus conjunction. You also have a Saturn/Mars conjunction. So people with Moon/Uranus conjunctions often times feel like the most important thing is freedom and autonomy. And this is not the most nurturing of placements, TBH. Doesn’t mean you’re not a nurturing person, but it’s not really your love language. You do really like being around people who can take care of themselves—that does really work for you. You do need a lot of very adult space to take care of yourself. 

Now that Mars/Saturn conjunction reiterates that and can make it a little extra rigid. 

When you say in your question to me that you know that you don’t want to be in a position where you have to caretake somebody who’s very ill in a long term way, and I look at your birth chart, I agree—you don’t want to. And that said, I actually think, based on your birth chart, you could work in something like medicine; you could work with people who have high needs. But there is a really big difference between your capacity with friends, your capacity at work, and what you want for your personal life. And I want to hold space for that. 

I want to really acknowledge so many people who don’t want children, love children, hang out with children all the time; they’re good with children. So many people who love parenting and have also wanted to be a parent don’t actually enjoy being around kids and could not imagine ever working with kids. One doesn’t equal the other is what I’m trying to say. 

So if your question is really saying I’m terrified of procreation. I’m terrified of having a fetus that is unwell and not being able to abort, but I am okay with having a child and that child potentially having something complicated or bad happen that forces me to caretake them in a dramatic way, if that’s the case then just adopt—bypass the whole risk. Lots of upsides of adaption. There’s some downsides, I’m sure. But I actually don’t look at your chart and think that you want to adopt, but I don’t think that that is the whole problem. 

The whole problem is your ambiguity of taking on a lot of the risk of parenting. And I respect that. There is nothing bad about that. There is nothing immoral or cruel about that. It’s knowing yourself so that you can make decisions so that you never act in a way that is cruel. Because if, essentially, your feeling is you have a disabled child, then you’ll what? You’ll just resent it? What is it? Because we can’t predict these things. We can’t know these things. 

Again, I don’t see any markers of this in your birth chart, but it is the risk of parenting. And it kind of gets to something a little deeper, which is does the idea of taking care of a child with a peanut allergy also make you feel really trapped or bad or like you don’t want to do that? What if your kid is really sickly, just like flus and bugs and flus and bugs—is that also a conflict? There are so many things that can go wrong. Not to be a ray of sunshine or anything, but there are so many things that can go wrong. And being a parent is making the decision to kind of put aside your individual needs and to center the needs of a child. And that child, like I said, could be an asshole, could be sickly, could have special needs, could be somebody that you love and feel like you’re besties with, or it could be somebody that you find deeply fucking irritating and you fight with all the time. That’s just—it’s all very TBD and out of your control. 

So the question becomes are you down to let go of that much control? That’s the question. And there’s not exactly a right or a wrong answer. There’s just an honest or not answer. Life is really a series of action and consequence. And when I say action and consequence, within that I want to acknowledge that inaction is a form of action. There’s no way out of action and consequence. 

So then for you, is the action of choosing to parent with all of its risks associated with it, are you willing to engage with the potential consequences? Similarly, if you choose to not have a child, to go through your life, hopefully, with this partner, in love, living your damn life, and not having a child to raise, are you willing to cope with that consequence? If you decide that you want to have a kid, you can make the decision to recognize that you really, really, really don’t want to take care of somebody who is really sick. The question is, would you stop loving them? The question is what would you do with them? What would you do with yourself? If the answers feel really ugly to you, then maybe this is not the best choice. 

The problem is it’s your choice. And it’s also the beautiful thing is that it’s your choice—fucking government be damned. The government may not want you to be able to make choices with your body, but, ultimately, you do have some choices here. And I think that it’s really important that you love yourself enough to really explore the question, to continue to explore this question. Because at the end of the day, you can’t know—you can’t know what’s going to happen with the kid. You can’t know how you’re going to feel in a situation, but you can know yourself at this moment. 

You can choose to look openly and honestly at things that are hard to confront, even from the perspective of will my conditional love show up in a child’s birth chart? That’s a good question to ask. It’s an interesting question to ask. But I have a better question for you. It’s, if I love my child conditionally, can I love myself unconditionally? Can I live with the choice of potentially being in a situation where I regret having a kid? I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is for you. 

But I can tell you this, you’re in the right time to be dealing with this question. This is the time in your birth chart that is forcing you to change the way you handle scary ideas. And in your birth chart, you’ve got Pluto/Mercury opposition, so you have a tendency to obsess and obsess and obsess on a question to evaluate all of the details to such an extreme that you end up not having any answer; you just have more and more and more details. And I wish I could make it really simple for you, but I can’t. 

I can encourage you to have honest conversations with your partner. What would the two of you do in that situation? How would your partner step up and help? How would you cope with it? And if the answers bring you outside of your ethics, if they feel unkind or cruel, then that’s your answer. But if what you come to is it would be scary, but at the end of the day, you would do your utmost, and you would keep your child, and you would take care of your child regardless of what happened, then know this: your fear of being able to care for a child, your honest evaluation of whether or not an abortion is the right choice for you, these things are not inherently bad. And if they show up in your child’s chart, they may not show up as a rejection of that child. They may instead show up as parenting—having a parent who takes responsibility for what they can and can’t do. Having a parent who takes responsibility for what they can offer their child. It’s not—all actions do not come from the same motivations. 

I am a big believer in questioning everything. Questioning your motives, questioning your choices, questioning your actions—not as a way to torture yourself, but as a way to really investigate. So as we investigate ourselves, we can make cleaner choices. But the risk becomes, with self-investigation, that it’s like digging and digging and digging to create more words, to further confuse and obscure an issue. 

So this kind of investigation that you’re doing has to include within it clarity about your values. What is it that you value? If you don’t have in your thinking clarity about what you value in your life, in yourself, in your actions, present and future, then it’s hard to evaluate your choices—what’s good for you and what’s not. Because, honestly, I’ve seen birth charts where the parent considered abortion, and, for my client, that shows up in their birth chart as something positive. Sometimes it shows up as something negative, and sometimes it doesn’t show up at all. That’s just real. 

You are entitled to every single one of your feelings. You are entitled to feel any way you feel. You are entitled to question everything. What is truly important? What will define you? What will define your relationship with a child if you have a child? What will define your relationship with yourself?  It’s what you do. It’s what you do in response to your feelings, in response to your thoughts, in response to your conditions. It’s what you do. So don’t worry that by questioning things that are kind of scary and upsetting and can sometimes feel grisly or bad that you’re somehow harming a child that is not yet conceived, or even harming the people in your life. Have your feelings. Have your questions, and act in ways that reflect your integrity. 

Now, one last thing I’m going to say before I wrap this up, which is you have a Sun at 25 degrees of the sign of Taurus, and Pluto is forming a delightful trine to your Sun over the next two years—year and a half, two years. This can be associated with virility and fertility. So, yeah, if you’re not trying to have a child, and you’re with a cis male partner, I strongly advise you to use birth control so that you have choice. Make sure that your choices are clear because I can tell you looking at your birth chart, you do not like feeling trapped. So do not leave it to chance because PnV sex makes babies. Not every single time, but that’s how babies are made. Have safer sex over the next two years as you struggle to make your decision. 

This month ICE announced that they would be carrying out nationwide mass raids. Last week they arrested 128 people in San Francisco alone. Advocates are worried that this is just the beginning, and thousands of families might be separated from each other over the coming days and weeks. Last year ICE executed the largest raid in US history on the first day of school, leaving hundreds of kids stranded. We have to be ready for more raids. Donate to Families Belong Together to help re-unite families and protect kids from ICE’s cruelty. Go to familiesbelongtogether.org to donate now.

Donate to Feeding America’s Corona Virus Response Fund. No one should go hungry during the COVID-19 pandemic. With school closures, job disruptions, and health risks, millions of Americans will turn to food banks for much needed support. They can’t do it alone, so if you can help, please do. Go to feedingamerica.org.

In a recent court reversal, ex-felons in the state of Florida must now pay fines before voting in November. This could seriously impede the ability of hundreds of thousands of voters to cast a ballot. It comes as no surprise that five of the six judges who supported the decision were appointed by President Trump. Help pay the fines on behalf of the ex-felons through the Florida Rights Restoration Council. They’re a grass roots, membership organization run by returning citizens who are dedicated to ending the disenfranchisement and discrimination against people with convictions. Visit floridarrc.com to learn more or floridarrc.com/donate to give what you can.

We’ve a lot to talk about this week. We are going to look at the astrology of October 25th through the 31st of 2020. But before we do, I just want to talk about a couple of things right quick. There is so much happening in the world right now, and the astrology of 2020—all of the things that are happening, that have already happened, and the things that we’re building up to that have yet to come, they don’t just impact the US. I mean, on the podcast, I talk about how the astrology of this moment is impacting us in the US because I can’t talk about all the world’s news on an astrology podcast and not have it become a totally different podcast. 

But we are seeing the rise of authoritarianism. We are seeing incredibly tumultuous and threatening conditions across the world, from Nigeria to the US, to Poland to Armenia. The struggle for human rights, the struggle against oppressive and restrictive and often very violent political rule by men with power—it’s a global phenomenon. And this period—2020 and over the next couple few years is going to require our attention and engagement. 

It’s so hard to stay aware of what’s happening in your state or province, your city, your town, and also the world. And if you are aware of what’s happening in parts of the world, it’s really—unless it’s your fulltime job and your whole life’s work, to become aware of what’s happening in all regions of the whole entire world, it’s not reasonable. It’s not realistic. For reasons of empathy overload, as I talked about on last week’s episode, but also for reasons of just—it’s not just about reading the news; it’s about understanding the context of social and political conditions for the region that they’re happening in. Because when we apply our own individual context to somebody else’s conditions that are radically different than ours, we are going to have fundamental misunderstandings. 

Which actually leads me to acknowledging and kind of reminding you that propaganda, man; it’s up. It’s super up. There is so much information and misinformation out there, and that is in part by design. I think that is also in part just by all of a sudden, we have access to self-generating news, and we do not, most of us, put enough effort and energy into vetting our sources.  You may read a bit of news from somebody that was posted by somebody that you trust. But they may have also done the same thing, and somewhere along the line, maybe a broken, like, telephone—remember that game, telephone?—like a broken wire. So we may be just spreading misinformation without meaning to. 

It’s overwhelming. It is a lot. And the tempo is unlikely to slow down in 2020. I mean this for how you feel. I mean this for your local, domestic conditions, you know, political and social conditions, and I mean this for global conditions. My advice to you, my loves, is to make a plan to be activated, to act in ways that reflect what you care about and act in ways that empower you to be a person who’s making a difference. That’s all. You don’t have to make a massive difference—that’s not necessary. Just make a difference. 

As you see the suffering of others, people you know and people you don’t, people far from you, and people very close by, there will be a cap on how much you can do, and that’s just, I mean, that’s just life here. But do something. Do something. 

Here in the US, we have had record infections of COVID-19, just the highest yet. So if you’re here in the US, you can make sure that you’re always wearing a mask around people, that you’re taking very seriously the risk and infection rates of COVID-19. I know it’s exhausting. I know it’s frustrating. I have a lot to say about that in the context of this week’s astrology, actually. But at the end of the day, my loves, at the end of the day, these are historic times. They are. I mean, I guess, arguably all times are historic times. These are historic times. You are here for a reason. And whether that reason is about your spiritual development or not, that’s cool, but what I want to be really clear about—because this is a spiritual podcast—is that in order to be right with yourself spiritually speaking, you cannot tap out and not be a part of the social and political issues that are at play in your world or in the world. That’s not really how spirituality works. 

If all you’re concerned about is manifesting happiness and ease for you, that’s not very spiritual; that’s selfish. And listen, I’m not mad at selfishness. Selfishness on its own is not a bad thing, but we are dealing in the context of Mars Retrograde in Aries, in the context of so many other astrological conditions. We are dealing with, essentially, toxic individualism. And we must find our way out of that to know that this culture of self-care, self-reflection, self-healing that I myself am a huge part of, it cannot happen separate from and outside of understanding that you are interconnected, that you are a part of the world, and when your self-care comes at the expense of others, when it empowers you to completely check out from the world and only focus on yourself, when it convinces you that you don’t have to use your privileges to support others who have less, that’s where we get into problems. That’s when we get into spiritual bypassing, and this is a time where we really need to be on guard against spiritual bypassing. Because we’re all fucking terrified. We’re all scared. We’re all overwhelmed and kind of unmoored. 

There has been a major shift. I don’t know if you’ve felt it, but there has been a major shift in the collective field. It’s a scary time; people are freaking the fuck out. And when we’re frightened, when we’re frightened is when we are most likely to act selfishly. It’s when we are most likely to say, “I’m too freaked out to center empathy in my actions.” So the key is empathy with boundaries, which is something I’ll talk about on the podcast in greater depth another time. Send me your questions if you have them. 

But it’s empathy with boundaries. It’s understanding that just because you’re sensitive, doesn’t take you off the hook for acting in accordance with your integrity, acting in accordance with the greater good. So because of the ways in which you feel, you have to organize your energy, and you have to organize your engagement in a way that is self-appropriate. But that doesn’t mean nothing for most of us. 

Now, of course, some people are in extreme conditions or really dramatic situations and that’s what that is. And I’m not trying to say if you’re dealing with something really dramatic that you should drop everything and take care of the world. I am saying you should be asking the questions though. Ask yourself the question, is this the time where I’m being self-indulgent or I’m just taking care of myself? And if we’re all acting this way, if we’re all engaging this way, then at the end of the day, what happens is there’s this wave of engagement—some people stand up and other people sit down. But there’s always a wave of people standing up so that it supports other people who need to sit down, who need a damn break. But it takes all of us choosing to center engagement in order for that strategy to work, right. Community requires all of us. It requires all of us, so get on board. Get on board.

Now, this week’s horoscope. Let’s do it, okay? So I’ll remind you, we’re looking at October 25th through the 31st of 2020. On the 25th of October, there’s going to be a Sun conjunction to the Mercury Retrograde. And I actually recorded with the lovely Chris Brennan, over at The Astrology Podcast, a two and a half hour long podcast episode about Mercury Retrograde, where we really ended up talking a fair amount about this particular transit—the Sun conjunction to Mercury. Not just this one, this week, but what that transit means in the context of Mercury Retrograde in general. 

So Sun conjunction to Mercury can be a time that is very clarifying. So it’s your identity—the Sun—coming into alignment with Mercury—your ideas, your attitudes, communications in general. So this transit can be a time where things get clear, where you start to see some sort of mobility in your clarity. Who doesn’t want a little piece of that? 

The thing about the Mercury Retrograde is that it is a clarity about something in the past. So something in our patterns, something that has been happening over the course of this Retrograde itself, something that we’ve learned. You may need to change your mind. You may need to change your course under this influence. And the Sun conjunction to Mercury Retrograde actually will help you to do that. So you’re best course of action on and around this date is to be interested in whatever comes up. Don’t take it at face value. Look at your own patterns, be interested in whatever it is that is happening. Be inquisitive. Be flexible. Because whatever it is that this happening is not just about the thing. It's about how you, your attitudes, what you’ve said, how you’ve engaged, it’s how all those things have brought you to this place. So I’m not saying everything is your fault, and you’ve total control over everything because none of that’s true. But what I am saying is that your patterns happen in your life for you to engage with and heal. Be interested in what your patterns are revealing to you on and around this date. Be inquisitive without getting too locked in on he said, she said, I did, they did. Instead, try to be flexible and open so that you can learn as much as possible about yourself, about the patterns in your relationships or your ideas, how you communicate, how you listen, and then be able to pivot as necessary, as needed. 

Now, on the 27th, we have Mercury and Venus moving from Virgo and into Libra. So this is fun. Okay, so Mercury is Retrograding into Libra, Venus is moving regular styles into Libra, and this shift of gears is from something more internal and reflective to something more relational. 

Now, in the context of COVID-19, I don’t love it because Mercury and Venus both are very relational; they want to hang out, and in so much of the country here in the US, it’s getting colder, and so hanging out has to happen indoors. And as that happens, the risk for COVID infection and spread becomes much higher, so I have a little bit of a red flag about that. And that’s not because Mercury and Venus in Libra should have anything to do technically speaking with COVID-19, but more that it will increase our desire to be relational, to hang out with people. And after so many months of shelter in place or quarantining, so many people are just so frustrated with having to be alone or be so careful about how we interact. I want to say really firmly, don’t fuck it up—not for yourself and not for others. Keep yourself, keep your loved ones, keep your community safe by continuing to be a COVID nerd, basically. I guess just be a COVID nerd. 

So the other thing about these particular transits is they’re really good for creativity. So Mercury and Venus both in the sign of Libra are great for creativity. So if you are a writer, if you love listening to music, if you’re actually an independent movie nerd, just really go deep into either being creative yourself or bringing the arts into your life. 

Now that brings us to the 31st, which is the big transit of the week. On the 31st, there is going to be a Blue Moon, which is a Full Moon. So Blue Moons, just FYI, are when there’s a second Full Moon in a month. It’s like that expression, it happens once every—once in a Blue Moon. That expression refers to how infrequent it is that there are two Full Moons in a month. And this particular month, we had a Full Moon at the start of the month, and here we have it at the end of the month, so hence the Blue Moon. The Moon itself, ’tis not blue—no, don’t believe it. ’Tis not blue. 

So this Full Moon is exact at 7:49 a.m., Pacific time. So adjust it based on your time zone, wherever you are in the world. And it's happening October 31st of 2020. There’s so much to say about this. First of all, Full Moon on Halloween, okay. Why not? Right. So Halloween is a time where the vails may be thin, and on top of it we have now a Full Moon. And Full Moons are always when the Sun and Moon are opposite each other. And it’s a time that we know emotions run high. And, so, the combo platter of all of these things, honestly, is a little concerning. 

This Full Moon chart is very Uranian. So let me explain what this means. When we talk about the signs Scorpio and Taurus—the Sun’s in Scorpio; the Moon’s in Taurus—we are talking about these fixed signs that tend to move a little bit slowly. They move slowly because fixed signs have a tendency of doing that. It’s like, let me figure out what is my certainty, and then from this place of certainty I will pursue whatever action. That said, Uranus—the ruling planet to Aquarius—is the internet. It’s electricity. It is revolution. And Uranus in this Full Moon chart is sitting exactly conjunct, almost to the minute—like, seriously, almost to the minute—to the Moon. And that means Uranus is also opposite the Sun on the Full Moon day. So it’s forming an exact opposition, literally, minutes from that Full Moon. 

And, so, instead of this sensual, dynamic, introspective Full Moon that we theoretically could have on a Taurus Full Moon, what we have is this unpredictable mess. Now how else could it be? I mean, seriously. How else could it be? 2020. 2020. 2020. Okay. So Uranus conjunct the Moon and opposite the Sun promises the unpredictable. That’s the damn problem with Uranus. Uranus is by its very definition unpredictable. 

So what we know we can expect with this Full Moon, on a personal level anyways, is feeling irritable or anxious or restless, feeling a sense of kind of urgency. So it’s different than that Mars governed urgency that we are also always feeling with this Mars Retrograde in Aries. Uranus is kind of like—it’s fixated on the future. And, so, there’s this urgency you may be feeling around protecting your future and, in particular, protecting your stability and security in the future, and the stability and security is because the Taurus Moon, right. It’s a Taurus Full Moon. So you may be feeling really unsettled, or you may do something impulsively that really changes everything. Somebody else may do something impulsively or that kind of just totally takes you off guard that totally changes everything. 

On a social level, the planet Uranus is associated with rebellion and big social change. Uranus is a planet that is associated with unrest and unrest with limitations and restrictions. So, therefore, it’s connected to instability, disruptions. And this can go in any direction. That’s the trouble with Uranus. The way I like to describe Uranus—I don’t know if you heard episode 153 of the podcast, aka the most recent episode I dropped. It’s about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and I think it’s fucking fascinating and super important to listen to, especially if you’re ambiguous about voting, and you’re not really sure if it’s worth it. Listen to that. A little astrology—how’s it going to hurt you? 

Anyways, the way I describe Uranus in that talk, in that episode, and it’s the way I often think about Uranus, is it’s kind of like those plasma balls that were really big in the 1980s. It’s just—energy goes everywhere, all at once, but it gets focused in one place. But even as Uranus’ energies get focused in one direction, there’s generally tons happening—so many offshoots of that one major thing. And, so, we are seeing this again in places around the world, that when we focus on justice for one, we have to look at justice for all. When we focus on one problem socially, we start to see how it’s interconnected to multiple problems socially, right. 

And with this particular Full Moon, I imagine we’re going to see a lot of disruption and a lot of unrest, and what that means, I cannot tell you. No one really can. But I can tell you this: things are not supposed to stay the same. Things as they are are not supposed to be stable. This is a time that is meant for change. It is meant for interrupting individualism that comes at the expense of the collective and a recommitment to the advancement of community, the advancement of equality. 

And none of this happens by tweeting or doing nothing or watching reality TV or whatever else. It happens by getting involved. It happens by caring. And, unfortunately, getting involved and caring means feeling shitty, becoming more aware of more problems in the world, becoming aware of your own part to play—the negative parts, the positive parts, all of it. And on this Full Moon, on a personal level, you may feel really resistant to that. You may feel really inspired to get involved, to get informed, to have a voice. It’s unpredictable because of Uranus’ involvement. 

So on the social tip, I want to remind you something that I’ve mentioned on the podcast a bunch of times, which is the transit of the planet Uranus in the sign of Taurus is really a major shift. It’s a major transit that lasts many, many years where we really decide who matters and how they matter. Uranus in Taurus is a transit that tends to be associated with the rise of authoritarianism. And this is in part because when individuals get scared about their own individual freedoms and their own individual rights, there is a way that it becomes very enticing to have other people scapegoated—to look for simple, easy answers that will make you feel safe without doing a lot of work. 

So I want to remind you, all of you, to really think about what you value, to consider whether or not what you value and what you want for you to feel secure and stable and safe, if you believe other people deserve the same thing. This theme of values and value is a big one associated with the sign of Taurus. And having Uranus moving through this sign is a time where we must investigate and be willing to change how we relate to the value of people, the value of women in society. And even this transit is associated with currency, which is not something I talk about on the podcast a lot because I’m not super interested in financial astrology, but Uranus in Taurus is absolutely related to the economy, and it’s absolutely related to currency. 

Now, on a more personal level, this particular Full Moon is likely to just feel overwhelming. The veils are thinner, and there have been so many more deaths as associated with COVID-19 in recent months in most parts of the world. As the veils are thinner, our sensitivities increase, and as our sensitivities increase on a Full Moon and around Halloween, you just might be feeling the feelings, the collective feelings of frustration and fear and impatience and irritability and all of this stuff, all of this disruptive emotion is likely to be impacting you, especially if you’re a sensitive person, right. 

And, so, what I want to encourage you to do is look at your relationship to stability and uncertainty. Because you can’t be in control right now. In this Full Moon chart, we have a Mercury square to Saturn, Pluto, and Jupiter. It’s really tight with Saturn. And what these transits indicate is this really intense desire to know the answer so that you can be safe. And I want to say, I’m so sorry, I know I’m an astrologer, but there is no answer. The answer is the process. How are you going to walk upon, wheel upon, stumble upon the path. That’s the answer. The answer is the choice you can make based on what you know today, based on what you believe to be right today. The answer is not I figure out the equation—one plus one equals two, and then I just say two, and then I win a prize. That’s not how it’s going to go. 

If you are scared and your primary coping mechanism for fear is to blame others or to scapegoat, then you’re probably going to be feeling pretty blamey around this date. If your response to fear is to disassociate, you are probably going to be drinking all the drinks, eating all the foods, smoking all the smokes, watching all the TV. But if you’re response to fear can instead be investigative, curiosity, taking care of yourself, leaning into the feelings, not the stories of what you’re sacred of, but instead the feelings, so that you don’t abandon yourself in your moment of need, there we have real growth. 

Because everyone’s going through these transits, it’s not the smartest strategy to expect other people to take care of you about now, okay. This is a meaningful moment, this Full Moon, for you to strive to take care of yourself. Now I don’t mean you’re on your own kid; go suck a dick. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is this is a meaningful time to cultivate your own inner resources and use your resources. This is an important time for taking responsibility for how you live, how you relate to yourself in a very personal way. And then, of course, by extension of those things, how you act, what you say, what you do to others, around others, for others, with others. 

On a personal level, this Full Moon can mark massive transformation, major growth and change. It’s beautiful, honestly, but it won’t come easy. It might come quick, but it won’t come easy. So what I want to encourage you to do is remain curious. Remain curious. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t look for answers, even. Find layers and layers of truth. 

Uranus can function like a hammer. It’s like, “This is it.” It can kind of look for a quick and easy answer because Uranus is impatient. Ditto on Saturn, honestly. This is a time to stay present with nuance. The only way to do that is to tolerate your emotions in your body—yuck, right. Gross. But that’s the work. You don’t have to be good at the work; you don’t have to be great at the work; you just need to stay with the work.

Now for a quick recap of this week’s transits. On the 25th, we have a Sun conjunction to Mercury Retrograde. On the 27th, both Mercury and Venus enter into the sign of Libra, keeping in mind Mercury is Retrograding back into the sign of Libra. On the 31st, we have a Full Moon in Taurus that is exact at 7:49 a.m., Pacific time. 

My loves, there will be obstacles. There just—there will. There will be obstacles in life. There will be obstacles this week. And if you can strive to not center the obstacle itself, but first asking yourself how do I want to respond to this? What can this thing teach me? What is the healthiest approach? In doing this work, healing occurs, wellness occurs. And there’s really no downside to that.