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.

All right. Buckle up, my loves—we’re in for a bit of a ride. This is your 2021 year ahead horoscope. These aren’t my favorite to do for a couple reasons. One is that it’s very hard to look at a whole year in society. Which society you ask? I mean, I’m going to focus on the US because it’s where I live, and it’s the country I know the most about. But it is really hard to focus on a whole year and to look at it objectively without having feelings about it, because I’m in the world; I’m part of it. You are part of it. We are part of it. So it’s a little bit harder to be objective and to not project my world view, my worries, all that kind of stuff. So I want to just be totally forth coming about that detail. 

I think it’s tricky to be an astrologer and, in particular, to talk about mundane astrology issues—and mundane astrology is the astrology of events and places and things and stuff like that—and to also have empathy and care and compassion because that empathy, care, and compassion can kind of screw a thing up, just make you feel emotional when you’re looking ahead. And I’m not saying this because something terrible is happening, necessarily, but just because that’s just real talks. 

I also want to just very clearly say something that I’ve probably said a bunch of times already, which is just because the calendar year closes doesn’t actually necessarily mean that much. It's not like your issues in November of 2020 magically go away because it’s 2021. That’s not a thing. I would also say it’s not the age of Aquarius—that’s not a thing. The astrologer Rick Levine did a really succinct and effective breakdown of that on his Instagram if you want to check that as well. 

So I want to kind of ground and center you into realistic expectations of the world at large and of yourself. We are still very much in a pandemic, certainly in the US, but it hasn’t even been a year, and it is a global pandemic in a very global world. And that’s a lot. Vaccine aside, it’s not likely to just go away in 2021 because we’re sick of it, no matter how sick of it we are. So all of these things are worthy of consideration. 

So that said, we have a lot to get to. I’m just going to dive right in and start with this. You know about Saturn and Jupiter having met in the sky for The Great Conjunction. You know all about it. You’ve listened to the episodes I’ve dropped about it already, and that is over. But within that, it is important to note that Saturn remains for the next couple few years in the sign of Aquarius. And Saturn in Aquarius, ’tis no small thing. I may have mentioned this before, but let me just reaffirm, the last time that Saturn was in Aquarius was in 1991 through ’93. The time before that was ’62 to ’64 and previous to that was ’32 through ’35. 

So ’32 through ’35 we saw banking regulations—yay, wonderful. Also, the Great Depression. Social security came in that period of Saturn in Aquarius. In ’62 to ’64, it was an explosive time for civil rights. We had the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. This was when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and it was also when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison—that was in ’63 that he was sentenced to life in prison. 

30 years later, during the next—the following Saturn in Aquarius, we had Mandela awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The reason why I name this to you, and this is—other than it’s interesting is because in a 30-year cycle, in a 29-year cycle of Saturn through all the zodiac signs a lot can happen. Meaningful and major progress can happen, and it is very hard to be patient. It’s hard to be patient with our own selves, and it’s hard to be patient with social development. But it’s good to see that these things happen—that we can have a major evolution in society in hearts, minds, and in legislation. 

So that brings us to ’91 through ’93. That is when we had the police beating of Rodney King caught on film and the subsequent uprising in response to that. That is also when we had this little thing, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but the internet. The internet was created April 30th, ’93. So we had the kind of like introduction of accessible technology at that time—it was when it became free and available to anyone. And so, what we can kind of like pull from these details is that Saturn in Aquarius is associated with an attempt by the people to force those in power to create protections, both legislatively but also socially, for the people themselves. And so, Saturn in Aquarius can be a time where we have effective and sustainable changes made to the fabric of our institutions, hierarchies, and society. Fucking yay, right. 

The injustices that we have seen in 2020—now, some of these injustices they have been long existing, but they’ve become clearer to the collective and a larger conversation on a collective level. That’s not going away; that’s getting more intense. So if you were hoping to like have your feed go back to selfie, selfie, selfies, nothing but selfies, ah, no. I’m going to say no, not so much—probably no. Unless, of course, the algorithms fuck with us. That brings us to the other thing. 

We are in Saturn in Aquarius times, which means we are going to have, in 2023, when Saturn hits the final degree of Aquarius, the internet’s first Saturn Return. Ooooh, what does that mean? For a human’s Saturn Return there’s a one-to-two-year long period leading up to the transit itself where things start to feel dire, and you become aware of what is and isn’t working in your life. For events I think that can happen as well. And there are other things happening astrologically to reiterate that idea. 

For the next couple of years, we are in a phase where we are going to be both more reliant on the internet, but also, we need our laws and our culture to catch up. So you join a new app, and they have access to everything in your phone or don’t they? Have you ever actually read an agreement to use any of the things you use with technology? Can you even understand them, or are they written specifically so you can’t understand them? Do our legislators understand technology? Do they protect us from the tech giants of the world? These are really important questions, and we are going to have to answer them. 

I encourage you to keep your attention trained on net neutrality. If we do not keep our attention trained on net neutrality, we may lose it. And there is just a terrifying cascade of bad things that can happen in that way. If you have ever read any amount of sci-fi, you know that when the government gets hold of technology that they understand, you lose your privacy, and you lose your freedom of movement. And we already see that happening in other countries, and it can easily happen here in the United States. So it’s something we really need to pay attention to and stay activated around. 

Now, kind of to further that, let me tell you that the big news of 2021, in my view, is the Saturn square to Uranus. So let’s talk about it. Saturn in Aquarius is the planet Saturn moving through this fixed sign. And Uranus in the sign of Taurus is also Uranus moving through a fixed sign. These two planets will be forming a 90-degree angle to each other all year and actually into 2022. 

Now, we have just come out of a phase of development where Saturn and Jupiter and Pluto were all in Capricorn. And so, we have had to deal with corruption and abuses of power from the top down, right. We have had to deal with so many problems associated with abuse of power, misuse of power, cruelty, condemnation, punishment—these things have all occurred. Now, also, good things have happened in the past couple of years, but this is consistent—these themes are consistent with the Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter mashup in Capricorn. Heavy fucking Capricorn. 

Now, what’s happening in 2021 and, again, through ’22 is this Saturn square to Uranus. This is a difficult combination of energies because Uranus loves freedom and expansion and autonomy, and Saturn wants to constrict and restrict and conform. And so, when these two planets form a square to each other in fixed signs we can expect unrest, we can expect instability. We can also hope for structural reform. We can hope for our structures and hierarchies, governments and corporations to become more humanitarian and more just. That said, they can also just learn how to use the language of social movements against us. I mean, we’re already seeing that; that’s like a thing that’s already happening, as always happens. But these things are very real. 

This transit of Saturn square to Uranus is associated with frustrations, rebellion, progress that is curtailed. The frustration that we can expect to feel has everything to do with our values and how they apply to the collective. So if at the end of the day, the primary values of our government or the corporations that have as much power of our governments is just preserving power, then we are all in a fucking world of trouble, and we need to really activate and come together. 

And here’s the thing. You know this. You know this, but I’m going to just repeat it because it deserves to be said. Our liberation and true justice involves all of us—people of all abilities, all classes, all races, all genders, all sexualities, whether or not we are legal citizens, whether we are educated or not, whether we have homes or not—it’s all of us. Regardless of our religion, regardless of our political parties, we are all entitled to being treated with dignity and having our essential needs met. And we must come together. If we continue to pick each other apart and pick ourselves apart and pick everyone else apart and force separation, the astrology of 2021 is just really going to do a number on us—like very much so. 

We have the opportunity this year to break apart systems that do not serve us, to create more liberty in the structures that guide us, in our personal lives, and in the world at large. The other thing that can happen is chaos. Revolution without a great clarity of purpose, a sense of strife or being blocked, like everything you do doesn’t work because of external circumstances or things you didn’t account for. And when we go through that as individuals or as a collective, frustration tends to lead to entitlement. 

So let me unpack this for a moment. If you are just having the shittiest day and everything’s just going sideways on you and things aren’t really working out, when somebody looks at you in a weird way, you get mad. You get mad. You don’t think about the day they’re having. You don’t think about anything because you’re just frustrated, and those feelings get leaky. And so, that is true for us this year. How you manage feeling frustrated, your willingness and ability to pivot, your willingness and ability to be flexible and adaptive is going to be tested this year—I don’t care what your chart looks like. That’s what’s happening on a collective level; we are going to see that in our systems; we are going to be seeing that across the board but also as individuals, okay. 

Now, this transit of Saturn square to Uranus is going to be exact on the 17th of February, so early in the year, and that will be at seven degrees. So Saturn will be at seven degrees of Aquarius, and Uranus will be at seven degrees of Taurus. On June 14th, Saturn will be at 13 degrees of Aquarius, and Uranus will be at 13 degrees of Taurus, and there will be another exact square. And then, finally, do do do dooo, 12/24 of 2021, we will have those two same planets at 11 degrees. So we have these three dates for these exact squares, and we can expect unrest, instability, the unpredictable to a certain extent because Uranus is associated with the unpredictable. 

Uranus in Taurus is something I’ve talked about on the podcast a fair amount. It is not a chill transit. On a fundamental level, it tests our values. It really challenges us to see who we value and how we value them. This transit of Saturn square to Uranus, I think, will do a lot for the economy and for the potential change in society or change behind the scenes of Cryptocurrencies. 

When we talk about value astrologically, or at least when I talk about value astrologically, when I’m looking at the planet Venus, the sign Taurus, and to a lesser extent the sign Libra—because Venus co-rules those two signs, but Taurus is the earth sign that Venus rules and Libra is the air sign—so when we talk about this Venusian theme, this Taurean, Venusian theme, we are talking about value in as much as it pertains to women in general, money, currency and material possessions, and on a fundamental level, values—values, right. So our values are going to be challenged by reality. 

So this is where a huge part of what I’ve been talking about in the last six months, especially, of 2020 is can you accept where you’re staring from? I’ve been kind of priming you for this concept of can you accept here and now? I guess I’ve been talking about it for a lot longer than six months, now that I think it through, but I have certainly been really trying to focus on that in the last six months of 2020. It is in no small part because of these transits upcoming in 2021, so it’s going color the whole damn year. 

If you cannot accept your moment, if you must resist and fight whatever it is that is, you’re going to have a harder time with this transit, my friends. So really remember and realign with acceptance is not consent, acceptance is not giving up. Acceptance is awareness. Acceptance is presence. My hope for you is that you will really handle that. 

Now, on a psychological level, Saturn forming a square to Uranus, it’s frustrating. Saturn is very kind of depressive, and Uranus can be depressive, but it tends to be a little bit distracted. So this transit could also signify total fatigue with being online all the time, total fatigue with being in front of a screen all the time. So I imagine we will experience some meaningful changes to how we engage with the internet. Because I don’t imagine that COVID is going to go away magically, okay. I think we’re still going to be dealing with it through the entirety of this year. And I would love to be wrong, that would make me really happy, but that’s what it looks like to me.

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.

Do you ever lie awake at night obsessing about the moment when everything went wrong? Maybe you wish you could reach out to the brother you stopped talking to 40 years ago, or maybe you want to ask your high school sweetheart why did you dump me? On the podcast Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein helps guests journey back to the past to answer the questions that still haunt them in the hope of setting things right. That’s Heavyweight from Gimlet. Follow and listen for free on Spotify.

I want to also acknowledge that Jupiter is in the sign of Aquarius. So let me just name that in January of 2021, Jupiter is going to form a square to Uranus. It is not the chilliest of all the things. I’ll talk about it more on the weekly podcast, and I’ll also unpack it further on my Patreon on the January horoscope, okay. But this transit is going to be arriving in the context of a series of other transits, and I think we can expect the unexpected. And I would advise incredible conservatism around COVID stuff. This is not the time to get messy with COVID protections, and this is going to be a transit associated, potentially, with complete frustration with all limitations. 

So there’s this idea that people have, and I did a Hot Take on Jupiter not long ago, but there’s this idea that people have that Jupiter’s just good, and Jupiter’s just great. And Jupiter can be associated, certainly, with many wonderful things. Every light has a shadow to it—that’s just life, right. And so, the expansion that Jupiter brings, if it’s bringing it to a frustration with restrictions, can be really problematic. 

So Jupiter will remain in the sign of Aquarius for the better part of the year, and on a humanitarian tip, this is great. On the potential for innovations through technology, this is great. The potential is wonderful. It's expansive for technology and humanitarian efforts. That is exactly what we want to hear, right. Also, Jupiter being associated with spread and being in an air sign, which is associated with airborne things, aka pandemic, again, it’s something to just—to take that data and not panic or freak out or anything like that, but to just be like okay, so I’m just going to make sure all my masks are comfortable enough to wear. 

The other thing to name with Jupiter for this year is that through the months of May through July of 2021, Jupiter moves back into Pieces. Now, the last time that Jupiter was in Pieces was January of 2010 through January of 2011. And there’s a lot of things that occurred during that period and they all kind of focused on the environment, so environmental problems that required greater environmental protections. Gay rights—that was a big time for like the struggle around gay marriage, which didn’t become actually legal in the United States until 2015, but this is when individual states started passing it. 

This is also when we saw the ACA, so aka Obamacare, passed in the United States, and we saw the rise of the Tea Party. So this is when they had their first convention. So we saw religious extremism, struggles—cultural and legislative struggles around healthcare issues and gay rights, okay, and also environmental protections. So those were the major themes, as I would name them, of Jupiter in Pieces. 

And you want to keep in mind that not only are we likely to see in that little period of time some kind of reiteration of those themes, but for the better part of this year we have Jupiter in Aquarius. The last time that we had Jupiter in the sign of Aquarius, lots of stuff was happening was technology, healthcare. It was the end of the reign of Bush, and it was when Barack Obama took office. It was a historic time. So that’s Jupiter for us. 

Now, if I can just pull back in time for one moment more to January. In January we’re going to have a really important transit on the day or right around the day that the 45 is meant to leave office. On January the 20th, we have a Mars conjunction to Uranus in Taurus, and that shit is just an explosive set of energies. This is a transit that I unpack in depth on my January horoscope on Patreon, so if you’re interested in that, join at the kitten’s level, and you will get all the 411 you may be looking for. 

And in the context of 2021, I want to point to January and February as really important months. I want to say that you can expect the unexpected. You can expect unrest. And how we respond to whatever unexpected, explosive things occur in January and February as a community or as a set of communities will really define what happens for the rest of the years. 

So okay, all of that brings us, my friends, to this little thing called the Pluto Return of the United States. Wait, what? Oh, yeah. Okay, so I’ve been kind of referencing it throughout 2020 because we have been under the influence of its energies building. In the chart of the United Sates of America, Pluto was at 27 degrees of Capricorn. Now, there are many different charts actually for the United States, like cast for different times. Some people don’t even do it for July 4th of 1776—they use a different date, but it doesn’t change Pluto. Pluto is the slowest moving planet in the zodiac. It doesn’t change shit when it comes to Pluto. 

So on the last day of February in 2021, Pluto enters the 26th degree of Capricorn, and now shit gets real. So the Pluto Return of the United States is not exact. It doesn’t hit that 27th degree until actually February of 2022. However, when Pluto gets that close to a Pluto Return, we can expect a great deal of intensity. 

Now, because Pluto takes about 250 years to move all the way around the zodiac, it’s not like we have experienced this before. It’s not like you are ever going to go through a Pluto Return in your lifetime. No, I don’t think you’re going to live that long, no matter how many fruits and vegetables you eat. And so, the Pluto Return of the United States, a lot of astrologers will have a lot of different views on this, and I certainly have my own, but we really will only be able to have the greatest amount of clarity about it in retrospect. That’s just hindsight being 2020 as it is—that is just what we can expect. 

That said, the Pluto Return of the United States is really going to challenge the union. What I’m expecting to see with the Pluto Return and to really be something we are confronted with increasingly and increasingly leading up to that 2022 exact transit is questions around whether or not we can survive as a union, whether or not all the states can stay united. This period building to the Pluto Return has confronted this nation with its genocidal, racist, white supremacist, homophobic, misogynous, problematic histories. We’ve really have been forced to deal with our shadow side. 

Now, me, I’m not a huge nationalist, and I actually think that there are so many wonderful things about this country—so many wonderful things about the United States. But the Pluto Return does not highlight what is lovely. It highlights what is lurking beneath the shadows. Pluto governs that which is toxic, that which needs to be transformed or transmutated, that which needs to be confronted so it can achieve healing. And we have certainly seen evidence of that in 2020 in a major fucking way. 

From my estimation as an astrologer, it was January 12th of 2020, that Saturn/Pluto conjunction that really started to beef up consequences for this forth coming Pluto Return. The enemies that this nation made on the international stage and the backdoor deals that the powers that be may have made on our behalf on the international stage, we have not seen the consequences of that yet. Now, do I think we’re going to start to see those consequences come February of 2021? More than we did in 2020, yeah, I think so. And I don’t know what that will mean by the time we hit 2022. 

I want to, again, remind you that we are dealing with Saturn square to Uranus all year, and the positive of that is we can achieve change, right. And I don’t mean we can complete change. It’s not about us getting to a place where everything is like buttoned up and changed, but we can stay in the process of change. 

Now if you’re listening to me and you’re an activist or a micro activist, if you are somebody who works towards change in the world, socially and politically, I want to encourage you to get patient, okay. Because there is nothing more frustrating than banging your head against a wall and sacrificing your time, your energy, your money, your smarts, all those things and not seeing the progress you want to see. We can expect to see changes that don’t fully develop roots because Uranus is constantly trying to dig things up and change them around. And Saturn’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but let me drop roots,” and Uranus is like, “No, no, no. Not yet, net yet.” And so, we’re going to see a lot of that push pull—stay with the work. 

Now, on a more personal level, again, there is going to be mounting intensity and pressure. May that mean more violence in the United States? Absolutely, it may. And when we talk about violence, let’s acknowledge that there are many levels on which violence occurs on a societal level. I would contend that a $600 stimulus cheque as a relief to COVID-19 is a form of fucking violence. I would contend that there are so many forms of violence that are not about physical like punch, punch, bang, bang, right. And so, we want to really stay centered, stay aware, stay empathetic as much as possible to ourselves and our struggles and to understand that our individual struggles are happening in the context of a larger world. 

So if you’re struggling financially, if you’re single and you just can’t mingle because of the damn pandemic, to not beat yourself up for not being able to achieve these things when there is a cultural context, an astrological, cultural context that is broader than just your efforts. This idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and just work hard and anything will happen, there is a wisdom to it, and it’s also bullshit. It’s and/also not either/or. 

Within all of this, within all of this we can expect more struggle, we can expect more striving and more awareness of what does and doesn’t work in our systems of governance. And who has privileges, who has rights, and who gets to decide? I want to encourage you—each and every one of you to consider how you can be a part of the solution to whatever you perceive to be the world’s biggest problems, without in any way shitting on the other problems that you don’t think are as important that other people are handling. Because there’s a lot of people in this here country, there’s a lot of people in this world, and if we all pick up some issue, if we all get activated around something, then everything gets done. So it’s okay that we’re not all focused on all the things. 

When we have Saturn and Jupiter in the sign of Aquarius, when we have the planet Uranus in the sign of Taurus, when we have Neptune in Pieces—which we don’t talk about enough, but let me go in a minute—when we have of these things activated at once, there is a greater potential for the people to get activated, stay activated, and create change, no matter how incremental, and that’s what we need. That right there is what we need. 

Another thing we can do is get dissociated, allow people to distract us, allow ourselves to be distracted, allow frustrations and the steps it takes to get shit done to stop us from thriving, from really thriving. And I think that the context of thriving is relative. For somebody who is safe and easy and wealthy and loved, thriving is going to look really different than somebody who’s really struggling for their essential safety. Thriving can happen on every level. 

Thriving occurs based on where you’re starting from—don’t invalidate your progress and your process just because it isn’t like something that you’ve seen on TV or whatever. We don’t need to be upholding broken systems and ridiculous ideals. The potential of 2021 and the astrology in the next couple few years suggests that the energy is ripe for social change, and social change—changing hearts, changing minds—is foundational to changing laws, changing protections, and that’s really what we need. 

It’s not enough to be like I accept you. We need equal protection under the law. We need equity. We need equality. So there’s going to be a lot of struggle on this; it’s not going away, my friends. And within that, we need to understand that healthcare and access to adequate, sustainable healthcare is a big part of that. And what I expect that we’re going to see with the vaccine is a great deal of struggle.

On January 5th of 2021, Georgia has the opportunity to flip the US senate blue. And whether or not you’re in Georgia, you can get involved. Here are some organizations that you can donate to and volunteer with, and the links to them all will be show notes. 

One super star on the political scene is Stacey Abrams. I know you’ve heard of her, but let me just tell you about her organization Fair Fight, whose mission it is to advocate for free and fair elections by fighting voter suppression and promoting fair elections in Georgia, as well as around the country. You can donate and find out more about how to get involved over at fairfight.com. 

Now, there’s another organization I want to share with you, which is called The New Georgia Project. They seek to empower the new American majority to vote through advocacy and engagement. You can go to their website at thenewgeorgiaproject.org to donate and get involved. 

And, finally, you need to know about Black Voters Matter. Their goal is to increase power in marginalized, predominately Black communities. Effective voting allows a community to determine its own destiny. Get involved and donate at blackvotersmatterfund.org. Link to all three of these orgs will remain in show notes.

Now, I mentioned Neptune in Pieces. Let’s talk about that for a quick minute. So Neptune is moving through the sign of Pieces for a long ass time. Neptune moves real slow. And here’s the thing about Neptune in Pieces—yes, it makes the world more international. It makes us much more aware of how we are all interconnected. In fact, I would say that the pandemic did a really great job of that for a couple of minutes there. 

The other thing about Neptune in Pieces is it can be really idealistic. It can be really idealistic, and so the dissociativeness of Neptune in the sign of Pieces has a lot to account for the amazing amount of time and energy we waste on bullshit, on being glamoured by famous people and fancy images. It’s important that you have fun and that you have pleasure and that you enjoy being glamoured by famous people doing stupid things or really smart things, whatever it is, but to not confuse that with spiritual growth and development, which we all need in order to make good choices in the face of difficulty. 

It’s worth me noting that in our little moment where we have May through July, Jupiter moving into the sign of Pieces as well. Jupiter will not meet Neptune in 2021—that won’t occur. That will happen in 2022. But when we have both of those very idealistic, humanitarian leaning but also very idealistic planets in the same sign of Pieces, I want to bookmark for you the kind of increased risk of religious extremism, spiritual bypassing, pandemic oriented shit, and propaganda, okay. So really pay attention May through July to these themes because what they’ll do is they’ll give us a better sense of what’s coming in 2022, if you’re in the market for looking ahead, which you are. Listen to you. You’re still here. You’re still here. You’re listening to me. I’m talking. It’s not boring you yet? Okay, cool, then you care about 2022. So May through July of 2021 is going to give you some sense of that. 

Now, all of that said, I got more for you because it’s not over. Okay. So at the very end of 2021, we’re going to have a Venus Retrograde. You don’t really need to think about it yet—you’ve got a lot of time, and it’s only starting on December 19th, and then it brings us into the next year, so I’m not going to talk about that much. You have experienced Venus Retrograde before. I have dropped many podcast episodes about it. It will be in a different sign. There will be different details—we’ll have a different presence in the context of the world that we live in. However, what’s important for you to know is that it’s coming. 

Now, Mercury will Retrograde this year, like every fucking year because Mercury goes Retrograde a couple few times a year, every damn year. But the dates of Mercury Retrograde in 2021 are January 30th through February 21st and that will be in Aquarius, and then May 29th through June 11th, that will be in Gemini. And finally, September 27th through October 23rd, and that will be in Libra—air, air, air, air, air. 

This has nothing to do with the age of Aquarius, nothing at all—just FYI. It has nothing to do with The Great Conjunction moving into air signs; they’re not related, okay. It just happens to be that that’s what’s happening this year. And I will say that two out of the three of those Mercury Retrogrades happen to coincide with the Saturn square to Uranus transit that I’ve been really kind of harping on over here. 

And so, when we go through our Mercury Retrogrades, we need to review and reflect, to reassess, realign. We need to do a better job of listening because we’re more likely to be so focused on our inner world, on our thoughts, that we don’t do a great job of listening and so then what we say and how we respond and our plans are not as wise as they can be. And having those Mercury Retrograde transits during that overhanging Saturn square to Uranus is important for you to note because it will increase frustrations if you’re not careful. So make sure to put in your little calendar active listening days, right. Think about active listening. 

Listening is not just about hearing people’s words. It’s about really receiving them. It's being receptive to them. It is about expressing with your body language or your words that you hear them so that they feel heard, that they know they’re being heard. Active listening is listening not just to what’s being said but to how it’s being said. Be a good listener during these Mercury Retrogrades, and I mean that in your personal life, I mean that in your inner most psychology, and I sure as hell mean that to the world at large. 

You are going to have to change your mind about something, you’re going to figure out something about something that you’re like, “Oh, shit. I didn’t think it was that; I thought it was this.” It is what it is. All this fixed energy, it’s a pain in the ass. I’m not mad at fixed energy. I have plenty of fixed energy in my own birth chart, but having these kinds of challenging transits in fixed signs is going to do exactly what it sounds like—it’s going to challenge our rigidity. It's going to challenge us to look at systems and attitudes etc., etc. that don’t really want to change because they’ve always worked before and challenge us to actually confront what needs to damn change. It’s a lot. 

Now, that’s not all—of course, it’s not all. So we’re going to have four Eclipses this year. A Lunar Eclipse on May 26th in Sagittarius, a Solar Eclipse, June 10th in Gemini. The June 10th date of the Solar Eclipse coincides with the Mercury Retrograde and an exact hit between Saturn and Uranus—that square, so we can really expect a lot around that particular Eclipse bucket, because you know that the Solar and Lunar Eclipse always come in pairs, right. 

So again, we have this theme, which we saw in 2020, of propaganda and truth, listening and learning. And I’ll unpack these themes a lot more closer to the date, but I want to really bookmark these themes for you because we have not seen the last of the propaganda that 2020 plagued us with, at all. We’re going to continue to see hate speech rebranded as like esoteric knowledge. We’re going to continue to see all of this stuff, and it is on us to become critical thinkers. 

When we look at these Eclipses, we want to look back at the Eclipses of 2020 in those same signs. So we’re talking about the Lunar Eclipse that was in Gemini on November 30th of 2020 and then the Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius on December 14th of 2020. So these are connected because they’re in the same signs. 

Now that’s not all, my darlings. We also have a Lunar Eclipse on November 19th happening at 27 degrees of Taurus and the Solar Eclipse on December 3rd at 12 degrees of Sagittarius. So we’re back to Sagittarius; we’re back to propaganda and truth and these same themes, okay. So the one Eclipse this year that is in a fixed sign—because Sagittarius and Gemini are mutable signs; they’re the carriers of messages. They are in charge of messaging in general. The one Eclipse that is in an earth sign is on November 19th, and I will talk about this a lot more when we get closer to the date because these are at the end of the year, and there’s so much that can happen between now and then. 

But I want to just have you, again, bookmark these themes and know that these Eclipses are coming. Now, Eclipses happen. We shouldn’t freak out that there’s going to be an Eclipse. It’s really useful—I want to kind of keep on bringing you back to this—it’s really useful to be able to use astrology as a way to have a sense of the weather report, like, “Oh, shit. It’s going to be a little cold this day,” or “It will be a bright day, so I’ll bring my sunnies.” It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s about seeing the weather and knowing how to, generally speaking, prepare. That’s a great way to use astrology. 

If any of this information at any point gives you panic, if you don’t know how to use it, just decide to ignore it. A tool is only useful if you know how to use it, and not all tools are good for all things. You can use astrology to help you with your personal life and not do well with mundane astrology or vice versa. 

Okay, so the major theme of this year, of 2021 is absolutely the Saturn square to Uranus. And that Saturn square to Uranus is going to bring up frustrations—there’s just no way around it. It’s going to bring up upsets. It’s going to bring up unrest. Now, I will say, we need those things. We need those things in our personal lives in order to create something that’s more authentic and true to us. We need that in the world in order to create conditions that have more equity and equality inside of them, that better reflect the needs of the people. So the upsets that we see can be transmutated into something really good. 

Associated with that, again, I want to remind you to really pay attention to and participate in, to the best of your ability, based on your nature, your resources, yadda, yadda, net neutrality. Mark my damn words, net neutrality, propaganda, free fucking press. We need a free press. This theme of needing to protect our journalists and the press in general is not going away. 

And then, finally, I want to remind you that we are in the phase, in 2021, of the conjunction from transiting Pluto to Pluto in the chart of the United States of America. We are going to be increasingly be confronted by the ways in which we are not united in these here states. We can point fingers, and we can blame, and we can hate, and we can call for punishments and all this kind of stuff, but the reality is we need to change. We need to heal. And the only way to heal as a collective is to confront where we’re hurting. 

Whenever we’re dealing with heavy Saturn stuff, heavy Pluto stuff we have a greater need for empathy—and not pie in the sky empathy, actual empathy. A willingness to understand what you don’t understand and to still have empathy when somebody does something that you think is stupid. When people are stupid, are they no longer deserving of your empathy and your care? Do they no longer deserve their rights? These are things to really consider because we don’t want to compromise our humanity as we struggle against the parts of humanity that are hurting us or others. 

The only way that we are going to have reforms for our broken systems, our racist and homophobic and misogynist and classist and ableist systems is by struggling with them, struggling against them, struggling to better understand them and to seek and create better solutions. 

So even though we are not necessarily likely to see all the magic of things being healed in 2021, this a great time for engaging in the struggle. In the words of John Lewis, get into some good trouble. 

As always, I want to thank you for joining me at Ghost of a Podcast. I want to invite you to join me over on Patreon where I drop bonus episodes of Ghost of a Podcast in the form of month ahead horoscopes. So if you want to get closer, if you want to do that kind of stuff, follow me there. I’m all over social media—find me on Clubhouse and Twitter and Instagram. And if you haven’t already, I invite you to find my book, Astrology For Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along. And you know what? Read it. Learn it. It is de-fricking-lightful. Let me delight you, why don’t ya? Bye.