Image: Cai Guo Qiang, Transient Rainbow, a public artwork made of fireworks
2023 promises to be very different than 2020–2022, especially in the “fixed” parts of your chart–the houses that contain Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. By early March 2023, Saturn, the great negator, will leave Aquarius! There will be no more grinding, years-long Saturn Uranus square. By the end of March, Pluto will dip its toe for the first time into Aquarius. May 16, Jupiter starts hanging out with Uranus in Taurus for a whole year, until May 2024. June 5, Venus enters Leo and settles in for a long retrograde period. She will be in Leo until October 9. July 18, the nodes will shift to Aries and Libra, further easing the pressure. The things that have been feeling bad in the fixed parts of our lives are easing up next spring, and things that (mostly) feel good or bring blessings will replace them, for substantial periods of time, in late spring and early summer. This is good news, and it should primarily be understood as such!
And is there a catch? Always! This time there are multiple catches, and they all have the same theme. 2023 is going to be great if you have done the work 2020–2022 and have something specific to leverage, and can take responsibility for yourself in a truly vulnerable way.
The Saturn Uranus square has been a time of freedom or authenticity coming out of limitations–at the collective level this transit perfectly describes things like “The Great Resignation,” the economic weirding that has come out of three years of a pandemic, supply chain issues, and “Quiet Quitting.” Three years into a global pandemic, each of us has had to figure out what is worth the risk of getting sick, or even what is worth the hassle of putting on a mask or shoving a swab up our noses. We’ve all hopefully reorganized our lives to at least some degree, in large part because there has been slowness, barriers, time to reconsider, separation from old routines. All of that time and inability to just do what used to be normal has been brought to you by Saturn.
With Saturn leaving the party, the drivers of change are going to evolve, but they are not going away! Slowness, delays, physical separation, and other limitations will no longer drive the change. There will be more, not less, energy around these changes. Jupiter is the principle of expansion and abundance. It will be sitting alongside Uranus, the planet that symbolizes that random lightning bolt of change, who is still in Taurus, still destabilizing the part of you that is bedrock. And over in Aquarius, Saturn is going to be replaced, on and off, by Pluto, a planet that, like Saturn, has a strong preference for you taking responsibility for yourself, but is less like a brick wall and more like nuclear fission. Pluto is your ingrained trauma response, your unfinished business with your family, your shadow–the parts of you that you don’t want to admit you have. It blows up all those hard things, so that you can deal with them and grow. Similarly, Venus is the principle of attraction! When she is retrograde, we are all called to examine whether or not we are being loving. It can be a time when unfinished business with the people we love is front and center.
This shift is elegant. All the negation, separation, and barriers are going to be replaced by supercharged calls to loving, healing, integration, and responsibility taking. It’s also a lot of hard to handle energy that could blow up in your face if you dealt with the last few years by withdrawing too much, hardening yourself, denying the inevitability of change, or otherwise trying to control a dynamic situation. I think it’s important to take a moment and do a little inventory while Saturn is still slowing everything down. What has changed for you since lockdowns in March 2020? What still needs to change? How vulnerable are you to this change? How much can you accept it? What kind of healing has it brought up? If this change gets a ton of momentum next year, where will it go? If it really succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, how would that make you feel? What would it do to your relationships? What parts of you would need to grow?
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