Everything Is Changing
Solar eclipse at 28° of Aquarius
Tuesday, February 17th, at 4:01am PT, the new Moon will pass between the Sun and Earth and give us a solar eclipse at 28° of Aquarius, the cosmic water bearer. In spite of its symbol, Aquarius is not a water sign; it is fixed air. In the northern hemisphere, it governs the deep, fixed-air-state of winter, that stage in the cycle when the outer world appears frozen and lifeless, but the inner, invisible world is at its most active. Its archetypal territory is the vessel of the mind, the vessel of conscious awareness, through which all phenomenon flows. It includes our understanding of the mind-as-intellect, and the mind-as-imagination-engine, but it also goes beyond that, conjuring the part of us that can travel through nonmaterial realms of existence, what many call the soul or spirit. Aquarius is like it is the furthest we can get away from the individual self while still being the self, or the most open and expanded version of the self. Because of all this, Aquarius is known for being visionary, far-seeing, future-oriented, operating “outside” the normal bounds. It’s also known for appearing spaced-out, detached, disembodied, and dissociated, and that’s certainly one expression of this archetype. Like someone who is playing a video game and has left their body and the sensate world; they cannot feel or hear anything in their immediate environment because they are so absorbed in this other reality. But at its most mature and developed, Aquarius is, in fact, not disconnected and detached, but hyper-aware and hyper-connected. It’s a portal to this heightened perspective or higher dimension even, from which we can see and feel the interconnectedness of all life; we can glimpse how time itself is not linear, but radial.
This is where Aquarian associations to democracy and humanitarianism come from, this access to collective perspective. But this collectivity goes way beyond the human. It includes all of life, all forests, oceans, spirits, stars. Once we’ve experienced this collective interconnectedness, once we know, we are relieved of some of our ignorance. We are not who we thought we were. We are alive here in the material world of forms, it’s true, but we are of the world of spirit. We are a part of something greater. Each of us is only a fragment of this great diamond of Being, a single wave in the great cosmic Ocean. If we can live our lives remembering this, remembering our wholeness, remembering we are each a part of each other, it will free us from a lot of unnecessary fear, confusion, and certainty. We can stay high on wonder and curiosity and loving awareness instead. We can experience what we came here to experience, learn what we came here to learn. And we can work on imagining and consciously co-creating the world together, again, not just with other humans, but with all of life, with all sentient beings, on this manifest plane and beyond it. That’s what Aquarius wants for us—not a disembodied techno-future, where we’ve put all our resources toward escape, and cut ourselves off even further from life on Earth. It wants a future where we’ve healed and grown beyond the mind-body-spirit split, and the self-other split, and the human-natural-world split. A future where we have evolved to realize greater conscious wholeness. A future where we all know and cherish what we have here on this gorgeous, holy spaceship, this perfect planet for creative dreamer weirdos to live out their dreams.
Aquarius season is a good time to for inner reflection, tending to our mental and spiritual health in the chrysalis dream void of winter, and doing some deep vision questing. New moon contractions in Aquarius tend to amplify whatever our current inner state is, whether that’s harsh or peaceful or both, so that’s what we are usually working with. This is not an ordinary new moon, however; it’s an annular solar eclipse. Eclipses happen when new and full moons occur at or near the nodes of the moon. The north and south lunar nodes are said to be like the head and tail of a great karmic soul dragon, where they head/north is hungry and draws in new energy and growth, and the tail/south releases what is no longer needed. They are currently transiting the Pisces/Virgo axis and will officially move to the Aquarius/Leo axis in late July. This new moon at 28° Aquarius is close enough the north node at 8° of Pisces to make it an eclipse, and that makes this is the first in a series of north node Aquarius eclipses happening over the next two years, the beginning of a new beginning.
Eclipses are, astrologically speaking, like power outages. The Sun and the Moon are our main sources of light, and when that flow of light gets disrupted, it temporarily destabilizes everything. Energies get unpredictable. There are outages and surges. Larger karmic forces takeover more directly and can effect rapid change. This one is practically crackling with Fate. It’s happening the same day as the Lunar New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse, said to portend a high energy year of rapid progress and disruptive change. The co-occurrence of a lunar new year and a solar eclipse is somewhat rare, happening only every few decades. In Chinese tradition, it signals a particularly powerful and transformative reset. Adding fire to that fire, this solar eclipse is conjunct Mars, planet of fire and heat, passion, instinct and impulse, action, anger and rage, and Vesta, asteroid of the sacred hearth fire within, our devotional energies, and the sacrifices we are called to make in service to a higher purpose. They are both at at 19° of Aquarius, degree of the dove, or the promise that peace or spiritual reward will follow a time of conflict. Pluto is also here, the planet of transformation, depth and hidden powers, and soul assignments. It’s at 4° of Aquarius, a degree of ancestral counsel. Uranus, disruptive planet of epiphany, awakening, and revolution, is tightly squaring the eclipse at 27° of Taurus, and this is a degree of perpetual new beginnings. Together, they are all constellating and calling in major revolution in the sign of our collective nature.
This eclipse portal is being consecrated by Saturn, the great Mother of Form and limitation and the traditional ruler of Aquarius. Saturn has just entered Aries (It’s Time), beginning its long-awaited conjunction with Neptune, the Water Father and planet of imagination and dreams, at 0° of Aries, the Zodiac point of reincarnation. I’ve been talking about this coming conjunction for a few years, and will continue to write about it as its energies unfold. Now that Saturn is in Aries, its job will be to bring its forming, focusing magic to the sign of bold, impulsive agency, and it will need to work with Aries’ ruler Mars to get things done. Mars and Saturn together can create a very challenging dynamic, and yes, that’s a clear reflection of where we are at. But at the time of this eclipse they are in what is called mutual reception—they are in each other’s houses—and that’s more likely to create a supportive combination. Imagine Mar’s energy and power get (finally) effectively channeled by Saturn’s discernment and commitment and discipline. What obstacles could we not overcome with these two working together? Adding a final, elegant note to all this hot magic, Venus is currently at 8° of Pisces, making an exact conjunction to the north node on the day of the eclipse. So this is all also being directly consecrated by the goddess of Love, in the sign of her exaltation, in the place she’s closest to the Source of all love, the great waterfall of golden love that surges at the center of the universe. The meaning of this degree of Pisces is a kind of “pull out all the stops” drive to succeed. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate the specialness and potency of this. It’s like reading a particularly beautiful alchemical formula for cosmological metamorphosis. The Sabian symbol for 28° of Aquarius is “A butterfly emerging from its chrysalis,” which reflects it exquisitely.
I recommend pausing for a moment, and letting everything I just said go, except maybe that last image—the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. You already know we are collectively in the midst of revolution. It’s been cooking, it’s already been happening. Occasionally bigger events initiate larger waves, but it’s ongoing. You also already know that you are in the midst of changing and becoming. That might be, in part, a direct response to this outer upheaval and its pressures on your heart and soul and physical safety and security. You’ve likely been working to sense your role in all of this, the people and places you feel called to protect, the values you want to fight for. You’ve been gestating fresh creative responses, shaped by the demands of this time in the collective, and shaped by the gifts you’ve been given in this specific lifetime. I guess I’m saying, everything is changing all of the time, and it’s not a linear process. This is a big moment, it’s true, and it’s going to be a big year. And, it’s just another chapter in the unfolding of this long story. Whatever is beginning for you personally now—and all of us, collectively—it’s been growing its dream roots for awhile. With eventual hindsight, we might be able to see how what’s growing in this moment was seeded in 2020, in that death portal, when Saturn’s transit of Aquarius began. We might see how it’s been dreaming itself up and trying on forms and more actively gestating since 2023, the start of Saturn’s transit of Pisces. And now that Saturn has entered Aries for good, it’s like the seed husk is cracking open, so that this new chapter of life can sprout.
As this new beginning continues to unfold, we are being asked to hold this paradox: that you and your individual life and your personal quest for freedom and becoming matters (Aries), and that the collective well-being and survival and evolution matters more (Aquarius). Your ability to sense what both/either are asking of you is what you have to keep developing and nurturing—your intuition. It will be helpful to let go of any definitions of intuition that require any clarity about the future or the big picture, or seeing the whole lay of the land. The intuition that’s going to help us through this time of rapid change and emergence is very granular, present, in-the-moment. I’ll just speak for myself, I have a lot of planets in Taurus, and I’m built for stability. The times in my life where I’ve had to go through big changes quickly have been so so hard and, of course, good for me, and knowing we are moving into a time of even-more-rapid change feels challenging to welcome. So I’m reaching out constantly—daily for sure, usually many times in a day—to ancestors and guardians and the Earth herself for support and guidance. The messages I’ve been receiving as we’ve been turning into this astrology have all been about spontaneity. Like, don’t focus on the warring and firefighting and speeding fire horse aspects of this year’s energy, and preparing somehow for that turbulence with planning; focus on the playful, spontaneous side of this quality of time, and preparing for that.
Practice not having a clear plan, maybe in smaller, low stakes situations if that really freaks you out. Practice grounding before acting. Practice pausing, listening, and allowing a genuine conscious instinct to emerge, and trusting yourself. The moment of change is the moment when we notice an old response pattern arising, and we pause, and go hmmm, there’s that old familiar impulse again, and we don’t give in to it automatically. That’s the moment of freedom. That’s the moment of change, when we can make a different choice. We can try out others responses and take different actions. You can feel into it — what do you want to try? How do you want to expand your repertoire? And then you just spontaneously try something new, even if you don’t know how it’s going to go. You let yourself learn and find out. Imagine if we could do that same thing collectively. If collectively we all could stay noticing these old patterns we want to interrupt, and collectively we let ourselves experiment with radical change. We are going to learn so much this year! If we keep pausing, noticing, and listening, we will be open to receiving the signals that will move us where we need to go. Trust that you will know what you need to know when you need to know it. Trust that there is an intelligence at work, and you are not separate from it; you are a part of it. Keep this quote from Ursula K. Le Guin close by: “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.” We are the forest. We are going to live.
Ritual & Writing Prompts
And now, some additional moon content for paid subscribers: a collection of links to the archive of writings on Aquarius lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some journal prompts to ground your reflections about how this eclipse is hitting you personally; an eclipse transmission from the Hanged Man; and a kind of combination ritual-prompt-creative-writing-prompt for those of us who practice writing magic.
