Yesterday I sat in my office and watched a thick fog slowly roll in throughout the morning. We have a surprising amount of fog at our new house (surprising because the location doesn’t seem to warrant it) which is great as fog is one of my favorite kinds of weather. And watching it slowly thicken while I worked reminded me that I wanted to talk more about Aquarius.
I’ve been engaged in this long-running journeying project to explore the horoscope signs. The goal is to understand the signs as landscapes — as countries really. I started in Sagittarius back when Jupiter was hanging out there and I was doing a lot of Jupiter work and found it so useful to explore the sign in this way that I resolved to do all of them. Originally I though I’d take a year and follow the Sun through the signs, but I got kind of derailed over the summer. In addition, some of the signs are really clear to me while others are very hard for me to visit. This seems somewhat tied to my own chart, but not entirely. So my exploration includes some meditation on why certain signs are more closed to me than others (houses, angles, etc.).
In addition, this exercise is useful because exploring the landscape of the sign is a great way of understanding how to deal with it. Capricorn was like this for me. Walking the cold dark halls of Saturn’s clifftop fortress, watching the tough, proud populace try to extract nourishment from the rocky soil, experiencing how their laws and traditions operated, all taught me something about how that domain operates in our world.
Anyway, one of the signs I’ve been focusing on in past months is Aquarius. And why not? Jupiter and Saturn just entered and had a major conjunction and over the next few weeks will be joined by every other inner planet except for Mars. So it’s been on my mind. Now, if you do this exercise, maybe you will see Aquarius differently. I’m not arguing for the objective truth of any one person’s experience with something as large and laden with meaning and symbol as a sign. That’s like visiting New York City and saying “this is America!” So take my interpretation as just that…
Aquarius is a landscape of high, wind-swept peaks that drop away to narrow valleys. These peaks are dotted with temples complete with meditating monks and hung with prayer flags. Clouds float by below and mix with fog rising from icy valley rivers. Paths wind down through terraced farms and small villages. The people are small of stature but extremely tough, completely acclimated to the thin atmosphere. They watch over small herds of wooly pack animals. Government might be best described as a localized gerontocracy with extended family structures. On the tallest peaks, stone observatories point their telescopes upward and outward into the sky. Cloaked figures make their observations, taking measurements with strange brass instruments and recording their work in large, leather-bound books. These books describe not only what has happened but what will happen… indeed what MUST happen based on the inexorable clockwork of the universe. Occasionally canvas dirigibles dock, tying to the stone pillars and delivering supplies.
Yes, in my head Aquarius is steampunk Tibet. So sue me.
Around the solstice, I had a journey where I stood on one of these high peaks and suddenly realized just how obscured the ground was. The sky, as ever at such an altitude, was clear blue. I could see immeasurable distances and myriad possible destinations, but the path, cut into the rock and lined with tiny delicate alpine flowers, dropped into a sea of fog almost immediately. It reminded me of a comment Austin Coppock made in his H1 2021 forecast about not being a time for making long range plans and goals but instead being flexible.
Of course to me this meant agile.
See, just because you can’t see the path from where you are, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The trouble is that while you might be able to see possible future destinations, you don’t know how to get there. So at the first fork in the path, you are lost. If you aren’t careful, you just keep marching but end up at the wrong place (or the right place when you started but the wrong place now, or maybe no place). Or maybe that’s too scary so you don’t move at all (which is an illusion of course as we are always moving through time, even when standing still). We have to accept that when there are no clear maps at ground level, clear directions aren’t going to help us. We have to navigate differently.
As someone whose whole career — maybe even whole purpose — is around plans and goals, you’d think this would drive me completely crazy. But it doesn’t because… agile.
This year I’m going to be working on deepening and broadening my understanding of agile as pertains not just to magic but to personal life navigation. How do we live in a way that keeps us nimble and our options open? How do we make uncertainty a strength instead of a weakness? How do we imagine a better future for ourselves when everything is all foggy? Because imagining better futures (for our households, our communities, our planet) is a moral imperative. We can’t keep racing to the same crappy futures on offer — the ones that destroy instead of nourish. We need to stop and really think about where we want to end up. Only then will our journey though the fog make any kind of sense and have any purpose.
