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Sitting Pretty with Venus Retrograde
Venus retrograde starts tomorrow and we are already feeling its effects. Unlike Mercury, Venus only retrogrades every 18 months, and it lasts six weeks when it does. Venus is not only the planet of love but the planet of beauty. It governs sweetheart Pisces, whose sign we are under anyway, and is profoundly creative. When this planet goes retrograde, it does not mean things associated with this sign go awry. It means they go under the microscope.
No big aesthetic or romantic moves are advised until mid-April. Marriages, engagements, cohabitation arrangements, and trysts beginning during this aspect have shaky long-term prospects, and major haircuts, clothing and home decoration purchases usually prove a disaster. (Yellow pointy boots: what was I thinking?) But Venus retrograde is a grand time to revisit long-simmering creative projects and to clear the air when it comes to matters of the heart. Exes resurface, less to reignite love affairs than to settle old scores and mend broken hearts. Any fissures in existing relationships–not just romances but intimate connections of all sorts–also come up to be mended. Significant breakthroughs in your professional practices, especially those of an artistic nature, are on the horizon, as well as the release of toxic emotional patterns. This particular V.R. begins in Aries and ends in Pisces in direct conjunction with Chiron, the wounded healer.* Aries is generally regarded as the child of the zodiac, the most boundless and self-referential energy, and Pisces is our resident old-soul, a Great Mother portal that’s
as invested in kairos as in daily life. Thus we will begin by examining our relationship to ourselves and our creative practices—how we betray ourselves, how we nurture ourselves–and end by addressing our deepest wounds with others as well as our connection to the divine feminine. Bottom line: This will be a deep-feeling early spring, with passion serving as a teacher rather than a playmate. Only the softest fabrics, the sweetest scents, and the gentlest songs will do, and the palest pink is the right color to keep close.
*It’s no coincidence that Chiron is the protagonist’s name in surprise Oscar winner Moonlight. Our whole culture is undergoing a seismic shift, and though it is painful as hell, the synchronicities are awesome to behold.
Freudian Slips and #OscarsSoEclipse
It was the dullest of times. It was the most scintillating of times.
Was it the solar eclipse? Was it a dissatisfied underling thumbing their nose at the Pricewaterhouse Coopers power-that-be? As of this writing, no one really knows why it happened. All we know is that, as the clock crept to twelve o’clock midnight during the most boring Oscars telecast to date, “La La Land” was incorrectly named Best Picture, creating the biggest kerfuffle on live television since November 9, 2016. By the time “Moonlight” received its due, producer/director/writer Barry Jenkins’s acceptance speech was, well, eclipsed by the general confusion waking up audience members who had drifted off during this Tinseltown snoozefest. Continue Reading →