#20: It's okay to cry, it's Scorpio season.
🦂 🦂 🦂 It is deep, dark, dense, and here.
Upcoming Astrology:
There are plenty of week ahead resources out there (the CHANI podcast is a good one), so I thought it might be more fun to read a focused interpretation of one dynamic in the sky.
Specific astro dynamic: I write about Scorpio season for the rest of this newsletter, but up top we’re going to just look at the next week of shifting planets.
The Sun just moved into Scorpio, so that’s spooky and an invitation to begin slowing down for the year. Get self-reflective, journal, soak up the last little bits of sun.
Saturn is moving soooooo slow. About as slow as Saturn ever does, because Saturn is about to sit still and then turn around and start marching forward again. Whenever a planet, especially a big ol’ guy like Saturn, sits still, we pay attention to it. If you have any placements at the very beginning of mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, or Pisces), they’re going to be feeling some big pressure. Be kind to yourself (always, duh) but especially with regard to what those planets represent.
Mars and Mercury are going to join up in Scorpio this weekend so you want to be careful not to be too harsh in your communications. Jupiter is going to be staring them both down from Taurus when this happens, so holding back the shit talking might be really hard. Remember: you don’t have to totally forgo it, but find an outlet that won’t cause unnecessary harm. Again… journals are great. Letters you never send, therapists, and very brief venting sessions with friends can also be wonderful options.
We have seen harder weeks and we have seen easier weeks, it’s all a cycle 🦂
Welcome to Scorpio season!
The Sun entered Scorpio on Monday morning, sitting in Mars’s house with Mars present. Very intense for the Aries, Scorpio, and Leo placements. Go on walks, drink water, and don’t be too hard on your people.
Stereotypes of Scorpio are: brooding, intense, gothic, sexy, dark, mean, secretive. Those are definitely evocative of a lot of the traditional Scorpio significations. Scorpio is a fixed sign, indicating an intensity and a stubbornness. Scorpio is a water sign, indicating an emotionality, a depth, and fertility. Scorpio traditionally correlates to the sex organs, so there is that. And Scorpio is a scorpion, an animal sign, something pre-human that will very likely outlive humans as well.
Maybe most important for understanding Scorpio is that we take those structural considerations and look at Mars with them in mind. Mars, who represents the impulse to act, aggression and defensiveness, fucking and fighting, surgery, vaccines, and wounds. When you apply those themes to a space that is receptive, passive, stubborn, emotional, and fertile, you get marshes teeming with venomous snakes and tadpoles, deep oceanic trenches we’ve never seen the bottom of, and the slowest moving glaciers that create new landscapes by carving out the earth’s skin.
This isn’t the depths of winter. It’s fall, a season I haven’t personally really experienced before now. Growing up, I didn’t really understand the implications of a full season of harvesting and decomposing. In Texas, this is a single moment before it gets colder and occasionally icy. In Texas, whatever is going to die in the winter dies all at once, without the autumnal slip out of summer. The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other at the speed of a few days or a couple of weeks.
Now that I’m experiencing this cycle for the first time somewhere else, I’m seeing what it means for leaves to very slowly change color and drop. Any food not harvested now would begin to slowly rot if you left it on a crop, a rot that would release seeds and begin another cycle, fertile dormancy before much delayed growth. This is an in-between that feels like it could last forever, even though of course before long the days will be short, the skies will be gray more often than not, and a lot of life will be hibernating for the season. Within the Zodiac, Scorpio represents this endless falling apart and breaking down. As a fixed sign, it’s experienced as permanence. As a water sign, there’s permeability and flow.
Scorpio and its opposite sign Taurus, carry these internal contradictions, reflecting different phases of the building up and breaking down cycle. Similar to the dynamic played out by Aries-Libra, Taurus-Scorpio shows us another way to think of the Mars-Venus relationship. Taurus, like Libra, is one of Venus’s homes while Scorpio is Mars’s second home. While Taurus’s growth and sensuality and springy energy is pleasant and invigorating, Scorpio is necessary. The teardown and reabsorption is necessary.
Unchecked growth has never been good for us. Scorpio knows this. With its Martian sensibilities, Scorpio is a place where we can release, decompress, and reconstitute. It’s a season for integrating what we want to keep and decomposing what we don’t. While that isn’t always enjoyable, avoiding the comedown doesn’t eliminate it. At most it’s a delay. And, unfortunately, when that delay runs out, the consequences can be much more jarring.
Cancer (the body kind, not the zodiacal kind) is an almost too perfect example of what happens when we don’t experience the Scorpio end of the axis. Expansion and intensification without pausing to let die what needs to die. If we’re lucky, we catch it and are able to surgically and chemically cut it down to size. If we’re not, the rampant growth overwhelms.
Of course, this is a metaphor, and overdoing it in life is hardly a cancer, but the call to accept the seasonality of things holds up. I say it for every one of these little zodiacal reflections, this is not a new thing, but the system is built more or less entirely around balance. It’s a good invitation.
Be careful out there. Get some apples from the farmers’ market. Don’t avoid the comedown. Listen to SOPHIE and let yourself have a cry.
This week’s newsletter is a shorter one, because I’ve been traveling and am tired. I’ve got some ideas I’m playing with that venture away from astrology which I am very excited about. Thank you for being here, if you ever enjoy a newsletter or hate it or think I was confusing about something, let me know! I am very curious.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.