Feeding the hungry dragon in your chart
and cleaning up after him too.
In the year ahead, there are soooo many interesting (scary? exciting?) astrological shifts. Pluto just changed signs. Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn are all changing signs. The Moon’s Nodes and Jupiter are each making moves. I’m just going to briefly touch on one of these in this first missive of 2025. The rest will be talked about ad nauseam throughout the rest of the year, I’m sure.
Note: I still haven’t sent the Mary zines lol - I was going to print and then some ~current events~ happened that I wanted to fold in and also my mom (hello, Mom!) sent me some interesting things about Mary that made me want to do some edits. Those are coming your way very soon! If you haven’t ordered, there are still eight up for grabs! Link to order (free, duh) here!
The seesaw we’re always riding—hunger and release.
The Moon’s Nodes change from the Aries-Libra Axis to the Virgo-Pisces Axis on January 11, 2025
The Moon’s nodes are imaginary objects in the sky, the two points in the Zodiac where eclipses occur. They’re especially important in Indian astrology and have been reimagined in New Age, modern astrology as markers of your “soul’s karmic journey”. Traditional Hellenistic astrology sees them as most important in their role of eclipse markers, though their placement in a chart is absolutely leveraged as a kind of ~astrological sentence enhancer~1.
One thing that most astrologers will agree on is that the North and South Nodes are significant points in the chart, their presence in a sign or near planets has a dramatic impact, and this is all heightened when that proximity is paired with an actual eclipse.
I’ve talked a bit about these before. The core details that you need to know are that they move “against the flow of traffic”, backward through the Zodiac, and they move at a more or less consistent pace. This isn’t exactly accurate, but the “Mean Node” placement has been used rather than the “True Node” by most astrologers for a while. Mean, as in, “average” not “rude”, though rude is not totally wrong…
To simplify: wherever the North Node is in your chart is going to experience inflammation or exacerbation while the location of the South Node might be numbed or depleted. In Indian astrology, the North Node is considered the “head of the dragon” while the South Node is the “tail of the dragon”. Wherever the head resides experiences intense appetite, while the tail’s placement experiences something more excretive… release might be a nicer way to think about it.
Let’s use me for example, because why not. As an Aries Rising, I’ve had the North Node in my first house recently. It’s not the only drama playing out in my chart, but it’s been a big one.
As the North Node moves through that landscape that is meant to represent me in the chart, I’ve been going through some significant expansion. In the last year and a half I have done a lot of “activity”. I say “activity” in quotes because it’s just a gesture, insufficient. I have being DOING a lot, trying new things, meeting new people, putting myself out there in ways that are new and exciting and tiresome. Through a lot of this time I’ve been doing that without really knowing where I would end up.
I’ve also had the South Node (the dragon’s ass) in Libra, in my Seventh House. This is where we see our intimate partnerships.
With the South Node’s presence in this part of your chart we might expect to see some challenges in close relationships. Specifically there might be a feeling of running out of fuel. Emptying out whatever there is inside and seeing what’s left. Sometimes this leaves a relationship stronger, but that was not the case for me this year. I ended a relationship that, for the eight years prior, had been absolutely core. A friend I had lived with and spent what felt like infinite time with. She is someone I have given a lot to and, at times, received a lot from. Infinity is not real, it turns out, at least for humans. When the South Node had stripped my Seventh House of all the non-essentials, that relationship did not make the cut.
Obviously, not everyone who is an Aries Rising ended a serious relationship this year. Like I said, there are many other players in my chart who are acting out their own dramas, influencing the story that I see in my experiences. But I think this is a good example of the tension between the North Node and the South Node. The North Node adds fuel somewhere and, to compensate, the South Node drains you elsewhere. What goes up must come down, but sometimes it comes down somewhere you never expected. Shoot an arrow straight up at your own risk.
The Nodes settled into Aries and Libra about a month before I arrived in Philly. Since then, I’ve been exploring who I want to be. I’ve been growing in ways that were scary and hard, but also very exciting. I feel closer to myself than I did in July 2023. That’s not a given in life and I am grateful for it, grateful to the friends who made it possible. A part of achieving this meant letting a relationship go that needed me not to grow in those ways. It was necessary and my life is better now, but of course it hurt at first.
In a little over a week the Nodes will move onward, out of the Aries-Libra Axis and into the Virgo-Pisces Axis. New changes are incoming. That, at the end of the day, is what I believe we can learn from astrology. Time occurs in fits and starts and our experiences are tied together in intricate ways we might never fully understand. I can’t predict what events these changes in the sky will reflect, but I can be mindful of the seesaw, the wave, the swinging pendulum.
Much of the Zodiac is built on the idea of paradox and opposites - where do you see the dynamic of the North and South Nodes in your life in the past year? Do these areas align with your Aries and Libra houses? Where has your life been in overdrive and what has been neglected? Do you see this continuing into 2025? Do you want to make any changes?
Thanks for reading along through this wild time! I’m excited to see what comes of the year ahead. More to come soon <3
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.
*insert spongebob clip with mr. krabs telling spongebob and patrick about sentence enhancers aka swear words"*