Every 5-6 days, you can expect musings on the I’ching, Gene Keys, and ancestral wisdom of the Gate, along with Somatic Practices and Creativity Prompts relevant to the energy of the season. Come take a walk with me!

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Hey everyone,

How’s everyone staying cool out there in this juicy, hot, late summer season? I got a shaved ice maker and have been dousing myself in the stuff between misting myself with a hose. Feeling the fruits of the past year’s work coming out to the surface more and more too, which feels good and right on schedule for this season.

Speaking of which, if you’re in Santa Fe, I’m going to be posting up with my Mandala 64 cards for mini Astro-HD readings at the new 505 Night market this Saturday, 8/8. Swing by and say hi!

This week the Sun passes through 15° Leo in Gate 7: The Role of the Self, aka The Army. Although some folks celebrated Lammas or Lughnassa on August 1, this 15-degree point of leo is astrological/astronomical Lammas, the true cross-quarter point between summer solstice and fall equinox.

Fun fact: Every solstice, equinox, AND cross-quarter day in the wheel of the year happens when the Sun passes through a G Center gate- the center of identity, direction, and love. Gate 7 is one of these gates, focusing on direction and strategy of leadership behind-the-scenes (as opposed to the loud and vocal influencer leadership of Gate 31, which we just celebrated week before last).

So- happy Lammas, happy midway point between summer and fall, happy first harvest festival! What are you harvesting now that first sprouted out of the ground back in March, literally and metaphorically?

Gate 46 is another G-Center Gate, the gate that the sun is in on the Fall Equinox/Mabon. And this Thursday, Venus moves there, into her own home sign of Libra. Mars is also in a G-gate, Gate 15 (the gate the sun is in on summer solstice), and Earth sits in Gate 13, the Imbolc gate.

So four G-Center gates are lit up at once this week, all reaching toward the Throat and the Sacral. Expect a week that asks for both direction and love, and doesn’t let you fake either one.

Gate 7: The Story

Last week, leadership gate 31 handed you a microphone. After a week of retreat, this week Gate 7 sits down in that same seat and takes out the map of the battlefield.

The hexagram is Shī, usually translated as The Army, with the trigrams Earth over Water. This evokes the image of groundwater gathered under the surface of the land, an underground river, nourishing but invisible until it’s needed.

The old commentary in the I’Ching talks about discipline; strength that only holds if it’s shaped by real order, a leader trusted because the people also trust each other and know that they are seen by the one making the plans. This is the first hexagram of a brand new season too, so the lower trigram flips from Mountain to Water, which means the whole felt tone of the wheel just shifted under our feet. This is the first of 8 water gates as we move through this juicy season before the fall equinox’s Wind takes over.

In Human Design this is the gate of the self showing up in a group, and it lives in the G Center creating a channel with Gate 31 in the Throat- the Channel of the Alpha. Gate 31 is elected and influential, and Gate 7 is the quieter half of that pair, the part that knows where the group is headed before anyone’s said a word out loud.

The shadow of Gate 7 is Division, picking a side or forcing a direction because sitting in not-knowing feels unbearable. The gift is Guidance, an inner compass that leads without needing to be seen leading. The siddhi is Virtue, leadership so unselfconscious it stops looking like leadership at all.

Gate 7 in the Body

Gate 7 lives in the G Center, the territory as identity, love, and direction, located right behind the sternum in the high heart chakra, the fascia that connects to our pericardium and creates a living cross within our bodies. This gate’s energy is also where the liver and blood do their work of filtering and carrying, which tracks with the theme of leading from behind. Blood doesn’t announce itself either. It just moves, and everything downstream depends on it moving well.

When this center gets pulled into performing a direction instead of feeling one, the chest tightens into something braced and directive instead of open. Our bodies know the difference between a leader who’s found their bearings and one who’s just afraid of the silence.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: Water begins its run as the new lower trigram this week through the next 8 gates. Water is,the felt quality of something submerged, patient, finding the path of least resistance without losing its power. Earth sits above it in Gate 7, giving this first hexagram of the season a grounded, held quality before the water gets a chance to show its other faces in the gates ahead.

Channel: Gate 7 completes the Channel of the Alpha with Gate 31 in the Throat. Gate 31 speaks leadership. Gate 7 makes sure there’s strategy behind it. Gate 33, Retreat, is the one gate between these two types of leadership in Leo season, which also create this channel. It’s like the lion stepping out with a big roar, retreating into his den, and then coming back out with a greater awareness of what leading the pack really means: discipline and strategy. How can retreat serve you to be a better leader?

Polarity: Directly across the wheel from Gate 7 sits Gate 13, the Listener. One end leads, and the other end remembers everything it’s been told. A leader who never listens burns out fast, and a listener who never leads just holds a room full of stories with nowhere to land. As I mentioned, Gate 13 is the Imbolc Gate, the cross quarter day between the winter solstice and spring equinox, and Gate 7 is Lammas, the cross quarter day between summer solstice and fall equinox. Think about how you feel in those seasons as you contemplate the polarity!

A Somatic Practice for Gate 7

Rest a hand on your sternum. Don’t try to have an answer about anything, just notice whether your chest feels like it’s steering something or holding something. Breathe there until the difference gets clear, and let whatever direction is actually true rise up on its own instead of the one you think you’re supposed to have.

Creativity Prompts

Give yourself 15 minutes with one of these:

• Write about a time you led without meaning to, someone followed you somewhere before you’d even decided you were going.

• Draw water pooling underground, unseen, already shaping the land above it.

• Or pull the Gate 7 card from your Mandala 64 deck and notice which side you’re living in this week, the one that grips the wheel or the one that trusts the road.

Next up: Gate 4, Formulization, the mind’s turn to soften its grip on certainty. This is the gate where the solar eclipse on Wednesday is occurring- you can read my longer post about that here:

xox!

Alison

ELA Map, our new astrocartography and human design workspace, is now live! Get your free map here:

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Mandala 64 Decks are for learning & divination:

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

Thanks for reading! Let me know how y’all are doing this week in the comments, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions you have or to book a reading about your life’s path in this season!

All my G-center love,

Alison

Eclipse season is trending right now. Next Wednesday initiates the second of two 2-week periods in the year that is bookended by the luminaries battling it out to darken the sky for a bit.

In astrology, regardless of where the eclipse path actually falls across the Earth, the psychological and spiritual effects of these transits are felt around the globe.

Whether it’s the moon obscuring the sun’s light (a solar eclipse) or the earth’s shadow being cast on the moon as it blocks the sun (a lunar eclipse), the astronomical perfection of these events has been a big deal for humankind for as long as our bodies can collectively remember.

Ancient humans saw eclipses as divine omens, celestial attacks by animals or demons, or signs of royal or cosmic distress, all ways of relating to the momentary darkness bestowed upon us by these alignments. Astronomically, when the Sun, Earth and Moon line up in a straight line, it’s known as syzygy. (What a beautiful word!) This alignment does not happen every month because the Moon's orbital plane is tilted by about 5.1° to 5.2° relative to Earth's orbital plane around the Sun (the ecliptic).

Because of this, eclipses only happen when the Moon is at one of the nodes, which one of two points where the Moon's tilted orbit crosses the flat plane of the ecliptic (again, the Earth's orbit around the Sun). Thus, the moon’s path meeting up with the Earth’s path create nodal eclipse points, which move through the Zodiac in a full circle every 18 years.

Total Eclipses are Magic

There are different types of eclipses- total, annular (ring of fire) and partial (bite out of a cookie)- and this upcoming one on August 12th is total, creating a dark path from the north pole through Greenland and the Iberian Penninsula.

Total solar eclipses are extra amazing because the moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, and it also just so happens to be almost exactly 400 times closer to Earth.This is a cosmic coincidence that makes the sun and moon appear nearly identical in size in our sky. There is nowhere else in our solar system where a planet’s moon matches the sun so perfectly in it’s apparent size- on any other planet, an eclipse moment would only be partial.

Earth is the only place in our solar system where total eclipses are even possible, making them extra wild and amazing. What’s more, like many things in this life, total eclipses are not a forever-thing. Our Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, at around 3.8 centimeters drift per year. One day in the distant future, the moon will appear too small to fully block the Sun, and total solar eclipses will never happen on Earth again.

So consider yourself lucky to witness this alignment, I suppose!

PS: Another Alignment is happening : Next Wednesday’s eclipse day begins with six of our planetary neighbors forming an arc in the sky before dawn. Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will all be visible in a semicircle before dawn on the eastern horizon. (The first 4 will be visible with the naked eye, but you’ll have to use an app like Stellarium to see the full arc, or get out your binoculars (Uranus) or telescope (Neptune) to see the outer planets.)

Adding magic to the mayhem, the day of the eclipse ends with the phenomenal annual Perseid meteor shower peaking after nightfall under the dark skies of the new moon.

Wowzers. Be sure to get outside and bow down to the skies!

The evolving story of mother earth’s eclipses

The Earth is the main player in eclipses. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t always to the ancient people who looked out to the happenings in the skies but weren’t as aware as we are now about the larger nature of earth-as-a-planet in the solar system. Stories of animals and mythical creatures eating the sun and moon are profoundly beautiful… and yet I believe that the story of our moon’s size and our distance from the sun is equally as profound and compelling.

I love to look at eclipses as the only times of each year where the Earth, in her fullness, comes into our awareness in a truly tangible way. Her shadow crosses the moon on a lunar eclipse. Her specific place in space is something we’re all aware of on a solar eclipse. On each eclipse, the Earth is making herself, and her position in the solar system, known.

That is a powerful myth to lean into as the skies darken and things start to get weird.

Every other full and new moon we’re thinking about the sun and the moon- which in astrology represent our conscious will and our emotional cyclic intelligence. Creation and reflection, life force and receptivity. Eclipses invige us to transcend that binary and pay attention to the ground that we’re standing on, the carbon-based earth that makes up our bodies too. We are the earth. Eclipses welcome us to assess the ground we’re standing on- to forget about our future based solar manifestations for a moment, as well as the reflections of our lunar pasts.

Eclipses ask us: Where are you right now? On this planet earth? How’s your relationship with her?

I think this is why eclipse seasons can feel so unsettling- we’re not supposed to manifest with our will and we’re not supposed to get carried away with our emotions , either. We’re supposed to ground into our bodies, into the earth, and attune to their wisdom.

It’s a powerful time of year.

But it’s nothing to be afraid of if we can release some of our control and anxiety and let the earth hold it for a while.

The eclipse is in Leo Decan 3, Human Design Gate 4

This eclipse is happening when the moon meets the sun near the South node of the moon’s path at 20 degrees Leo. Leo: the sign of the regal lion, the king, the crown, the stage, the fruiting time of year, the first harvest, the ego, and the feeling that sums it all up for me: personal self-expression.

The south node is the point in the crossing paths of the moon/earth that represents decrease, release of things that are past their prime, well-worn paths (which are also known as ruts). The tail of the dragon, The place of excreting what has been fully processed and letting it go. South node eclipses amp this up- our bodies, our feelings start to take over when our solar minds go dark. And they are the parts of us that are sharing what it is that needs to be composted. Our mind takes a back seat, hence the discomfort.

20 degrees Leo is the beginning of the second decan of Leo. This is a fiery, bold, and hyper-driven part of the lion’s archetype, ruled by the Sun and sub-ruled by Mars. This decan combines Leo’s sense of pride with an Martian Aries-like energy, which shows up as brutally honest, ambitious, and stubborn with a warrior-king type of vibe.

20 degrees Leo, in the Human Design Mandala, is a degree within Gate 4: The Gate of Formulization. This is known as Youthful Folly in the I'Ching, the hexagram of the young fool who must learn through trial and error, mistakes and all, before wisdom can take root. This gate, in the Gene Keys, carries the shadow of Intolerance, the gift of Understanding, and the siddhi of Forgiveness. The arrogant ambition and stubbornness of the Leo III decan is definitely reflected in this gate.

Gate 4: Formulization is built from the trigrams Mountain over Water in the I'Ching. It's the image of a spring bubbling up at the base of a mountain, raw potential still finding its shape, the early stages of learning, and a reminder that guidance matters at this stage.

Gate 4 pushes us toward wanting an answer for everything, regardless of whether that answer is valid. It’s the gate that generates hypotheses, and is the basis of the scientific method. On its own, Gate 4 is only responsible for asking questions, and when left to work alone it will try to create answers to those questions even when the hypotheses are a little ridiculous. Because of the intolerance of the process and the warrior-king mentality here, those answers can end up far from valid.

Gate 4 doesn’t have the ability to check its own answers, and if it can’t understand something, it will find a logical-sounding reason to reject it instead of sitting with the not-knowing. In the I’Ching, hexagram 4 makes room for mistakes and not-knowing as part of the path rather than something to be ashamed of, and asks us to meet others with an open mind instead of a fixed one. It calls for self-discipline and real inner reflection, and it pushes us to actually live out what we’ve learned instead of waiting around to be told what to do next.

So this eclipse will be tied to letting go of the naiive pride and intolerance of youth - the childlike quality of saying “I already knew that!” (my 7 year old says this to me ALL THE TIME). What will get released on this eclipse is the need to have the answer before you’ve earned it, the desire to be certain when we need to have a reflective and open mind.

It’s time to let go of the part of yourself that reaches for a quick, confident explanation just to make the discomfort of not knowing go away. Leo eclipses always ask us to loosen our grip on being right, and release our propensity to perform certainty for an audience that was never actually watching that closely anyway.

Heads will roll this Leo eclipse, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a softening available here, when we welcome in willingness to stay in the question a little longer instead of rushing to close the loop and find an answer based on our own ego and pride.

Leo is ruled by the sun, so it’s a perfect time to pay reverence to the earth and the moon, the soft bodies that are taking over the solar stage for a bit. They carry wisdom that is not brash, not arrogant, not always rushing to fill the dark spaces with light or sound or consciousness.

Sometimes the dark space, the liminal realm, is where the answer is actually forming. This eclipse reminds us to flush out the tendency to avoid or ignore the things that still soft, still unfinished, and not ready to be dragged into the light and forced to defend themselves yet.

The moon doesn’t explain herself. She moves through her phases with grace, disappearing and returning, trusting that the dark is part of the cycle and not a formulaic problem to be solved. This eclipse is an invitation to let some part of you stay in shadow a little longer, unformulated, unrushed, and still in a process of becoming.

Let’s love on our close-by moon mama while we still can, from our place on this earth, with our feet in the soil…. before she drifts another 3 centimeters away.

xox,

Alison

You know the version I mean. The new red convertible in the driveway. The guy who leaves his wife and starts wearing leather. The motorcycle, the affair, the sudden shreds of electric guitar floating down the lines of cubicles. As a young person witnessing adulthood, the whole thing looked to me like what happens to people who spent twenty years doing boring corporate, American Dream-style work that they were told they were supposed to, and then woke up one morning with no idea who was living in their house.

That was never going to be me. I got out early. I was a traveler, an artist, a philosopher- someone who went looking for what I wanted before anybody could tell me what to want. I have been examining my own life more or less continuously since my teens. I read my own chart. I saw the future. The whole point of doing that work early, I thought, was that you get to skip the part where the crisis comes for you at forty.

Boy, was I wrong.

It came for me anyway, and it came exactly on schedule- a schedule kept by the outer planets Saturn, Pluto, Neptune and Uranus. nd knowing the schedule turned out to help with approximately none of it. It arrived as a divorce at thirty seven, suddenly leaving a life I had spent years building. It arrived as a baby on my hip, single motherhood, a feeling of free-falling through space and the laborious work of disentangling from a relationship I could no longer stand to be in. I wish it could have been a red convertible and an electric guitar.

What I have learned since is that the midlife crisis is not a character flaw or a failure of self-knowledge. It is a set of transits that teach you about your biggest blind spots. And they come for everyone, on a timetable, whether or not you have been paying attention or believing you’re above them. Being awake for it changes what you can do with your newfound inner wisdom, but it does not get you out of the dirt.

Which brings me to this month.

I can’t tell if July felt like it lasted 20 years or a blink of an eye, but the most anticipated astrological month of 2026 has already come and gone. Despite having no childcare and lots of cats to juggle and a few family wildcards, I fared pretty ok. I’m still feeling the juice in my veins after running that midsummer race.

For me, though, this year’s peak frequency was never going to be July. August 2026 has been waiting for me since the moment I was born.

Eclipse Season is Beginning…

A lot of people already have Wednesday, August 12, circled on their calendars- and it has nothing to do with me.

It is the day of the big solar eclipse, the first one in 9 years to happen on the Leo-Aquarius axis. The nodes moved to the lion and water bearer’s domain from Virgo & Pisces just a couple weeks ago, so our collective hunger (and our collective drain-pipe) are dramatically shifting gears. The Virgo-Pisces eclipses have been all about releasing perfectionism and over-achievement, and bringing a deep global hunger for spiritual healing. Integrating the two has encouraged us to bring our most ethereal dreams into the minutiae of the day-to day.

And now, that polarity is shifting to focus on the tension between what one person burns for and what the collective needs. August 12th is the first solar eclipse on the new axis, and it is in Leo, on the south node, sitting near Regulus, the star of kings. The Leo-Aquarius eclipses, which run through 2028, will be focused on the tension between individual ego vs. collective community, releasing a need for external applause, and integrating authentic self-expression with the wider webs of humanity.

Eclipses on a fresh nodal axis tend to set the collective tone for the eighteen months that follow, so a lot of people are watching this one.

Underneath that, also on August 12th, is something fewer people are tracking. The Barbault Basket already had its exact moment back on July 19, when the outer planets (Pluto, Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter) all sat at 4 degrees and the whole internet turned to look at it. French Astrologer Barbault’s astro-mathematical method is the one that called the fall of the Berlin Wall and the pandemic long before they happened, so when the basket formed, people who track collective cycles were paying attention.

That exact moment of those 4 degree sextiles has passed, but on August 12, the same day as the eclipse, it gets a Frankenstein moment and comes back to life- this time with even more harmonics. On the 11th, Venus arrives at 5 Libra and closes the basket into a five pointed star.

And then on the same day too, the asteroid Ishtar - the Babylonian face of the goddess Inanna- steps out of Scorpio into Sagittarius and joins the minor asteroid Sauer (known for the sixth point of the Grand Sextile, which almost nobody is talking about. I became truly enamored with Inanna’s myth of descent and return/feminine power years ago, and she has come to me again and again this year in dreams and in art and in my work. On August 12th, the minor asteroid named after her (she orbits between earth and Mars) lands in the same sign and gate as my natal Jupiter and Uranus. This is the first of several reasons this stopped being an abstraction for me.

So depending on what celestial bodies you take into consideration (asteroids or not), August 12th will form a pentagram a 6 pointed star (with a grand fire trine between neptune, mercury, and the asteroids and a grand air trine between Pluto, Uranus, and Venus.) I mean, just look at this:

So the eclipse everyone has circled is also the day the basket becomes a closed and complete shape- a full wheel of sextiles, with the androgynous/nonbinary messenger god Mercury and the goddesses Venus and Ishtar (one and the same, really) coming in to disrupt the council of sky gods. wheee!

But this isn’t the reason I have the date circled twice… it’s also my exact Uranus Opposition.

The same afternoon all of that comes together, transiting Uranus in Gemini arrives at the exact opposition to my natal Uranus in Sagittarius. This is THE midlife transit, the reliable one, the one that eventually finds every single person who lives long enough. Uranus takes eighty four years to go around the sun, so at age 42 it sits directly across the Zodiac wheel from where it was when you took your first breath.

My natal Uranus is conjunct with Jupiter in Sagittarius, so it’s a double whammy of expansive oppositions for me. Plus, transiting Uranus is in Gemini sitting on my Chiron, so old wounds are being illuminated… hopefully in order to be healed.

Whats even more wild is that on the same day of August 12th, this first Leo solar eclipse lands in my first house, right in the tight space between my natal Venus and my natal Mars. I don’t even know where to begin….

So basically the planet of disruption and liberation will be opposing itself, opposing my Jupiter, and conjunct my wounded healer, while the eclipse itself will be happening right in between two of my most personal planets….. on the day the collective sky completes one of its rarest shapes.

And honestly, I wouldn’t be writing this down if it were only mine.

The three Midlife Crisis Transits that we all experience- in order

There is a sequence of outer-planetary transits that show up for people in their late thirties and early forties, and it runs in a particular order.

Transiting Pluto squares its own natal position first: the Pluto Square. Then Neptune squares its own: Neptune Square. Then Uranus opposes its own: the Uranus Opposition. For me, those landed at roughly ages thirty eight, forty, and forty two, spaced almost evenly. The spacing is worth noticing, and I will come back to why.

Ages are shorthand, though. The outer planets move slowly enough to retrograde over the same few degree two or three times before they finally clear it, so what looks like one date on a calendar is closer to a year and a half of the same energy passing through, retreating, and arriving again. That is why you can be deep inside one of these transits for a long stretch before you have any name for what is happening to you.

I’ll tell you a little tale of my midlife transits, with my upcoming Uranus opposition as the grand finale.

Pluto square came for me first, and he brought Saturn and Jupiter along to the demolition derby.

My natal Pluto sits in Libra, in Human Design Gate 50, and my natal Saturn lives right there next to it. So when transiting Pluto came around to square my Pluto from Capricorn in 2020, it was squaring both my Saturn and Pluto at once. That was an especially intense time for me (I mean it was for everyone- 2020, right?) but especially for me because transiting Jupiter AND Saturn AND Pluto were all in the same part of the sky that year - in Gate 60, the Gate of Limitation. This was a triple whammy of planets squaring my double whammy of structure, boundaries, and the underworld. FUN. And Libra to Capricorn is a cardinal square… which is the impatient kind. Cardinal is initiatory- it arrived all at once and stood there waiting for an answer.

Gate 50, where my natal Pluto and Saturn live, is the Gate of Values, aka The Cauldron. It is the gate of holding, of being the one who keeps stirring the pot on the fire for everyone else. Gate 60, where Pluto and Saturn and Jupiter (and Mars too, right when the lockdown started in March) were hanging out in the sky in 2020, is the gate of accepting our Limitations. It’s the gravity that holds you down once you reach the mountain top and want to keep climbing. It’s the hard edge you cannot get around and have to build from instead. So transiting limitation was squaring off against my instinct to hold everything and keep stirring the pot, because that’s what I had inherited- that’s the way it had always been done.

My Pluto square was a generational cycle-breaking event.

In real life that looked like a series of underworldly events- a breakup, a freefall, a divorce. It looked like leaving a company I had built, and leaving the city I’d created a life in for over a decade and returning back to my hometown- with a little baby on my hip and no clear plan. My natal Pluto in my fourth house was having the lights turned on in every corner of a relationship and family dynamic that had been living in the shadows up until that point. Fourth house is home, family, and the ground under the floor. And Pluto square spent about two years down there revealing and excavating what had rotted underneath the foundation.

Neptune came second. Neptune wasn’t a flashlight into the basement, but a seeping fog.

Without much time to process Pluto, my Neptune square was close on it’s heels.

My natal Neptune is in Sagittarius, Gate 11: Ideas. Transiting Neptune squared it from Pisces, Gate 36: Crisis (dun dun dun…). Both of these are mutable signs, so compared to the shocker of Pluto’s cardinal square, this midlife transit had no edges at all. Nothing to push against. Just fog.

Gate 11 is the Sagittarian gate of Ideas- the vast expanses of possibility that reach for the galactic center (which is also located in this gate). The fifth line, where my Neptune lives, is the heretic- the one who has to take an idea and translate it for people who didn’t ask for it. Gate 36 is crisis, emotional intensity. Transiting emotional crisis, squaring my capacity to make sense of things for others.

This square ran from my fifth house to my ninth, which is dreamy self expression and creativity on one side and higher education/meaning making on the other. For about two years as Neptune squared my natal placement, I could not tell you what I was here to make. I would sit down to work or create and lose the thread of why. Underneath that were the ongoing custody changes and battles, the drifting calendars, the multiple households with a toddler, and the question of what kind of mother I was going to be in a life I had not designed and was still in disbelief about. Neptune isn’t as surprising as Pluto, but is much soupier- a churning sea where the moments of sunshine carry a reminder that you might get sucked under again any minute. Which is worse in some ways, until you learn how to swim.

Uranus is here now… and Uranus is loud.

My natal Uranus and Jupiter are both in early Sagittarius, both in Gate 34: the Gate of Power. Jupiter is in the fourth line and Uranus is in the sixth. Now transiting Uranus is in Gemini, in Gate 20. This is a mutable activation again, and this time an opposition, running from my eleventh house to my fifth.

Gate 34 is all about power. Raw, undirected force, where the sacral center pushes and activates with no instruction attached. Gate 20 is the Gate of the Now. It is the only gate in the wheel with no delay built into it, no gap between the impulse and the moment.

20 and 34 are across the wheel from eachother, and also connect to eachother in the bodygraph, which is rare- only 3 channels in the bodygraph are also polarities.

The 20-34 channel is the Channel of Charisma, which means this transit on August 12th is doing something more complex than just opposing. It is completing a channel in my body, a Self-Projected Projector who has no sacral definition of her own. This is a manifesting channel running from raw sacral power straight up to my voice, in a body that is used to having to ‘wait for the invitation’.

And Uranus is slow moving, so this is not a single afternoon of manifesting generator power. It came into range earlier this year and it will still be there next year, moving back and forth across the gate as Uranus stations and turns. August 12 is where it goes exact, and the rest of it is a long season of having access to something I was not built with. This is the sort of thing that only becomes clear when you look at the detail of the gates rather than the planets and signs alone, and it is most of why I keep doing this work.

What this opposition has felt like so far (TBD about the exactitude) is an enormous upwelling of creative energy with a very short fuse on it. Everything I have been slowly assembling for years, through the Plutonian rupture and the Neptunian fog, has started demanding to exist immediately. And because transiting Uranus is also sitting on my Chiron in Gemini, the demand is specific. It’s saying “Bring it down to earth. Make it usable, make it conversational.” The vision has to come out of the loft and into something a person can hold in their hands.

That is most of what this year has been for me, sitting down and building the things rather than describing them.

Fire and air

As I approach this Uranus opposition with far more consciousness about these things than I had when going through my Pluto and Neptune activations, I’m giving myself a lot of grace. I’m connecting with myself and with the elements more, with the relational energies I bring to this work. I went to a Temescal sweat-lodge ritual yesterday that my friend facilitated, and had an opportunity to really drop in with water, fire, earth and air.

My natal Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are in fiery Sagittarius in my 5th house, a house naturally ruled by fire-sign Leo. My Mars and Venus are in Leo in my first house, a house naturally ruled by fire-sign Aries. I’m a Leo rising, ruled by the sun.

That is a lot of fire, and my whole adult life I have understood myself through it. Burn bright, be seen, warm the room.

And there are a lot of planets in Fire right now, too, feeding the flame. But the other outer planets are in Air, and that’s an element that’s a little more unfamilar to me consciously. Uranus in Gemini, Pluto in Aquarius, and the North Node now in Aquarius. Lots of air blending with all that fire.

Air is what fire eats, and air is also what carries fire past its own edges. It lifts the embers up and sets them down somewhere the original burn never reached. Air is pollination, larger weather patterns, and smoke that crosses state lines.

That is the shift I have been feeling and did not have language for until recently. The fire has been mine, a personal heat and personal brightness kept close to my own hearth. The air element opposing my fire is asking that heat to leave the hearth and travel, spreading that warmth as I go. And it’s asking do so safely, in a way where no one gets burned.

The eclipse on the 12th falls in Leo, in my first house, on the south node. It lands in Gate 4, the Gate of Formulization, and it happens in the gap between my natal Venus and my natal Mars, both sitting there in Leo in that first house. So the eclipse is threading itself right between the part of me that wants to be loved and the part that has the drive to go get things, and darkening the space in the middle for a few minutes.

Gate 4, Formulization, is a mind gate, a 3rd eye gate. It is all about formulating a possible answer under pressure before anything has been tested. Its I’Ching name is Youthful Folly, which might read harsher than it truly is meant. I see it as the acknowledgment that our minds will offer an answer whether or not there is one, and that offering an answer too early is how people truly learn. So the eclipse is darkening this tendency of valuing formulaic thoughts, answers, completions to the cycle of confusion and illumination. It’s in my first house, in the corridor between what I want and how I go after it. If I have been trying to reason my way to a formulation about who I am now, after these five years of midlife transits kicking my ass, this is the sky taking that away for a while.

My read is that what this eclipse will take away- for all of us, but especially those with planets in Leo/Gate 4, is the premature version. The stories we have been assembling about what all of it means, before we’ve finished living it out.

South node eclipses are release points. It’s like someone turns the lights off, and when they come back on the furniture is not where you left it and nobody checks in about whether you approved. There is a karmic settling to them. Mine is landing on my identity, on the first house, on the fire I have built a self out of. My read is that it leaves the brightness alone and takes the part of me that needs to feel closure and completion while I burn.

Are you experiencing midlife transits too?

All of this would have stayed a diary entry, except for the timing.

If you were born somewhere between 1982 and 1988, there is a good chance you are somewhere in this same sequence right now. Pluto square in your late thirties, Neptune square around forty, and Uranus opposition around forty two. The exact timing shifts depending on where your own outer planets sit and how fast Pluto was moving the year you were born, so the years are approximate. But the order holds for most of us, and the window is roughly forty to forty four.

That clustering is a feature of this particular stretch of time. Uranus is the metronome, so the opposition around forty two holds steady for everybody in every era. Neptune is close to steady too.

Pluto is the one that moves. Its orbit is a long ellipse around the sun, and it is currently in a faster-moving part of that ellipse, which is why our Pluto square is arriving in our thirties. For people born when Pluto was in its slow signs, that square arrives much later in life, and for some of them it does not arrive inside a lifetime at all. So the three of these outer planetary-to-birth chart transits landing evenly spaced across five years, right in the middle of adult life, is specific to the time when we happened to be born.

That means that there is a specific cohort of people, right now, being taken apart and taught lessons by the outer planets in the same order at roughly the same age. The true nature of your foundation is exposed first, then any meaning that is not solid dissolves completely, and then a surge of creative, liberatory force arrives that will not wait.

And meanwhile… the polycrisis

The word that is now commonplace for what the larger collective world is going through at this moment is polycrisis. Edgar Morin coined it in the nineties. Jean-Claude Juncker picked it up around 2015 when he was trying to govern Europe through the Greek debt crisis, Putin’s first move on Ukraine, Brexit rumbling underneath, and Syrian refugees arriving all at once.

Adam Tooze is the one who made polycrisis stick, writing about a moment where the shocks were no longer arriving one at a time and no single explanation covered them all. The part of his framing I keep thinking about is that the crises interact, so the whole becomes heavier than the sum of its parts.

Look at this summer. We’ve got horrific heat and fires that keep breaking their own records, with smoke drifting down out of Canada and sitting over American cities for weeks, and researchers still revising upward what long exposure to that smoke does to a person’s body. The political situation in the United States that keeps testing what the guardrails were ever for. The genocide in the Middle East that has ground through civilian life for years without an ending. Data centers going up by the hundreds to feed the AI build out, drinking water and power from communities that were never asked and will not see the returns. The standard cost of living almost everywhere is outrunning what a working life is able to cover. And the fake news idea that we used to laugh about and get enraged about is now our default mode of operation- people are no longer arguing from a shared set of facts.

None of those reduces to a single cause and none of them has a single fix. If you pull a lever on one, you’ve likely moved something in two others that nobody was tracking.

The polycrisis is the master’s sprawling plantation house - it simply cannot be dismantled with the master’s tools.

And this is where the midlife crisis meets the polycrisis.

The people currently getting dismantled by this three-transit sequence of outer planetary initiations are the same people currently holding the world together. We are the ones in the middle of careers, raising the young children, caring for aging parents, running the small businesses, keeping the schools and clinics staffed. We are being stripped down to the studs personally, right on schedule according to the planetary gods. And they’re breaking us down in this succession at the same moment the collective structures we are inside of are also being completely taking apart.

On a hard day that feels like being hit from both directions with nowhere to put your feet.

On a good day, it looks like preparation. It looks like… we are the ones we have been wating for.

What I went through with Pluto took away my ability to keep believing something about my own life that had stopped being true years earlier. Neptune took away my boring certainty about what I thought I was here on this planet for. And now, Uranus is handing the power back to me from the present moment and making it very hard to use it the old way.

If you had told me before these transits what they would feel like, I would not have chosen any of it. But I am far better equipped now than I was at thirty six, and I am not the only person my age who would say that.

Maybe that is only the story I need to tell myself to keep going, and I want to be honest that I cannot prove any of it. But it does seem worth noticing that a lot of us have spent the last five years learning from the inside that the bottom is a real place with a floor in it, at exactly the moment when knowing that has become imperative.

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Inanna, and the floor

I’m channeling Inanna as my guide as her asteroid meets my Uranus and Jupiter in the Gate of Power, at the exact same time as my midlife opposition.

Inanna went down through seven gates to see her sister, queen of the Underworld. At each one she had to remove something she wore, an emblem of her authority and power. First her crown, then her jewelry, then robe, until she stood in front of her sister completely naked and was hung on a hook to die there. The story is not gentle about it. She is dead for three days.

What gets her back is other people. Her handmaiden Ninshubur, who had strategic instructions from Inanna before she left, goes and asks for help until someone listens. Two small mourning creatures are sent down who do nothing except sit with Ereshkigal and grieve with her while she is in labor and in pain. That is the whole rescue - somebody keeps their promise from above, and somebody sits with the grief below. Only when this is done is Inanna released- and she comes up to the Great Above from the Great Below with real power, the power of descent and return- not the false sense of power she cloaked herself in and went down with.

I have been living inside that story for over five years. My best guess is that I am now somewhere on the stairs, ready to ascend. Some days I am less sure, and I think that uncertainty is part of the climb. I do know it’s not my last time in the underworld, but it’s not a place I’m afraid of - or turning a blind eye to- anymore.

What it looks like from here

I keep coming back to my garden. It is August here at my seven thousand foot desert home, and the monsoons have come in, finally. Everything that looked finished in June, all that silvery grey and dry and holding in the plant world, is now greener again inside of a week. None of the dry part was dying. It was waiting, with more discipline than I have had at many times of my life. And with the rain comes flashes of lightning where we can see everything clearer, if just for a moment.That’s the most real thing I have to offer anyone reading this while the fires burn and the news stays mind-bogglingly offensive and filled with grief.

If your own Pluto or Neptune or Uranus activation is doing its work on you, remember that dormancy and death look identical from the outside for a long time. What is being taken apart in you during this half-decade was never the whole of you, and the same is true of what is being taken apart out there in the larger world.

There is beauty in the Great Below. Once we realize that the descent is part of life and stop running from it, the natural cycles will continue to bring us back up to the light.

Right now, six celestial bodies are closing in on a beautiful sextile-star in the sky. On the day the moon covers the sun, this is a structure that holds steady while the eclipse clears out attachments to old formulas. I am choosing to read that as a promise, and I know that it is a choice.

If you are in a midlife transition too:

The old cliche what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is definitely overused- most of the time it gets used to excuse something that should not have happened. But there is a real version of it underneath, and I think my generation is currently proving it out.

We’ve gone down to Pluto’s domain and had our foundations excavated. We’ve drifted through Neptune’s vast seas and lost our certainty about what we were here for. And now Uranus is running current through the whole scenario- the earth and the water and the sky- and handing the power back with a different quality. Three different kinds of undoing, one after another, in five years, and hat comes out the other side of that is a person who has survived the loss of the things she thought she could not live without, and who now knows from the inside that the bottom has a floor in it.

That is not just resilience, which to me just feels like going back to the shape you were. It is closer to what Taleb called anti-fragile, the property of a thing that gets stronger from being handled roughly. A whole cohort of people, right now, in their late 30s and 40s, becoming truly harder to break.

Gen X went through the same order of planetary initiations a little earlier in life. Xennials and millennials are in it now. But it does not hold forever. Pluto is slowing down as it moves through Aquarius and into Pisces, and for most of Gen Z the sequence reshuffles entirely. For them, the midlife transits begin with a Neptune square around forty, Uranus still at forty two, and then Pluto arriving much later, in their fifties (along with their Chiron return), long after the first two have finished. Their midlife will have a different shape than ours does, and their descent will come later- that’s a story for a different article.

Which means this particular arrangement, three undoings stacked into the middle of adult life, belongs to us. It is what we were handed, and I have come to think it was handed to us on purpose, at this moment, for this. There is no one else coming. The people who were supposed to have the answers for us are visibly out of them. And the ones standing in the gap are the ones who spent their thirties finding out that everything can be taken and the sun still comes up. It’s time to stop looking up to the podium and turning our gaze toward our own beating hearts.

A crisis is a place where something has to change- and where the change is finally possible. I think it goes without saying that we are standing in a lot of crises at once. But there is opportunity in that. Every person around my age who has rebuilt a life from nothing already knows how to do the thing the world is about to require of everyone. We know in our bodies how to let a structure fall that was never going to hold it’s shape. We know how to sit in the not-knowing for a year and a half without turning to mush. We know how to start over with a baby on our hip and no plan, because a lot of us have already done exactly that.

That is not a small skill set. That is precisely what a civilization needs from the people in their prime when the old arrangements stop working. And there are millions of us, all arriving at the far shore of this passage at the same time. Thinking of all of these powerful nodes of midlife-initiated ones realizing their power makes me feel all tingly inside.

We are the ones we have been waiting for, which is a line older than any of us, and it has never been more literally true than it is for the people going through these transits right now.

If you want to look at your own…

I’m excited to be offering a couple of new reading types:

1. Midlife Transit Readings:

Ninety minutes exploring your personal mythology of descent and return, discounted from my usual rate because I want more people going through this window to have this. We go through all three: your Pluto square, your Neptune square, and your Uranus opposition, with the houses and gates each one moves through and the dates they are/were live for you. This works if you are in the thick of it now, or if you can see one coming and want to know what it is going to ask of you in the future. Or if you are on the other side and want to look back and find your own myth inside that re-birth canal. Most people arrive knowing something enormous happened to them and having no map of it, and that is what this reading is for.

Book a Midlife Transit Reading

Astrocartography Readings & ELA Map:

Astrocartography is the practice that took hold of me when my Pluto square catapulted me back to my hometown after eighteen years away. When the ground goes out from under your life you find out fast that your specific relationship with place is a huge variable in the equation. I have been doing a lot of these readings lately, and helping people find the meaning in their own lines is my favorite work right now. The app my partner and I just launched last week, ELA Map, is free to use, so you can go look at your lines today, and I am here when you want help reading them.

Check out ELA Map

Book an Astrocartography Reading

En fin…

I do not know what is coming. Not for me next Wednesday, and not for any of us over the next few years. Nobody truly does, and I have stopped trusting anyone who says otherwise.

What I do have is a set of tools for zooming in on the lesson while I am still down there in the muck - which is the time the lesson is truly of most benefit.

That is the whole of what I am offering here. There is a way down that we can either fight with or learn how to swim, and there is a way back up to the surface. And if you learn to ride the waves and meet your depths, you can come back carrying a different kind of power than you went down with.

Thanks for reading, friends. The odds are ever in our favor.

You love juice.

Right?

I know I do. I LOVE juice.

I mean, who wouldn’t? Fruits on the vine that are ripe to the point of bursting, just waiting to share their sweet nectar with whoever’s teeth are lucky enough to puncture their delicate skin. No corn syrup-water-substitutes, but real juice. You gotta love it.

I, for one, love taking a slice of dripping ripe watermelon, or a peach or a mango, into the shower with me and eating it the way a fruit is meant to be eaten- letting it drip and squish and getting myself super juicy and sticky before washing myself nice and clean.

I also love that the slang “juicy” means compelling and intriguing. I use it all the time.

Because it is… compelling and intriguing. And delicious.

(Just go watch some videos from lovefruitss on tiktok, the account of the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve in Florida, and thank me later.)

@fruits_911OMG 😱is this your fav?#usa #fruit #asmr

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Juice is self expression.

I was floating on a pool noodle yesterday afternoon to escape the 99-degree desert heat, dreaming of the juicy passionfruit popsicles that were waiting for me in my freezer at home, and I suddenly couldn’t get this jam out of my head:

Back in 2013 when “Juice”- Chance the Rapper’s debut single- came out, it was blasting from my bike-boom-box whenever I wanted to feel… juicy. Which was pretty much all the time.

There are lots of songs and artists that also got the juice: Janelle Monae, Pharell Williams, Lizzo, Soulja Boy, Dream Junkies, Yo Gotti, Juice WRLD. The 1992 Tupac Shakur film Juice made the word pop off in hip hop culture, and it never slowed down.

But Chance the Rapper’s is my favorite. The juice that he got feels proud and confident yet humble - it’s not arrogant, compared to the rest. He uses the phrase "having the juice" as a metaphor for personal power, natural talent, and energy, and warns of the danger of too much thirst. It’s dripping with real, unadulterated, straight-from-the-fruit juice.

Creating Excitement

I had an ex who worked for a big direct sales/wholesale-to-retail company when he was a teenager, and in their morning meetings before going door-to-door selling chessboards and knives and other Chinese mass produced shit, they would get juiced.

There, JUICE stood for Join Us In Creating Excitement. It’s a high-energy team slogan and interactive chant popular with promotional teams and motivational corporate cultures. (This kind of juice was also made popular by a very dark scene in the film Requiem for a Dream, which I wish I could go back in time and shelter my teenage eyes from watching, but I digress…)

Regardless of how I feel about motivational corporate direct-sales culture (eww), the slogan Join Us In Creating Excitement really does capture the overall vibe of Juice.

The thing about juice is that you can’t see it, but you know exactly who has it, whose life is bursting with it.

In the 1800s, juice was slang for the electrical current that powers a city. In pop culture today, it is the exact same thing: a magnetic, invisible force of clout, respect, and authority.

If you got the juice, you hold the ultimate source of energy and influence.

Having this song pop in my head while dreaming of fruit pops in the pool makes so much sense with the astrology of the moment. The Jupiter-sun cazimi in Leo this week sat directly on my ascendant, and all that expansion happened in the Human Design Gate of Influence.

This is the gate with the shadow of arrogance, the gift of leadership, and the siddhi of humility. It’s the gate where the Lion King strolls out onto pride rock, feeling himself as he shakes his mane and looks out at the Circle-of-Life kingdom beneath him.

The Lion King has definitely got the juice.

Beyonce attested to this fact when she voiced Nala and created her visual spinoff album for Disney, Black is King, during the peak of Black Lives Matter movement in July 2020. It’s debut happened when the sun was in the gate of Influence, too, and whether that should be read as Disney’s corporate influence in their ability to capitalize off of civil rights movements or the truly powerful influence on the world by the African diaspora (or both), it was a very juicy release that Leo season.

”Follow your light…. or lose it. You can’t wear a crown with your head down”

-Black is King

Speaking of Lions…

As Leo season progresses, the sun and Jupiter will move forward through the sign of Leo from their meeting point of influence.

Jupiter will stay in Gate 33, the gate of Retreat, where the lion goes back into his den for a bit to think about what this whole Pride Rock thing really means for him, for all the other lions, and for the rest of the kingdom. The sun passes through there and then moves on to Gate 7, another Gate of Leadership, this one more about cooperation and leading from behind. It’s known as the Role of the Self. And while the sun is in this gate each year, we celebrate Lammas, the cross quarter day between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox, and also… you guessed it, THE LIONS GATE 8/8 PORTAL.

By the time I publish this, your feed will probably already be drowning in reels telling you to manifest your dream life because the universe cracked open a magic door on 8/8 Lion’s Gate. And look, I’m not here to yuck anyone’s cosmic yum. But I got curious about where this actually comes from, because “portal” is doing a lot of work in these captions and nobody’s explaining the mechanics. So I went and found the real story, and it’s so much… juicier than the hashtag.

It starts with Egypt. Thousands of years ago. The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, would vanish from the night sky for about seventy days every single year, swallowed up in the glare of the sun. And then one morning it would come back. Just reappear, low on the horizon, right before dawn. The Egyptians had a name for this star as a goddess, Sopdet. Sopdet was a goddess who got folded into Isis a few centuries later- but Sopdet was her own goddess first. Her return mattered so much to them that they built their entire calendar around it. Because Sopdet coming back lined up with the Nile flooding, and the Nile flooding was the difference between fertile crops and a good harvest and a starving year. So her reappearance got a festival. It got called the new year. It was a huge deal.

Back then, in ancient Egypt, Sirius came back to rise in mid to late July. It wasn’t August 8th. This is because the earth wobbles on its axis over long stretches of time, a thing called precession, and that wobble slowly drags the date of Sirius’s reappearance, or heliacal rising, later and later across the centuries. Thousands of years later, standing where a lot of us stand now, that same star comes back in early August instead (the exact date changes depending on your specific location's latitude and horizon conditions). Which is why the date lines up on or close to 8/8 today and didn’t back then. Nobody planned the numerology. The sky just drifted into it.

I’ll admit I’m not neutral on any of this. Sirius was the first celestial body to rise with my ascendant the moment I was born. So of course I have a soft spot for the Lion’s Gate. It’s basically been my whole life saying hello to me every August since day one.

Back in Egypt, knowing exactly when Sopdet would reappear was not casual information. The priests who could track her return and predict the flood held actual power because of it. They were the ones who could tell the pharaoh when the water was coming back to life, when the fields would feed the kingdom again.

That’s juice in its oldest form, the invisible current that everyone recognizes and nobody can fake. And the lion was already sitting in the middle of this whole story, long before anyone called it a gate. Egypt had lion goddesses like Sekhmet, who carried the brilliant radiance of sun and powerful fury in one body. And the Sphinx guarded the whole place with a lion’s body. So when Beyonce leaned into lion imagery for Black is King, crown and mane and all, she wasn’t reaching for a Disney mascot. She was reaching for the same authority the Egyptians built entire dynasties on top of, the juice of knowing deep truths about the sky and letting them move you.

So, power to you on 8/8 Lion’s Gate. Get that juice.

Because there’s another layer to this:

The juice isn’t a metaphor - it’s a whole damn season.

Here’s how I actually track time, if you don’t already know this about me. Over the past couple of years, I haven’t been using four standard seasons or even twelve Zodiac signs to feel into where I am in the year.

I use eight.

The Wheel of the Year splits a trip around the sun into eight thresholds: four solstices and equinoxes and four cross quarter days tucked halfway between them, the old fire festivals that agricultural cultures built their lives around.

Lammas is one of those four cross quarter days. It was the first harvest festival in ancient Europe, the one where the ancestors marked the fields and the trees both starting to give things over at the same time. Fruit off the branch, grain off the stalk, together, at the same threshold and beyond.

And if you were to follow the life cycle of a plant instead of a human-coded-calendar, this is exactly the move that’s happening right now. From summer solstice to Lammas, Cancer season into the beginning of Leo, we’re in the season of fertilization - the inward part of the life cycle that nobody sees, when pollen finds its way to ovum after the pollination of spring. A season where nothing visible is happening on the outside but everything is coming into being on the inside.

Now, at Lammas- which coincides with the Lion’s Gate and Sirius’ heliacal rising- we’re about to move out of that fertile, inward stillness and into the season of outward, expressive FRUIT. The part of the plant that got fertilized in secret is finally showing itself, swelling, getting soft, ripening, and turning into something you can pick with your hands and eat in the shower.

You don’t get to fruit without going through fertilization first. Real juice doesn’t come into being without a deep setup of elapsed time and inner awareness that unfurled before it

In the Human Design mandala, the gate that opens this season, the gate that ushers us from the season of fertilization to the season of fruit, is Gate 7, sitting right where the sun crosses into that first harvest point. In the Human Design bodygraph, Gate 7 lives in the G center of identity and direction, and it’s known as the Role of the Self, a soft kind of leadership that doesn’t perform.

After being on pride rock and then going back into the den, the lion realizes that they just need to hold their own direction so cleanly that other people start orienting around it without being asked. Sounds a lot like that yummy humble juice to me.

And here’s a super intriguing part of all this: Gate 7 is the first hexagram/gate of all 64 to have WATER as its lower trigram. From Gate 7 at Lammas all the way to the fall equinox, each of the eight gates in a row has that same water base, holding and swelling and concentrating, the exact motion of something going from hard to dripping.

Gate 7, the gate that the sun moves into this week for Lammas/Lughnassa on August 7th and the Lion’s Gate on 8/8, is represented by the trigrams Earth above Water. In the I Ching that combination symbolizes groundwater held inside the earth, a reservoir that’s invisible from the surface but completely full underneath. Ready to pop.

You can’t see it and yet you know exactly who has it, remember?

So yeah. Juice.

This whole season- from Lammas on August 7th through the September 21 Equinox- this whole season truly got the juice.

It was never just a song I liked.

It’s the actual water-filled trigram running under my feet for six weeks straight during late summer. It’s this beautiful season of water, self-expression, the first harvest… of bursting, juicy LIFE.

This week from now until August 4th, the Gate of Retreat helps us go into our dens for a few days and reflect on what has come up in our lives since Summer Solstice, when the season of Mountain began. Now we enter the season of Water- and water contained in the sweet self expression of the plant in her cycle: the juicy fruit.

There’s a good chance you’re hot right now, so go get yourself a popsicle or your fave fruit to celebrate this seasonal threshold. I’ll be sending out more ritual ideas and horoscopes for the season ahead to my paid subscribers later this week.

So…. what’s your favorite juice?

Hey y’all,

On Wednesday the Sun and Jupiter met in exact cazimi at 6 degrees of Leo, right in the heart of Gate 31: Influence, with the Full Moon and Pluto lighting up the opposite pole in Gate 41: Contraction. This was big, loud, expansive energy. And now the Sun keeps moving around the wheel and leaves that cazimi behind, moving into Gate 33: Retreat.

Jupiter is still sitting back there in Gate 31 until August 3rd, glowing its expansive light, calling people into leadership in a big way. But the Sun has already moved on to the next gate, one that says the loudest voice needs to be followed by the longest pause. That’s the natural progression of this week. The leader speaks and influences the world, and then the leader goes quiet to sit with what that lion’s roar felt like and how it’s reverberating.

Gate 33: The Story

Like Gate 31, Gate 33 lives in the Throat Center, and it’s the voice that says “I remember.”

Last week Gate 31 was the voice that gathered people around it. This week that same voice goes silent for a while. Not because it has nothing left to say, but because it needs time alone to sort through what just happened before it can say anything more about it.

The hexagram is Dùn, usually translated as Retreat. The image is Heaven sitting above Mountain, which sounds almost backwards until you picture it. The mountain doesn’t move. It just holds its ground while Heaven’s creative force gathers above it, out of reach of whatever is happening down in the valley. The old commentaries talk about knowing when to withdraw before you’re forced to, about stepping back with dignity instead of getting pushed out. This isn’t retreat as defeat. It’s retreat as timing.

In Human Design, this gate carries the memory of the whole Collective circuit. Everything Gate 13 down in the G Center has witnessed and listened to and gathered comes up through this gate to be spoken, but only after it’s had time to settle. Ra Uru Hu called this the gate of the elder, the one who has lived enough of life to know that raw experience isn’t wisdom yet. It becomes wisdom after you’ve gone away from it for a while.

The Gene Keys frame the shadow of 33 as Forgetting. Not simple forgetfulness, but a deeper kind of amnesia, the kind where you lose touch with what actually happened to you, or bury it so it can’t teach you anything. The gift is Mindfulness, the capacity to be fully present with an experience instead of rushing past it. And the siddhi is Revelation, when the retreat itself becomes unnecessary because the person has learned to carry that same quality of stillness right into the middle of their life, without needing to leave it first.

Gate 31 handed you the seat last week. Gate 33 is what happens when you sit down in it, close the door, and actually feel what it’s like to hold something other people are watching.

Gate 33 in the Body

Gate 33 sits in the Throat Center, the same territory as last week’s Gate 31, but it’s the last of the throat gates the Sun visits before it leaves this whole run of voices behind. Gate 62 was “I think.” Gate 56 was “I believe.” Gate 31 was “I lead.” Gate 33 is “I remember.”

The Throat Center governs the thyroid and parathyroid, the whole neck and jaw and the pathway sound travels through on its way out into the world. Everything that happens anywhere else in the body eventually tries to reach this center to become spoken or acted on. Gate 33 is the part of that center that holds a door shut for a while, the part that says not yet, I haven’t finished feeling this.

There’s a particular kind of tension that shows up in the back of the jaw and the base of the skull when someone is trying to speak about something they haven’t actually processed yet. The words come out but they don’t land right, because the body knows the retreat got skipped. This gate belongs to the Collective circuit, the same slow, pattern-watching territory Gate 31 lives in, and it works on the same timeline. It isn’t built for quick answers. It’s built for the pause before the answer, the one that makes the answer worth hearing.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: This is the eighth and final gate of Mountain season, the run of hexagrams built on the lower Gen trigram that began at the summer solstice. Earth topped the mountain in 15, the mountain doubled itself in 52, Water pressed against it in 39, Wind shaped it in 53, Thunder rolled over it in 62, Fire crossed it in 56, Lake settled into it in 31, and now Heaven crowns it in 33. Every trigram in the wheel has now had its turn resting on this mountain. After this, the wheel turns, and the Sun crosses into Gate 7 in the G Center, right around Lammas and Lughnasadh, the cross-quarter day that marks the season’s actual pivot.

Channel: Gate 33 completes its channel with Gate 13, the Listener, down in the G Center. Together they make the Channel of the Prodigal, a design built for witnessing life. Gate 13 gathers the stories, listens to what happened to you and to everyone else, and holds it as part of identity. Gate 33 takes all of that gathered experience and won’t let it out until it’s been turned over enough times to mean something. Without 13, there’s nothing to remember. Without 33, everything gets said before it’s ready.

Polarity: The gate directly across the wheel is Gate 19, the Approach, down in the Root Center. Gate 19 is the pressure of wanting, the felt sense of what a person or a group actually needs before they know how to ask for it. While the Sun sits in the gate of remembrance, the Earth sits in the gate of need. One end of that axis is looking backward to make sense of what already happened. The other end is looking at what’s missing right now. A retreat with no sense of what people need becomes navel-gazing with no purpose. A need with no reflection behind it becomes grasping with no wisdom to guide it.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 33

Find a place you can be alone for a few minutes, somewhere with a door you can close. Sit down and let your eyes close too. Put one hand at the base of your skull, where the neck meets the head, and let the weight of it rest there.

Bring to mind something that happened in the last week. Not the biggest thing, just something ordinary that’s still sitting with you. Don’t try to explain it to yourself yet. Just let the memory be there, whole, without narrating it or deciding what it means.

Notice the urge to talk about it, out loud or even just in your head, to start turning it into a story before you’ve actually finished feeling it. Let that urge exist without acting on it. Stay with the raw memory a little longer than feels comfortable. Notice what shifts in your jaw or your throat as you resist the pull to explain.

When you’re ready, let one true sentence about the memory rise up on its own, without you reaching for it. Say it quietly, once. Then sit in the silence after it for another minute before you get up.

That gap between having the experience and being ready to speak about it is exactly where this gate lives.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a season of your life you had to leave before you understood it. Free write about what you couldn’t see while you were still inside it, and what became visible only once you’d stepped away. Then write about something you’re still too close to, still inside of right now, and notice what your mind wants to do with it before it’s ready.

Draw or paint a mountain with heaven resting directly above its peak, not touching it, just close enough that the mountain can feel it there.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 33 card and sit with both sides. Notice what you’ve been carrying around unprocessed this week, something you keep almost-explaining but haven’t actually sat with. Let your hand move from there.

Next up: Gate 7 · The Role of the Self, the first gate of the new season, arriving for Lammas and Lughnasadh, when the voice that just learned to remember starts learning how to lead again, this time alongside others.

See you soon,
Alison

ELA Map is now live, for all you astrocartography fans:

Check out ELA

Get a Mandala 64 Human Design deck:

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

Thanks for reading! Let me know how y’all are doing this week in the comments!

xo

Alison

This week for my Magicians series on Living the Spiral, I sat down with the truly inspiring Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin. Aki is a medicine woman, a storyteller, the founder of Minka Brooklyn and Minka Mystery School, and she writes Field Notes from the Inbetween on Substack.

She also, by her own description these days, is a cosmic slut.

🎧 Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:

On claiming a new identity after divorce

Aki told me the identification with the term cosmic slut came to her post-divorce, after years of thinking she was asexual inside a monogamous marriage. What she landed on instead was something way bigger than sex alone:

“I am so hopelessly in love with being alive, being in the process of alive, and other humans. And other things… the rock and the tree and the river.”

On work as an offering rather than a role

I asked how she brings this into her teaching, her writing, and her sessions. She said it’s less about output and more about a felt sense she tries to work from in everything:

“My commitment is to fully understand what I feel like, not as a feeling like an emotion, but what I feel like as a felt sense, as an essence of who I am. And do everything from that place.”

She talks about having reverence for a laughter-filled dinner with her kids with the same energy as teaching a class. Both count as the same frequency to her.

On what magic really means

This is the one question I’ve been asking everyone in the Magicians series, and Aki’s answer went straight to Mary Magdalene:

“Magic is in being fully present to all the things that’re available to us. Visible, invisible, all the sides of us, all the tools that we have, and to be able to utilize it accordingly in order for us to co-create what we would like to see.”

She tied being fully human to being fully divine at once, where we can hold the fact of dying and the fact of being eternal in the same body.

On liberation and undoing separation

Aki’s work gets described as decolonial and collective-liberation focused. Aki traced it back to something simpler:

“Colonialism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all of that is the process of creating more and more separation. Then we have to understand that is the complete opposite of doing spiritual practice.”

And on why she uses big, fancy words for what she calls a very simple process: “I wanna claim it!”

On desire as a creative engine

The center of our whole conversation, really, was about the deep power of unshaming desire.

A friend of hers said she had been having a hard time dreaming, and it stuck with Aki as something larger than one person’s creative block:

“How we create this world is through our subconscious and through our dreams, and through our desire, claiming that we want it. And we are living at a time where things seem so impossible... that we are forgetting to desire to dream.”

She said the antidote is simple and hard at once: “I want us to desire fully. And if we don’t get what we desire… fuck it. We’re just gonna desire again.”

On trauma culture and what comes after naming it

We got into how the last few years seem to have shifted collectively from an obsession with trauma to asking “What’s next?” Aki connected the freeze that can follow trauma awareness to a wider cultural fragility:

“We stop living because we are afraid of getting hurt. That is in the same vein as I don’t love because I’m afraid to grieve the loss of love.”

On love as a brave act

Her closing thought on this one has stayed with me since we talked:

“To love is to grieve at the end of the day, no matter what it is. Even if I were to stay with someone for the rest of my life, somebody has to die first.”

She told me about falling for someone who was leaving the country in two weeks, and choosing to love them anyway. She called it one of the most romantic experiences of her life.

🎧 Tune in to our full conversation in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:

About Aki of Minka Brooklyn

Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin (also known as Jewel Moon Medicine Woman) is a multidisciplinary energy healing facilitator and community organizer whose work centers on decolonial spiritual liberation. She has dedicated her life to studying mysticism, philosophy, and various healing systems.

Aki is a lives between Japan and the US, and is teaching this summer in LA, the Berkshires, and New York. She’s running a Young Witches School for teenagers learning to work with intuition and oracle cards, and offering a Reiki training during the Lion’s Gate portal built around what she and her teacher call Earth Evolution Reiki. You can find her writing at Field Notes from the Inbetween on Substack, follow her on Instagram at soulflowermedicine, and find her teachings at Minka Brooklyn.

Follow Aki’s writing here:

Field Notes from the In-Between: the in-between as the holy

What if the in-between isn't where you're lost, but where you're most alive? What if it isn't homeless ground, but holy ground? These field notes are for those learning to call it home — and in doing so, becoming the future ancestors we always were.

By Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin

About Alison of Living the Spiral

Alison is an ecosomatic astrologer, Human Design guide, breathwork practitioner, and creative sovereignty coach based in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives under the name Hearth & Spiral, where she blends astrology, Human Design, somatic practice, and myth into a path back to the body and the land.

She hosts Living the Spiral as both a podcast and a Substack publication, where she’s currently walking through all 64 Human Design gates as the Sun moves through them across the solar year. She co-created ELA Map with her partner Jackson, an astrocartography and Human Design cartography platform, and works as a consultant and practitioner there. She also offers one on one coaching through her Tending the Flame container.

Alison draws on Celtic seasonal traditions, the I’Ching, and goddess mythology, with a longstanding devotion to Inanna’s descent. You can find her writing at Living the Spiral on Substack, follow her on Instagram at @hearthandspiral, and book a session at hearthandspiral.com.

Interested in being interviewed on Living the Spiral: Magicians? Send me a DM!

This article is part of the Mandala 64 Walk, a series following the Sun as it moves around the Zodiac through all 64 Human Design gates.

Thanks for making this journey with me!

Hey y’all,

How did Gate 56: THE STORYTELLER land for you this week? Did you catch yourself telling a story you’ve told a hundred times, or did you find one you’d never put words to before?

Today, Friday July 24, the Sun leaves the wanderer’s fire and jaunts into the first full gate of Leo Season - Gate 31: Influence. This is the gate Jupiter has been sitting in at the top of the Barbault Basket since July 9th, and the Sun is now meeting the expansive gas giant here, ready to call us all into new leadership. Jupiter stays in this influential gate until August 3rd, but this week as the sun lights up the great benefic is when we will really feel it’s effects.

And on Wednesday July 29, Jupiter and the Sun make their exact cazimi, directly across the sky from the moon and Pluto for an intensely transformative full moon in Aquarius.

Another BIG week in the skies, folks….

This week the Sun catches up with Jupiter at 6 degrees of Leo, right in the middle of Gate 31. This is a cazimi, which means Jupiter is not just conjunct the Sun, it’s in the heart of the Sun. It’s so close that the astrologers of old considered a planet in cazimi to be seated “on the throne” of the sun, receiving it’s golden radiance.

Jupiter’s whole cycle empties out and starts over here with this solar cazimi, and this happens in the gate of the leader, of influence. This gate expands our personal sense of what leadership means, how we lead in our own lives, and whose influence is taking center stage in the world’s unfolding play.

On the same day as the cazimi, the Moon becomes full at 6 degrees of Aquarius, directly opposite the sun and Jupiter, and it’s sitting very close to Pluto a couple degrees away at 4 Aquarius. The Full Moon and Pluto are both sitting in Gate 41, the gate of the contractions and anticipation that occur before a new world is born- which is the exact polarity gate of 31. Every line of hexagram 41 is the reverse of every line of hexagram 31; in the Gene Keys they’re known as programming partners. In Human Design, Gate 41 is the start codon, the gate that begins the whole genetic wheel- it’s the inception and origin point of the entire 64 gates.

So on Wednesday morning the sky opens the leader’s throne on one end of the axis and the origin point of a new cycle on the other, and lights both of them at full volume with Pluto bringing the powers of the underworld to the new beginning. The voice that says “I lead” is exactly 180 degrees from the pressure that says “begin”, creating an infinity loop of tension that is sure to usher in new leadership of all kinds. The basket that barbault foresaw is still holding place, with the outer planets Pluto Uranus and Neptune still parked at 4 degrees, and this is the day Jupiters expansive qualities on the top of the basket get a boost from the sun.

So this full moon/Jupiter cazimi packs a punch. If you’ve been waiting for a starting gun to get you off to the races, this is a loud one.

ELA Map is live on the 29th

Which brings me to another reason Wednesday matters to me….

My partner Jackson and I are launching ELA Map on July 29, on the cazimi, in Gate 31.

ELA Map is the astrocartography and Human Design cartography platform we’ve been building- tt maps your planetary lines across the earth AND it maps your Human Design across the earth, which is something no other tool does nearly as cohesively. You can see where your Sun line runs, AND where your gates and channels and incarnation cross activate your sense of place. Where you might feel more like yourself, and where you might feel less.

We picked this launch date on purpose. Gate 31 is the gate of influence that only works when it’s invited, and Wednesday’s cazimi is the moment a whole Jupiter cycle begins again.

👉 ELA Map goes live July 29 — sign up for the waitlist here!

Check out ELA

Gate 31 (Influence, The Leader, Sounding Your Truth): The Story

Gate 31 lives in the Throat Center, and it’s made up of the voice that says “I lead.”

Last week Gate 56 told the stories that were gathered over Cancer season. Now Gate 31 is what happens when the story gathers people behind it. Gate 31 is the feeling when a story and a voice stops being simply interesting and starts being followed.

The hexagram is Xián, usually translated as Influence… and also or Wooing or Conjoining. The image the two trigrams, lake over mountain, make is of a lake resting in a hollow at the top of a mountain. The mountain doesn’t reach for the water. It makes a shape that water can settle into, and the water gathers there because the shape is right. That’s the whole teaching of this gate. Influence here works by attraction and gravity rather than by pushing or pulling. The old commentaries of the I’Ching talk about courtship, about the responsiveness between two things that recognize each other. The guidance here is always to stay open and receptive so that what wants to come can come through.

In Human Design, this gate is projected, which means the energy in it doesn’t work until someone asks for it. Ra Uru Hu called the channel it forms “a design of leadership for good or bad,” which is about as blunt as he ever got. Gate 31 is the elected leader, handed the seat by the people who trust their voice. Take the seat before it’s offered up and the whole thing curdles.

This is exactly what the Gene Keys says, too. The shadow of 31 is arrogance. Richard Rudd frames it as using language to manipulate, acting without thinking of the karma or consequences- usually based on an insecurity or blindness to a deeper truth, trying to control our lives with arrogant behavior.

The gift of 31 is leadership, which is the voice that speaks for the collective because the collective elected it to do so. And the siddhi is humility, which in this key means that the chosen leader finally stops experiencing themselves as the author of anything, and the words come through clean and true because theyre not trying to be impressive anymore.

The further the leader appears from being fallable, from being human, the closer they usually are to the shadow of arrogance. Oftentimes this appears with spiritual leaders who are captivated by the siddhis, the spiritual frequencies, and forget to live in the human realm with their feet on the ground. Find your blind spots and be patient in order to become a true leader.

Gate 31 in the Body

Gate 31 sits in the Throat Center, at the front of the neck, wrapped around the thyroid and parathyroid glands. This is our third week running with the Sun moving through a Throat center gate, and the progression has been pretty exact. Gate 62 (Details) was the voice that says “I think.” Gate 56 (The Storyteller) was the voice that says “I believe.” Gate 31 (Influence) is the voice that says “I lead.”

The thyroid is the body’s pacing gland. It sets metabolic rate, how fast you burn, how much heat you make, and how quickly you move through a day. So this gate is physically wired to the question of tempo, and the shadow of arrogance often shows up in the body as a tempo problem before it shows up as a personality problem. The arrogant voice is one that talks over people, with an urge to answer before the question finishes. It’s a pace that outruns the room and then wonders why the room goes quiet or stops listening.

This gate belongs to the collective Understanding circuit, which is the logical, future-facing part of the bodygraph. It works by watching patterns over time and then saying out loud where those patterns are heading. That’s slow work, and the voice that comes out of it is meant to be slow too.

There’s a particular tension that lives in the front of the neck and the underside of the jaw when someone has been performing authority they haven’t been given. It tends to come with a shallow breath and a habit of clearing the throat before speaking. The body knows the seat wasn’t offered even when the mind has talked itself into taking it. Met with deeper awareness, this gate becomes a voice that the room settles around, one that’s willing to wait and with nothing to prove.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We’re still in the season of Mountain, the series of eight hexagrams built on the lower Gen trigram that began at the summer solstice. Earth sat above mountain in 15 (Extremes), the mountain doubled itself in 52 (Stillness), Water pressed against it in 39 (Provocation), Wind shaped it in 53 (Beginnings), Thunder rolled over it in 62 (Details), Fire crossed it in 56 (Storytelling/Stimulation), and now Lake comes to rest on it in 31: Leadership. Only Gate 33 is left before the wheel turns at Lammas/Lughnasadh and the Sun reaches Gate 7 in the G Center.

Mercury also stationed direct on July 23rd, so we come into this Leo gate with our minds moving forward again, right as the Sun gets to the leader’s chair.

Channel: Gate 31 completes its channel with Gate 7, the Role of the Self, down in the G Center. Together they make the Channel of the Alpha, a design of leadership for good or bad. Gate 7 knows what direction to take direction, and Gate 31 has the influential voice to speak it. Without 7, the leader is a mouthpiece with no idea where they’re going, and without 31, the sense of direction stays private and never reaches anybody.

What I love about this chanel is that Gate 7 is also in Leo, at 15 degrees, which means the Sun moves through it in about two weeks. The whole Alpha channel lives inside this season of the Lion. The Sun moves through the influential voice first and the direction second, which is a little backwards- but honestly that’s how it usually goes for most of us.

Polarity: The gate directly across the wheel is Gate 41, Contraction, down in the Root Center. While the Sun moves through 31, the Earth sits in 41, and this week the Full Moon and Pluto are there too.

Hexagram 41 is known as Decrease or Contraction, and it’s trigrams are Mountain over Lake, the exact inversion of this week’s Lake over Mountain. Gate 41 is the start codon, the gate that begins the whole wheel of the Human Design Mandala. It’s the pressure of a fresh feeling with no experience attached to it yet. Its Gene Key runs from the shadow of fantasy through the gift of anticipation to the siddhi of emanation.

Gate 41 is the pressure to begin, the utarine contractions before birth is possible, sitting in the Root with no idea what the next cycle holds. Gate 31 is the voice at the of influence that pulls the cycle where it’s going. A beginning with no voice stays a private ache in the belly, and a voice with no beginning underneath it is a person standing at a podium with nothing to say.

Wednesday has a Full Moon and Pluto on the new beginnings end of that axis and a Jupiter cazimi on the leadership end. A tension, a tightrope, an infinity sign integrating the two.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 31

Sit somewhere you won’t be overheard and put one hand across the front of your throat, thumb and fingers resting on either side of the windpipe, right over the thyroid. Just let the weight of the hand be there, softly. Breathe for a while and feel how much of your breath you can feel moving under your palm.

Then, out loud, say one sentence you believe to be true. Something ordinary, like “I’m tired” or “I want to finish that painting.” Say it at whatever volume comes, and keep your hand where it is, and feel the sentence leave. Notice the impulse that shows up right after, wanting to explain it or make it more convincing. Let that impulse just be there without following it.

Say the same sentence three or four more times, and each time let it come a little slower and a little lower in your body, until you’re speaking from somewhere under the collarbone instead of from the throat itself. Notice if there’s any bracing in your jaw or the floor of your mouth. Then stop talking and sit with your hand on your throat for another minute in the quiet, and feel what a voice feels like when it isn’t trying to move anybody.

That gap between the voice that tries to persuade and the voice that just speaks the truth, is where this gate of influence does its work.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a time you were handed a seat you didn’t ask for. A group project, a family crisis, or anything else where people turned to you as a leader without you offering it up. Free write about what your voice did in the first ten seconds. Then write about a time you wanted the seat and didn’t get it, and what your voice did then. Look at the two of them next to each other on the page and see which one sounds more like you.

Draw or paint a lake resting in a hollow at the top of a mountain, with the whole sky held in the still water, held in reflective stillness by the solid ground below.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 31 card and sit with both sides. Notice where you’ve been reaching for a seat this week and where you’ve been waiting to be asked. Let your hand move from there.

Next up: Gate 33 · Retreat, or Privacy. The final gate of the Mountain season, where the voice that just learned to lead decides to be quiet on purpose and takes the whole story of Mountain season underground to settle, right before the cross quarter day of Lammas/Lughnasadh arrives.

See you soon, Alison

One more reminder:

ELA Map: Your Energy Location Atlas goes live July 29, on the Jupiter cazimi, in the gate of influence.

Check out ELA

Get a Mandala 64 Human Design deck:

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

And, if your curious about what gates light up your chart or how the transits are influencing you right now, book a reading!

My Books Are Open

Thanks for reading! Let me know how y’all are doing this week in the comments!

xo

Alison

Everybody happy to be leaving that Mercury Retrograde in Cancer behind and getting this summer started for real? (I know I am, that was a dooozy!)

Off we go now to pride rock, where the Sun joins Jupiter in the lion’s den, opposes Pluto and the moon in Aquarius, and later in the season meets the moon for the first solar eclipse in Leo. From a Plutonic-cazimi full moon to a south node eclipse, there are no normal moons this Leo season, and the heat is on to both expand and release some feline energies this month.

Click the player above to listen to the full Leo Season episode, or read on below for some transcript highlights.

Leo season horoscopes will be coming out soon too, so subscribe to get them in your inbox if you haven’t already!

Subscribe now

A few exciting announcements:

1. I put together a 30 page guidebook about the archetypes, holy days, elements, and human design gates of Leo season - you can download one on my website for yourself or as a gift for your favorite Leo! (I also have Aries > Cancer guidebooks available there too). These books are packed with ritual ideas, somatic exercises, and info about the energies of the lion’s season.

Get a Leo Season Guidebook

ELA Map is going live to the public next week! ELA is the astrocartography and human-design-cartography workspace that my fiancee Jackson and I built after our travels in Central America last year. It’s been in private beta, and it’s going live on the Jupiter Cazimi/Full Moon in Aquarius on July 29th…

Join the Waitlist!

3. You heard it here first: I’m going to be offering a course in Ecosomatic Astrology and Human Design starting on the fall equinox! Come learn the basics of astrology and human design in a grounded, experiential way, with emphasis on connecting the planets, signs, and gates with your body and the earth’s changing seasons. Sign up for updates here:

Stay in the loop!

Exciting times ahead for this Leo rising, Venus, and Mars…!

Now, onto the news…

A quick look back at Cancer

Cancer season opened with Chiron crossing into Taurus, a new era of embodied healing after seven years of the wounded healer in Aries. We moved through six Human Design gates: Extremes, Stillness, Provocation, Beginnings, Details, and Stimulation, following the crab from the solstice to this threshold of the lion’s den. Mercury went retrograde in Cancer the same day as a full moon in Capricorn, asking us to revisit home, safety, and belonging. Jupiter crossed into Leo right in the middle of the season, so a lot of us have spent the last month incubating something in our crab shells that’s about to want a much bigger stage. And on July 4th, Mars met Uranus in the gate of Provocation, which stirred things up (though not as much as some were predicting).

Tomorrow, July 23, the Mercury rewind releases its soupy grip, and today, June 22, the sun moves into Leo. Crab season hands off to the lion while a watery retrograde clears its fog at the same time- this feels fitting for a fire sign season that’s all about stepping fully into the light.

The lion throughout time

Leo has always been the sun’s own house. In the Thema Mundi, the mythical birth chart of the world that Hellenistic astrologers used to explain the whole system, the sun sits in Leo next to the moon in Cancer. Cancer is the womb, and Leo is the first cry, the first light hitting skin.

In Babylon, this stretch of sky was called the Great Lion, and it stood guard through the dog days of summer, the hottest stretch of the year. In Egypt, the lion was Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of war and healing, who nearly destroyed humanity in a fit of bloodlust until the other gods tricked her into drinking red-dyed beer. Once she woke up from that, she became Hathor, goddess of joy and love. In Greece, conquering the Nemean Lion was Hercules’ first labor, and afterward he wore its hide as armor for the rest of his life. He didn’t kill the lion and move on with it, he became the lion, carrying its invulnerability on his own back from then on.

“The lion isn’t just about showing off or standing on center stage. It’s about being a guardian, standing at a threshold and holding heat that could either destroy or heal.”

Right in the middle of all this mythology sits August 8th, the Lion’s Gate, which is a modern spiritual tradition rather than an ancient astronomical one, tied to the bright star Sirius and its heliacal rising in ancient Egypt that coincided with the flooding of the nile. I believe the Lion’s Gate doesn’t need old backing to be worth honoring. It asks the same thing the whole season does: what are you going to do with the heat in your heart this time of year? Let it fizzle or lean into it’s radiant self-expression?

The archetype

Leo is the fixed fire sign of the Zodiac, ruled by the sun. Fixed means sustaining, the center of a season rather than its cardinal start or its mutable close. And the sun as ruler means Leo doesn’t orbit anyone, it just radiates because that’s its tue nature.

In the body, Leo rules the heart and the upper spine, which is also where courage lives. In the life cycle, Leo is the emergence into fruit after the incubation and fertilization of solstice time- it’s the bees coming out of the hive after Cancer season’s honey-making inside. I think of Leo also as the early to mid twenties in the human life span, stepping out of the Cancerian parents’ house and onto the world stage for the first time.

“There is a real difference between Leo the stereotype and the mature expression of Leo. The shadow stereotype is often a diva who needs constant applause. The mature Leo expression has stopped performing for approval and has started radiating their authentic expression.”

Cross Quarter Day Celebrations: Lughnasadh or Lammas

Right smack in the middle of Leo season, the Celtic wheel of the year celebrates Lughnasadh, or Lammas, the first of three harvest festivals. Lughnassadh is named for the skilled solar god Lugh, one of the most important gods in Irish mythology, part of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine race said to have ruled Ireland before the Milesians (the ancestors of the Irish people) arrived. Historically in the british isles this was the holy day that communities baked the first loaves from the newly milled wheat and brought them to be blessed. It’s not the big final harvest of Virgo and Libra season, but it’s the first cutting, a chance to harvest the first fruits of your labors and recognize how much they’ve grown since spring, even if it’s only a small first loaf out of the oven. Celebrate and harvest what has grown since Aries season on this day.

(I”ll be hosting a ritual for Lammas/Lughnassa for paid subscribers on Zoom- details on that coming soon!)

The Human Design of Leo season

Leo season opens still inside Gate 56, the last gate of Cancer, the Gate of the Storyteller. Cancer isn’t a language-based sign, it’s feeling-based, so Gate 56 is the bridge where that feeling finally starts turning into something spoken out loud.

From there:

Gate 31, Influence is the first full gate of the season, leadership through resonance instead of force. This is the gate Jupiter sits in as the Barbault Basket completes its formation in late July.

Gate 33, Retreat follows right after, the lion ducking back into the den before it’s depleted, metabolizing its own experience in private before sharing it.

Gate 7, the Role of the Self, sometimes called the Army, is quiet, logistical leadership, the coach or the general who guides without needing to be the loudest voice in the room.

Gate 4, Formulization, also called Youthful Folly, is the mind reaching for answers before it has enough information to actually be sure of them.

Gate 29, Perseverance, the Gate of saying yes, closes out the season. This gate is the willingness to commit to something from your gut level without seeing all the way through it.

The season ends crossing into Virgo Gate 59, sexuality and intimacy, breaking down the barriers between people so something real can pass through.

By center, the season opens with three Throat gates in a row (56, 31, 33), all about what gets said or held back, moves into the G Center with Gate 7, identity and direction, then Ajna with Gate 4, the reaching mind, and closes with the Sacral yes of Gate 29.

The transits of Leo season 2026

The nodes shift into Leo and Aquarius on July 26, with the South Node settling into Leo after eighteen months in Virgo.

On July 29, the Full Moon in Aquarius opposes a Sun-Jupiter cazimi in Leo, both sitting in Gate 31, while the moon and Pluto sit together in Aquarius in Gate 41, the very first gate of the whole Human Design wheel. This is the Barbault Basket in motion, and it’s a preview of the eclipse axis rather than an eclipse itself.

“I like to think of oppositions not as a ping pong match between two sides of the sky, but actually as an infinity sign, a figure eight that goes from one side to the next.”

August 6, Venus moves into Libra, a sign it loves, softening things. August 9, Mercury moves into Leo, joining Jupiter there, giving our voices more warmth and color right as the eclipse approaches. August 11, Mars enters Cancer, bringing a more protective, circling energy right before the big reveal.

August 12 is the total solar eclipse in Leo, both sun and moon together in Gate 4, at 20 degrees Leo, with totality sweeping across Greenland, Iceland, and northern Spain. It’s a South Node eclipse, oriented toward release, conjunct Mercury and Jupiter, with Mercury opposite Pluto, Mercury sextile Uranus, and Venus opposite Neptune completing a six-pointed star formation with Ishtar entering Sagittarius that same day.

“This eclipse is releasing the ego that comes with Leo the sign, releasing the need to be right, releasing the need to be on the stage and be the center of attention. This is an eclipse that’s asking us to sit in not knowing for a while.”

August 28 brings a partial lunar eclipse in Pisces, the tail end of the older Virgo-Pisces cycle closing out even as the new Leo-Aquarius story opens. The next eclipse fully within this new series lands in Aquarius in February 2027, followed by another total solar eclipse in Leo on August 2, 2027, this one crossing Egypt and lasting close to six minutes.

The season closes on a gentler note. August 17, Venus sextiles Jupiter, the two benefics landing in an easy, generous aspect, a good day to lean into reconciliation or generosity after whatever the eclipse stirred up.

The seasonal whole

Mercury clears its Cancer retrograde right as the season opens. The nodes shift into place on July 26, setting up a Full Moon and cazimi three days later. The season moves through influence, retreat, quiet leadership, and reaching for understanding without needing all the answers yet, with Lughnasadh asking us to bring in the first harvest along the way. Mars slips into a more protective Cancer just before the total solar eclipse in Leo on August 12, and the season closes with an easier note between Venus and Jupiter on the 17th.

“The next big thing is a whole bunch of small things.”

So rather than waiting on some single big reveal, this feels like a season for being a leader within your own direct community, for tending your own hearth honestly. Don’t let the South Node and Jupiter cancel each other out in your mind, they’re different energies. We get to choose which parts of Leo to keep and which parts to release with this eclipse.

May your Leo season be filled with warmth, with hearth energy, and with honesty about what you actually want to bring to the table as a leader within this new era.

All my love, Alison

About Me

I’m Alison Dale. You can find me at hearthandspiral.com where I offer astrology and Human Design readings, including Soulshine Readings that look at your astrology and Human Design together, your timing, and what’s asking to move in your world right now. I also have the Mandala 64 Walk on Substack at livingthespiral.com, where I walk the 64 Human Design gates in real time with written posts and somatic prompts delivered to your inbox.

If you’re listening out in the world of Apple or Spotify, a review or a star rating goes such a long way. And if you’d like to receive this podcast in your inbox, subscribe at livingthespiral.com.

If you want a deeper look at how this season will show up in your personal chart, her books are open at hearthandspiral.com.

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Thanks for being here!

Hey y’all,

How did Gate 62: DETAILS land for you over the past week? Did the right words show up at the right moment, or did the facts pile up faster than you could name them?

Today, July 19, as the Sun crosses into Gate 56: The Wanderer, (the last gate of Cancer and the first gate of Leo season), the sky closes into the shape it has been building toward for years.

This week, the Barbault Basket reaches its peak, with Jupiter at 4 degrees of Leo, Pluto at 4 degrees of Aquarius, Neptune at 4 degrees of Aries, and Uranus at 4 degrees of Gemini, four planets all holding the same degree of their signs through the 22nd. And for a few hours today, the basket becomes a six-pointed star. The Moon passes through 4 degrees of Libra and the little asteroid Sauer holds 4 degrees of Sagittarius, and the cradle briefly seals into a Star of David. I wrote about the whole configuration in depth last week, so if you want the full story of the womb the sky is carrying, start there:

Today, what I want to sit with is the timing. Every point of that basket is held by a slow moving celestial body parked at its degree. The geometry is fairly fixed, for a time. The body moving through more quickly is the Sun (headed for it’s Jupiter cazimi on July 29th) and the Sun spends this exact window of time walking through the gate of the Wanderer… aka the stimulating storyteller.

That feels like instruction to me. A configuration like this doesn’t come with its meaning attached or spelled out for us. It arrives as raw frequency, and then us human beings do what we have always done with the sky: tell a story about it.

Gate 56 is the voice that says “I believe.” It’s the gate that takes raw experience and threads it into meaning-making so it can be carried and passed on. So while the outer planets hold the womb of a new era in place, the Sun is lighting up the very faculty that will decide what that era means. The basket is drawn, and the story about the basket is still being written, and of course,, we are the ones writing it.

The basket itself already knows this about us. Riding along with Neptune at 4 Aries is Borasisi, the Kuiper belt body named for Vonnegut’s sun god of comforting lies. The patron deity of beautiful untruths is sitting inside the cradle, which means the new world arrives already wrapped in narratives, and some of them will be sold to us rather than lived by us.

This is where the Gene Keys progression of Gate 56 becomes a practice for the week ahead. The shadow is distraction, where meaning gets consumed like doomscrolled content, one babbing story after another with nothing digested or integrated. The gift is enrichment, where meaning gets made slowly, from experience that has been fully felt first (think of cancer moving into leo- the lion moves out to pride rock to tell the story of what the crab felt deep inside the shell). The week of the basket is asking us to be that second kind of storyteller.

And there’s a direction to the Sun’s walk. Gate 56 carries it out of Cancer, into Leo, and straight toward 4 degrees of Leo, the seat Jupiter is holding at the top of the basket. That degree lives in Gate 31, the gate of Influence, where a story stops being just entertainment and starts gathering people behind it. The storytelling sun this week is walking toward the leader’s chair, where it will meet Jupiter. So whatever tale you find yourself telling this week about who you are and what this turning means, tell it with care. By next week, it starts to wield more influence.

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Gate 56 (The Storyteller, The Wanderer, Stimulation): The Story

Gate 56 lives in the Throat Center, and it is all about the drive to tell stories. Last week Gate 62 gathered the facts and named them precisely, and now Gate 56 picks those facts up and threads them onto a string of meaning. This is the storyteller’s gate, the part of us that can’t leave an experience alone until it has been shaped into something that can be passed from one mouth to another ear. 62 wanted accuracy, and now 56 wants resonance. It will happily bend a detail if the bending makes the story land deeper in the listener’s body.

The image for this hexagram is fire moving across a mountainside. A fire on a mountain can’t settle anywhere. It burns through the grass it finds, and then it has to keep moving toward the next fuel. That’s the wanderer: a traveler who stays long enough to gather the story of a place and then feels the pull of the next horizon. The I’Ching counsels the traveler to stay modest and adaptable, because a wanderer who acts like they own the mountain gets burned by it.

In the Gene Keys, the shadow is distraction, which is the restless hunger for the next hit of stimulation. This is the frequency of the endless scroll, the next trip planned before the last one has been digested. The gift is enrichment, which is what happens when your senses slow down enough to taste what’s already here. And the siddhi is intoxication, which here ia a state of being so drunk on ordinary existence that the seeking stops entirely, because every moment already holds the whole feast.

So over Cancer season, Gate 39 got provoked, Gate 53 planted new seeds, Gate 62 read the fine print, and now Gate 56 sits down by the fire and turns the whole journey into a tale.

Gate 56 in the Body

Gate 56 lives in the Throat Center, at the front of the neck, home of the thyroid and parathyroid glands. This is our second week of the sun’s energy running in the Throat- Gate 62 was the voice that says “I think,” and Gate 56 is the voice that says “I believe.” This gate doesn’t report facts, it shares beliefs, and it does that through story, metaphor, and the well-timed exaggeration. It belongs to the collective abstract circuit, the part of the bodygraph that makes sense of life by reflecting on experience after it has happened, which is why this gate teaches best in past tense. The story only becomes nourishing once the experience is over and has had time to compost.

Held without conscious awareness, this energy turns the throat into an entertainment machine. This is te compulsive raconteur who can’t stop performing, the voice that gets louder and faster as the room’s attention drifts. The person who leaves a gathering hoarse and strangely empty. The nervous system pays for chronic stimulation-seeking too, running on novelty the way a fire runs on kindling, bright and quick… and gone. Met with awareness, this becomes the storyteller whose tales help a whole room digest its own life, or the friend whose account of their hard year somehow makes your hard year make sense.

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Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We’re in the fifth gate of the Mountain seasonn, the stretch of 8 hexagrams that began at the solstice with Gate 15. Water pressed against the mountain in 39, Wind reshaped it in 53, Thunder rolled over it in 62, and now Fire crosses it in 56. Fire is the trigram of clarity and clinging. On a mountain it can’t cling to anything for long, so this is the one hexagram in the quarter where the mountain’s stillness meets an energy that refuses to stay. This gate also carries the Sun across a threshold: partway through the transit, on July 22, the Sun leaves Cancer and enters Leo, so the wanderer walks us from the water sign of home into the fire sign of the heart.

The Sun steps in on the very day the Basket peaks and the Star of David seals, which I’ve written about up top. Then in the final days of the transit, on July 23, Mercury finally stations direct in Cancer, and our minds get to move forward again, right as the storyteller finishes her tale.

Channel: Gate 56 completes its channel with Sagittarius Gate 11, the Gate of Ideas, in the Ajna. Together they form the Channel of Curiosity, the Design of a Searcher. Gate 11 generates the ideas and images, a constant stream of pictures about what life could mean, and Gate 56 gives those pictures a voice and an audience. Without 56, the ideas stay locked in the mind as private philosophy. Without 11, the storyteller runs out of material and starts recycling. Like last week’s channel, this one is projected, so its stories land deepest when someone has asked to hear them.

Polarity: The complementary gate across the wheel on the Capricorn/Aquarius cusp is Gate 60, the Gate of Acceptance, down in the Root Center. While the Sun moves through 56 this week, the Earth sits in 60. In the I’Ching, Gate 60 is Limitation, Water over Lake, and just like last week’s pair, these two hexagrams are exact opposites, every single line reversed.

The wanderer wants the open waters, and 60 holds the banks that make the lake possible at all. A journey with no limits is drifting, and a limit with no journey is a cage. The story needs a form to pour into, and the wanderer needs a home to leave and to return to.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 56

Stand up if you’re able, and begin to walk slowly around your room, your porch, or your garden. As you walk, narrate out loud what your senses find, in plain spoken words. The warm board under your left foot, the smell of rain coming, the sound of the AC kicking on. Let the voice stay soft and unhurried… you are a traveler taking notes. Notice any urge to make the narration more interesting than what’s in front of you, and let that urge pass without following it.

After a few minutes, stop walking and close your mouth. Let one sensation come to you without any words attached to it at all. Stay with it for three slow breaths. Feel the difference between the narrated world and the felt one, and notice which one leaves you fuller. That gap between the story and the sensation is where this gate does its deepest work.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a story from your life that you’ve told so many times it has gone smooth as a river stone. Tell it again on the page, and this time include one detail you always leave out. Notice what the polished version has been protecting, and let the writing follow that thread down.

Draw or paint a fire moving across a mountainside at dusk, with the burned ground dark behind it and the unburned grass waiting ahead.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 56 card and sit with both sides. Notice whether you’re seeking stimulation or savoring enrichment this week around a particular topic or situation in your life. Let your hand move from there.

Next up: Gate 31 · Influence, aka the Alpha. The last gate of the Mountain quarter, where the stories we’ve been telling start to gather followers, and the voice learns to say “I lead.” And yes, that’s Jupiter’s seat in the basket. We’re headed straight for it.

Would you rather have the journey or the map?

See you soon,

Alison

Get your Mandala 64 Human Design deck:

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

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And, if your curious about what gates light up your chart, book a reading with me to get the deep dive!

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Love yas! Let me know how y’all are feelin this week in the comments!

xo

Alison

You have probably seen the headlines by now. The world we know ends in July. The most important transit of the century. A new era begins. Most of them trace back to that one sentence, written by a man who died in October 2019, three months before the pandemic he had predicted arrived right on schedule.

I want to take Barbault seriously, because he definitely earned it. And I also want to ask the question hiding inside his most famous sentence. “Splendid” for whom?

The man who did the math

Barbault was no crystal ball mystic. He was a mundane astrologer, which means he studied nations and centuries instead of individual charts, and his main tool was mathematics. Building on a method developed by Henri Gouchon in the 1930s, he tracked what he called the cyclic index: take the five slowest planets, Jupiter through Pluto, measure the angular distance between every possible pairing of them, and add the numbers together. That gives you a single figure for any date in history. When the number is low, the outer planets are bunched together on one side of the sky. When it is high, they are spread out.

Then he laid that curve over the historical record. The low points lined up with the Black Death, the Great Plague of London, the Spanish Flu, and the two world wars. In his 1967 book he pointed decades ahead to 1989, when Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would pile up in Capricorn, as a hinge for the century. The Berlin Wall came down that November. In 2011 he wrote that the next deep trough of the index, arriving in 2020 to 2021, would very possibly bring a pandemic. He named the word. He named the year.

So when the same man, running the same math, called July 2026 “the most benefic configuration of the century” and predicted a splendid relaunch, people who track his work paid close attention. The index bottomed out in the early 2020s right on time for Covid, and it is climbing now. The crest of that climb is coming- this week, from July 19th-22nd.

What is happening up there

The main picture of the outer planetary dance is much bigger than one week in July, but July is activating it in a powerful way. This is the part I most want you to understand.

Uranus in Gemini is trine Pluto in Aquarius, and both of them are sextile Neptune in Aries. Many astrologers are calling it the magic triangle, a mini grand trine among the three slowest bodies in the sky, and it is anything but fleeting. This triangle holds through 2028. Uranus and Pluto alone will perfect their trine five times over these two years, and the sky does not snap “back to normal” on July 23.

If the basket is a moment, the triangle is the climate that moment lives inside. It’s a multi-year structure that is the harmonic reply to the tense Uranus-Pluto squares that happened between 2012 and 2015. The planets that gave us Occupy and the Arab Spring have now returned to a flow state instead of being steeped in friction.

The big trine between Uranus and Pluto here means that the great disruptor and the lord of the underworld are getting along famously. Whatever is breaking down and whatever is breaking through have stopped fighting each other. And that is the cosmic climate until at least 2028.

But this week, July 19 through 22, is when the weather peaks. Jupiter just entered Leo on June 30, and it settles in at 4 degrees of Leo to close the triangle into a full basket on July 19. From the 19-22, the sky’s vessel-shaped lineup looks like this:

• Pluto (conjunct the asteroid Juno) at 4 Aquarius

• Neptune (conjunct the asteroid Borasisi) at 4 Aries

• Uranus at 4 Gemini

• Jupiter at 4 Leo

Four planets at four degrees over about four days. Jupiter is opposing Pluto across the middle while sextiles and trines curve beneath them. On a chart the shape looks like a cradle, or a basket.

Asteroids in the basket

Those two conjunctions between Pluto/Juno and Neptune/Borasisi deserve a closer look, because they change the guest list. Credit where it is due: astrologer Ingrid at Clan Mother Worldwide is the one who ran the basket with the asteroids in, and once I saw her version I couldn’t unsee it.

Borasisi, conjunct Neptune this month, is a small Kuiper belt world named after the sun god of Bokononism, the invented religion in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Bokononism is a faith built entirely on foma: the comforting lies that make life bearable. So inside a configuration many astrologers are calling the Cradle, the god from Cat’s Cradle is conjunct Neptune, the planet of fog and collective dream. You could not commission a better warning label. Whatever glorious story gets told about the new era this month, it arrives with the patron deity of beautiful untruths sitting right on top of it.

And Juno is conjunct Pluto. Juno is Hera, the wife of Jupiter/Zeus. She is the keeper of vows and contracts, and the goddess who knows exactly what her husband has been up to. On July 19, she is standing in Hades’ corner, directly opposite Jupiter/Zeus on wheel. On the peak of exactness of Barbault’s basket, she is on Hades’ side of the table with the marriage contract in her hand.

One more flicker worth knowing about. For a short window on July 19, the basket briefly becomes a Star of David.

The Moon passes through 4 Libra while the asteroid Sauer sits at 4 Sagittarius, and for a few hours the cradle closes into a six-pointed star of celestial bodies all at 4 degrees Air and Fire. Two interlocking grand trines with three oppositions running through the center.

I believe that the asteroid Sauer is worth pausing on. The asteroid is named for Carl G. Sauer, a flight dynamics engineer who spent his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculating spacecraft trajectories. Astrologer Eric Francis has tracked this asteroid for years and reads it as the signature of engineering, of carefully planned trajectories, and of events that unfold the way they do because somebody designed them to.

In the July 19th 6-pointed star, Sauer is in Sagittarius in direct opposition to Uranus, and stays within orb until September. During this time, the planner of trajectories faces off with the one planet that cannot be planned for. Inside the brief but perfect star, that is the live tension: is this new era being engineered from above, or is it about to slip the flight plan entirely?

Hold that question…. I’ll come back to it.

When the star closes, it is two triangles interlocked, a grand trine in fire and a grand trine in air, and that is the elemental signature of the whole era, since Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune will all be traveling in air and fire signs for many years to come. The sky's deep weather now runs on spark and wind, on vision and voice, which leaves earth and water, the elements of body and feeling, out of the outer planets' hands entirely.

The boardroom of the sky

Asteroids aside, let’s look at the main planetary players in the basket. Jupiter is Zeus. Uranus is Ouranos, the primordial sky. Neptune is Poseidon. Pluto is Hades. Every one of the big daddies of the sky/sea/underworld, harmonizing at the same degree at the same time.

There is a real case that this could mean good news. When the old powers stop grinding against each other, things get built. Treaties get signed, infrastructure goes up. Barbault himself imagined the relaunch reaching the people at the bottom, envisioning a rising standard of living for the poor and a victory over misery won through solidarity. Harmony among the gods can mean peace in the village.

It could also mean the powers-that-be have finished arguing with each other and reached an agreement about the rest of us.

And if that’s the case, here is where the sky gets almost too literal. In June, a data leak exposed the membership of Dialog, a secret society co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2006. This is twenty years of off-the-record retreats where senators, treasury secretaries, generals, and tech billionaires meet to discuss things like AI disruption “How to Prepare for WWIII” and, per one leaked session title, how fun it is to be in charge.

The sky daddies and their devotees have been harmonizing behind closed doors for a while. What changed is that we can see them now, which is very Uranus in Gemini of the universe.

And the date planned for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, the one revealed in the leak? The one that has now been cancelled by the venue due to public backlash?

August 12-16, outside Dublin.

Hold that date- August 12th. It’s the first solar eclipse on the Leo/Aquarius axis. he sky has big plans for it too.

The gates of the basket

By looking at the Human Design gates of the Barbault basket configuration, the picture becomes more specific. Those four planets at 4 degrees each land in a particular energetic frequency, and the gates give some deeper clues about what kind of machine the basket is.

1. Pluto, lord of the underworld, is in Gate 41, the Gate of Contraction, until December 2028. Gate 41 is the only gate of the 64 that is correlated with the genetic start codon. It is also the first gate of the Human Design year, the beginning of a new cycle. 41 lives in the Root center as pure initiating pressure, the hunger for a new form of experience.

   Its gift is anticipation, like an expectant mother experiencing contractions and anticipating a new life to arrive. Its shadow is fantasy, the story of the new world that you believe blindly, before anyone has had a chance to live it. Pluto exposes the shadowy basement, the dank soil that nobody has reached into for a while. That is where the riches are buried. It’s also where you’re going to have to get a little dirty to find them. Pluto in the start codon means the new cycle does not begin in the light. It begins underground, in the compost, and whatever is born of this pressure will come up with the silt still on it. And Juno stands right here beside him, the keeper of vows and contracts pressed into the start codon, which tells you the new cycle opens with the terms of the old agreement on the table. Whatever begins here begins as a renegotiation.

Pluto sextiles Neptune….

2. Neptune is in Gate 17, the Gate of Opinions, until May 2029 (with retrogrades back into Gate 25, the Gate of Innocence). Gate 17 is in the Ajna/3rd eye center, where the mind forms an insightful vision of where everything is going. Its gift is far-sightedness, which is the real ability to see the larger pattern from a birds eye view. Its shadow is opinion, ideology mistaken for truth. Now consider what Neptune does. Neptune dissolves the boundary between what you see and what you wish were there, and it makes whatever it touches feel true in the body before the mind has checked a single fact. Park that planet in the Gate of Opinions (with asteroid Borasisi, the god of comforting lies riding along) and the sky is being extremely clear about where the failure mode lives. Neptune in Gate 17 is the vision that could carry a civilization, and it is also the fog that gets mistaken for one. From the inside the two can feel identical.

Neptune sextiles Uranus…

3. Uranus is in Gate 20, the Gate of the Now, until June 2027, a year from now. Gate 20 is a gate of the Throat, embodying the voice of pure presence. This is the only individual gate in the whole configuration, a gate that quotes Ram Dass: Be here, now. Its gift is self-assurance. Its shadow is superficiality, all announcement and no substance. Uranus is lightning, the awakener, the future arriving before anyone scheduled it, and it can only ever strike in the present tense. In Gemini, the sign of media and information, Uranus in this gate describes the world we are already living in, where everything announces itself instantly and the feed never stops saying now. Uranus in Gate 20 is either genuine awakening speaking in real time or an endless scroll of hot takes, and the difference comes down to whether there is anything standing behind the voice.

and to complete the basket, Uranus sextiles Jupiter…

4. Jupiter is in Gate 31, the Gate of Influence- from July 8 to August 2 of this year. Gate 31 is also in the Throat center, and represents the voice of leadership, the alpha who speaks for the collective. Its gift is leadership that has been chosen by the people it serves. Its shadow is arrogance, the leader who elected himself. And Jupiter is Zeus, the sky king, the great amplifier. In Leo, in this gate, he is wearing his own crown while he does it. Whatever voice occupies this gate right now gets handed the biggest microphone in the sky and a royal costume to go with it. Jupiter in Gate 31 will make someone’s leadership enormous this season - and the question that matters is whether the people being led ever did any choosing, and whose hands the microphone will be in as the summer progresses.

Read from bottom to top, Barbault’s basket is a single breath. Contractive pressure to begin something brand new, a far-sighted dream of the future, an electric and liberatory voice in the present moment, and a voice of influence ready to announce the new era from across the table. That is either the anatomy of a renaissance or the anatomy of a propagandist press release - and the gates hold both frequencies at once.

And what decides between them is which one we feed.

One more thing is worth noticing here, as it relates to the body. Among the planets in the basket there is a Root gate, an Ajna gate, and two Throat gates in this machine. There is no Sacral. The center of life force, fertility, and the energy that grows things is missing from the basket entirely. The single exception is that short time on July 19, when Sauer passes through Gate 34: Power. The sacral seat of raw power is occupied by the asteroid representing an engineered plan. Then the seat empties again.

Which brings us to the hole.

The hole in the basket

Chiron, the wounded healer asteroid that we all know and love, left Aries after 8 years and crossed into Taurus this June. He now sits at the very first degrees of the sign of the bull, and will stay there throughout the Barbault basket window.

Some astrologers, like Hummingbird Star of Collapse Astrology, are calling Chiron “the hole in the basket”, and the framing is apt. Chiron was only discovered in 1977, so it was never part of Barbault’s math. His index literally couldn’t see it, so the planetoid that sits between Jupiter and Saturn is left out. And the wound is the blind spot of the model.

To see why, let’s look at where the wounded healer sits within all this. The first degrees of Taurus fall in Gate 3, the gate of Ordering emerging out of raw chaos. The gate of new beginnings struggling to take root, the seed under the soil that may or may not make it.

In the bodygraph, Gate 3 lives in the Sacral, the center the basket is missing. Taurus is earth: soil, food, material resources, and the body itself. So while the big daddy gods harmonize about pressure and vision and voice, the wound of the whole configuration sits in the earth, in the place where things either grow or they don’t. Any relaunch of civilization that cannot answer for the soil, the food, and the body has a hole in it… and the hole is load-bearing.

…unless it was never a hole

Let’s look at the shape one more time. Four gods- Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter form a curve, a vessel, a cradle. And something small and tender sits at the center of the open bowl - Chiron in Taurus, in the gate of the seed. There is an old and obvious name for a vessel carrying a vulnerable new life at its middle. And once I saw it I could not go back to calling it a hole. The basket is a womb. Chiron is what it is carrying.

The chart supports this reading almost embarrassingly well. Pluto’s gate, remember, is Gate 41, the Gate of Contraction, whose gift is the anticipation of an expectant mother. And Juno, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, is right there with him. The sky put the underworld god and the goddess of childbirth in the gate of labor pains at the exact moment a wounded seed settled into the belly of the configuration.

And Chiron is no passive passenger in there. From early Taurus he squares Pluto on one side and the Leo seat on the other, sitting at the apex of a T-square with the whole Jupiter-Pluto opposition funneling into him. A square is friction, and friction is how resolution gets made. Chiron in the middle is the center point of the conversation, the one asking the big gods to explain their positions, the pressure that turns a summit into labor. Whoever occupies the Leo seat- Jupiter now, Mercury at the eclipse, and other fast-moving planet after them - has to answer to the wound in the body of the earth before anything gets born.

Then there is the subliminal part. Chiron makes no major aspect to Uranus or Neptune at all. He sits one sign away from each of them, Aries on one side and Gemini on the other, a relation that traditional astrologers called aversion. Uranus and Neptune cannot see Chiron. But he works on them anyway, underneath awareness, the way a pregnancy works on a body, changing everything without ever announcing itself or needing to be visible.

Here’s something I find fascinating- something in the collective body seems to know. All summer, women have been comparing notes in group chats and comment sections online about cycles gone strange, periods skipped, periods doubled, their bodies timing thrown off schedule. The explanations on offer run from heat waves to collective stress to the wilder and lovelier idea that cycles are syncing up around the world. I am not going to adjudicate that here. I will only say that in the summer the sky formed a womb, an unusual number of wombs appear to be recalibrating, and our bodies do tend to get the memo before our minds do.

So here is my over-under on the whole era, reading the gates. The great gods of the sky, sea, and land are holding a convention that spans several years, and they are being visited in shifts - by the Moon, by the goddesses, by the quick-moving personal planets, and by a stream of asteroids, each visitor closing the vessel for a while and adding its take to the record.

At this point in the essay, I’d like to soften something I said earlier, because it changes the reading. These gods are not men. They are not Thiel or Musk or Trump or Netanyahu, although these men would like to think they are gods. No, the gods hosting this convention are powerful ancestral rememberances of the sky, the deep sky, the sea, and the underworld- gods that trace their lineage back long before men tried to become them. They are the primal domains of creation themselves coming into harmony. Men in boardrooms will surely try to ride the weather, and some of them have the retreat already booked, thinking they can control it. But the weather itself is much older and larger than they are, and this season they are not piled on top of eachother causing chaos.

They are shaped like a perfect vessel with new, vulnerable, earthly life inside.

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What did Barbault mean by splendid?

I read an article the other day that made a point about this Barbault’s basket hype that I have not been able to shake. Samira Bechara of Critical Astrology wrote about the man behind the name we’ve all come to know, reporting that Barbault was misogynistic and womanizing, as well as a vocal supporter of a genocide-enabling war criminal.

She writes:
The point here is not to deny Barbault’s research nor the very real predictions he made, but rather to think critically about what exactly those predictions were in the context of his worldview, what that means about what we should be expecting, and how we should be navigating a world in which we recognize the harmful ideologies held by persons in positions of influence in our community.

When someone announces the most splendid time ever is here, you have to ask what splendid meant to that particular someone. Barbault was a brilliant man of his century, and by most accounts a deeply patriarchal one. His “splendid” may well have looked like exactly what one version of the July chart shows: the old gods, the fathers, at peace with one another, presiding over an orderly and productive world. Harmony at the top levels, but not so much on the ground, or for the marginalized.

A prediction is always also a portrait of the person making it. The math may be sound while the adjective is his.

So here is my honest read of the Barbault Basket. It is real, it is rare, and it describes harmony between the old gods, for better or for worse. Whether that harmony becomes solidarity and a more beautiful world for us all or becomes a very well-organized boardroom that relies on the subjugation of those at the bottom of the pyramid depends on what enters the picture next.

… and, lucky for us, something does enter the picture next.

August 12: the goddesses arrive

On August 12 there is a total solar eclipse in Leo, the sign of the king, the first on the Leo-Aquarius axis that will be active for the next 18 months. It is a south node eclipse, which makes it an eclipse of release, of flushing, of shedding, and it lands in Gate 4, the Gate of Formulization. This is the Ajna gate where the mind stores its formulas and answers. The lights dim briefly over the king’s own sign, right at the gate where the old answers are stored. The invitation for this eclipse is straightforward: shed the formulas we inherited about how power works and who gets to hold it, because whatever is being born will not run on them.

Around this eclipse, for a couple of days the basket-vessel-womb reactivates with new personnel. This one is a brief window, open only while Venus holds her orb, which makes it less of a season and more of an appointment. Mercury, the messenger between the gods and humans, takes Jupiter’s seat in Leo in the opposition to Pluto in Aquarius. Jupiter still stands within orb behind him. Neptune and Uranus hold their corners. And then, Venus arrives at 5 Libra and turns the basket into a five-pointed star.

Then it gets better. On the morning of the eclipse, the asteroid Ishtar, the Babylonian face of the goddess of the earth and sky, Inanna, crosses out of Scorpio into Sagittarius and joins Sauer there. On August 12th, we’ll again have six points, evenly spaced around the whole wheel: Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Mercury with Jupiter, Venus, and Ishtar with Sauer. A grand sextile, lingering longer than the last fleeting one on July 19th. This is the rarest of the harmonic patterns, a closed circuit where every point feeds every other, formed on the day of the eclipse by Venus and the underworld queen taking their seats at the table.

And here’s the secret: Venus and Ishtar are one and the same goddess, the planet and the asteroid carrying her newest and oldest names, Inanna of Sumer who became Ishtar of Babylon who became the Venus of Rome, which means the queen of heaven herself holds two of the six seats.

Now recall the flicker of July 19, when the Moon at 4 Libra and Sauer at 4 Sagittarius closed the basket into a 6-pointed star for a few hours. Those two points where the star is completed fall in Gate 18: Correction and Gate 34: Power.

On August 12, Venus stands in Gate 18 and Ishtar enters Gate 34. The August star redraws the July star point for point, in the exact same gates… and look at who holds which seat. The Moon’s chair goes to Venus. Venus lights up Libra Gate 18, the Gate of Correction. Here, she is the one that sees what has been spoilt in relationship and repairs it. This gate is seated in the Spleen, the body’s oldest intelligence. Keywords for Venus here are healing, wholeness, and clearly seeing.

And Ishtar joins Sauer, the flight engineer, who is still sitting at 5 degrees Sagittarius when Ishtar walks in. So for a few weeks the symbol of a planned trajectory and the goddess who descended into the underworld to find her true power are sharing the same gate. Gate 34, the gate of raw Power, lighting up the Sacral center. Ishtar is the goddess who descended, was stripped of everything, hung on the hook, and came back up changed. She was no longer covered in garments of false authority, but sovereign in her true, unadulterated power. This is the energy she’s bringing to the conversation.

And Hestia, the hearth goddess (known as Vesta in Rome), spends this eclipse period conjunct Chiron in Taurus, the focal seed of the womb. They are squaring Pluto on one side and Mercury on the other. Hestia is the goddess who gave up her Olympian throne to tend to the fire. On eclipse day she sits down inside the wound of the whole configuration, in Gate 3, the gate of what struggles to grow, and she makes hard angles to the lord of the underworld and the messenger between worlds. She is under no obligation to harmonize. The keeper of the hearth interrupts the boardroom to tend the flame of the wounded healer ( note that this is happening on the exact day Thiel’s boardroom was set to convene in Ireland….!)

The goddesses do not crash the party in August, necessarily. They simply were never absent. Juno sat beside Hades through the whole July summit with the contract in her lap, the Moon flickered the star into being for a few hours on the 19th, and then on eclipse day Venus, Ishtar, and Hestia come to take their places in seats of Correction, Power, and Ordering to bring their embodied wisdom to the table.

The July basket is the old gods coming into harmony, out in the open at last. The August star is the goddesses of childbirth, value, descent, correction, and the hearth completing the circle around them.

Whatever civilization is relaunching, it will not be launched by the fathers alone.

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The womb keeps quickening

Because the triangle of Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune holds through 2028, drifting slowly forward through the early and middle degrees of Gemini, Aquarius, and Aries, the fourth seat of the basket-womb keeps getting filled by different faster moving bodies. Every time an inner planet or luminary reaches exact opposition to Pluto from Leo, the vessel closes again (within orb, if not exact) and the womb quickens. I ran the ephemeris against Pluto’s actual drifting position, and here is the calendar of closings:

• July 20, 2026 - Jupiter closes the vessel. The OG Barbault Basket itself.

• July 27, 2026 - the Sun takes the seat one week later, the first solar closing of the era.

• August 12, 2026 - Mercury closes the basket, exact to the degree on the morning of the eclipse, while goddess energy of Venus and Ishtar complete the 6-pointed star.

• October 5, 2026 - Mars arrives to oppose Pluto, the first raw motor to close the vessel, and worth watching for that reason.

• July 29 through August 5, 2027 - a full procession- definitely a week to watch! The Sun closes the vessel on July 29, Venus follows on August 1, and Mercury on August 5. Three closings in a single week.

• July 27 and 29, 2028 - Mercury and then the Sun, two days apart.

• September 12 and 15, 2028 - Venus and Mars cross the seat within three days of each other, the lovers closing the vessel nearly hand in hand as the triangle era winds down. By this point, Uranus is at 14 degrees of Gemini, so the outer planet triangle is moving apart, marking the end of the era.

Two things in that calendar are worth underlining. Venus never takes the Leo seat at all in the first year. Her 2026 contribution comes from Libra, the 5th star point, and her first turn in the Leo basket seat itself arrives August 1, 2027, then again beside Mars in September 2028.

And every single one of these closings, from Jupiter’s in July of this year to Mars’s in 2028, lands in Gate 31, the Gate of Influence. The seat never leaves the leadership gate. For three years, whoever closes the vessel does it through the voice that speaks for the collective. So the standing question of the era is the one Gate 31 always asks, which is whether the people being led did any choosing.

And Ishtar, once she steps into Gate 34 on eclipse morning, holds the Gate of Power through this September. However long her stay runs, the point stands strong. The seat of power that the engineer held all summer passes to the Venusian goddess of Earth and Sky walking behind him.

What Splendid really means remains to be seen. The circle, at least, will be whole, and the vessel is carrying something powerful.

Where all of this lands for you personally

I have been staring at these charts for months… because they have been staring back at me in a potent way.

Transiting Uranus in Gate 20 is sitting on my natal Chiron in Gemini. The Leo seat, Gate 31, holds both my rising sign and my design Venus. The Libra point is conjunct my natal Moon. And the Sagittarius seat that Sauer rockets through and Ishtar claims on eclipse day, Gate 34, is exactly where my natal Uranus and Jupiter live, which makes the August 12 eclipse/6 pointed star day the EXACT day of my Uranus opposition. Almosst every visiting seat in the star is furnished with something of mine.

The reason I share this is because this is how mundane astrology works. The collective weather always arrives through somebody’s window, and knowing which window is yours changes how you meet it.

A configuration this size is likely touching your chart somewhere important, through some degree, some gate, and some room of your life. For me, the whole womb bearing a new era is lighting up my natal energies. I’ll be reporting from the front lines!

If you’d like to know how this once-in-a-lifetime, world-changing astrology is lighting up your chart, book a reading and we will find your window into the convention of the gods & goddesses together. I’m offering them at half off my normal rate through July, and would be honored and so excited to dive into this powerful time’s astrology with you.

Book a Reading: Barbault Basket

If this piece landed for you, share it with someone who has been seeing the July astro-headlines and wondering what might materialize! It’s still TBD, of course, but I hope this has given some additional context and things to ponder.

And if you want to walk the gates with me week by week, the Mandala 64 Walk is free to join.

Thanks for being here!

Hey y’all,

How did Gate 53: BEGINNINGS land for you over the past week? Did anything new start pushing up through the soil, ready or not?

Drop a note in the comments or the chat and let me know what got planted!

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In the I’Ching, Gate 62 is Thunder over Mountain, or Preponderance of the Small.

We’re still in the summer stretch where every hexagram carries Mountain as its lower trigram, the largeness of everything above ground, and this week the sky over the mountain makes some noise.

Gate 62: The Story

Gate 62 lives in the Throat Center, and it holds the drive to name things. This is the gate of language itself, the impulse to take what has been seen or felt and pin it down in words precise enough that someone else could pick them up and use them. After two weeks of Root Center pressure, first the provoking of Gate 39 and then the fresh starts of Gate 53, the walk now arrives at the Throat, where all of that stirred-up energy finally gets to say something about itself.

An image for this hexagram is a small bird flying low over a mountain. The old text says it plainly: small things may be done, great things should not be done, and it is well to remain below. The bird that stays close to the ridgeline arrives safely, while the one that soars too high gets lost in the wind. This is a gate that trusts the modest gesture and the exact word over the sweeping statement.

The shadow in the Gene Keys is intellect, the habit of living inside explanation, where a feeling gets described so precisely that it never has to be felt. The gift level is precision, which is what happens when the details stop being armor and start being service, and the right words are offered at the right moment so that something complicated becomes usable. And the siddhi, impeccability, is language so clean that nothing extra clings to it, every word carrying exactly its own weight and no more.

Last week Gate 53 planted the seed, and Gate 62 reads the fine print on the seed packet. It wants to know what this beginning is made of, what it needs, and what to call it.

Gate 62 in the Body

Gate 62 lives in the Throat Center, located at the front of the neck, home to the thyroid and parathyroid glands. The Throat is the great hub of the bodygraph, the place every other center is ultimately trying to reach, because this is the center of expression and manifestation. Whatever moves through your inner life becomes word and action out in the world through here. Biologically it governs the thyroid, the gland that sets the tempo of your metabolism and decides how quickly your body transforms fuel into living.

Gate 62 is the voice that says “I think.” In the Human Design tradition this is the gate responsible for the creation of language itself, the naming and labeling faculty that turns raw experience into something that can be organized and taught. It’s also known as the inter-species gate, carrying a knack for communicating with animals through clear and structured signals, which anyone who has trained a dog with a consistent word and tone has felt firsthand.

Held without awareness, this energy can turn the throat into a fact machine, reciting details to prove competence or to fill a silence, and the body pays for it in a strained voice and a mind that won’t power down. Met with awareness, it becomes the quiet skill of saying the one thing that makes everything else make sense.

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Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We’re in the back half of Cancer season, still in the quarter that carries Mountain as its lower trigram, the same steady ground that held Gates 39 and 53. Gate 39 was Water pressing against the mountain and Gate 53 was Wind slowly reshaping it. Gate 62 is Thunder over Mountain, a huge sound rolling across the peak and then contained by it. Thunder usually gets to be enormous, but here the mountain holds it to a human scale, and that’s the whole teaching of this hexagram: big energy expressed through small, careful action.

The Sun didn’t cross into this gate empty-handed, either. On the evening of July 12, retrograde Mercury met the Sun in an exact cazimi at 20°42’ Cancer, which sits in the very last arc minutes of Gate 53, in its sixth and final line. Traditional astrologers describe a cazimi planet as seated in the heart of the Sun, washed clean in its light, so the mind got dipped in the fire of beginnings just hours before the Sun stepped into the week of details. Whatever flash of clarity came through on Sunday night is the raw material Gate 62 wants to name and organize now. Then the New Moon on July 14 lands right in Gate 62 itself, with Mercury still retrograde, so this whole window favors reviewing and reorganizing what’s already in your hands over launching anything new.

Channel: Gate 62 completes its channel with Aries Gate 17, the Gate of Opinions, in the Ajna. Together they form the Channel of Acceptance, sometimes called the Design of an Organizational Being. Gate 17 sees the pattern and forms the opinion, and Gate 62 gives that opinion its legs, the facts and the language that let other people test it for themselves. Without 62, an opinion floats untethered. Without 17, the details pile up with no structure to hold them. This is a projected channel, which means its clarity lands best when it has been invited.

Polarity: The complementary gate across the wheel in Capricorn is Gate 61, the Gate of Inner Truth, up in the Head Center. While the Sun moves through 62 this week, the Earth sits in 61, so this pair is fully lit right now. Gate 62 names what can be known and measured, and Gate 61 holds the mystery that can’t be. In the I’Ching these two hexagrams are exact opposites, every single line reversed, the outer fact and the inner knowing gazing at each other across the wheel. Facts with no mystery turn into pedantry, and mystery with no facts never quite lands in the world. Each one keeps the other honest.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 62

Bring one hand to the base of your throat, right where your collarbones meet, and let it rest there without pressing. This is the home of the thyroid, the gland that sets the pace of your whole metabolism, and the seat of Gate 62’s voice. Take a slow breath in through your nose, and on the exhale, hum. Keep it low and quiet, and notice where the vibration travels, whether it moves into your hand or up into your jaw.

When the hum fades, stay a moment in the silence after it. Then, out loud, name one small true thing about this exact moment. Something plain, like the temperature of the air or the weight of your hand on your chest. Notice what it feels like to say something simply and completely accurate, with nothing added to make it more impressive. That’s the frequency of this gate at its cleanest.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a time when someone’s exact words changed how you understood your own life. Then look at where you might be explaining something these days instead of feeling it, and let the writing move from the explanation down into the feeling.

Draw or paint a small bird flying low over a mountain ridge, close enough that its shadow touches the stone.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 62 card and sit with both sides. Notice whether the details in your life right now are serving as armor or as service, and let your hand move from there.

Next up: Gate 56 · Stimulation, aka the Wanderer. The details we’ve gathered this week are about to get spun into stories, and the storyteller is already clearing her throat.

Is the devil in the details or is god in the details?

See you soon,

Alison

Get your Mandala 64 Human Design deck:

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

And, if your curious about what gates light up your chart, book a reading with me to get the deep dive!

My Books Are Open

PS- Happy birthday season to all you Cancer ♋️ folks out there! The Gate of Details is the birthday gate of my partner Jackson, who has spent the last 9 months creating the most detailed and amazing astrocartography & human-design-cartography app that I could ever dream of. It’s in private beta now and launching to the public very soon- sign up for the waitlist at elamap.com!

(If it’s not your thing but you want to stay subscribed to my other work, you can unsubscribe from this section only using the link in the footer.)

Thanks for being here!

Hi Mandalav64 walkers… how did Gate 39: PROVOCATION show up in your world over the past 6 days, along with the Mars-Uranus conjunction on the 4th of July in Gate 20 (The Now)? It’s been pokey for me… drop a note in the comments or the chat to let me know how you’re feelin.

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Gate 53: The Story

Gate 53 lives in the Root Center, and it holds the pressure to start something. This is the gate of the baby in the womb pushing out before it knows what the world will bring, the pull toward something brand spankin’ new before there’s any proof it will take hold. It doesn’t ask whether the timing is perfect, it asks whether the beginning is honest.

The I’Ching name for this hexagram is Development, which is sometimes translated as Gradual Progress. The image is wind blowing over a mountain, knowing that the mountain will gradually change shape due to it’s gusts, but it won’t be possible to see the results in the moment.

The shadow in the Gene Keys is immaturity, the impulse to launch something out of fear or restlessness rather than readiness, or the opposite pull, staying frozen in the old thing because starting again feels unbearable. The gift level is expansion, which here is the willingness to grow past what’s familiar without needing to know exactly where it leads. And the siddhi, superabundance, is what happens when the seeking finally stops and life keeps producing new beginnings on its own, without anyone having to force a single one of them.

This gate sits in the Root center, the same pressure center that fed last week’s Gate of Provocation. But where Gate 39 discharges tension through friction and crab claws a-blazin, Gate 53 discharges it through initiation, striking while the iron’s hot. The question is whether the beginning is rooted in something real or whether it’s just pressure looking for the nearest exit.

Gate 53 in the Body

Gate 53 lives in the Root Center, located at the base of the spine, the perineum, and the adrenal glands. The Root is the lowest center in the bodygraph and one of the body’s primary pressure centers. It governs the adrenal system, the fight-or-flight response, and the raw momentum that pushes you forward whether you feel ready or not. Pressure from the Root builds, and it looks for release.

Gate 53 channels that pressure specifically toward beginnings, the urge to start a project, a relationship, or a whole new chapter before the ground underneath it has fully settled. Held without awareness, this can look like starting things compulsively and abandoning them just as fast, a trail of half-finished rooms and unopened boxes. Met with awareness, it becomes something closer to trust, the willingness to plant a seed without demanding to see the whole tree first.

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Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are deep in Cancer season, in the trigram quarter governed by Mountain as its lower trigram, the same steady ground that held the provoking Gate 39. Gate 39 was all about Water slowly pressing against that mountain, testing what was fixed, Gate 53 is Wind moving over it, a gentler and more patient force with starts and stops built in. Wind doesn’t crack stone through confrontation, it shapes a mountain slowly, over years, through steady contact. This is the energy of this particular beginning: not a rupture, but a long, unhurried unfolding.

Channel: Gate 53 completes its channel with Aries Gate 42, the Gate of Growth, in the Sacral. Together they form the Channel of Maturation, the cyclical energy of starting and finishing, planting and harvesting. Gate 53 starts the cycle; Gate 42 stays with it long enough to see it through. Without 42, a beginning from Gate 53 can scatter before it takes root. Without 53, Gate 42 has nothing new to grow.

Polarity: The complementary gate across the wheel in Capricorn is Gate 54, the Gate of Ambition, another Root Center gate. Gate 53 carries the pressure to start something new, and across the sky Gate 54 carries the pressure to rise, to climb, to transform a beginning into something with lasting standing in the world. Together they hold the same thing from two ends: the seed going into the ground, and the drive to see it grow into something that matters materially.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 53

Stand if you can, feet hip width apart, and bring your awareness down through your legs into the base of your spine, the same place you visited with Gate 39, the Root Center. The center that holds pressure before it knows exactly where to send it.

This time, instead of releasing the pressure outward, let it settle down into your feet. Imagine it moving into the ground like a root looking for soil. Take a slow breath in, and on the exhale, feel your weight drop half an inch through your heels. Notice if there’s an urge to rush, to already be somewhere past this moment. Let that urge exist without acting on it yet. A beginning that’s rooted doesn’t need to prove itself right away.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about something you started and abandoned before it had a real chance to grow. What was the pressure underneath that beginning, and what would it look like to start it again slower this time?

Draw or paint a seed just under the surface of the soil, roots already reaching down before any green has broken through.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 53 card and sit with both sides. Notice where in your life something new is asking to begin, and whether it’s ready or just restless.

Next up: Gate 62 · Details, aka the Preponderance of the Small. Time to get precise about what's actually in the fine print before any of this beginning gets away from itself.

xo, Alison

Get your Mandala 64 Human Design deck:

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

And, if your curious about what gates light up your chart, book a reading with me to get the deep dive!

My Books Are Open

How is the Gate of Beginnings feeling for you so far? I’m struck by how much pressure I feel to be further along in some parts of life than I am, but when I remember that this gate is activated, I feel a little more ok with the fact that we’re always beginning new chapters.

Let me know how you’re feeling in the comments. xoxo.

I’m trying something new here on Living the Spiral.

For years I’ve moved through forecasts of different shapes - weekly deep dives, then biweekly on the full and new moons, then monthly, always tracking the sun and planets through the signs, gates and seasons. That work isn’t going anywhere- it’s my foundation. But today I felt called to record without a plan, to speak from the hip instead of from research, and to let whatever wants to come through actually come through.

This is new for me in a specific way. I’m a 5/1 in human design, and that one line in my unconscious profile is about investigation, about laying a foundation before anything gets said out loud. I’ve spent years earning trust with myself by going deep before I speak. So sitting down to talk without that groundwork first is its own kind of edge. But as a self-projected projector, I need to speak out loud to know what I mean and what I desire. So it’s also, I think, exactly what today is asking of me.

Listen in the player above or find Living the Spiral wherever you listen to podcasts <3.

The Gate of the Now

It’s Friday, July 3rd as I record this, and we’re sitting inside the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, in Gate 20, the Gate of the Now. Mars and Uranus meet up roughly every two years, so the conjunction itself isn’t rare. What is rare is the sign. This is the first time this pairing has landed in Gemini in about 84 years, after about a decade of these conjunctions happening in Taurus. A new flavor of energy is moving through, and it’s arriving right as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t think that timing is incidental. The Fourth of July always falls when the sun is in the Gate of Provocation (39), whose gift is dynamism and whose siddhi is liberation. There’s no liberty without provoking or bringing attention to the thing that’s making you feel trapped.

The gate of Provocation is a Cancer gate, and I keep thinking of the crab: a creature built to withdraw into its shell, and also built with claws. Hiding isn’t the only option. Sometimes the claws come out because the shell alone won’t do the job anymore.

So we’ve got Uranus and Mars electrifying the present moment while the sun sits in the gate of Provocation, and the message underneath all of it feels pretty blunt: look around at where you believe yourself to be trapped, and take action. Shock the system a little. Move.

My own Chiron in this

My natal Chiron sits in the Gate of the Now, so this conjunction is landing directly on it. Chiron is the wound we hold that can eventually become the thing we teach from, once we’ve alchemized it. For me, this wound is about not feeling heard and not feeling fully seen by my community. Gemini rules communication and local networks, and this placement sits in my 11th house, the house of larger community and friendship groups, so having Uranus and Mars stir that up is landing in a very specific spot.

What I’m noticing under the provocation is a pattern I’ve built without meaning to. I tune myself down sometimes. I round off the complexity of what I actually think so that I’ll be easier to receive, softer to meet in the moment. And that habit, born out of wanting to be understood, ends up being the very thing that keeps me from being fully met.

A Chiron wound reopening tends to work that way. It doesn’t just point at the wound. It points at the strategy we built around the wound so we don’t feel it as intensely, and asks whether that strategy is still serving us. The pain can turn into medicine once it has an outlet.

This is where self-understanding becomes part of the medicine. I've spent years with astrology, human design, the gene keys, meditation, and deep reflection, and what they've shown me about my own wiring is specific.

The only channels active in my chart are collective understanding circuits, and my sun gate is Gate 64, the gate that alchemizes Confusion into Illumination. So much of my design leans toward the big picture, toward zooming way out across long stretches of time and pattern. So when my Chiron is met by Uranus and Mars in the Gate of the present moment, I feel real friction there.

For a long time I treated that friction as something wrong with me, something to smooth over or apologize for to my community. Now I hold it differently. It's information about how I'm built, and it lets me meet the now on my own terms instead of forcing myself into a shape of how the now should look that was never mine.

I think this is available to anyone doing this work with their own chart. Getting to know yourself this closely means you can choose your response instead of running the old strategy without noticing. And once that kind of self-knowledge starts to settle in, it stops feeling like a personal project, and starts feeling like part of something much bigger moving through all of us.

From tribal bargain to individual sovereignty

Zooming out, we’re approaching a much longer transition that ties into all this.

In 2027, the precession of the equinoxes moves the vernal point from Gate 37, the Gate of Family and Community, into Gate 55, the Gate of Spirit and Abundance. Gate 37 is a tribal gate. Gate 55 is an individual one. Ra Uru Hu is said to have brought human design through in part to help prepare people for this exact shift.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Tribal life runs on bargains. You give something, the group gives something back, and the whole structure depends on those trades holding. What I’m hearing from clients, and feeling in the wider culture, is that a lot of those bargains are starting to unravel, quietly failing. Institutions that promised protection in exchange for years of loyalty are backing out of the deal. Insurance companies drop coverage the moment it’s actually needed. Family systems built on the promise of safety in exchange for compliance stop delivering the safety once the compliance has already been given.

We’re standing in the brackish water where one system meets the next, and it’s uncomfortable in a very specific way. It’s not simply relief that a shift is happening. There’s real grief in a transition like this, and real fear in learning to trust your own inner authority instead of an external arrangement.

What abundance actually means

Gate 55 carries the word abundance, and I want to slow down on that word because I think it’s been flattened. Abundance comes from the Latin abundare, built from ab (away) and undare (to surge), rooted in unda, meaning wave. It’s a picture of water overflowing its banks. Abundance, at it’s root, is not accumulation. It’s the opposite. It’s overflow.

That distinction matters a lot to me right now, in a collective moment of time defined by the outer planets all in fire and air signs after a long stretch of earth and water. Water hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved into the earthen cells of our bodies, into the emotional and energetic current each of us carries. Into the wave that fills and spills over rather than the pile that gets hoarded.

The shadow side of Gate 55 is victimization, and I want to be careful here, because there is real reason for people to feel like they’ve been trapped or targeted. This isn’t a manifest-your-own-reality message. It’s more a question of where our attention goes once the old bargains stop paying out.

Do we keep waiting for a system that isn’t going to fulfill its end, or do we start filling our own cup first, tuning into our internal wellsprings so what we have to offer comes from overflow instead of depletion or an outdated exchange?

Where this is heading

I’ve been deep in research on Egypt this year, on the pyramids as possible superconductors drawing on the Nile’s rise, and I keep landing on the idea that the human body works on a similar principle. The heart generates its own electromagnetic field. There’s a real connection between the water in the earth and the water in our blood, the same abundant overflow I’ve been circling all through this piece, just traced through a different lens.

I think this collective shift toward abundance is going to show up first in the body, before it shows up anywhere else. Abundance was always about what moves through us and spills over, and the body is where that movement actually happens. It’s in the blood finding its rhythm, the breath filling past capacity and letting go, the heart’s own field reaching past the edges of skin. Learning to trust that overflow in your own body is practice for trusting it everywhere else - in your relationships, your work, and the wider shift we’re all living through together.

I’ll be teaching a free masterclass later this summer on these larger planetary configurations, including the Barbault Basket, the grand fire and air trines forming among the outer planets, and the shift to the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix. Comment or send a message if that’s something you’d be interested in!

I’m also building toward a small group coaching offering in September, back to school season, where we’ll look at your individual chart alongside these collective shifts and work through embodied practices to meet this transitional moment with abundance. I want to talk there about what it means to attune to your own life force, your own frequency, and create from that place, instead of the one that got handed to you before you had a chance to shine your light.

Happy Gate of Provocation and 4th of July, however you choose to celebrate. May whatever’s been holding you tightly loosen its grip enough for you to notice it was never as fixed as it seemed.

xo,

Alison

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Hey hey Mandala64 walkers… how did Gate 52: Stillness show up in your world over the past 5-6 days, along with the Capriorn full moon in Gate 58 (Vitality)? Drop a note in the comments or the chat- how you doin?

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Yesterday, July 1, the sun moved into Gate 39: Provocation. And I won’t be the first to say that this week carries a strongly provocative charge this year. On July 4th, Mars and Uranus meet in exact conjunction at 3°52’ Gemini, landing in Gate 20, the gate of presence, the now. Mars and Uranus together are certainly provoking, any way you shake it.

And Gate 39’s solar transit is always during the time of the United State’s celebration of Independence Day… there is something quite fitting in that. The day a nation declared its break from an old structure falls, year after year, inside the gate of provocation.

The gift of this gate is liberation, and I like to think of them as 2 sides to the same coin. Sometimes we must be provoked to know how important it is to be free.

The couple that climbed to the top of the Empire State Building (in 90 degree heat) to raise a flag in devotion to freedom and love (and make the most epic marriage proposal the world has possibly ever known…) was a true embodiment of this gate’s energy.

Gate 39: The Story

Gate 39 lives in the Root Center, and it carries a charge unlike most other gates in the mandala. This is the gate of the provocateur, one who pokes, tests, and stirs with their crab claws, to see what is true underneath the surface. It asks a question with its whole body: is the spirit here correct for me, or not.

The I’Ching name for this hexagram is Obstruction. True to that name, Gate 39 is a n energy that pushes against something, tests boundaries, and creates friction on purpose. The shadow is provocation born from pressure and avoidance, a restlessness that gets projected outward without awareness, picking fights or stirring chaos simply to release internal tension. The gift is dynamism, the same provocative energy channeled with intention, used to crack open stagnation and invite real transformation. And the siddhi, liberation, is what happens when the provoking is no longer needed at all, when the spirit has already been freed and the tension has nowhere left to grip.

This gate sits in the Root, the center of adrenaline, momentum, and pressure. It is built for friction. The question is whether that friction serves something larger or just discharges itself into noise.

Gate 39 in the Body

Gate 39 lives in the Root Center, located at the base of the spine, the perineum, and the adrenal glands.

The Root is the lowest center in the bodygraph and one of the body’s primary pressure centers. It governs the adrenal system, the fight-or-flight response, and the raw survival energy that pushes us forward whether we feel ready or not. Pressure from the Root builds, and it looks for release.

Gate 39 specifically channels that pressure toward emotional provocation, the urge to stir feeling in oneself or in others as a way of testing what is real. Held without awareness, this pressure can show up as restlessness, irritability, or the compulsive urge to create tension just to feel something move. Met with awareness, it becomes a kind of emotional alchemy, the friction that breaks something open so feeling can finally flow.

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Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are deep in Cancer season, in the trigram quarter governed by Water over Mountain. Water moves and seeks its level no matter the obstacle in front of it. Mountain holds still, immovable, a boundary that does not easily give way. Gate 39 sits at the meeting point of these two energies, water pressing against stone. This is why provocation lives here. Something fluid is testing something fixed, looking for the place where it might finally give.

Channel: Gate 39 completes its channel with Gate 55, the Gate of Spirit, in the Solar Plexus. Together they form the Channel of Emoting, one of the most emotionally dynamic channels in the bodygraph. Gate 39 provokes; Gate 55 reveals what spirit, what mood, is actually present underneath. Without 55, the provoking has no clear purpose. Without 39, the spirit has nothing pressing it to reveal itself.

Polarity: The complementary gate across the wheel is Gate 53, the Gate of New Beginnings, in the Root Center. Where Gate 39 provokes an ending, a rupture, the breaking open of something stuck, Gate 53 carries the pressure to start fresh. Together they hold the full arc: the old pattern cracking, and the new cycle pressing in right behind it.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 39

Stand if you can, feet hip width apart, and bring your awareness down through your legs into the base of your spine to the Root Center, the place in your body that holds pressure before it knows what to do with it.

Notice any tightness here, any clenched or held quality in the pelvic floor or low back. Take a breath in and on the exhale let a small sound escape, a sigh, a hum, whatever wants to come. This is giving the pressure somewhere to go besides outward at someone else. Notice what shifts in the body once the pressure has a place to move through rather than build up.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a moment when friction with another person or with yourself revealed something true that had been hiding. What did the provocation actually uncover?

Draw or paint the image of water meeting stone. The push, the resistance, the place where something finally gives way.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 39 card and sit with both sides. Notice where in your life pressure is building right now, and ask what it is asking to be released.

Next up: Gate 53 · Beginnings. Time to start something brand spanking new.

xo, Alison

Treat yo’self… get a deck!

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck!

I’ve been selling a lot lately, so only have TWO decks left in hand, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

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And, if your curious about what gates light up your chart, book a reading with me to get the deep dive!

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Jupiter, the planet of expansion, wisdom, and abundance, enters Leo on June 30th, 2026. After a year of deep nourishment and inward tending with Jupiter in Cancer, this transit asks somethi…

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Alright Mandala64 walkers… how did Gate 15: Extremes land for you over the past week? Did the swings feel familiar, or did something in you find an unexpected peace with the range? Drop a note about your Solstice experience in the comments!

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Gate 52: The Story

We have just crossed the solstice threshold, the longest day behind us now, and the Sun is moving into Gate 52 in the very first degrees of Cancer. The light is still full, but something has tipped. If Gate 15 was the exultant crest of the wave, Gate 52 is the moment after, when the water begins its long, patient return to shore.

Gate 52 is called Stillness, and it lives in the Root Center - the center of pressure, adrenaline, and the drive to move. So although it is about inaction, this is not a gate that lives in a peaceful corner of the chart. It lives in the most pressurized center in the bodygraph and carries a single instruction: stop. Because the mountain does not need to do anything to be what it is.

Gate 52 holds the energy of the Buddha under the tree while everyone else is plowing the field - and everyone around it is a little annoyed about that. The world wants this energy of the Mountain to be a motor. Gate 52 knows that its deepest gift comes from concentration, not action, and that the right focus cannot be forced into being.

The shadow of this gate, in the Gene Keys, is Stress. The feeling that arrives when you cannot locate stillness inside yourself - when the pressure of the Root builds and builds with nowhere to go, and you start bouncing between restlessness and emptiness. The fear inside Stress is that if you stop moving, you will miss the thing you are supposed to be concentrating on. The gift is Restraint - which Richard Rudd describes as “no unnecessary movement”.

This is the tortoise pulling its limbs inside the shell, the ability to hold a question without grabbing at an answer. Restraint is what makes the eventual focus clean and true. And the siddhi, the highest frequency, is Stillness itself - a still-point so deep it is no longer an effort, it is simply what you are. “A stilling of the wave”, Rudd calls it.

We arrive here the week after the solstice,,when the external world is at its most vivid and full, but something in our energetic bodies is already curling inward to the shell of Cancer' season. Gate 52 knows this rhythm and it sits with what is here.

Gate 52 in the Body

Gate 52 lives in the Root Center, which occupies the base of the bodygraph and corresponds physically to the base of the spine and the adrenal glands. The Root is a pressure and a motor center both - it generates adrenal energy, that urgent hum of the body’s alarm system, and pushes it upward through the chart in search of release.

When the Root is healthy and aligned, that pressure is purposeful. It fuels focus, drives action, and powers the kind of sustained effort that produces real things. When it is dysregulated, the adrenal system runs hot on empty, creating anxiety, restlessness, and the exhausting sense that you should always be doing something more.

Gate 52 specifically channels Root pressure into the quality of concentrated stillness. Think of the base of your spine settling, your sacrum dropping, and your whole nervous system lengthening downward into the earth. People with this gate defined often have a relationship to the body’s resting state that others without it defined find puzzling. They can go very still, very focused, for long stretches, and they truly need that quality of collected attention to function well. Without it, the Root’s pressure becomes noise. The body gets caught between the imperative to move and the gate’s insistence on stillness first, and what results is that anxious paralysis of not knowing what to begin.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are now beginning the Gèn lower trigram- as the summer solstice complete, we move from 8 trigrams of Kūn (Earth) (which we were in since Beltane/Mayday) to Gèn (Mountain).

And the Mountain holds still. It does not reach toward the world but waits for the world to come to it. This is the felt quality of post-solstice midsummer - not the exuberant outward movement of spring or the bright apex of the solstice, but the real first turn inward as the days begin to get darker.

The upper trigram of Gate 52 is also Gèn, which makes this a doubled Mountain hexagram. Mountain over Mountain. Two ranges stacked, one behind the other. The image from Wilhelm’s IChing translation is sparse and exact: the image of Keeping Still. The assignment is to not let your thoughts go beyond your present situation. Be here. Only here.

Channel: Gate 52 reaches toward Gate 9 in the Sacral Center, forming the 9-52 Channel of Concentration. Gate 9 is the Gate of Focus - it carries the Sacral’s deep yes-or-no attunement to detail, along with the ability to stay with something and go deep rather than broad. Gate 52 needs Gate 9 to know where to point the stillness. Gate 9 needs Gate 52 to be quiet long enough to hear what the Sacral is actually responding to. The channel is called a Format Energy, which means it shapes the entire logical circuitry of the chart when it is defined. The stillness here is not personal, structural. It creates the conditions in which the collective’s logical process can actually work.

Polarity: Directly across the wheel is Gate 58, the Gate of Vitality - the joyous, ebullient pressure to make life better, to move, correct, and improve with a kind of contagious aliveness. Gate 58 and Gate 52 are the two fuel sources of the logical circuit, and they could not be more different in character. Gate 58 wants to be out in the fields. Gate 52 wants to be the Buddha under the tree. The axis between them is the full breath.

Stillness and vitality need each other the way any inhale needs its exhale. The joy that Gate 58 carries can only be sustainable when Gate 52’s gift of restraint is also present. And Gate 52’s stillness, left alone without Gate 58’s animating spark, becomes inertia. The polarity asks us: can we be still and vibrantly alive at the same time?

A Somatic Practice for Gate 52

Find somewhere you can actually sit down and stay for a few minutes - outside if you can, or with a window nearby. We are in the very beginning of Cancer season, and our bodies have just been through the peak light of solstice. There is a quality of settling available right now that was not there a week ago. Let yourself feel into it.

Bring your attention to the base of your spine, the sacrum, the very bottom of the structure that holds you upright. Feel the weight of your body dropping into wherever you are sitting. The Root Center lives here - all that pressure, all that adrenaline, all that urgency. Let it descend. Let it find the roots underground. This gate asks you to let the pressure you’re feeling settle toward the earth instead of firing upward into action.

Sit with that for a moment. Notice what is there, in your root center when you are not trying to concentrate on anything in particular. The mountain does not seek its focus. It becomes still, and eventually the right thing arrives.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about your relationship to stillness - and be honest. Is stillness restful to you, or is it a little terrifying? Where does the pressure go in your body when you stop moving? Write toward the specific physical sensation of waiting without knowing what you are waiting for, and then write toward a moment when the right focus finally arrived. What did that feel like in the body?

Draw or paint a doubled mountain - range behind range, the visible peak and the one behind it. What is hidden in the farther mountain? What does it mean for something vast to place itself behind something else, to let the nearer thing be what is seen?

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 52 card and sit with both sides. Where is Stress showing up for you right now as the pressure to keep moving before you know where you are going? And where is Restraint available - where could you afford to be still a little longer than feels comfortable, trusting that the right focus will find you?

Next up: Gate 39 · Provocation, the Cancer gate that follows stillness into the heat of summer (and rings in the 4th of July every year in the US…).

xo, Alison

Treat yo’self… get a deck!

If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck! I have a few decks left in hand and not sure when the next preorder will be, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free, but your generous paid subscription helps keep it alive! Plus...

Paid subscribers get free access to my live rituals at each of the 8 G Center gates through the year, plus bonus horoscopes and extra goodies.

Thanks for your support, loves!

Welcome back to Living the Spiral: Magicians!

So this one was a wander.

I sat down with Petah Raven, editor, writer, and the mind behind Pandora’s Lost Gift on Substack, and we just... followed the threads.

To give you a little context for how we found each other: I’m an astrologer and Human Design guide, and for the last year a significant thread running through my work has been the myth of Inanna - the Sumerian queen of heaven and earth who descends through seven gates into the underworld, stripping away everything she knows, and returns transformed. I’ve been painting her, and I’m writing a book called The Great Below that maps the stages of her descent to the body and the wheel of the year. She has been a real presence in my life and work over this Fire Horse year, not just as a symbol but as something I’d call a genuine visitation.

What really got me was what happened after his visitation: he went and looked up the asteroid Ishtar in his chart and found her sitting exactly on a significant transit point at that moment. She had shown up in the sky to mirror what had happened in the meditation.

That sent me straight to my own chart, and I found her right on my Mars in my first house - conjunct the planet of desire and will, right at the surface of the body and the self. It reframed so much for me. Mars in the first house is the part of you that leads, acts, desires, and moves into the world without apology. And there she was. The queen of heaven and earth, the one who descends by choice and comes back fiercer than she left, sitting right on that point.

It changed the way I read my own personal mythology. And finding a male-bodied writer engaging thoughtfully and personally with goddess mythology from the inside was rare enough that I wanted to have a longer conversation.

I’m really glad I did.

We started with the origin story behind Petah’s Substack name (Pandora’s vessel was a jar, not a box, and it wasn’t actually Pandora who opened it), and from there we were off.

We talked about words as spells - which is where the episode title comes from. The Old English wyrd is where we get both “word” and “weird.” Spelling is casting spells. We are all, at any given moment, weaving something with our language. That thread ran all the way through, from runes to propaganda to the magician card to what it means to build a narrative versus just having good intentions.

We got into the goddess, polytheism vs. monotheism, and why Petah thinks anything “mono” is kind of a bad idea spiritually and psychologically. We talked about the non-binary figures in the Inanna myth, imaginal cells, the tai chi symbol, Fuxi and Nüwa (see their image below!), and how yin and yang in Chinese is actually one word - because they were never meant to be separated.

There was a moment where we talked about the internet as a hyperlinked oracle and then mourned the scroll replacing the surf. And another where Petah made the point that magic gets dangerous when you hand it to people who haven’t earned the wisdom to wield it, which feels very true right now.

The whole thing was that kind of conversation where you look up and an hour has passed and you’ve somehow gotten from Pandora’s jar to Tolkien to the Daoist cosmogony to the etymology of Thoth’s name.

Petah has a book coming out soon called The Living Language of Tarot, and I cannot wait to work with it.

You can find Petah’s writings on Pandora’s Lost Gift here on Substack.

🎧 Listen to the episode in the substack player, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:

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Pandora's Lost Gift | Meaning, Myth, and Mysticism

A place where nobody dared to go ... stories and musings on all things weird, wonderful, and mysterious. Come for the occult, stay for the tiramisu.

By Petah Raven

About Alison & Living the Spiral

Alison Dale is an artist, writer, astrologer & human design guide based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives at the intersection of ancestral systems that track the seasons and the planets, embodiment practices, creativity, and earth-based spirituality. She hosts the podcast Living the Spiral, and offers astrology and human design readings as well as 1-on-1 astro-somatic coaching packages at hearthandspiral.com.

Join her here on Substack by clicking the button below, and follow along on Instagram at @hearthandspiral.

If this podcast has ever helped you find your way back to yourself, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the show wherever you are listening, leave a five star review, or share this episode with someone who might resonate with it. It truly makes a difference in getting these conversations to the people who need them. Thanks for being here. <3

Part one goes through the history of Cancer as a sign going all the way back to Babylon, the six Human Design gates the sun transits through during the season, and all of the major transits of Cancer season 2026. So go ahead and listen to that as well if you’d like the larger picture first.

A quick note for those new to rising sign horoscopes: rising sign horoscopes are more accurate than sun sign horoscopes because they reflect your actual house structure in the chart, which is where the action shows up in your lived experience. The rising sign is the sign that was coming up over the horizon when you were born, and it sets up where all the different astrological houses fall in your chart. If you don’t know your rising sign, you can look it up at astro.com with your birth date, time, and location.

You can listen to all twelve, or jump ahead to your rising sign, your sun sign, your moon sign, or any placement you feel called to. Take what resonates and leave the rest.

Alright. Let’s begin.

Jump to your Rising Sign’s Timestamp:

00:00 Welcome and Overview

01:50 How Rising Signs Work

02:43 Aries Rising: Home & Roots

06:48 Taurus Rising: Voice Care

10:50 Gemini Rising: Values & Worth

17:15 Cancer Rising: Season Reset

21:31 Leo Rising: Inner Retreat

27:02 Virgo Rising: Community Check

31:39 Libra Rising: Career Nurture

36:12 Scorpio Rising: Big Beliefs

40:09 Sagittarius Rising: Deep Healing

45:33 Capricorn Rising: Relationship Axis

50:50 Aquarius Rising: Routines & Health

55:36 Pisces Rising: Creative Bloom

01:00:11 Closing and Resources

Thank you all for being here for the Cancer season horoscopes!

If you’d like the bigger picture of Cancer season, the history of the sign, the Human Design gates, and all the major transits, go back and listen to part one.

The rising sign horoscopes speak to this season, but they also touch on longer arcs - Chiron moving into Taurus is an eight-year transit, and Jupiter entering Leo is a year-long one. So some of what I’m describing here extends well beyond Cancer season itself.

Go Deeper: Get a Cancer Guidebook for your favorite crab friend!

If you’re a Cancer, happy birthday season! Grab a 32-page Cancer Season PDF Guidebook for yourself or another crab in your life!

I made this book with lots of love and care, and it’s filled with the astrological and human design mythology of the season, ritual tips for the holy day of Litha (summer solstice), somatic prompts to attune you to the energy of early summer, and much more….

Get your Guidebook!

About Me

I’m Alison Dale. You can find me at hearthandspiral.com where I offer astrology and Human Design readings, including Soulshine Readings that look at your astrology and Human Design together, your timing, and what’s asking to move in your world right now. I also have the Mandala 64 Walk on Substack at livingthespiral.com, where I walk the 64 Human Design gates in real time with written posts and somatic prompts delivered to your inbox.

If you’re listening out in the world of Apple or Spotify, a review or a star rating goes such a long way. And if you’d like to receive this podcast in your inbox, subscribe at livingthespiral.com.

If you want a deeper look at how this season will show up in your personal chart, her books are open at hearthandspiral.com.

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Let me know how Gemini season went and what you’re feeling as Cancer season arrives in the comments below, or click on the heart to help this reach more people! Happy beehive cluster/emo teen angst season!

xoxo

Alison

One last thing:

Here’s the Mandala 64 Walk article for this week, too! Gate 15: The Gate of Extremes:

This post is coming to you a few days late- apologies! The sun entered Gate 15 on June 19, which this year happened to fall on the same weekend as both the Summer Solstice and Father’s Day - a full and intense and beautiful few days that kept me away from the keyboard. I guess there is something fitting about being late to write the gate of natural rhythms because life was calling me outside. I hope your solstice weekend was sweet.

And - how did Gate 12: Caution land for you over the past week? Did anything ask you to hold back, to wait for the right moment before speaking? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Do you have Gate 15 defined in your chart? Drop a note below and tell me how you feel it.

Leave a comment

My books are open for July!

If you’d like to learn more about YOUR Human Design and Gene Keys as they relate to your astrology, you can book a reading with me. It’s been life-changing for me to get to know the specific gates where my natal planets live in my chart, and I’d love to explore yours with you as well.

My Books Are Open

Gate 15: The Story of Extremes

We have arrived at the Summer Solstice gate, the longest day, the fullest light. Gate 15 is one of the eight G-Center gates that mark the Celtic holy days, and it sits right here at the threshold between Gemini and Cancer, between the world of ideas and the world of feeling, between the airy motion of late spring and the deep rootedness that summer asks of us.

Gate 15 is called Extremes, and the name is spot-on. This gate carries the love of humanity in all of its wild variation. It is the gate that says: people are not supposed to be consistent. Rhythms change. Some days you need to move fast and stay up late and talk to everyone, and other days you need to go quiet and stay close to home. And both of those things are part of the same person. Gate 15 holds that paradox without flinching, understanding that the full range of human expression, from the very ordinary to the ecstatic, is what love actually looks like.

The shadow of Gate 15 in the Gene Keys is Dullness. This is the low feeling that sets in when you believe life is supposed to have more charge in it, when you keep expecting a spark and finding the same Monday morning repeating forever. The fear underneath Dullness is that nothing will ever feel alive again. But Dullness in this gate is also a teacher. When the ordinary stops feeling like enough, Gate 15 invites you to look closer, to let the flatness open instead than fighting it. The gift that lives inside that opening is Magnetism, the gift. This a quality of presence that is rooted, unhurried, attuned to what is actually here rather than reaching for what should be here. People who have worked through the shadow of Gate 15 often carry this quality you can feel before they say a word. Something in them is in rhythm with life itself, and it draws people in.

The siddhi of this gate is Florescence, which Richard Rudd describes as the verb of bursting into flower. Summer solstice is the moment when ordinary life has the potential to become indistinguishable from the sacred. You cannot force Florescence, but you can tend the conditions for it, and those conditions have everything to do with learning to love the diversity of life that is right in front of you.

Gate 15 in the Body

Gate 15 lives in the G Center, which sits at the center of the bodygraph both visually and physically, in the area of the chest around the heart and sternum. The G Center is the center of identity, direction, and love. It is the magnetic core of the design, the place that orients you in space and pulls you toward what you are here to love. When this center is open and functioning well, there is a sense of being carried, moving through life with a kind of ease that is receptive to what arises.

Gate 15 connects the G Center down to Gate 5 in the Sacral, forming the Channel of Rhythm. The Sacral is a pure life-force motor. When Gate 15 is lit up, it is reaching toward that motor, toward the deep generative hum of the body that says yes or no, that responds to what is alive and declines what is not. The rhythm this gate carries is a Sacral rhythm - it cannot be scheduled or decided by the mind. It moves when it moves and rests when it rests, and the G Center holds that oscillation with spacious love.

Physically, Gate 15 is associated with the pericardium surrounding the heart, the liver and the blood, with the physical rhythms of the body that are always changing and that require us to adapt. People with this gate defined often have a deep relationship to their energy levels, noticing clearly when they are in a high-tide phase and when they need to pull back. The body’s natural modulation between extremes is the gate working exactly as it is meant to. There is no version of Gate 15 that looks like a steady, predictable, even-keeled day after day. The invitation is to trust that the full range is the rhythm.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We cross a major threshold here. The lower trigram of the Mandala shifts at the Summer Solstice from Kūn, the Earth - the vast receptive field that has held us through the long Beltane-to-Solstice stretch - to Gèn, the Mountain. The Mountain holds still. It does not reach. It gathers what comes to it rather than going out to meet the world. This shift is the whole felt quality of midsummer, that turning inward just at the moment of peak light. The upper trigram of Gate 15 is Kūn, Earth - so this gate itself is Earth over Mountain, which is Hexagram 15 in the I Ching: Qiān, Modesty. A mountain that places itself beneath the earth is the image of hidden greatness, of something vast choosing not to announce itself. The I Ching says modesty always brings success. This is the quality that Gate 15’s magnetism grows from - a presence that is not performing.

Channel: Gate 15 completes the Channel of Rhythm with Gate 5, the Gate of Fixed Rhythms, in the Sacral Center. These two gates describe a polarity within the channel itself. Gate 5 brings the need for consistency, for routines and patterns that feel grounding. Gate 15 brings the extremes that disrupt and expand any routine that has become too tight. Together, the Channel of Rhythm is exactly what its name says: not a fixed tempo, but the living alternation between pattern and disruption, regularity and surprise, the kind of rhythm that a season makes.

Polarity: Directly across the wheel sits Gate 10, the Love of Self, which is the Winter Solstice gate. Gate 10 is about self-empowerment, having a code for how you move through the world - a personal conduct, a way of being that comes from deep internal knowing rather than needing outside opinions. Gate 15 loves all of humanity in its variation and extreme range. Gate 10 loves the self with that same quality of acceptance. The axis between them is the whole arc of love: you cannot genuinely extend toward others what you have withheld from yourself, and the love of self that Gate 10 carries is the root that makes Gate 15’s magnetism possible.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 15

Find a way to be outside if you can, or near a window where you can see some piece of the natural world. Feel the season - the specific quality of the light, the temperature, whatever is in the air right now. This is not a metaphor. Gate 15 is a body-level attunement to what is actually happening, and the Summer Solstice is a real event in the natural world that the body registers whether or not the mind is paying attention.

Place one hand on your sternum, in the center of the chest. This is the G Center in the body, the magnetic core. Just feel the warmth of your hand there. Let your breath move without directing it. Then ask yourself, without needing an answer: what rhythm am I actually in right now? Not the rhythm you think you should be in. The one that is actually moving through you. Let that be enough for a moment. The gate of Extremes does not ask you to smooth yourself out. It asks you to know where you are in the swing.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a rhythm in your life that keeps swinging between extremes. It might be your energy, your social appetite, your creative output, or your need for solitude. Write it without trying to fix or manage it. Let yourself describe the full range, both ends of the swing, and what it feels like to be in the middle of the movement. What if that oscillation were actually intelligent?

Draw or paint the image of a mountain placed beneath the earth, greatness making itself humble. What does hidden worth look like? What kind of presence comes into a room without announcing itself?

With your handy Mandala 64 deck (I still have a few left in this order!) , pull the Gate 15 card and sit with both sides. Where is Dullness showing up in your life right now, as a fear that things are not extraordinary enough? And where is Magnetism already operating, where have you simply been yourself and noticed something drawing close? Let the card sit with you through this solstice week.

Next up: Gate 52 · Stillness, the Cancer gate that follows the solstice into deep summer.

xo,

Alison

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I see you.

Father’s Day landing on the Solstice this year feels extra pointed.

Sol = the sun, the son, the sky-god.

It’s the celebration of the longest, most bountiful day of the year, and we’re spending it paying reverence to men.

Fathers, yes. But…also...lots of men.

If you’re noticing a saltiness to my tone, you’re not wrong. Because I’ll be honest: I’m personally ready to see men step it up.

Not only specific men that I can name, but Men-at-large.

Fathers are so important. So are the men underneath who hold that title.

Step it up. Own yourselves. Listen.

That’s it, actually.

It’s not actually stepping it up that I’m desiring from men. It’s leaning in. What im really wanting is for men to start leaning in close enough to listen - even when something is being whispered.

Sheryl Sandburg spent a lot of time and money telling women to lean in.

But I think leaning in is needed from men far more.

This Father’s Day solstice, with the moon half-full and half-new in the sky, it’s time to find balance within the extremes. It’s time to put it all on the table.

A day of extremes

The Sun is traveling through Gate 15 on the Solstice- which in human design is known as the Gate of Extremes.

And that’s exactly what today felt like.

Everything is out on the table at once. The dust has been shaken from the cloth and is hanging in the air, waiting to drop.

Solstice brings a palpably gorgeous, overwhelming chaos to the surface. Nothing is hidden underground on this day. At Solstice, all the work is being done on the flowers of the vine, not in the roots.

So for this reason, Solstice is always a point of maximum contrast.

After months of building toward summer, feeling juiced by the heat and the light and the fullness, something in our bodies is suddenly registering: the days are getting shorter now. The climax has been reached. The sun is so hot, I might want to go inside. What felt like sweet abundance a few weeks ago could now start to feel like a lot to hold.

That’s the gift and the difficulty of this particular threshold. The diversity of information, relationship, and feeling at solstice can feel like SO MUCH. Buzz buzz buzzzz.

And that same diversity can also feel like.. LOVE. Real true honest agape love.

Both the overwhelm and the deep magnetic love are present on the Solstice. Both are Gate 15.

There’s a beautiful Gemini-to-Cancer dynamic happening right now too. Gemini season was bees rolling in experiences - pollinating, gathering, moving between flowers, collecting everything.

But after the Solstice, the bees are going back into the hive. Cancer season is about choosing which of the multitudes to actually nurture. The womb gets fertilized. You can’t bring everything home.

Not all sperm meet the egg. Not all pollens make the honey. In the post-solstice season of Cancer, you choose what gets nourishment.

The solstice is exactly the moment between those two impulses - still holding all of it, just beginning to sense which thread to follow deeper, and which ones to let disintegrate back into the web.

Father’s Day Feels

For me, this day carries a lot. My own father, my grandfathers, my ex-husband. At different times, I wanted more from them as father-figures. Sometimes a lot more.

There’s so much pain in that. So many memories floating through today, living in my body as felt sensations more than linear thoughts. Today brings up so many embodied memory-sensations of misunderstanding. Judgement. Withholding. Fear-based decision making.

And at the same time on this day that is filled with so much heartache and somatic trauma of not-enough and too-much, I’m watching my daughter with her step-dad, my partner.

And I am moved to tears with the deepest gratitude and joy I can imagine.

He is teaching her things I didn’t know fathers could teach - how to listen to yourself, how to stay emotionally present. They laugh together so much. Deep belly laughs. She adores him. He is the most beautiful example of present, attuned, leaning-in-to-listen fathering I have ever witnessed.

And then, despite all that love, I’m a complete asshole to him on Father’s Day.

Because I guess that’s what happens when the absolute beauty of something so personal to your present life touches a deeper, older wound you haven’t finished grieving.

The tenderness comes up fast. The rawness. The grief disguised as irritability.

Which brings me to the astrology of the solstice.

Right before solstice, Chiron moved into Taurus on Friday, after being in Aries for 8 years, since 2018.

For the next seven years while Chiron is in the sign of the Venusian bull, the wounds asking for your attention are the ones that live in your body - in your sensations and your emotions and your nervous system - much more than the wounds in your mind.

Taurus rules the throat, so the wounds surrounding your throat and your voice, specifically, are going to be showing up now.

But the thing about Chiron is, even though his wounds never fully heal, he is the wisest healer and teacher in all of Greek myth. He didn’t transcend his wound - he taught through it.

Chiron would likely open up his Rumi book and tell you: the truth is, sweet child, the wound is where the light gets in.

This solstice-Father’s Day is a Chiron in Taurus moment if I’ve ever felt one.

Whatever is coming up for you today - the grief, the longing, the tenderness, the way you might be snapping at someone you love - that’s not a failure. That’s the wound doing what wounds do when they’re finally ready to be seen, to be witnessed, to be cared for.

Over the coming season and the coming years, ley your wound be felt, in all its extremes. And let it be nourished and tended to and expressed, so the act of doing so can also nourish others.

Notes and prayers

I had really wanted to hold a live ritual on Zoom for each of the eight holy days this year. We gathered for the equinox/ and for mayday, and it was powerful.

This time of the solstice got away from me in the most Gate 15 way possible - full of extremes, full of multitudes, full of exactly the kind of chaos-that-is-also-love that I described above.

So no live ritual today. But I’m not leaving you empty-handed.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can take 50% off any reading with code SOLSTICE. I may also record something sweet and send it out to you - a little ritual to sit with. No promises on timing, but it’s on my heart.

However you’re moving through today - with deep grief or with incomprehensible gratitude- or with both at once - I hope you feel the threshold under your feet.

Nourishing, nurturing Cancer season is here.

And the wound is absolutely where the light gets in.