Around the Fireplace, On this Road of Life
A message to the reader...
*This astrological interpretation & divination focuses on the U.S. context. As an Evolutionary Astrologer, Depth Psychologist, and Indigenous wisdom-keeper, I do not believe it is possible to extract myself from my context, perspective, and experience. Therefore, I encourage all readers to translate the message and central energetic themes to their own unique context, trusting their intuition and discernment as to what is for them, and leaving the rest. Safe travels.
2022 is set to be a year of integration. We have been learning and unlearning so much about our simultaneously decaying and regenerating world, specifically about the relationships that hold it all together or break it apart. 2020 was a reckoning that led us inward and kept us close to home with our closest people, bringing up a lot of emotions and considerations previously overlooked or unconscious that led to rearrangements of various kinds in just about every aspect of our lives. In 2021 we slowly came back out into society where we began testing our new ways of being, doing, and thinking with people we hadn’t seen or talked to for a while, and throughout the year conversations and media, the buzz turned from more immediate concerns of public health and safety too much larger debates about governance, political power, conspiracy theories, and budget spending. In 2022 we will garner these prior year's lessons around care and conflict and begin to assimilate our new truths and perspectives into our bodies and material resources where shock and stress are absorbed but also resilience and intuitive guidance are found.
In January, the lunar nodes shift from their 18-month cycle through Gemini and Sagitarrius, the axis of Knowledge, and begin another year and a half guiding our learning and growing along the axis of Power, Taurus and Scorpio, also known as the axis of Life and Death as it occurs through the power portal of sexuality. While the south node through Sagittarius helped us to release beliefs and paradigms that no longer serve us or the collective good, Scorpio supports the release of our most entrenched emotional traumas out of which our beliefs and views of the world are formed. The North node in Gemini since May of 2020 was an important call to inquiry, rather than certain knowledge, and pushed us to see reality more objectively from all angles and to formulate effective questions rather than make choices based on assumption or dogma. In Taurus, this more refined practice of inquiry gets grounded, in our five senses, in our already honed skills and talents, in the money, resources, and relationships we already have manifested, to assess how we would like to do life from here. Where do we want to invest our resources? From where or whom do we want to divest our resources? Which power dynamics - inherent to every relationship - feel reciprocal, generative, transformative, and safe? In what relational dynamics do our bodies feel tense, triggered, afraid, or ashamed? It may be that money gets moved from unethical financial institutions to values-based social enterprises, for example. Contracts may also be renegotiated or dissolved for greater justice and equity. Venus is the ruler of Taurus and Mars is the traditional ancient ruler of
Scorpio. These planets that we have been taught for generations to represent both the ethos and bodies of women and men as very separate creatures are moving together for much of the year 2022, covering critical ground in the divine blueprint of our transition to the dawning Age of Aquarius. Today we have a greater understanding, or at least more perspective, about the spectral fluidity of masculine and feminine energetic expression in people who identify as women, men, or a fractal somewhere between. People have been more public and proud about their exploration of these nuances and the truth as they feel it in their unique bodies. This very Plutonian transformation of taboos in Capricorn social norms, agreements, and cultural recognition has been ramping up since 2008, effectively pulling up the roots of false binaries which create limiting “Black or White” scenarios. Throughout 2021 this dance and the need for the harmonization of mutual respect between the divine masculine and divine feminine energies in all life will be powerfully highlighted. The Wisdom of sexual energy as the most potent force of creation or destruction - abundance and pleasure or destitution and rage - is being uncovered and recentered as key to our healing and liberation, individually and collectively. There will be a more visceral comprehension of how and why in most capitalist, competitive nations people are suffering from epidemic porn addiction and a systemically supported culture of rape. More people may actually feel the pain of Mother Earth’s rape and pillage of their bodies, as well as those millions of ancestors and relatives still alive on the planet who have been victims of rape, one of the primary and most effective tools of war throughout the Ages.
If you thought 2020 was “bad” and that 2021 “couldn’t be any worse” but then it was, it may be necessary for your own well-being to have a ceremony or conduct an ongoing ritual in which you take some time to really sit with the gravity of the time we are in. It is not going away or getting easier. It will absolutely get harder and more “real” before we see the benefits of this transformation at scale. However, we are also getting more real. We are getting stronger in our ability to face and name hard truths, braver in our surrender to this Mystery, and more clear about our role in ensuring a just transition that does not leave behind those who have been long pushed to the margins, denied, abused, and discarded. We chose to be here for this war because we are warriors.
Remembering what true warriors is may also be helpful at this time, which the myths and creation stories and sacred texts that we Mystics hold with reverence all discuss. Most of the representations of the rising divine feminine depict very masterful, strategic, and altruistic beings of Light. Call upon the goddesses, deities, and ascended masters that can help you hold your center alignment through these battles. In January, Uranus will also station direct in Taurus for the first time since August 2021, while the other outer planets catch up to the last points they traversed before retrograding in 2021, thereby beginning to cover the new energetic ground we have not yet experienced. The most notable advancement of these collective consciousness avatars is Pluto returning to the degree of Capricorn where it was at the birth of The United States when the Declaration of Independence was signed. No one alive has ever lived through Pluto in Capricorn, much less at the critical last degrees on the brink of crossing the threshold into Aquarius in 2023. Pluto is the planet of the soul and the death process inherent to energetic evolution. What will the soul return of the U.S. look like in 2022? We cannot know but we can perceive some aspect of truth in that this nation is going through a collective dark night that demands, just as they do for us personally, to surrender what is not working and make room for the new to be born - willingly or by force of nature. Overall, 2022’s focus will be on our personal resources, with whom and how we invest and exchange them, and the great power to make the change we have in this. The material outcomes of these choices will be starker, and our awareness as to how trust or fear within our psyche is guiding these will be, too. There will be a deeply personal illumination of how the quality and use of our sexual energy and soul resonance largely determines what we desire, attract and create, and what Shadow work may be required to bring this power into greater integrity with who we know and want ourselves to be. It will be an incredibly potent year to dispel projection, manipulation, expectation, and dissociation that negate our personal power and sovereignty as well as that of others, in favor of harmonizing our inner forces in sacred union so that we can come together more intimately, creatively and committedly than ever before.
About Katina Castillo
Passionate Pure Heart, Spiritual Warrior, Earth Guardian, Wisdom Keeper, and Priestess for the Goddess, she channels natural cycles of change. A daughter, sister, auntie, friend, and guide, her purpose is Love and Freedom for all. B.A. English: Folklore & Cultural Studies. M.A. Decolonial Depth Psychology: Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco- Psychologies.
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