What a time we are in — one that builds our power and demands our vulnerability. This moment of uprising is the moment of our spiritual training. What does it mean to train? To me, it means to wake up fully in each moment. Cancer season asks us to feel it all. To fully face our grief and anger. To thoroughly investigate collective + personal missteps and commit to changing. To profoundly appreciate how many of our freedoms have been won by Black liberation and Black family.
One of the gifts of astrology is that it helps us tell time. The planets circling us are nature’s clock showing us where we are in the larger story of Earth. Astrology says this is a time of massive shifts in power and regimes. But there is still much, much more to come. I’ll share more, soon, about the planets and eclipses that will move us in the coming months. For now, this moment. Here are some ways I am meeting now, and some invitations for you as well. Guided, as always, by the planets surrounding us.
Cancer Season
Gemini season blew us into June with a big gust of change. As a mutable air sign (if you don’t know what that means, it means lots of change), Gemini catalyzed rapid new thinking and activity. We went from isolating at home to living collectively in a protest zone: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). We saw a vast shift in the public mind: 67% of Americans support Black Lives Matter, a 23% increase from 2016. Cities have promised to abolish police, defund police, and remove them from schools entirely. For the first time in a century and a half, there is real, large scale talk of abolition.
Now comes the time to sustain the movement. For ideas to become embodied change, we must feel them deeply. Cancer season calls upon us to feel. And I mean, FEEEEL.
Imagine if you were on a speeding bus and it suddenly slowed down. Imagine how you might lurch and topple forward. Imagine how, by instinct, you would grasp for a pole and for your footing. That change in momentum is the moment you feel your body. This moment of collective change requires us to feel our bodies and to feel our feelings.
The Mercury Retrograde in Cancer is a gift right now. It is time to catch up with our feelings and with decades and centuries of momentum that has brought us to this historical moment. But we can’t just learn it from books and words. We have to truly feel what’s happened in the United States if we want to change its direction.
Mercury Retrograde
For some of us, this may require rest. We might need to slow down in order to drop into our bodies and feel. But, as my wise friend B. Anderson of Song of the Spirit Institute says: “Rest, and then return.”
This Mercury retrograde in Cancer is coinciding, for me, with a mandatory quarantine period after traveling. Being closed in a box by myself has meant a lot of resting and returning. I am re-educating myself on the things the American textbooks and school system did not teach me. And making space to feel and cry through a lot of it.
My Mercury Rx re-education includes:
Abolition history & the leadership of Black rebellion.
Abolition future & what it means to abolish the carceral state.
Reparations and making concrete plans for it.
Also, re-evaluating Instagram. It’s gotten so didactic.
Also, making zero-waste menstrual pads for myself and my friends.
What do you commit to re-learning during Mercury retrograde?
In support of the growing movement to abolish police, I am studying the planetary alignments behind abolition. I have found strong resonances between this moment, and the last time there was a mass movement for abolition, to end the institution of chattel slavery. At the center of it all is Pluto. In astrology, Pluto burns down human structures in order to get us to evolve. It was activated 200 years ago in a similar way it is activating now.
As the researcher on this project, I must be clear. I am an Asian American, and my perspective and embodiment of abolition is limited — if I am not in relationship with others. That is why I am preparing this research to be shared and returned to Black family and leaders and organizers. My role is to cull the astrological data for useful information that can serve the movement.
Support this work. 100% of funds go to Black family who are on advising on this project. Please help honor their labor and their heart-minds by giving generously to the project. This work requires our spiritual and material support. You can Venmo @lizhenjane with the note: Astrology of Abolition.
Thank you for being in this with me, together. May the work that you & I do combine and grow. May it snowball into an irrepressible force of change.