THE MOOD: Sleeping and Awakening

THE MOOD is back! This year, THE MOOD will focus on the four seasons. While we might typically start with spring — the beginning of the astrological new year — there is something to be said about winter as its own beginning, a necessary and vital prequel to spring.

For the past few months, THE MOOD – my written astrological forecast – has been asleep. While the planets’ movements do not sleep, my writing needed sleep. I needed sleep. We all need sleep.

I have been reflecting on winter, the season of deep sleep. In the northern hemisphere, winter can feel so harsh. The sunlight fades. The ground hardens. The world goes gray, cold, and quiet. Seasonal depression kicks in. Winter tests our preparation and our endurance.

While modern industrial capitalism’s fantasy of endless production refuses seasons – or perhaps glamorizes an endless summer – we need winter. Winter is the season of rest, reckoning, and renewal. Winter is part of nature, and part of us.

Winter is the time we draw the curtains of our eyes and rest our weary bodies. We go underground, under the covers, away from the light. We sleep, grieve, dream. The winter inside of us can feel uncomfortable, particularly in a world that asks us to define ourselves through doing and often refuses to acknowledge the pangs of darkness. Yet winter gives us the time, space, and silence we need to prepare us for everything to come. Winter holds delicately and carefully the inner workings of renewal – quiet, underrecognized, and unbelievably potent.

The astrological signs of winter – Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces – know this. Capricorn’s stoicism, discipline, and long-haul resourcefulness ensure that we prepare for what we will need to survive the season: adequate food, water, tissue boxes, and occasional (and perhaps somewhat bleak) jokes. Aquarius uses the cold, hard earth to reflect and refract the little light that is available to us, imagining prismatic possibilities for the future. Through the detached and silent space of deep winter, Aquarius has learned that community is the core ingredient that will hold us together in the harshest of times. Pisces softens and melts, using its incredible sensitivity to channel the warmth that is coming, hydrating and permeating the hardened ground with water – life.

We hold the seasons within us, and we each have our winter. Without winter, there can be no spring. It is a beginning, the quiet slumber that invites the dawn. 

I wish you the silence, spaciousness, and daring to continue to doze and dream.