In this springtime of chaotic newness and sporadic reunions and ongoing pandemic exhaustion, May brings us a few new themes. The first is a renewed faith in the beauty of what we all are (or could be) together. This comes as Jupiter moves from Aquarius to Pisces on the 13th. After spending roughly a year in the heady Air sign of revolution and rebellion, this shift to Pisces brings us deeper into our soft, gooey molten centers. Jupiter, gay cheerleader of the cosmos who likes to chant “Go! Go! Go! More! More! More!” in response to whatever the collective energy might be finds itself shifting teams from the intellectual to the intuitive, from theory and praxis to deep communion. And as Jupiter is associated with what we believe in, this marks a shift toward a year-long journey of renewing our faith in compassion, imagination, restful retreat, and love. Pisces, as the last sign of the zodiac, gathers all our energy in for the night like a parent calling their children in for dinner. Pisces wants us to remember that all that noise and bustle of our waking lives is surface, but there is something deeply nourishing underneath. Pisces loves the fact that on an atomic level we can’t actually distinguish edges and boundaries—that zoomed in close enough, I don’t know where I end and the world begins. With Jupiter in Pisces, we are moving into a year of re-enchanting the world, of renewed idealism, of no long agreeing to hustle as hard as we do for lives of drudgery, fear, and scarcity. Jupiter in Aquarius may be all about the revolution, but Jupiter in Pisces brings in revolutionary love and joy. With this influence, we remember that restoration, rest, and retreat are valid practices to keep us connected to our hearts and to each other when the world is overwhelming.

As I write this, my social media feed is full of deaths. Untimely deaths of queer and Black beloveds. Friends who have no words. Grief that is raw. I want to ground all this discussion of revolution, rest, and joy within the very real context of what we are up against in this moment—more people across the world are grieving loved ones as Covid has claimed millions of lives. More white people are paying attention to what the Black community has been suffering for many generations. More people are becoming aware that there is no “safe” place to retreat to—no getting away from the collective reckoning with centuries of racism, with ongoing colonialism, with the rising urgency of climate change. So when I speak of joy and rest, I don’t mean distraction and isolation. I don’t mean tune out, change the channel, pretend it’s all okay and find some private sanctuary where none of it can touch you (although believe me, there are times when that sounds mighty appealing!). What I mean is the kind of joy that comes from knowing that you are a part of the world, that you are always connected. Your body knows how to take in food from what this world offers and turn it into you. You are made up of millions of moments of interaction with others; they have shaped you as you have shaped them. There is no taking you out of the space you hold in this world, and the grief we feel for those who have passed is a testament to this. We feel that lack. And in grief, we reach out to one another. This is what Jupiter in Pisces is promising: when you open your heart to the grief, the joy will also come. When you retreat from the bustle and noise, you will be able to reconnect to what and who you love. From that place of reconnection, a different kind of power and a different kind of vision of the future can emerge.

The second theme May brings is one of disruption, questioning, and a challenge to get curious about our assumptions. This comes with the lunar eclipse on the 26th, although the full eclipse season lasts from the New Moon on the 11th to the Full Moon on June 24th. Eclipses always bring flashes of new information—they disrupt the ordinary cycle of the Moon waxing and waning, or the Sun shining all day, and in the unseasonable darkness they create we are able to see things differently. This year, the eclipses falling primarily in Gemini and Sagittarius means that we are going to be learning a lot about our belief systems and assumptions (Sagittarius) and our ways of understanding and questioning the world (Gemini). If you have planet in one of these signs (or Virgo or Pisces), this eclipse season might be a powerful one for you. Remember that eclipses bring revelations but not necessarily certainty—it’s a good time to get curious and explore what you find, not quite as good a time to take decisive action.

My books are closed for readings this month as my sister and I work on the 2022 calendar, but I’ll be excited to talk to you all in June! If you want to see how our art process is going you can follow us @abacuscorvus and if you want a little more astro insight for this month (and a chance to win a free reading with me), head on over to my Patreon and follow me @corinadross.

Aries

Get curious about: How you connect the dots between your smaller and larger worlds. Why you believe what you do about love, relationships, and your own capacity to be loved. What new adventures are calling you, pulling you away from what’s comfortable. Who you need to talk to in order to get a fresh perspective on something you feel blocked by. The limits of ever understanding another person, no matter how much you learn about them. The beauty of those limits, of the mysteries they protect. The beauty of what you’ve gotten used to and assumed had no magic left in it. How to stay open to the unexpected.

Taurus

Get curious about: What you’re trying to build on and what you’re ready to release. How it can feel good to say goodbye, even to something you’ve loved. How to feel held by this present moment, which is to say how to be fully in this present moment. How love can hold a safe enough container that you can risk discomfort and disagreement without injury. How safety really means being ready for what comes, and how that readiness relies on the resilience of knowing what you love, who you love, and how to love all this broken, imperfect, in-process mess of life.

Gemini

Get curious about: How an eternal quest for more information can leave you uncentered and without meaningful direction. How many conversations you need to have, books you need to read, articles you need to reference, before you understand your own truth. How the phrases you’re quick to use may be more about deflection than self-reflection. How it feels to settle, to slow, to sink into knowing. How it feels to find the wonder and beautiful surprise of learning something only you could know, without needing to go chase it down.

Cancer

Get curious about: All the ways you take on emotional labor without realizing the cost to you. All the ways you take out the cost on others without realizing it. What it means to find gentleness, forgiveness, and release in relationships that have gotten tightly wound. Your own need for ritual, routine, and stillness. The way you understand yourself through relationship, and the way you understand yourself alone. What it means to let go without giving up.

Leo

Get curious about: Why it’s okay to want attention. How love is the foundation of meaningful social change. How being loved is part of that equation, not just offering it endlessly and selflessly. How to ask for the care, focus, and affirmation you need. How to offer it and keep that energy circulating. How you are incredibly important—but not on a scale where some people have to be less important or more so. What it means to be in your center, to radiate and attract love from your truest innermost heart, while acknowledging you are one of many centers, many nodes in many interlacing networks, that are all incredibly important.

Virgo

Get curious about: Why you compare yourself to people who you don’t need to be anything like. What’s happening when you fall into scarcity stories. What you’re here to do and be that only you can. What you know in your bones, even if you don’t yet have the language to describe it. What you’ve learned and healed from to get where you are now, even if no one has witnessed your whole path. All the pieces you’ve picked up and woven into your sense of self, into the self you are still becoming. Becoming as a finely tuned instrument, or a skilled hand. Your own beautiful capacity to keep absorbing the meaning and the potential of your experiences and distilling them into something precious.

Libra

Get curious about: How two people can say the same words and mean totally different things. What happens beneath the language, what assumptions aren’t said out loud. What it means to love people you can’t communicate with. What it means to communicate even better with people you might have given up on. That special magic that happens when a conversation shifts your entire sense of self, expanding and grounding you all at once. How many perspectives you need to try on before you know which one is yours. How much of language is really gesture, feeling, and play.

Scorpio

Get curious about: Where there is joy, not just sorrow. What rhythms set your heart dancing. What you are here to uphold, to maintain, to offer in abundance to the broken-hearted of this world. What you know from having been through the fire. How to share this wisdom without needing to literally return into that fire to remember how it felt. How to let yourself heal. How to let go of the guilt that you have survived what others haven’t, and that you get to heal from what others haven’t. How to be whole.

Sagittarius

Get curious about: Information that doesn’t fit the story you think is true. What your sweetheart (or ex-lover or best friend or sworn enemy) has been trying to tell you that isn’t what you thought they meant. Details that disrupt your assumptions. The possibility that things are more strange and wonderful and especially more unknowable than you assumed. Why your belief systems protect you and why they might need updating. The difference between core values and ideological dogma. Where there is room for nuance, for curiosity, for learning even more about the marvelous people you love.

Capricorn

Get curious about: The lure of laziness. The urgency of bustling. The seesaw between “go, go, go!” and hitting snooze a dozen times. Why relationships start to feel like work, like the same kind of stress of every other damn responsibility. What deep trust offers to change that. How to get to deep trust. How to get focused on what’s under the surface of your urgency, your stress, your worry about everyone. How to dip into calmness without floating away into disassociation. How to show up fully present. How all these movements toward and away can be fluid, graceful, and grateful.

Aquarius

Get curious about: Why you matter, as an individual and not as a demographic. How your social power or lack of social power has become part of your life story. What else makes up that story. Why that also matters. Why you are more than a summary of your privileges or lack thereof. How self-consciousness can block you from feeling the real feelings underneath the analysis. Why it’s more comfortable staying detached and having an outside observer status, even in your own personal life. What happens when you get more vulnerable. Who’s there to hold you when you get more vulnerable. What becomes possible when you let some rigid worldviews crumble. How to touch into a deeper level of what matters.

Pisces

Get curious about: How you can claim and hold onto your silence, your privacy, and your stillness even if springtime and vaccines are pressing you to emerge from your cocoon. How to balance emergence and deep retreat. The dance of there and back again. The deeply grounding pull of being alone with your feet on the earth and your eyes closed and no one texting you or yelling in a neighbor’s yard—just this long, slow moment of sinking slightly into the gravity of the earth you are made from. How to model the kind of self-love that lets you forget about FOMO and stay attuned to these silences, these satisfactions of merely being.

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