Who Are You When the World is On Fire?

I’ve been meaning to write this article since the Aries New Moon Solar Eclipse on March 29th, but I hadn’t been able to find the time or psychic energy to sit down and do so until now. In typical Virgo Mars/Rising/Chiron fashion, I’ve been feeling immensely guilty and unproductive for the delay, but upon reflection I think that it’s been necessary to give me enough distance from the energy to think clearly and put words to the thoughts and feelings this lunation provoked. So with that said, thanks for being here friends — buckle up and let’s get into it.

Saturday, March 29th we experienced the last eclipse in the Aries-Libra axis for some time. The North and South nodes were stationed along this axis from July 2023 to January 2025 and bore witness to a series of eclipses which highlighted an ongoing story about the tension between the drive to claim a sense of control and agency in an increasingly volatile global context, and the difficulty of detaching from deeply ingrained perceptions of how one can/should/must function in society. Chiron, the asteroid representing a source of deep wounding (and also healing potential), has also been present in Aries since 2018, further triggering the pain points touched by eclipses along this axis.

Put plainly, the storyline for this series of Aries-Libra eclipses pushed us to take more ownership, initiative, and action on what truly matters for each of us, while moving away from people-pleasing tendencies, co-dependency, and the need to be liked, understood, or accepted by the majority. Easier said than done, right? However the past year and half went for you, it’s likely that you learned some major lessons on these topics (check the houses holding Aries and Libra to get a sense of where and how). Last weekend was like a dramatic exclamation point at the end of this long and winding saga, and it may have felt painful. But pain is a sign that you can still feel, which in this day and age may be a rarer gift than we realize.

We don’t often think of pain as a gift, but this transit of the North Node in Aries (my 8th house, iykyk) taught me this valuable lesson. Pain means that you are alive and that however damaged or frightened you may be, your capacity to sense and feel is engaged. In a world increasingly designed to numb, distract, and disarm you, pain serves as a harsh and swift grounding mechanism that brings your awareness down from the clouds and back into your earthly body. Pain kicks your survival instinct into gear and empowers you to act. Time can’t be wasted, because every second is felt. This is how the North Node’s transit through Aries felt for me, like inflammation radiating around a wound until the throbbing — and how to relieve it — was the only thing I could think about.

During this transit, Mars demanded that we pay attention and act with urgency where we might have been dragging our feet or sticking our heads in the sand before. Actually, it didn’t just ask — it forced by escalating the intensity of the pain until it could no longer be ignored. It became painfully clear what the price of not taking action would be, on a personal level (pushing us beyond our comfort zones in the house holding Aries) and on a collective level, as members of societies subjected to the increasingly violent behavior of cult-like political leaders and a parasitic billionaire elite.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the timeframe in which Israel began its deadly assault on Gaza, a truly unprecedented act of genocide in its speed, intensity, and transparency. The world (or those who would look, anyway) was forced to watch in real time as every day, innocent civilians — men, women, and children (so many children)— were slaughtered in unimaginably violent ways. The genocide is still happening, escalating rapidly yet becoming increasingly less visible outside of Gaza, since most of the journalists who reported on the ground have been killed (more than in WWI and WII combined). Hamza Al Dahdouh, Ayat Khadoura, and Hossam Shobbat are just a few of their names.

During this time, many of us in the West heeded the North Node’s call to the collective and stepped up to the plate to say the quiet part out loud, condemn what was being done, resist, raise funds for Palestinians, and apply pressure to our elected officials to intervene. Students risked, and continue to risk, arrest, expulsion, and deportation by speaking out. Many of those who spoke up and continue to speak up have lost jobs, opportunities, money, and friendships, been blacklisted in their industries, or targeted for harassment, doxxing, and death threats.

Others receded back into the comfortability of refusing to take a stand, saying, “It’s too complicated. There are two sides to every story.” Many chose to close their eyes and remain silent, feeling that there was too much to risk (personally) by talking about it. Still others decided that it would be more politically/socially/economically advantageous to align themselves with the institutions and structures of power manufacturing the weapons, profiting from the bloodshed, and crafting the narrative justifying greater violence. Although Libra represents justice, harmony, and diplomacy, the South Node’s transit through this sign amplified how perverted many of our institutions and authority figures have become in their pursuit of Arian themes of authority, control, and naked self-interest. It also asked us to take accountability for the ways in which we surrender our own power in order to fit in, keep the peace, or maintain neutrality.

Here’s a little example of the Libra south node in action:

In one of my past lives (aka the job I had after graduating college in 2017), I worked at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. The Shoah Foundation was founded in 1994 by Stephen Spielberg after he made Schindler’s List, and was dedicated to collecting, digitizing, and archiving the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Its mission was to ensure that this dark era in history was not repeated. Over time, its collection of testimonies — called the Visual History Archive — grew to include accounts from survivors of incidences of mass violence and genocide across the globe. The idea was that if only people had access to a record of firsthand accounts from survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, humanity as a whole would never let these atrocities happen again.

Obviously this noble mission stands in contrast to a much darker reality. Not only does the genocide in Gaza continue, but the very institution dedicated to building “a future for all” that “rejects antisemitism, hatred, dehumanization, and genocide” has never even acknowledged it as such. What the Shoah Foundation did do was denounce any affiliation with 2024 USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum, who minored in their own resistance to genocide studies certificate (!), because of her comments criticizing Israel.

But let me come back to the astrology, and the point of what I’m trying to communicate here…

The nodes’ transit through the Aries-Libra axis highlighted pain points relating to the struggle to establish personal authority and stand up for our values in the face of institutional pushback, social ostracization, and material consequences. On March 30th, one day after the last eclipse in this series, Neptune entered Aries for the first time since 1861. Neptune is a slow-moving outer planet that represents illusion, idealism, mysticism, and the dissolution of boundaries. Wherever it transits, its brings a sort of rose-colored fogginess that mystifies and obscures the truth (whatever that is). Saturn, which represents structure, limitation, materiality, and decay, will soon join Neptune in Aries on May 25th. On July 15th, the two planets will aspect each other in a tight conjunction. I’ll share some thoughts on what this combination could mean and how it might manifest in a future article, but for now I’ll leave you with a couple of reflection questions:

When push comes to shove and you realize that you can no longer trust the institutions and authorities you once did, how do you cope?

What do you fight for, even if you have to fight alone?

How do you make meaning amidst disillusionment?