What's good right now?

Keeping your eye on the ball

What do you really love? What makes your heart sing? Seeing a poppy snap from its bud, popping into billowing, diaphanous radiance? Glimpsing the electric blue of a passing kingfisher as others just walk on by, unaware? Witnessing the slimmest slice of crescent moon after the new moon? Spotting the Big Dipper from a gap in the curtains as you settle into bed on a cold, clear night? Bright, luminescent green euphorbia seemingly glowing with life and growth, pushing through the railings of a London street with the multi-faceted purple of wisteria hanging over it creating an energetic palette? Roe deer seen from a train window only for a barn owl to come into view, quartering the field beneath heavy clouds, moving as though an otherworldly force holds sway.

So much is fleeting, but here’s the thing – these beautiful, almost secret things keep on coming. They’re not finite, even when the world seems bleak – and they’re often in plain sight, though many do not raise their heads to see them. To me, these things feel increasingly like – are – true reality and I have to give them more of my attention to remain sane. Somehow, the more I give them my attention, the more they proliferate.

I have been listening to Duncan Barford and Alan Chapman on their podcast Worp FM and this is something – amongst many other wonderful things – that they talk about a lot. And of course, if you’ve read more of my Substack you will have seen mention of Ian McGilchrist who has said that “Attention is a moral obligation,” meaning that while conjuring tricks abound all around us, we should keep our eye on the ball (under the upturned cup). It’s a moral obligation now more than it’s ever been. And part of that is down to the crazy astrological configurations we’re seeing.

The outer planets are all doing interesting things (read: synchronising in ways never before witnessed by humans; which is not to say that they haven’t happened before our time on this planet) – moving over particular points repeatedly due to retrogrades; but more importantly, moving over the final degrees of signs and the very first degrees of signs. This is changing the dynamics – internally and externally, and boy are we seeing it play out. What is interesting to me is that they are all also moving (or have relatively recently moved) into masculine signs:

Pluto into Aquarius

Neptune and Saturn into Aries

Uranus into Gemini

With the patriarchy in freefall, this could seem worrying, but I feel quite strongly that this is forcing us to understand what masculinity truly is and how we express our masculinity in a healthy way. And of course, astrology itself has predominantly grown out of patriarchal cultures so how we see the cosmos tends to be through a masculine lens (go forth and conquer, chart and log, categorise and collect). There are many “minor” asteroids, and some would say planets or plutinos – planets the size of Pluto, who was famously declassified to a “dwarf” in 2006 – named after females: the asteroid Lilith (as well as Black Moon Lilith which is a point in space, but no less powerful for it), Pallas Athena, Vesta, Ceres, Eris. But also Chariklo, Sedna, and Haumea just to name a few. Each of them have rich mythologies that help us orient ourselves at this remarkable time in history. Paying attention to what these lesser astronomical bodies are doing in our own charts and the charts of those in power can be insightful.

What I am holding onto (lightly) are the words of astrologer André Barbault. I was not aware of his work (which focuses on the cycles), but via Neil Spencer, I learnt that Barbault saw the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction (perfecting in February 2026 but we will likely start feeling it this summer) as particularly significant. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction is inextricably linked to the history of Russia as events such as the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the assassination of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, the death of Stalin, and the fall of the Berlin Wall (and so the Communist Block) all occurred under these two planets conjoining. The combination of planetary movements set to play out in the coming months, led to Barbault saying before his death in 2019 that he saw the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 2026 as “The most benefic configuration of the century, which will work for the splendid relaunch of civilisation.”

As always, I feel like I have so much more to say, but the days and weeks are speeding by and these paragraphs have sat in my Drafts for far too long. I wouldn’t say I was particularly religious, certainly not in the conventional sense, but some weeks back, we saw the kingfisher that I’ve painted above. It was hovering like a hummingbird above Pangbourne Bridge on the River Thames – so high for such a little thing and seemingly presenting itself to us as though it were an oracle, its mere presence a message. I couldn’t help thinking of the name Lazarus as we watched the bird, appearing almost static before us – it looked resurrected, like a tiny angel, wings ablaze. Of course, kingfishers hover when they are hunting and there isn’t a suitable, overhanging tree branch nearby. But it felt infused with meaning and his silhouette is seared onto my retina from that day when the sun was blindingly bright with spring promise.

Yesterday, I went hunting for a song that was lodged in my head. It used to be played in the store I worked at, Monsoon-Accessorize. Each month we would get a cassette sent to us from head office, which we would then listen to on repeat, whether we liked it or not, for the next four weeks. I finally found the song. It was Sunset by Nitin Sawhney. Which is a pretty good song to have stuck in my head. You can listen to it here. And here’s a post from Nitin when I did a search because I wondered what he was up to. Seems to tie in nicely, because attention is ultimately about consciousness.

Happy Easter.