To which my answer is, “I’m not that rational, actually.”

I understand why people wonder and I’m not offended when they ask (in fact I’m delighted, it gives me the chance to explain something I keep wanting another go at). The fact of the matter is, until relatively recently I too thought astrology to be bullshit. As a result, when I first developed an interest in it I was so squirmingly embarrassed that for about six months I told absolutely no one.

All my life I had rolled my eyes at those women who exclaim “Oh, it’s because you’re an Aries!” whenever someone so much as sneezed. I associated astrology with a particular kind of heavily perfumed Prozac-gulping bored housewife type. I, on the other hand, was a charmingly clear-eyed sceptic of course. I could chat about God and past lives and auras with the best of them but inwardly my ego would be pumping my superego in the ribs, pointing and laughing. I could sample all the pseudoscientific woo-woo I wanted because, you see, I was immune. The scientific method had vaccinated me.

In other words, tumbling headlong into astrology meant overhauling entire sections of my identity. Because — and it is important to state this outright and with emphasis — scientifically speaking, astrology doesn’t make sense.

Many armchair astrologers give astrology a bad rap by making statements like “well if the moon can move the ocean then surely it moves us as well!” or “well, Newton said that everything exerts force on everything else, therefore planets must affect us with their gravitational pull” which... yes, everything affects everything else, but it’s quite an imaginative leap from there to arriving at the complex and layered thing that is astrology. In fact, if astrology were scientifically sound simply because things influence other things, then by that argument — since the food we eat most definitely affects us — we should also come up with a comprehensive paradigm of personhood based on what our mothers ate while we were in utero.

We’ve known for centuries that planets revolve around the sun, yet astrology still looks at everything from an earth-centric point of view. Retrogrades — astrology’s most notoriously grumpy uncles — are actually a misnomer: In reality planets never move backwards in the sky (they just seem to from the earth’s point of view). There is also no reasonable argument for why the planet Mercury should speak to our communication styles and Venus to love and pleasure, except that it fits, somehow, with the myths and archetypes we know and love.

And no, I don’t think that upcoming advancements in satellite imagery, quantum physics, and [insert fancy theory here] will suddenly “prove astrology right.” Astrology, like art, music, and romance, evades rational explanation; it belongs in the realm of feeling rather than verifiable fact. Trying to reduce it to a physically explicable phenomenon would be chasing our own tails.

All of life’s big questions can be approached with rigour and curiosity, and be debated over joyfully. They can be studied scientifically from many angles too, but their raisons d’etre are outside the sphere of observable experience. We don’t know why music makes us feel things, only that it does. We don’t know why we love, only that we do. I don’t know why astrology resonates with me and so many others, only that it does.

At the end of the day, we feel, therefore we are. We like something, therefore we do it. We poke at the firmaments of heaven with microscopes and telescopes and label that Reality, but we know — we all know, no matter how cynical we think we are — that poetry is Real too.

I think what confuses people about astrology, though, is that it does make some kind of truth claim. It is an actual model of the self, rather than a lovely string of words or colours that makes us feel things. In that sense it is different from those other things I’ve listed — love, music, poetry. It is, instead, applied poetry. It purposely interacts with daily living; it has something to say about how we live, and because of that it does indeed encroach a little on scientific territory — which understandably gets people’s hackles up. Like, you know, poetry is nice and all but no amount of beautiful words will save my life when I need antibiotics.

In other words, art belongs in the pretty corner, and science in the useful corner. Yet astrology seems bent on wandering the room.

To address that, I would like to return to the concept of applied poetry. Many esoteric practices straddle myth and intuition in this way, weaving the sensory and the intangible into something slippery yet oddly coherent. Prayers, mantras, magic spells. Fairy tales, indigenous story-poems. Tarot, the Enneagram, meditation, ecstatic dance, dream analysis. The magic is in the weirdness, in the resonance — like singing a note and hearing a nearby snare drum vibrate in response.

The closest I can come to explaining these practices is to say that the universe seems to be absolutely brimming with patterns that repeat and reflect each other. Whether atoms or galaxies, things revolve around each other, attract and repel, absorb and expel. Whenever I poke my hand into the murky soup of consciousness, something uncannily familiar glides past.

Have you ever read a poem that made you feel such a shock of recognition that it hurt a little bit? To me, Mary Oliver does this exceptionally well — she writes about a black bear1 descending from the mountain and although I have never even seen a bear I recognise it with my entire body; I can hear its snuffles, smell its fur; I miss it like I miss a beloved grandparent. The bear makes me understand something about love; but more specifically, Oliver’s words — and her keen eyes, her pattern-seeking mind, her poetic heart — break that open for me. She links the bear to wordless, perfect love in a way that I never would have thought of, but that now feels undeniable.

To me, that is what astrology does as well. It is a long and evolving poem begun in antiquity and continued to this day, half based on observation, half on imagination. It is inexact, ripe with metaphor, and open to interpretation. When viewed through a fundamentalist lens — “You’re a Taurus so you’re stubborn” — astrology shrivels up and dies, because it is not meant to be a set of rules but instead a conversation. It is a bunch of people, over centuries, throwing their words into a melting pot of sky-poetry and seeing the sky itself wink back at them.

In other words, astrology does not ask for belief, only for the suspension of disbelief — and a knack for story.

Which is great, because I’ve never been that good at belief. I don’t quite believe in rationality, for instance. It has its uses but people seem to be irrationally attached to it.

It is far more fun to explore than to expound. It is far more fun to be a mystic than a firm believer. It is tremendous fun to take a deep breath, clutch one’s lucky feather, and ride the wind — without knowing how such flight is possible, and without needing to.

Spring
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

(Mary Oliver, from House of Light)

I also wrote an entire essay about the mythos and poetry of Scorpio season, which you can find here.

Okay so we’re in Scorpio season. What that means is that the sun is currently moving through the sign of Scorpio (at least, according to Hellenistic astrology). I wrote about Scorpio season in this post, if you’d like to know more about the poetics and meaning of this time. The summary is that this season signifies rebirth but also survival, challenge but also celebration. It highlights themes of depth, tenacity, and power. Where these themes will be most active for you depends on your rising sign (not your sun sign, as most pop astrology would have you believe). Other events, such as the movements of other planets, new and full moons – all of these also add texture and focus to certain areas of your life.

In light of that, some important events in Scorpio season:

• 22 October (so yesterday, at time of publishing this): Neptune retrograde re-entered Pisces (actually this happened a few hours before Scorpio season officially started, but it’s close enough to be really significant). It will stay in Pisces until end of January 2026, hanging out with Saturn which is currently also in Pisces for a final time before moving on. Both these slow-moving planets spent a long time in Pisces before briefly moving into Aries earlier this year – now, back in Pisces, they’re revisiting old lessons. Which Piscean themes were really highlighted for you in 2022-2024 (and even before?) Prepare to dive once more into that fray.

• 5 November: Full moon happens in Taurus, opposing the sun in Scorpio.

• 8 November: Uranus retrograde re-enters Taurus. It will stay in Taurus until late April 2026. Like Neptune and Saturn, Uranus is now revisiting older themes for a few months before shaking off that bullish energy next year. Which Taurus themes were restructured for you in the past few years? Expect some final cabinet reshuffles in those areas.

• 9 November until 29 November: Mercury retrogrades through Sagittarius and Scorpio, and on 20 November, right at the end of Scorpio season, there will be a Mercury cazimi (i.e. Mercury conjoining the sun).

• 20 November: New moon happens in Scorpio (in conjunction with Mercury in Scorpio).

All our slow-moving planets are retrograde right now, and soon, our celestial messenger (Mercury) will be too. In the meantime, Mars, Scorpio’s ruler, will be hanging out first in its home sign, Scorpio, then in Sagittarius, adding some fiery flair to an otherwise watery time. As for Venus, first she will be happily travelling through Libra, adding a backdrop of beauty and justice to it all, but about halfway through this season she’ll move into Scorpio as well and contribute to its mounting intensity.

Jupiter is currently in Cancer (another water sign), so throughout this month the sun, Mercury, and Venus will make multiple trines (120 degree aspects) to it. To me that’s a positive note: Things might get gnarly by the end of this season but at least Jupiter is lending us its fortitude, its optimism.

In general, there will be a LOT of watery things happening this month, i.e. a lot of emotions, since Saturn, Neptune, the sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and the new moon are all travelling through in water signs.

The Garden Route is in a severe drought right now, so I’m hoping all this metaphorical water might get tangible too. Either way: Let it rain!

Your brief, according to your rising sign:

Aries rising ♈

Behind anger, if we’re willing to look, there is often sadness. Even if – especially if – you’re not much of a weeper, experiment with shades of melancholy this month. Watch a sad movie, write a letter to your childhood self, and, in particular, see if you can let the heat of frustration and pent-up movement turn into some potent waterworks instead.

Don’t go into debt – if your money runs low, rather get creative about how to generate income. Revisit work and moneymaking ideas you had in 2023, 2024 and early 2025: Can you build on these? Can you find the sweet spot between steady and innovative to build yourself a life that won’t be shaken by every storm?

By the end of this month you may be having quite a dynamic and sexy time, but watch out for miscommunications in the areas of your life where your energy overlaps with others’. Play with mutual chemistry without signing a binding contract. Lean into connection and even some energetic tug-of-wars without rushing into commitments.

Much of what you do this month, and in the next few months, may not be visible to the world or even to yourself. Liminal spaces aren’t your comfort zone, but you’ve spent a lot of time there these past years, and this is the final stretch. If you approach your shadow work with a willingness to go deep and even feel existentially uncomfortable, you’ll have the tools to build something visibly beautiful by next year.

Taurus rising ♉

While you might usually experience yourself as constant and reliable, you’re not immune to changing your mind or discovering new things about yourself. Over the last few years, your understanding of who you are may have broadened or been shaken – this month, expect those shake-ups to get revisited, particularly where your self-concept overlaps with your most significant relationships.

Plainly stated: Your significant other(s) might trigger some big reactions in you this month. Be careful with your words, especially during conflict. Avoid making big promises or big accusations. Instead, try to identify why you get triggered, and how that feels in your body. You’re being invited to soften into self-compassion.

Let your closest friendships and daily rituals nourish you. Double down on your healthy routines, write doable to-do lists, get cosy with your daily life. The everyday is sacred, and never more so than now.

The networks and community you built over the last few years, even if you haven’t paid that much attention to them over the past months, are coming into focus again. Next year you’ll be digging around in your most shadowy self and you’ll need your community to have your back, so use this time to make sure it’s sturdy.

Gemini rising ♊

You’ve been overhauling huge parts of your life this year, particularly in the areas of home, career, community, and self-concept. In fact, you may be so used to this transformation train forging full steam ahead that slowing it down feels nearly impossible. Well, this month you need to do the nearly impossible: Slow it way, waaaaay down. Pull the handbrake if you need to.

Focus on sleep, food, exercise. Focus on working well rather than working hard. Listen to your body. Identify where your energy is flagging, and rest your nervous system. You’ll need all your mental and physical acumen soon – in 2026 the makeover continues. For now, eat your vegetables.

You probably also went through something of a spiritual and psychological revolution these last few years. This month, there is more work asking to be done here, but it’s fun work. Ponder the nature of consciousness. Revisit all the healing work you’ve done. In particular, lean on and respect your mind-body connection.

Resist the temptation to worry about money – you’ve put good structures in place, and they will hold. Instead, take a good look at your public offering and plans for your career. Do they reflect your ideals? And are they feasible? Reconsider, revise, and dream a little, too. Then just do the next right thing, trusting that your past self laid the groundwork.

Cancer rising ♋

The start of this year was probably particularly hard on you, but if you haven’t yet: You can unclench now. Feel what wants to flow – water is your friend, and never more so than this month. Cry, and swim, and jump in puddles, and then make beautiful things from all the watery revelations you’ve been having.

The childlike parts of your life – your actual children and your inner child, your romances, your creative pursuits – are asking for some attention. Resolve whatever tensions arise in these areas with sprinklings of wonder and gratitude. Make art for your own pleasure. Go out and play. This is transformative work.

Some details might fall by the wayside this season, so make sure to keep a record of your creations: Back up the photos of your kids, jot down the lyrics to that song you wrote even if you think you have it fully memorised. But also don’t take yourself too seriously, and don’t sweat the small stuff. Not everything needs to be part of some Grand Plan.

Travel, learning, and some armchair philosophising are also in the cards for you over the next couple of months. Be open to new friendships from unexpected avenues. Lean into these, because next year your career will be front and centre, and you’ll want to bring a replenished and holistic self to it.

Leo rising ♌

If your home life or your family is making you hot under the collar, don’t try to force a solution. Instead, use this opportunity to revisit and negotiate your own needs and boundaries, your fears and desires – the hotspots of intensity in your inner life that make this journey so interesting.

Be wise with your words, and thorough in your arrangements. If things do inevitably get lost in translation, particularly in matters close to home, try to channel some excess steam into creative projects or career plans.

You may also feel a renewed pull towards deep engagement with others: Energetic exchanges, power play, friction – or more prosaically, overlapping financial interests. This theme has cropped up for you many times over the last few years, so just hold on to that sturdy self-awareness you’ve been cultivating, and follow your truth.

There are breakthroughs to be had for you this season, particularly in the push and pull between private and public self. Solitude can be an unexpected refuge for you in this process. You contain multitudes – don’t be afraid to plumb your own depths and engage with the shadowy things that come up.

Virgo rising ♍

This next month, you may have to submit to slightly more chaos than you’d prefer. Especially in areas where you’re used to being on top of things: Your routines, your to-do list, your communications, and your home. Although it might not be your preferred medium, surrender is an art form, and this season you get to perfect it.

You’ve been rethinking how you do relationships for a while, and for the next few months there will be a renewed focus on that. Your approach to commitment in particular is being put under the microscope: Does it reflect your highest good? Also, is it practically feasible? Analyse away, but don’t forget to play too.

If over the last few years you learned an unexpected skill, travelled somewhere you never saw yourself going, or suddenly deepened your spiritual path, these themes may come up again now. Cement the lessons you’ve learned so they become an unquestionable part of you – next year you’ll find yourself using your new spiritual and mental agility to overhaul your career path too.

Community is a powerful source of joy for you right now. Use the strong networks you’ve established, and, if it feels safe and good to do so, work on de-armouring your heart even further.

Libra rising ♎

It’s time to get up close and personal with your finances. Specifically, you’re being invited to reconsider and recalibrate your beliefs and fears about money, self-worth, labour, and your ability to secure your future.

Thinking about finances doesn’t have to be scary, though. Your career is evolving and the seeds you plant now will flourish soon. But first, you’ll have to take a sober look at your current situation. Have you been doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for different results? Have you been hoping to resolve your worries by simply working even harder? If so, stop. Take a breath. Ground. Nurture your nervous system as many times as it takes – and this month, it may take a few.

Other people may also be a surprising boon to you in this time. Consider creative partnerships, co-ops, stokvels, or simple energetic exchanges as a way to sustainably replenish your coffers. Your energy is finite, but the universe is not. What might collaborating with all of life itself look like?

You’ve been stretched and challenged in the domain of work and effort for a few years now, and finally you’re in the home stretch. Apply the lessons you’ve learned, establish your very own work rhythm, and keep listening to your body. You’ve got this.

Scorpio rising ♏

Don’t get too attached to any one idea of yourself, because this month will remind you again and again that you are always in the process of changing. Bend rather than break; adapt, innovate, and breathe through any tense moments. You know, more than most, that discomfort does not equal damage.

While for the last six months there may have been an increased focus on your work, health, and energy, the rest of this year is inviting you to revisit how and where you find joy. Making creative expression and childlike play part of your daily life will sustain you far into the future.

Your committed partnerships are also being placed under the microscope for a few months. However, you’re probably feeling an increased sense of curiosity and wanderlust these days, so use that as well as your innate playfulness to innovatively resolve whatever relational shake-ups come your way.

All your life, you’ve been told that you’re “intense.” This Scorpio season, it’s time you explore what that concept really means: You have an immense ability to meet the fulness of life without flinching. You have honed this ability relentlessly, and it will stand you in good stead all your life. This month, plant your flag in this bedrock, and fiercely celebrate who you are becoming.

Sagittarius rising ♐

You’re revisiting – and will soon be concluding – whatever restructuring you did over the past couple of years in the areas of work, health and routines. Use this time to cement the lessons you’ve learned about what your body needs, how to sustainably manage your time, and how to marry effort and joy. Next year the focus will shift towards creativity and relationships, and you’ll want to be well-resourced for that.

Another aspect of your life soon to shift, after one last big push, is that of home and family. Use the next month to investigate what belonging means to you, and what your ideal home life might look like. Don’t be discouraged when there are setbacks in your domestic goals – this Scorpio season is for envisioning, and soon visible changes will follow.

The sense of old lessons being revisited, especially when you thought they’d been concluded, may bring up some frustration in you. This month is asking you to sit with that frustration and even play with it a little. Have a chat with your shadow, when you encounter it – you might learn powerful things about yourself.

Although your life isn’t uncomplicated, a growing sense of resilience and hope is taking root within you. In particular, the investments you have made in others’ lives are paying off in both tangible and energetic ways. Relish the dynamic and supportive interactions you’re having with key people in your life.

Capricorn rising ♑

Fostering community and healthy interdependence can feel out of your comfort zone. This month you’re being challenged to revisit how you engage with your networks, and particularly how you ask for support. Do you shy away from showing vulnerability? Don’t force anything, but consider where you could deepen your community connections.

This renewed focus on your broader networks may bring some growing pains, but you’re being supported through it by your immediate environment: daily routines, interactions with your nearest and dearest, lists and short-term plans, reflection, habits and rituals. Deep joy can be mined from the mundane.

In the last few years your creative process and ideals have probably been significantly rearranged. Now you’re being asked to revisit this area one more time. To do that, spend time with children, and also with your inner child. Get weird and silly about what you put into the world. Let your art reflect your inner rebel.

Another source of nutrition for you right now, and stretching into next year, is the domain of your partnerships. Whether in the form of romantic relationships or long-standing friendships, the optimism and growth you’re experiencing here can feed into the work you’re doing in other areas of your life.

Aquarius rising ♒

Your axis of public and private self is rumbling. Leadership roles, public identity, your vocation and long-term goals – all of these are under revision. Miscommunications are quite likely right now, so speak with care and avoid making big promises. Your work in the world is changing shape, but first you’ll need to do some excavations.

You are not being asked to abandon the mission, but rather to slow your pace and re-imagine the path. Yes, expansive vision – and corresponding impatience with detail – is part of your approach, but this month, yielding to a slower, deeper tempo is the more powerful spiritual practice.

There is strong support available for you in the domain of actual effort and physicality: the sweat of your brow, the way you treat your nervous system, the optimisation of labour and health. Use it. Disciplined daily habits are the scaffolding for the future you’re moving towards.

For the next couple of months, quietly plan and dream around money and material resources. Get your finances in order; refine your values. You are in the last chapter of testing what you’ve built these past few years – make sure it can stand before next year shifts the focus to what you do with all that capital, literal and psychic.

Pisces rising ♓

You’re being invited again to redraw your sense of self: what you can hold, what you can’t, where your power is, where your limits are. Themes from early this year may resurface, not to exhaust you but to allow you to answer with more maturity. Use this time to lay a deep foundation of self-awareness and self-regard.

For the next six months there is genuine luck and optimism in the realms of creativity, children and inner-child work, and any process of re-parenting yourself. The better you know yourself, the braver and more alive your expression becomes. Make a habit of delight.

There are also some meaningful shifts in your relationship to travel, learning, and philosophy. New interests may sprout up and lead you once again towards how you are reconstructing your identity. Follow these sparks, even when they challenge your sense of self.

On the other end of that axis you are also revisiting the mundane areas: daily life, local environment, short-range plans, and time management. One last overhaul is required here to make the everyday frictionless, so that your creative dreams can more easily be birthed.

To summarise: This is a time for deep reflection, and also for getting weird. There are wobbles ahead, but in the long run they will strengthen our foundations. Let’s get creative with our lives.

I’m having a pet peeve moment: Halloween is exploding all over my socials, as it does every year in October... but we’re not actually in spooky season. All Hallows’ Eve, as it was originally called, originated from the Celtic festival Samhein (pronounced “Sauw-en”), celebrating the crux of autumn: That moment where summer’s harvest and winter’s frost are poised equally far apart, where for a single night the veil between the living and the dead is thin enough to allow us to almost, almost, touch. In the Southern Hemisphere, that means Samhein should fall on or around 30 April.

(Maybe next year, just to be obnoxious, I’ll host a Halloween party on Freedom Day (27 April). That feels rather poetic, actually. Watch this space.)

(Alternatively, we could come up with a different celebration that is hybridised to Africa instead of being taken wholly from Europe?)

On a related note, people have been asking me if astrology works differently in the Southern Hemisphere, if the signs should be the other way around or have other meanings. This question makes sense since most of the astrology we encounter comes from the Global North: Aries season, start of the zodiac year, coincides with our early autumn. Conversely, astrologers talk about the link between Virgo season and the autumn harvest, when down here we’re gearing up for spring. And we’re used to thinking about Scorpio season as being a globally spooky time, when for us it’s actually the time of flowers and rebirth.

So yes, to some degree, the vibe of astrology in the Southern Hemisphere would change. The Zodiac signs stay the same, because planet-wide the sun is indeed moving past the same stars, but the interpretation of what these signs mean is allowed to morph according to our geographies. Astrology is about myths and meaning-making, and also about situational specificity. We get to play with and add on to old archetypes.

Keeping that in mind: Spooky season it is not, but it IS the time of creepy crawlies. Springtime in Southern Africa means the relentless awakening of snakes, wasps, huntsman spiders, and perhaps most unsettling of all: scorpions.

The other day I took a nighttime walk through a forested area with some friends. We shone our UV torches around and the trees LIT UP with scorpions (yup, scorpions glow in the dark under ultraviolet light). I mean like 30 scorpions per yellowwood tree, each half-hidden under flaky bark, retreating from the light until only a front pincer would protrude. Some were tiny as the tip of my pinkie, some as large as my palm. It was beautiful, and eery, and I will never again rest my back against a tree with the same nonchalance I did before.

While writing this, I also read a book about scorpions in Southern Africa*. It was a surprisingly riveting read. I’m conflicted about which interesting facts to pass on to you because these creatures are utterly fascinating, but here are a few:

• I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Scorpions glow under ultraviolet light. Scientists don’t know why. I think it’s because the earth is both a poet and a prankster.

• Many species can go without food for as long as a year, by slowing their metabolic rate. Also, they can trap air in their exoskeletons and survive underwater for two days.

• Scorpions are some of the oldest land-dwelling animals, predating dinosaurs by 200 million years. They have barely changed since pre-history, meaning they are so well-adapted that they’ve never needed to change any further.

• Scorpions moult roughly 6 times in their lifetimes, each time to make way for a bigger exoskeleton. The entire moulting process is weird and exhausting and may take longer than 12 hours. The periods in between moults are called instars (isn’t that beautiful?)

• Scorpions can’t see very well so they use a variety of complex instruments to sense vibrations instead. Also, in some scorpions, their tails can sense light just like their eyes can.

• Because scorpions can’t see very well, they might mistake an approaching mate for prey. Due to this, male scorpions have very elaborate mating rituals meant to warn the female scorpion of their interest; they only approach once she signals her consent. Also, some males do something called “the sexual sting” (the description of which sounds quite similar to a love bite), which calms the female.

• Scorpions give live birth to babies they’ve sometimes gestated for almost as long as an elephant gestates her calves. When times are tough, female scorpions can even stall their pregnancies or reabsorb the embryos. When the young scorpions are finally born they clamber onto their mother’s back, absorb water from her body, and remain there until their second instar. In other words, scorpions are devoted mothers, which is unheard of in the arachnid world.

The Garden Route scorpions, O. capensis, also known as the Cape docile scorpion, look like ebony Johnny Bravos, massive-shouldered and tiny-tailed. They’re only slightly venomous and described as “very docile indeed” in the book I just read. It’s true they don’t use their stingers easily, but try and rescue one by chasing it into a jar, and see how it attacks with pincers held aloft. Docile…. riiiiight.

So scorpions: Strange. Tenacious. Secretive. Fierce. Devoted. Extremely good at survival.

In the Southern Hemisphere we are in scorpion season, and we are also now in Scorpio season (23 October to 21 November). Much is made of the skill for persistence and stability of Scorpio’s opposite, Taurus. Scorpio is said to hold the other end of that truth: Death, intensity, transformation. Together they magnetise the two poles encompassing the twin lessons of desire and control. Control through protection, the bull says, and control through self-immolation, the scorpion responds. (By the way, an enduring and faulty myth about scorpions is that they will commit suicide by self-sting when placed near a fire. Actually, scorpions are immune to their own venom.)

But I think the contrast is not quite so simple. Have you seen a grumpy bull? With those horns, it’s not too different from a scorpion that’s being threatened. And as capacity for destruction goes, I think the bull is far less scrupulous. Perhaps we have dichotomised these two signs too far. Perhaps Taurus too can stand for anger – if a different anger from Scorpio’s – and Scorpio too can stand for sheer bloody-minded tenacity. The difference between the two, to me, is that Scorpio also understands the art of scurrying, of lying still under a rock for months on end, and of breaking through a skin that has hardened and shrunk around it. Its survival is sometimes creepy, and sometimes gross. It is also breathtakingly effective.

So, taking our cues from the creature it is named after, I wonder if we could view this time through a slightly altered lens: Scorpio as continuance, rather than death. Scorpio as creative tenacity, rather than resurrection. Most of all, if we look at the scorpion itself: Scorpio as the wisdom to know when to moult, and when to resolutely remain the same (even for millennia).

Rather than control, I’d call the wisdom of the Scorpio-Taurus axis the wisdom of survival. Even if, at times, that survival looks like death.

There are other ways to look at Scorpio season too, of course. My favourite approach to any sign is to interpret it through the lens of its element and mode – in this case, Scorpio as a fixed water sign.

Fixed signs, as I understand them, do not represent obstinacy (although they can) but rather the quintessential heart of the element they represent. Fixed water, then, is water that does not rush to be somewhere else but instead plumbs its own depths. In a large rock pool it spelunks and ripples, never fully still, never wasting energy. It lets light in yet its edges remain murky. And in that murkiness, we see the world reflected back to us: Upside-down trees, clouds, birds. A liquid camera obscura confronting us with the strangeness of our universe, with the strangeness of ourselves. Inviting us to reconsider our perceptions and especially our certainties.

Fixed water simply is. And by being so, it creates slow, deep change all around it. Entire ecosystems spring up. Plants grow, frogs spawn, mammals drink. Rocks are carved. Landscapes are formed.

Yet another way to look at this sign, and this is where we get to differences in hemisphere, is through the season it inhabits. In South Africa, Scorpio season coincides with mid-spring. Here I am, this season announces. After sloughing off every unnecessary leaf, after surrendering my moisture to these icy nights, after sending my creatures into dormancy, after lying still in wait for months, I erupt. I am opulent. I am randy. I am creative.

After everything, here I am again. My persistence is a thing of beauty.

Do you feel that power? Spring, like its arachnoid offspring, has mastered the art of going into hiding, then lunging forth. The power of Scorpio season, through this lens, is not only in transformative loss but in victory. This is a time to celebrate all we have survived, all we have overcome, and all we will face again and again until we are made powerful by these encounters.

Deep water. High spring. Scorpions. Three ways of understanding this sign, interwoven with each other. Together, I think they represent unhurried transformation. An unflinching willingness to do what it takes. And thus: irrepressible power.

This is a challenging season, undoubtedly, but also a time to take stock and acknowledge what a brave and beautiful thing it is to exist. Yesterday I re-read these lines from Jack Gilbert’s poem A Brief for the Defense:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, 
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have 
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless 
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only 
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

Let’s risk it. Let’s not make hardship the only measure of our attention. This Scorpio season, let’s go forth and be delighted.

*Scorpions of Southern Africa, by Jonathan Leeming

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I spent my 29^th birthday on a meditation cushion in the renovated ruins of a tiny chapel, surrounded by coloured glass and misshapen sculptures, with gusts of wind and peacocks howling plaintively in the background. I was coming off a bad breakup – I spent most of my 20s coming off a bad breakup – and I was in a pensive mood. I would, I had decided a few weeks before, become a Person Who Meditates. This three-day solo retreat was my first big step towards that goal, and this particular moment, in that frozen chapel, was its fulcrum.

Seven years later, I can say with some confidence that I am never going to be a Person Who Meditates. I am, however, a person who sits down to meditate and then bursts into song/dance/wild howls/scribbled bits of poetry instead.

I am, as it turns out, rather happy with this turn of events. And if I could pinpoint a single moment that launched me in this direction, I’d choose that one, on my 29^th birthday: Hovering half-frozen on the tip of a meditation cushion, staring through a pane-less window at a row of conifer trees flinging themselves with almost destructive abandon into the gale-force wind.

Movement. That’s what I saw.

Dance.

Air and earth. A meeting of opposites – quite literally an unstoppable force and an immovable object – crafting this ever-changing tableau. This wild beauty. Giving and grabbing and buffeting one another, neither winning nor compromising. Fierce. Elemental. Also: Yielding. Adapting. Made by the other – for what would wind be without earth to fling itself against, and how many landscapes would never have come to pass without the guiding hand of air?

Now here, I thought to myself, is true romance.

So I abandoned my attempt at meditation and began to hum instead. I tried to match my voice with the multi-tonal whistle of the wind, feeling its reverberations in my throat, feeling my body respond and gradually begin to dissolve into the vastness around me. I became a single string on the massive harpsichord of life; a tiny candle in a cathedral full of flames. That thing I had been fruitlessly trying to achieve with meditation – that stilling, that ridding of the monkey mind – now settled over me quite naturally and for a moment I felt the relief of being finally free of myself.

After a while, still singing, I began to address the Earth. How do you expose yourself so bravely? I hummed. How can you stand losing bits of yourself to the air? How do you know when it’s damage, and when it’s simply change?

And if, over time, every rock and tree becomes a grain of sand and that grain of sand is swept away until nothing of your landscape remains the same, then how do you even know what you are? Which part of all these parts is YOU?

And aren’t you scared?

The Earth responded in a susurration of needles landing and lifting ceaselessly from the ground:

Everything everything everything everything everything.

I sang and sang and listened and listened. And a gentle decision slotted into place within me: This would be my goal. To seek relationships in which we might become the earth and the air. Finding, somehow, ways to move each other without relinquishing our own natures. Being radically changed by our points of contact yet always becoming more of ourselves. Adaptation through dance, rather than obligation.

There would always be violence, I knew. Hurricanes cause gashes in the surface of the earth. Earthquakes birth storms.

Violence, but not damage.

Damage is a point of view, the Earth prodded. I cannot be damaged, only changed. I always return to myself.

Everything everything everything everything everything.

I had little interest in astrology back then; knew nothing of my own birth chart. Two years later, when I started learning about it, I discovered myself to be a Gemini rising with a Virgo sun and mars. Gemini: Mutable air. Virgo: Mutable earth.

The dance is within me. The violence is within me. The return to myself is always also an ending. I am the shale sliding down the banks of a donga, sharp-edged and torrential, facetious as a breeze. I go to war with myself and win and lose every time, and grieve and celebrate as if these are the same thing. I am frightened of death yet I am drawn to it. I know – I have always known – that becoming is nothing other than dissolving. I seek out experiences that remind me of that.

I am made of everything. But on this earthly plane, I cannot be made of everything all at once. I am first scared, then amused, then angry, then sad-happy. I am young, then less young, then old. Sometimes I feel the breath of Life itself flowing through my veins; sometimes I am a grumpy blob of flesh stuck interminably in traffic. Sometimes I remember, mostly I forget. Throughout it all, I dance with my selves, past present future. I grieve who I thought I’d become. I laugh at who I’m turning out to be. I think about my many deaths, and I flinch, and I gasp at the beauty of it.

Now that is true romance: This endless dance with my own spiky bits and composting soul, my rotten leaves, my windblown brain.

Death is fertile. It is a becoming. And becoming is sexy because it is so vital, so very alive.

Endings are deeply sexy.

That is the wisdom of mutable signs.

Mutable signs appear at the end of a season. Here in the Southern Hemisphere, Pisces heralds the end of summer, Virgo the end of winter. Gemini the end of autumn, Sagittarius the end of spring. They straddle the liminal space between sloughing off and quickening. They are filled with days of unpredictable weather, hot spells, bergwinds, flash freezes, wonder and loss. They make promises they don’t intend to keep (they rely on the cardinal signs to do that on their behalf, soon after.)

This year, they are also where our eclipses are happening, specifically in Virgo and Pisces. On top of that, Saturn and Neptune – planets of reality and dream, respectively – are doing a last tour of Pisces before moving away early next year. 2025, if you didn’t already know that, is a year of endings.

Octavia Butler said it best: God is change. This year, we feel that. The awareness of it begins to seep into our bones.

Change is also very, very hard. Navigating it demands skill, which can be learnt, and intuition – a certain adeptness, a subtle instinct for death and rebirth that all of us do have, fortunately, to some degree. We all have mutable signs in our charts – even with no personal planetary placements there (which is unlikely), mutability forms part of the zodiac, part of the collective body-mind. Death lives in all of us.

To navigate these choppy waters, these times of erosion and resettlement, it helps to tune into the wisdom of the mutable signs. Each of them holds a different yet related kind of knowing. Each represents the mutability of a different element. For me, meditating on the wisdom of mutable air, earth, fire and water breathes courage into my tired muscles. It reminds me to soften instead of resisting. It reminds me of how I already understand these lessons instinctively, because I have seen them play out around me. Nature is full of adaptation, and we are part of nature. We remember how to do this, on a cellular level.

Here is what I am learning from each mutable sign:

Gemini – mutable air

This is the youngest mutable sign in the Zodiac, which, if you think about it, is self-evident – for what could possibly be more youthful than air at its most malleable? The nature of air is to move; even Aquarius, which is fixed air, by definition wants to flow. Mutable air, though… It doesn’t just move, it flirts. This is not the gale force wind of a cold front, nor is it the heavy, fragrant air of a midsummer’s day. No, Gemini is the breeze that whips the hat off your head, then dies down all at once. It is that day that alternates bewilderingly between hot and cold, pushing fleecy clouds in front of the sun just as you’re about to take your jersey off, wildly shaking the leaves of a single tree while leaving its neighbours untouched.

It stirs up buried things and buries others; it scatters seeds, it pollinates. Its touch is everywhere: in the unknown plants sprouting in your flower beds, in the orchids growing seemingly without water, even in the scent of food wafting through empty midnight streets.

Gemini is also the air of phase change (in collaboration with Pisces, which is mutable water): the humid, moisture-laden layer just above the surface of the ocean. The vapour-like spray at the bottom of a waterfall. The wisps of mist being dispelled by the sun in front of your very eyes. And the steam that powers the locomotives of old.

Gemini understands duality. It is committed to the both-and of life, doggedly loyal to everythingness, to the sacredness of questions rather than answers. Make no mistake, though: There is power in its tricksterish manoeuvring. We tend to think of power as blunt force, resistance, single-mindedness. Gemini reminds us that often curiosity can take us further than passion, can last longer, can nourish us for entire lifetimes. Purity is okay, Gemini says, but have you tried variety?

Nourish yourself with Gemini energy when you feel yourself slipping into fundamentalism, when a specific grievance is keeping you up at night, when a problem seems insurmountable, or when you’re feeling too self-righteous for your own good.

How, you ask? The options are unlimited: Debate the merits of Amazonian fire ants with a ten-year-old child. Ask yourself “why?” when you discover something you have a strong emotional response to. Order a different drink at the bar. And, of course, go outside and allow the breeze to tickle your face. Open your arms and pretend for a moment that you’re a human-sized bird. Lick the air. Let it lick you back.

Virgo – mutable earth

Of all the elements, earth is the least obviously mutable. For earth, transformation is a task, rather than an effortless state of being. Change asks of earth to surrender something of its natural stability, its very shape, in this process of becoming. Therefore earthy mutability is a sober thing, a process of mindful metamorphosis, a deceptively humble transmutation.

It is also absolutely teeming with life. Where is earth at its most changeable? In the compost heap, of course. The wriggling red bodies of dozens of earthworms, the carapaces of tiny beetles, the humming of flies and the rapid flick of a gecko’s tongue as it catches the flies: That’s mutable earth energy. Virgo is all about organic material, about minerals and leaves and dung being digested back into the greater whole, about air pockets and water flow. It’s about the ancient tree that has collapsed in the forest and is now being subsumed with a quiet kind of violence into the moss-covered floor.

Mutable earth is also about how quartzite and marble are formed – incrementally, with the application of immense heat and pressure. Virgo knows that patience is not a virtue, it is a necessity. This too shall pass, Virgo says, but you might not see it come to pass. Level ground becomes a riverbed and boulders become sand, but it will take time, and many, many deaths. But take a closer look at those deaths and you will see untold lives play out in front of you, in vibrant, minuscule detail.

Tune into the wisdom of Virgo when the world is breaking your heart, when you’re wondering how your small actions could even matter, when the big picture becomes too big. Tune into the wisdom of Virgo when you need an ego death. Do so by kicking open a pile of dried animal dung and witnessing the shoots of green beneath it.

Sagittarius – mutable fire

At first glance you’d think that all fire is mutable – flames are, after all, chemical reaction made visible. But the nature of fire is to transform other things while itself remaining essentially the same. What, then, would mutable fire be?

Well... lightning, of course. A massive disparity in electrical charge builds up in the droplets of a thundercloud, until it is so strong that lightning resolves this imbalance in one perfect moment of forked ferocity. Did you know that thunder is the sound of air exploding? That’s Sagittarius energy.

But it doesn’t stop there. The lightning bolt hits the earth and morphs from electrical current into any number of things: a ground current, for instance, or something called a plasma channel, which is when its heat fuses sand and rock together. My personal favourite is latent lightning, which is when the bolt strikes a tree and travels all the way down to its roots. But the tree is robust, full of sap; the air is moist. And so at first it seems as if the lightning made barely any impact. Yet under the surface a process of internal combustion begins. For days you might not see anything, until suddenly the weather turns – the air is drier, the day warmer – and suddenly the tree explodes into flame.

Sagittarius waits, when waiting is what’s needed. It allows the charge to build, and then it releases its flaming arrow right into the heart of the matter. If Gemini is in service to sacred questions (and all questions are sacred), then Sagittarius, in return, is in wholehearted service to the answers. Its version of mutability is to take vast tensions and seemingly impossible paradoxes into its body and fashion something brand new out of them.

Mutable fire moulds itself – and the world around it – to fit a purpose. This is a far more active process than that of any other mutable sign, and yet it is still, at heart, a deeply adaptive way of being.

Fling yourself into Sagittarius energy when your life seems stagnant and in need of reinvention, when your mind feels scattered, or when you need some sacred anger in your day. If thunderstorms are hard to come by, listen to AC/DC instead. Or simply seek out your bluntest friend, ask them for some home truths, and bask in the uncomfortable joy of their perspective (children are also very good for this).

Pisces – mutable water

What can I even say about Pisces? As the oldest sign in the Zodiac, by definition this sign defies definition. Did you notice the water interacting with Gemini’s air, with Virgo’s soil, with Sagittarius’s lightning? That’s Pisces. It’s everywhere.

There’s a Buddhist saying that goes something like “enlightenment is when a wave realises it is the ocean,” and really, that sums it all up. The mutability of water is what allows life on our planet to exist at all.

Of course, therefore, Pisces would also be the sign closest to death. Mutable water knows that death and life are simply different phases. It knows that identity is a beautiful but temporary thing we cling to for safety, and that one body of water can become a myriad different bodies of water without losing an ounce of value in the process. Vitality needs no definition.

Adaptation at a level this well-practised becomes an art form. Pisces is an artist, and endings are its medium.

Dive into Pisces energy when you’re scared, when your heart is heavy with a wordless kind of yearning, or when compassion is threatening to undo you. Go to the ocean and allow the salt water of your body to sing out to the salt water of the sea. Gaze at a cloud. Touch a dew-drenched leaf. Wonderingly taste a droplet of your own sweat.

We’re in a time of endings. But we’ve been here before. Allow nature to remind you how to navigate upheaval, then feel yourself shape-shifting into the creature you need to become for times like these.

Mutable signs invite us to unclench what’s tight, to open our palms, to feel where flow naturally wants to happen. They invite us to dance.

So let’s dance.

I do astro readings now! If you’d like more of the above, but personalised to your own birth chart, see here for more information on what I have to offer.