For the Anchorage Press: 2022, The Year Ahead

In line with 2020 and 2021, major shifts and changes take place in the skies of 2022; discussions of power and insurrection remain prominent as will a deep mining of our personal relationships with ourselves and those closest to us. This year has a halo of optimism, however, as it is bolstered by the sparkles and magic of Jupiter and the imagination of Neptune and Uranus finally goes direct. It feels like there may be beauty and love and hope again after all, even in the midst of painful awakenings. This year has a lot going on, so we’re breaking the year ahead into two parts to be able to better focus on some of the months immediately ahead. Take note of what’s to come.

With Jupiter freshly in one of its home signs, Pisces, 2022 starts off with a promise of expansion, dimmed only slightly by the Venus retrograde in work-oriented Capricorn that has been forcing many of us into a kind of excavation of our most intimate relationships. That promise of expansion and shimmer has created a layer of calm and ease in this process, which could get ruffled as Mercury enters its first retrograde in Aquarius on January 14, where it will stay retrograde until January 25 before retrograding again in Capricorn until February 3.

Retrogrades generally get bad rap for throwing bricks through our best laid plans, but they can be wonderful teachers if we can go with the flow and listen to what they teach us. Venus, a planet ruled by Libra and Taurus, wants for pleasure and beauty—it is a planet that wants to please and to be pleased, to attract and also to surround itself by what it finds attractive. So when Venus is in retrograde, there is a kind of turning over of matters of love, creativity, and pleasure, which is difficult in calculating Capricorn—how do we quantify what makes us happy and how our current situations do or do not measure up?

Adding a Mercury retrograde in Aquarius, a communicative sign that at its best is progressive, humanitarian, and innovative and at its worst is an arrogant, attention-seeking wild card, might create a kind of over confidence in our communications of the delicate matters we find ourselves mired in during Venus’s retrograde. Mars also stations in Jupiter-ruled Sagittarius this month, a sign in which the Scorpio-ruled planet of aggression, action, and sex can be hasty and lost in the stars, which might encourage us to be even more impulsive in our movements.

With these retrogrades, my general admonition is: Take care, go easy on yourself. Asserting your needs for your own happiness but holding your tongue while you carefully choose your words is tricky business.

February’s Pluto return, which only happens about every 225 years, is one of the celestial signals that last year’s political upheavals and the overthrowing of the bedrock of our global communities is not over. (The last time Pluto completed a return was 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.) We can expect uprisings, power struggles, and an unearthing of secrets within deeply entrenched societal systems. Pluto, which moves on a large, outer orbit, affects us individually based more so on the house in which it is in in our charts and less so based on its sign, which is more a description of the tenets valued and exalted by a generation. (When Pluto entered money-counting Capricorn in 2008, we entered a major recession, the effects of which rippled through the world.)

Saturn and Uranus were major players in 2021 and they will continue to be this year, though there should be an ease to their relationship. Saturn, which is in its home sign of Aquarius still, is no longer directly squaring Uranus, which should provide a bit of subtlety to tensions, even if those are not quite over yet. The planet of restraint, cutting away, and heaviness is still closely squaring the planet of upheaval, so we will be feeling the effects of the last two years for a while. So, what does this mean? A Saturn-Uranus square is best represented by insurrection, and the first iteration of this square took place last year on January 7, 2021—the date after some Americans stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and the same day that Mars, the planet of war, moved into Taurus and activated this square.

That said, Uranus is finally direct in Taurus as of January 18, which should manifest in a bit of ease of stresses related to personal finances and home-life, places where Taurus, a space-maker and keeper of house and home, highlights.

The day following this helpful transit, the lunar nodes transit from Gemini and Sagittarius, where they have been for over a year, to Taurus and Scorpio. This shift indicates that a new sort of karmic lesson in the collective consciousness is in store. The North Node is about where we are heading collectively, and in Taurus we can expect that this lesson has something to do with stability, natural resources, home, and healing. Taurus holds space, which feels like a positive direction for the next 18 months as we heal all that has collectively taken place in the past two years. The South Node is largely about the past (there is a karma-dharma relationship between the South and North nodes, respectively), and in Scorpio, we can expect a penetrating look into the past and especially in issues relating to power.

Both Mars and Venus will enter Aquarius on March 6, which might indicate that our personal interactions, which were already in focus, could get a little…weird. Mars, the planet of action and sex, and Venus, the planet of love and pleasure, both being in a Saturn-ruled sign while Saturn is also still in Aquarius might mean that for some of us, fine-tuning the arrangements in our relationships—with lovers, with co-workers, with the folks with whom we are intimately intertwined—is par for the course. Be ready to think about the structures of your relationships in a new way. Be ready to be weird.

Venus is closely enclosed by the malefic planets, Mars and Saturn, during March, which feels like there could be a kind of suppression of pleasure and a stress on our relationships. As this happens right after Venus has spent over a month retrograding in Capricorn, it indicates that the way that we find, give, experience pleasure is in a kind of review.

It feels appropriate that Jupiter starts the year off with a noticeable and helpful transit, as it, along with Neptune, has a large mark on this entire year, which might not be bad for a year with so much unearthing and deep dives. Jupiter will be in Pisces for most of the first half of the year and will exactly conjoin Neptune on April 12. Jupiter expands toward resources and opportunity and is often associated with luck, while Neptune is the planet of our dreamscapes and personal and collective unconscious and can be a bit esoteric. The combination of these planets in prominent places promises that there can be silver linings to tension but that we might be inclined to go overboard and get lost in overindulgence and escapism. But with this transit on the horizon, there’s a sense that tapping into our intuition will help us through the year and help us reimagine our futures. The arts and creative pursuits will be bolstered greatly during this time.

Jupiter will also sextile Pluto on May 3, which adds to our individual sense that if we can dream it, it can be made manifest. Immediately preceding this transit, Pluto stations retrograde on April 29, where it will stay until October 8. This may not sound pleasant, but Pluto retrogrades are largely about death. Rebirth is the subtext, but Pluto isn’t about the rebirth—it’s about losing what must be lost. Which, ultimately, is a good thing but will not always feel like it; there can be deep feelings of helplessness with the acknowledgement that we are not in charge. With this sextile to Jupiter, however, expect the rebirth part of this death to make itself known, perhaps in just small ways.

In addition to all of this Plutonic activity and the shift of the nodes, Pluto-ruled Scorpios and those with Scorpio in prominent places will also be the stars (or the shadows) of their own show during several upcoming eclipses. On May 15, there is a Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio, followed by a Solar Eclipse in Scorpio in the fall. As the nodal shift is collective, however, we may all be being asked to spend time with our shadow selves during this first half of the year, while we, as a global community seek to sever what no longer serves us in order to bring about something new.

Venus-ruled Libra and Taurus may feel highlighted in some way as well during this first part of the year as the planetary focus is on their realms of beauty, relationships, and pleasure. Water signs may feel the pull of power balanced by the pull of escape like the ocean feels the moon. Earth signs may feel unsettled with all this Aquarian energy flying around. In these overhauls and feelings of helplessness and loss, we may have to work to see the good in one another and to recognize our individual gifts and those of others. There is a place for all of us in this story, however, and that is one of the main messages of Aquarius, the age in which we are now in: we are all a part of this world, and in order to build the world we want to have, we must think outside of the norms we have established and we must do so together.