Moira's pet dragon & the upcoming eclipse season

Many of you have noticed that I haven’t written a lot this year, I have been huddled deep within the bowels of The Hermit Year, I come to you now with an explanation and a hoard of hermit insight. At the beginning of 2025, I outlined this year within the framework of the numerological 9, the archetypal Hermit, and the year of eclipses on the Virgo-Pisces axis within the container of my newsletter. With another Virgo-Pisces eclipse season approaching in September, it might be a great time to review an excerpt from that article and share where I’ve been: 

Often, The Hermit asks us to abandon an old way– this could be the path of glory and acclaim for some but it could also point to anything that was misaligned and particularly that which was a drain on health or vitality. The Hermit is not an easy journey, it requires that we take our time. Father Time used to be depicted on this card in earlier versions of the Tarot where instead of a lantern, he held an hourglass signifying how short life is but also that this is the path of delayed gratification. This is often a lonely experience because it requires that we go a different way from our friends and family, at times they may not understand why we have to walk The Hermit’s path. Some examples of a Hermit’s journey might include: sobriety, any project or course of study that requires full attention and focus, a commitment to health, dietary changes, spiritual exploration, celibacy, and foreign travel or immigration. And while I’m sure temptation could become a factor for anyone of the flesh, The Hermit is so committed to this change that nothing and no one can sway him, this is not often something that has to be forced because he is willingly walking away from his past. He is shaken and transformed for good, this is the kind of year we are stepping into... Perhaps you've already had or are in the process of embracing this cumulative experience of epiphany and abandoning something that was misaligned.

In that same article I emphasized 2025 as a “health year” and this has proven itself to be very resonant for me in my personal life. This year I broke my ankle in three places. It turned out to be a serious injury that required surgery to have a plate and screws put in, several months of physical therapy to relearn how to walk, and likely a second surgery next year to have the plate removed for increased mobility. I am only just now walking without aid 6 months later.

I told one of my friends late last year that I was expecting some kind of major health issue to show up around the March eclipse season in 2025. It was very loud in my upcoming transits but I had no idea that it would be an injury, it’s much more common for me to become ridiculously ill. I wonder sometimes if those kinds of blind spots exist so that even masters of divination are required to experience the lesson– it’s strict out here, no free passes! This has truly been The Hermit year of all Hermit years for me, and as much as I wish that painful life moments pushed me closer into the arms of creativity, writing didn’t feel very important or necessary or even desirable this year. Only now is it starting to feel more aligned as I start to walk again and even still, I’m finding myself experiencing a kind of stage fright. 

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the quiet and I think that this is a fundamental for The Hermit. Hibernation serves a very real function, the call to “go away” is almost always for the eventual “coming back out”. As a Hermit Person (my credentials are the 2 profile line in human design and the numerological life path 9) I often process pain alone. Predictably, Saturn in Aries put that to the test by temporarily taking away my independence. I suddenly couldn’t walk, work, cook, drive, or even get into the shower without help. All of this has been quite psychosomatic, a giant reflection of my own hyper independence and general unwillingness to trust anyone with anything. As much as this has been a year of isolation and limitation, it has also been a year of forced confrontation with the ways in which I create isolation, limitation, unsafe relationships with people that I wouldn’t want to receive help from, and ultimately, how I may have had some kind of hand in my own injury. This is a fine line for me here. I don’t want to cross over into the realm of blaming myself for falling and breaking my ankle, but at the same time, I was in a work environment that was blatantly draining my vitality. Survival– perceived and real threats to survival– drive us to make so many decisions that are Not Body Approved. A huge drive for me at this time was financial hardship, so the most logical thing for me to do was to get a soul sucking job. The problem is that this clashes deeply with my consistent bodily response to soul sucking jobs, which is: a health crisis.

I remember the day that I was injured very clearly. I had only just started the job in January after being laid off from a different soul sucking job last October. By February I had walking pneumonia (that I chose to work through), and just as I was starting to feel better in March, I woke up that day with a sore throat. I only had a three hour shift ahead of me that included some time sensitive things that needed to be done that day. Meanwhile, I had dirty dishes in the sink, laundry everywhere, and my apartment needed to be swept badly. Nothing in my life was put together because of how sick and fatigued I had been since my start date but I went into work anyway. When I got there, I kept having strange thoughts. “Remember to slow down when you’re in your work shoes,” my shoes would often catch on the floor when I was moving too quickly. I even thought, “Maybe I should skip the shoes today,” it wasn’t uncommon to be shoeless there, but I put them on anyway to avoid picking up dirt on my socks. I walked down the stairs to ask my boss a question, distracted and looking at a list on my phone, and suddenly my shoe caught on the step and I’m falling… one way, then the other. I knew immediately I had broken something. 

"A serious accident demands answers. What does it mean, why did it happen, what does it want? Continuing reappraisals are part of the aftershock. The accident may never be integrated, but it may strengthen the integrity of the soul's form by adding to it perplexity, sensitivity, vulnerability, and scar tissue... These accidents in youth were not foretold by the acorn as if laid down in a divine plan, nor were these untoward events determinants of later career, forcing it along a defined path. Rather, they were "necessary accidents," necessary and accidental both. They were means for the soul's calling to come forth, ways the acorn expresses its form and formed their lives." – James Hillman, The Soul's Code.

So, like, clearly the illness thing wasn’t working. I used to take off work when I felt sick but when it became a frequent occurrence, I started working through it anyway. I hated how much my superiors and coworkers resented me for my inability to stay present, I hated how much my bank account suffered from missing work, so I took every vitamin known to mankind and kept it pushing. Clearly, my body or the Universe or some other entity caught onto my avoidance and began sending me things that were much bigger. I mentioned I was laid off last October, but that only came after I was in a car accident. Just after I got my car back from the body shop, I got the call that my boss couldn’t afford to keep me on any longer and within the week, some kind of debris from the road shattered the passenger side mirror of my newly fixed car. I could. not. believe. my luck! At some point, we moved on from sinus infections and asthma attacks into the realm of car accidents and broken bones. As a result, I’ve had to become very serious in considering the kind of work that I accept, and especially now that my mobility is limited. 

Why am I telling you all of this? I guess part of me just wants to share how absolutely blown away I am by the transits, how clear the archetypal voice in all of this is. Another part knows that as a writer, I cannot keep these stories to myself, they don’t really feel like mine to own anyway. I know that I am not special in these experiences, it is your right of passage as a human to experience the voice of the universe in accidents, opportunities, and mysterious figures… but how many of us have turned the volume down on these unbelievable events because we are driven by an empty bank account or the weight of some egregious and burdensome expectation of what it means to be a human with real needs. So, I didn’t break my own ankle, but I do think some part of me was looking for a socially acceptable way to disappear from the rat race for a while. I have no idea what it means for me to not go back to a soul sucking job. I’m not even entirely sure if I can do it but if I ignore these illnesses and accidents and injuries, playing them off as unfortunate but meaningless, I am afraid I would have to find out what comes after broken bones. I have a feeling that it might be much more severe. 

I think another confirmation that something about this is divinely psychosomatic: I was having insane panic attacks before my post op appointments. Shaking, breathing hard, nausea– the absolute works. Eventually, I had to reflect, what is going on? I realized I felt that if my surgeon saw that I was “better” that he would clear me for work. If I was cleared for work, that meant I had to go back to my soul sucking job. After that realization I discovered that actually, anytime that I made significant progress in physical therapy, I would then experience extreme episodic pain. I was finally able to walk on the beach about a month ago– a huge triumph for me– but when I came back from the coast, I had a rash on my foot and I was unable to sleep because my entire leg (not just my ankle) was in a complete spasm. After this epiphany, I made a promise to myself that whatever it takes, I will not go back to a job that sucks. The pain and the panic attacks stopped after that recognition and reassurance. 

"Here's the bottom line on prevention and protection: when you suffer symptoms of illness or experience an accident, you do so because you're unconsciously trying to prevent yourself from having to do something you don't really want to do and/or protect yourself from something you don't really want to feel. The illness or accident is your unconscious mind's clunky way of doing you a favor. It's a costly favor, though, and once you learn how to navigate your Upper Limits, you can move through your barriers in a much more friendly way than making yourself sick or having an accident. Having created a few unnecessary illnesses and accidents myself, I can testify that acting consciously is better." - Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap

These kinds of experiences are incredibly Nodal and Saturnian in nature, we happen to be approaching another incredibly Nodal and Saturnian month in September 2025. Starting September 1st, we have Saturn retrograding back into the sign of Pisces after our first Summer preview of Saturn in Aries. On September 7th and 21st, we have the Lunar Eclipse in Pisces and Solar Eclipse in Virgo respectively. Don’t take this story as some kind of omen that you too will be broken and ill, but rather as a sign to tune into the ongoing metaphorical “breaks” in your life, to those strange thoughts that foreshadow something important. I have had plenty of eclipse seasons pass without much noise, but I’ve had just as many act as they have this year: as cosmic redirections. It isn’t unusual for the nodes to feel fated, destined, or as though some other entity is majorly humbling you or pointing you down a different path with its big powerful finger. There is always an air of ambiguity around the eclipse threshold, a collective sense that there is something that we don’t know or that the plan for the rest of the year as we know it is not quite complete yet. The Nodes are really just the head and tail of Moira’s pet dragon. 

Saturn’s retrograde here is fascinating. It stuck around in Pisces just long enough to be present for the first eclipses in Pisces on September 17th 2024 and in Virgo on March 14th 2025 and is now back in this sign just in time for eclipses on its own axis again! We don’t always experience these Saturn-Nodal contacts and while they are challenging, they are also synchronous…it is admittedly hard to be mad that you’re experiencing hardship when it’s also kind of Cool– maybe that’s just me though. In the excerpt above regarding our Hermit Year, it was mentioned that in the Hermit card in Tarot, he used to hold an hourglass to symbolize his connection with Father Time, the brevity of life, and delayed gratification. Saturn is archetypally Father Time and as such, it makes sense that he would be so timely with his own transit. It’s good to remind ourselves that Saturn is an agent of discipline, but the root of discipline isn’t to punish, it is to teach. I spent much of this year non weight bearing in Saturn’s Time Jail, so I feel very qualified to tell you that whatever limitations or responsibilities show up as the foundation of eclipse season, they hold immense educational value. 

We can’t ignore the fact that we’re on the last leg (ha!) of Saturn in Pisces here, this retrogression marks the last 6 months of the 3 year journey we’ve been on since March of 2023. Now that we’ve lived through the full transit, we have the chance to put the pieces together to form some kind of emotional or spiritual clarity out of the canonically messy and confusing sign of Pisces. We all have this sign sitting somewhere in our charts and Saturn’s attempts at straightening up the Pisces ruled house might finally start to make some retroactive sense. This retrograde is very necessary, we’ve covered a lot of new territory in such a short time but it’s impossible to sustain that much newness all at once. Consider this a favor, Saturn is buying us the time we need to find our bearings in whatever this new world has started to shape itself into. 

This “New World” was another thing that 2025 has introduced in tandem with The Hermit Year. Every outer planet (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) along with Jupiter and Saturn has shifted within the last year. Even while several are experiencing retrogrades, this has been a preview year. These are long cycles from planets that signify not just our culture and society but also the very consciousness that is alive to invention and the evolution of humanity. 2025 has been reminiscent of a blackout with actors and set pieces taking their place on the world stage. We have no godly idea as to what life will look like when the lights go up, but there are already moving shadows. This new world and new normal that I have shared with you through my broken ankle story is not just about me, it might also reflect something back to you about your new world and new normal that is setting up as we speak. Eclipse season is simply another hand in that, this year in the signs Virgo and Pisces, the shapeshifters. 

I always refer to Virgo as "the shapeshifter" because while it can have these seemingly boring and prosaic significations (work, health, chores), Virgo uses these mundane activities as a gateway into the mystic; this is why it opposes Pisces. Mercury as Virgo's ruler and exaltation lord shows us that every unremarkable, routine thing communicates something to us about our journey. Mercury's Virgo is proof that life is always speaking to us through its signs and symbols it poses for us to decipher. Nearly a week after our Lunar eclipse, we'll have Mercury joining the Sun in a cazimi at 20º Virgo. Language, translation, and communication through the mundane will be particularly relevant this month and throughout the remainder of this nodal cycle.

I’m hoping that sharing this with you all is the end of the writer’s block drought and a doorway into your own eclipse season reflections. Much love, especially to all of you who have been asking about me and where I’ve been! It means a lot, thank you. 

Your friendly neighborhood astrologer,

Katie

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