A Retrospective on the Cruellest of Months
...while we look forward to gentler astrological pastures in May.
T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month but this one has felt like an endlessly reopening wound. With a Mars-Neptune conjunction peaking today, an emotional crash is to be expected. Personally, I still feel “rode hard and put away wet” despite sleeping like the dead for 12 hours straight last night. Though it may be difficult to access hope today, know that we find ourselves on the other side of arguably the most intense astrological clusterfuck of 2024 — if not the past few years. And yes: May will bring reprieve, a return of joy, and the much needed balm of Venus in her earthen domicile. Oh, and Jupiter in Gemini (entering my first house) which better fix my entire life, lol.
Just to recap the shitstorm: a total solar eclipse crowned, bloody, in Aries on the 8th, conjoining Chiron itself and sowing its totality path with earthquakes and the imminent arrival of the so-called zombie cicadas (which map rather neatly onto the eclipse’s ragged scar across North America). Mercury was retrograde all of this month too, stationing on April fool’s day no less.
The spectacle of droves of humans swarming the eclipse totality path feels like some god, with a magnetic wand, dragging humanity’s lead filings into a single, seething line. Even the ongoing pro-Palestine student protests kicked off along that totality path, at Columbia in New York. The high winds and mythopoetic drama of “dragon time” will be felt in the USA for months to come (as Pluto’s decay continues its long-game).
It’s fascinating to me that this eclipse series — and several before it — have been sponsored by Mars and Venus: our star-crossed cosmic lovers. Even if eclipse energy is chaotic neutral at best, it’s rarely comfortable to host the whorling of ambivalent transhuman forces on the level of our closest relationships. An entire Bayeux Tapestry gatecrashing the tiny chambers of the sonnet.
Betwixt eclipses, I did feel temporarily protected by Venus in her Piscean chariot, as M and I sauntered through her seafoam on beaches in Oaxaca, rode horses by starlight and the flint of fireflies, sipped mezcalitas in the emerald oases of Condesa and La Roma, ate endless exquisite meals, and fucked in hotel pools. Even the flight I’d chartered from Oaxaca City to Puerto Escondido over Whatsapp, paid for with Paypal and finalized with emojis, was miraculously real and a rather elegant point A to be B (aside from the grackles playing uncle with the prop-plane propellers).
Then Venus was chucked from the chariot of her exaltation, Pisces, to the sign of her detriment, Aries, just before the solar eclipse and our departure. The ancient astrologers considered Venus in detriment to be in a state of exile: separated from her resources and her creature comforts. And this played out all too literally for me.
Upon my return to Canada from Oaxaca, just two days before the solar eclipse, I realized that a silk cloth bag containing some of my most precious jewelry pieces had been stolen right out of my checked luggage on an Air Canada flight. This was about the same day as the Air Canada gold heist, incidentally (it pains me that this trash airline holds such a monopoly over air travel in Canada).
Nothing in that bag was of particular monetary value though the necklaces, pins, bracelets and earrings, gathered over decades in flea markets all over the world, were holding vessels for wisps of my restless soul. The soviet insignia I bought at a market in Cuba, when I was 20. The lapis and gold Leo Tolstoy pin purchased at a Doukhobor museum in Castlegar. A heavy necklace made of rolled antique linen, and wrapped in strings of swarovski beads, that I thrifted in a market in Lisbon. The loss of this one in particular has plunged nettles in my heart.
Suffice it to say, during one of the most challenging periods of my life (the waxing Saturn square hitting hard), I feel all the more naked and exposed without my sacred adornments. Inanna-maxxing fr. I’m just trying to hold onto the fact that anytime jewelry has suddenly left me, I’ve been catapulted into a fortuitous new chapter. Make it new, make it new.
The most recent piece lost was a brass bracelet, of sinuous jointry, in the form of a dragon; the clasp had the creature biting its own tail. M bought this one for me at a stall in Parque Alameda in CDMX: a lone table of jewelry all but drowning in a larger traveling market of anime waifu body pillows, walls of Funko pops, and black market amiibos. Vintage Nintendo controllers and games were scattered on the ground like scrap metal, and everywhere huddles of Mexican goths solemnly comparing binders of Pokemon cards. I can’t help but consider that the dragon bracelet dragged the rest of my jewelry into the underworld with it.
In any case, the coincidence of the eclipse season with Mercury retrograde alone would be enough to unleash massive chaos — but then there were the conjunctions. Major synodic cycles have been resetting our timelines in April, along with the whorling of those eclipse gyres. Mars and Saturn met in Pisces, on April 10th, the very day I received word that I was one of thousands of Canadians being randomly audited as the CRA attempts to claw back covid relief money (Mars-Saturn was the grim planetary pact that launched the pandemic in 2020). So on top of everything, I have endless documents to gather to prove that I was indeed eligible for CERB (speaking of wounds being cattle-prodded).
A meeting of Jupiter and Uranus is already relatively rare: occurring approximately every 14 years. But these their alliance in Taurus is rarer still: it’s happened in Taurus only five times in the past millennium (1015 – 1016, 1098 – 1099, 1181, 1858, and 1941, to be exact) — and they won’t meet again in this sign until 2107. The conjunction of 1941 presided over the unforeseen horrors of mechanized warfare, the flooding of women into factories and manual labor jobs (laying the groundwork for firstwave feminism), the surprise naval base attack on Pearl Harbour that brought global conflict to the USA’s doorstep, and the release of Orson Welles’ revolutionary cinematic opus, Citizen Kane.
Eclipse season always brings monumental endings and beginnings but the “endings” part has never been felt so acutely. Three members of my extended family, on both sides, suddenly passed away since the beginning of eclipse season. When the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction was peaking on April 20th, I unexpectedly found myself at a funeral in Camrose, Alberta. The passing of my Uncle Lorne has been particularly shocking and heartbreaking. What should have been a completely routine pacemaker operation went tragically awry, leading to open heart surgery and a subsequent infection that spread to all his organs. He was only 69, looking forward to the playoffs and springtime ball games.
Only just back from Mexico, I attended the inurnment of my Uncle Lorne’s ashes in a tiny cemetery by Meeting Creek, while clutches of farming relatives I hadn’t seen in years held each other and wept. There was nothing to break the wind, save for the nerve endings of trembling aspen; the sun blazed without warmth over the drought-blanched prairies. The pastor, my cousin’s husband, offered Corinthians: “our earthly bodies are planted in the ground when we die but they will be raised forever. Our bodies are sown in brokenness, but they will be raised in glory.”
More than 300 people attended his funeral in Camrose, in one of those sprawling evangelical churches converted from abandoned strip malls: large enough to accommodate the swells of mourners that revealed just how beloved my Uncle Lorne was within the counties scattered around Basha and Ponoka. Even my little brother, a card-carrying Sagittarius, surprised us all by taking a last-minute, 32 hour flight, from Tasmania to Edmonton to arrive in time for the service. As Jupiter-Uranus was peaking, he nonchalantly strolled into the farm kitchen out of his rental car, as my poor mother immediately dissolved into tears and I asked him what the fuck he was doing there, haha. Just Jupiter-Uranus things.
We hadn’t all been gathered on the farm like this since Christmas of 2012, when my mom was awaiting test results for a cancer diagnosis. Jupiter is the planet that presides over faith, social congruence, the codification of ritual, and the gathering of humans under a common banner — or a thunderclap of sudden, piercing grief. The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction peaked in my 12th House of loss and absolution.
Some of my happiest memories from childhood are the summers I spent semi-feral on his farm, playing games of “kick the can” with my cousins until dawn, hunting down barn kittens, and eating carrots pulled from the earth — soil on, of course.
Though I haven’t connected with my Uncle Lorne since early adulthood, I remember him as a deeply decent man and hard working farmer, with a rather sporting mustache, who had a long and successful marriage to my Aunt Connie — my mom’s sister. He survived a bailer falling on him in middle age. Another farming accident shaved off the tips of two fingers, one of which was referred to with fearful reverence as the “the stump”. Ending in pure bone, errant cows or cousins would receive a rap of the stump’s sudden retribution exactly when it was deserved.
Playful brandishings of the stump aside, I remember Lorne (a Taurus) as a man of few words. He would flash this shy, even conspiratorial smile, as if in cahoots with himself and the cards he kept close to his chest in a family of preachers and raconteurs. But he was always the first to spring to action if someone was in need. He had this way of bending down to your level, clapping you on the back, and asking “are you ok?” in a teasing way that still didn’t undercut his kindness.
There was indeed a crackle of Uranian dissonance within the more Jupiterian funeral proceedings, as Lorne’s cousin and best friend took the stage to share memories — A man I’d never met. I would later learn that he’s known as the “weeping prophet” in this fold of rural Alberta. A recovered alcoholic and farmer with a long line of machinery accidents himself, he claims to have seen the prairies open into a maw of reaching hands and tongues: a vision of hell, as he describes it. He’s gathered something of a following through his unofficial sermons, marked by cussing and fits of weeping.
He described an evening when my Uncle Lorne uncharacteristically took the stage, where he’d been proselytizing, to state, plainly, that “he wanted what he had”. A man who was as quiet about his faith as everything else, I’m haunted by what he felt he was missing, exactly. Had I ever really known my Uncle Lorne at all? Though I wish I’d spent more time with him as an adult, M and I plan to visit the farm later this year and further support my widowed Aunt Connie whose entire life changed in a night. Even in the peak of her grief, she wanted to see photos of my new “beau” and get all the details on how we’d met.
In a later eulogy, my cousin Darcy, now a pastor with a gift for storytelling and oration, described being rear-ended on his birthday with my other cousin Brian (I was very close with both of them the summers I’d spent on the farm as a kid). The accident occurred after a ballgame they’d attended with my uncle. Lorne heard the sirens from the pitch, somehow intuited his son and nephew were in danger and hightailed it in his own vehicle to the scene of the accident (a streak of premonition seems to run through that side of the family).
Though my cousins were largely unharmed — mostly stunned by the explosion of glass when the airbags ignited — my uncle found them dazed at the side of the road. He sprinted toward them with remarkable speed, gathered them both, one under each of his arms, and for a long time just kept telling them “it would be ok”. I’ve seen pictures of my Uncle Lorne, a calf under each of his arms, bottle feeding the creatures with a patience and gentleness that has taken me 36 years to truly appreciate.
The night before Lorne passed, my mom dreamt she was helping him hobble through a long hospital corridor toward a room where her mother, who died long ago in Camrose, was waiting for them both — chiding him for taking so long.
There was life before April and after April and I honestly don’t feel like the same person who hopped on that flight to Mexico City. But I’m heartened to know that May will bring more spaciousness and ease as we rummage through the wounds it opened. Double down on your grace and self-compassion under these murky skies. To be continued…
Stephanie, this was beautiful. Thank you.
We had three eclipse deaths in our family too, though one of them was a beloved chicken. Some of the synchronicities are uncanny, though. Like your Uncle Lorne, my husband’s grandmother went into the hospital for one thing — a broken femur — and then things quickly escalated when she developed a pulmonary embolism…Anyways. Work like yours reminds me of the beautiful entanglements that hold it all ♥️