if aquarius is the air we’re breathing, what air are you inhaling?

image from are.na

We’re arriving into the Yin Wood Snake Year.

In the Chinese zodiac, often referred to as ‘the little dragon’, the Snake 巳 is associated with mystery, wisdom, healing, intuition, renewal, creativity.

Yin Wood 甲 are the plants that grow and live on a host - moss, fern, orchids - co-existing in symbiosis within the wider ecosystem, nourishing those they touch. Yin Wood 甲 is the flexibility and resilience of bamboo - how they sway without snapping, and 甲 for the flowers that return gracefully after a dormant winter, re-appearing after a season of sleeping.

Yin Wood 甲 relates to our liver and inner vision - how do we carry our vision and trust in ourselves to move forth in the dark?

This Yin Wood Snake year is inviting your enigmatic gifts to be revealed, to sense your wise undercurrents as they move through you, trusting that your creative powers are the exact right dose of healing for what is needed now.

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I only realised a few months ago that Lunar New Year coincides with the Aquarius New Moon every year. As a native Aquarius Moon, this tickled me.

I’m always wondering how to keep myself fluid, then get dehydrated and wonder why my skin starts peeling.

This month, I have been slowly daring myself to ask different questions in my relationships, practicing more asking and less assuming.

Instead of listing all the things I want from the outside world - in relationships, in business, in the big wide world, how am I embodying these very ideals and concepts I keep naming? How am I showing up as the friend, neighbour, lover, guest - that I actually long to be in relationship with?

The answers have been revealing, humbling, and heart-opening.

My capacity for relating has expanded from even just a year ago, when I decided to make space in my life, s p a c e in time for more of what I cherish, enjoy and love. Widening my internal container to breathe, move, live, think from a felt sense of liberation, and less collapsing into numbness, or turning away from what life is offering (an Aquarius Moon survival specialty!)

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As the Moon kissed the Sun in Aquarius, Mercury right by Pluto in Aquarius, there are strange deep seeds being planted, uprooted, scattered, rising like clear smoke into the atmosphere.

If Aquarius is the air we are breathing, what air are you inhaling?

You are here because you are walking a new way. Each day bringing you to another edge. You are breathing new states of being. You are drawing down innovative, imaginal ideas into the here and now.

You are here because you are imagining and living into something new. You are practicing your visions in your everyday because you know that living into your vision means greeting them with friendliness: can I get to know you better I don’t really know what I’m doing but I am willing to try, even if just once today, and again tomorrow.

Your visions, strange to you at first, are precisely yours. You may feel the loneliness of the call that looks different to what your parents, friends, teachers, community, lovers are imagining for themselves and their lives.

Aquarius is calling you to leave the comfort of what is known into the strange unknown - not for rebellion’s sake, but the renewal of your spirit.

You may be singular, but what if you also belong?

Your vision is not just an idea. When fleshed out through you - your felt senses, your mind’s eye, your internal dialogue, your emotions - what do your visions constellate into in this moment?

Can it be true that you get to live a glimpse of the future right now?

How do your hold your strange difference with clarity, conviction and compassion?

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Let your visionary ideas land and inhabit your body. Your vision of what you long your experience of life to be, a world where you are fully expressed in your voice, where you no longer shrink in the face of confrontation and conflict, where you ask for what you want and receive it without guilt, where you sense your erotic power so fully that life feels vividly, sensually alive.

Let yourself imagine what you are still scared to imagine.

Especially that which appear to be beyond your ‘control’.

What if instead of railing against entitlement, you simply imagine what it would be like to feel ‘entitled’ to show up in that certain way? Take up space in a room never designed for you? Ask for what you want before you feel desperate for it - help with household chores, a pay raise, credit for your labour? Say fuck no with certainty and without a dash of guilt?

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Ruled by Saturn, Aquarius is the liminal state between what we have always known, and what we are seeing as we look beyond these very structures we once built, the systems that someone once envisioned we could squash into.

Aquarius knows you cannot fit into a box, that you are continually sprouting, outgrowing your mental constructs of what is supposed to be.

Aquarius as fixed air sometimes wants to hold on to our ideas of right and wrong but what if what’s being exchanged between you and me and the table between us reminds us that ideas are simply ideas until we touch the fleshy intimacy of allowing our rigid concepts to be irrevocably changed by one another.

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Aquarius the water bearer is our connective tissues, fascia, circulatory and nervous system - that which stretches all over our bodies, keeping all parts of us connected, fluid, moving.

When you stretch and hydrate and relate to your water bearing parts with kind intention, this ripples into the whole connective field, the entire collective body, all who came before you, all who are coming after you.

We are greeting our inner visions with that giggly excitement reserved for meeting a new playmate at kindergarten, with the hope that as we keep playing together, we begin to know what these visions can feel like in our bodies and collective bodies, before they are naturally expressed into new commitments we get to practice and embody each day.

What new shapes are your visions morphing through you this New Moon in Aquarius, as we slither into this Yin Wood Snake year?