A Meditation for the Maelstrom

Today, for our many snowed-in subscribers, we’re pleased to offer a moment’s reflection on this hinge point of the year, via the literary & astrological stylings of the inimitable Emmalea Russo.

Later this week we’ll wrap up our serialization of Matthew Gasda’s novel Seasons Clear, and Awe. Catch up with the previous chapters here.

Submissions for our next contest are open until this Wednesday, January 28th, after which we’ll introduce a new round of Finalists among whose excerpts our subscribers will vote to select the next novel we’ll serialize in full at PILCROW. Do please spread the word.

Stay safe out there in the maelstrom.

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To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry….

-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Dora Maar, Sea Monster

Astrology tells us about time’s qualities. The planets and their angles bespeak textures, atmospheres, and light that might be likely to hold certain sorts of events. It’s a weird and trippy task to attempt to read the astrology of a whole year ahead. (Who knows WTF is going to happen?!!) And January 1 is not the astrological beginning, anyway. The zodiacal wheel starts with Aries in late March—early spring, first fire, high sun. Even so, January feels like a psychological restart. A psychoactive mix of daunting, exciting, and comforting to see the calendar dates and ephemeris spread out before me as I try to read the year ahead.

Speaking of Aries: the biggest (?!) celestial event of the year—the Saturn Neptune conjunction—is unfolding at the very first degree, the zero point, of Aries, which also happens to be the first degree of the zodiac. (“Where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer?” T.S. Eliot asks in Four Quartets.) On February 20^th, Saturn and Neptune will conjoin, join forces, come together. They haven’t done this since 1989. Saturn, lord of time and winter, is associated with structures and limits—the hard edges of so-called reality, and Neptune with oceanic dissolve, cinematic imagination, and redemption. Most astrologers talk about Saturn and Neptune as contraries, and about their upcoming meeting as a sign that longstanding structures—literal and figurative—will dissolving. (The last time Saturn and Neptune were together was 1989—around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall…)

Aries, host of this once-every-thirty-six-years happening, rules the head, as we come into the world headfirst. Aries—the emboldened, youthful portions of our sky and selves—likes to rush ahead. Saturn, however, goes slow—taking 2.5 years to move through a sign. Renaissance astrologer and priest Marsilio Ficino said we encounter Saturn through mourning and magic farming. So: a very wintry planet, damp and contemplative, will spend 2026 in Mars’s hot house. It reminds me of how T.S. Eliot opens “Little Gidding” (the fieriest portion of Four Quartets): “Midwinter spring is its own season.” That wild stanza ends with zero summer—unimaginable, charged, gaping.

This year, many planets are leaving earth and water (“feminine” elements) and entering fire and air—overtly dynamic, action-oriented. Mercury—planet of language, speech, poetry, and trickery, goes retrograde three times in 2026. Its backward, downward trips will all take place in water signs. Traditional astrology tells us that Mercury struggles in liquid: waterlogged, bogged down, sad. Slow and swimming lingo. Reflective, maybe, of some turn away from AI or fast utilitarian fixes. The weirder, thicker, more ambiguous route.

In Eliot’s Four Quartets, water shows up at the start of “The Dry Salvages,” in the form of a muddy river, “sullen, untamed and intractable” and “almost forgotten by the dwellers in cities.” This water stores everything, but it’s not like iCloud storage. Rather: “seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder of what men choose to forget.” The water watches and waits. The water is mad and primary, its rhythm “present in the nursery.” Treading water while reading and re-reading our primary texts: dreams (this is partly why I’m teaching this yearlong study of dreams!) This is also Saturn-Neptune merging: the mind-altering, suddenly poetic dimensions at the edges of scrolling, repetition, clock time’s drudgeries.

To take reality undiluted—and to suffer, is the trippiest thing ever. Saturn turning into Neptune, sea god, and god of sea turning back into Saturn—father, mother…Time. Yeah, maybe that’s it—?!—2026: the year of dealing with time straight-up, uncut. Like one of Simone Weil’s most hardcore takes: “Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.” We can take it. But what’s the point? Well, Weil doesn’t love her suffering “Because it is useful” but “because it is.” (!!) Suffering is the relationship, Weil tells us, between past and future. Which is both nothing and everything. Hmm. I began this reading by with astrology and time and am ending with the immense necessity of suffering! (I’m a Virgo! It was inevitable.) I’m watching the astrology of 2026—moving the planets through the signs as the year rolls on and on and they make conversations, go invisible under the beams of the sun, then emerge—sunburnt and new.

Here are brief horoscopes for the year ahead. Horoscope means HOUR MARKER. So, these are ways to mark the long-short hour of 2026. I think of them as like, tarot cards or screen shots—little moments to read, walk away from, come back to, amplify, delete, riff on.

Read for your RISING SIGN and/or SUN SIGN ☺

ARIES

A shimmering, alchemical darkness at the year’s start, which might, if you explore it fully, turn into solid gold later on. Old memories and repetitive thinking, or the awful, helpless sense that you’ve wasted lots of time. By the end of February, the dreariness may begin to lift, and it’s like life’s in technicolor again. The sense that you’re in your body and the world, not to the side or hovering somewhere above. Pay close attention to your body’s movements, desires, breath. Come summer, Jupiter enters your house of romance, children, play, and partying. What seemed f*cked or hopeless at year’s start enters the realm of the possible.

TAURUS

There’s a feeling of earthy sainthood about your 2026 transits. E.M. Cioran called saints “God’s insomniacs.” So: a sense of otherworldly insight brought to you via facing the most occluded parts of your soul and the world via Neptune and Saturn converging in your 12^th house of hidden knowledge. Said otherwise: you might stay up late at night. You might want to devote lots of time to your dreams, taking them very seriously while also using care not to take them too literally. Read them, instead, as dense texts to be returned to again and again and again until year’s end, amen.

GEMINI

Come springtime: some lightbulb, holy ghost moments brought to you by Uranus, planet of electricity and sudden revelation, who is moving into your sign. Venus will already be there, acting like a pretty welcoming committee. Unexpected romance, new insights into an artistic process, or epic synchronicities. Light might get shed on what it means to you…to be a Gemini. Twins, doubles, and double motifs, Jung observed, often show up in dreams that have to do with synchronicities. Where are your doubles? What pair of creatures guards your consciousness? How do they talk to each other?

CANCER

Saturn and Neptune are coming together at the very top of your chart—at the brightest, most lit part. How do you want to be seen? How do others regard you? What about your legacy? Something you’ve been studying, researching, writing, working hard on for the past two or three years may reach the hot high light of noon in the near future, so make sure you give it your all, leave it all on the field. Later, when Jupiter enters your house of finances this summer—you might receive an unexpected gift that further clarifies these questions of visibility.

LEO

An emphasis, this year, on mental and physical trips, along with questions of fate and free will. Maybe you’ll take a road trip and/or get very into astrology. Jean Baudrillard (a fellow Leo) wrote that one’s astrological sign is one of the last vestiges of fate in an age so obsessed with “making things happen” as opposed to “letting things happen.” Like, you can’t surgically remove your Leo-ness. You just can’t. So how do you relate to it? You might seek, this year, to “let things happen,” to study and seduce the stars and the weird zodiacal movements of fate as they unfold and shimmer. Baudrillard wrote: “No one should laugh at astrology, for he who no longer seeks to seduce the stars is the sadder for it.”

VIRGO

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism,” wrote fellow Virgo Georges Bataille. This is the sort of freaky and sacred thing that’s getting spot lit for you in 2026—intimacy, limits, and those mind-altering dissolves and separations between you and your loved ones. Sex, death, other people’s money, karmic and financial entanglements! Write down your dreams, reveries, and random access memories—scribble them in an allotted notebook before you forget! Dreams, according to Bataille, belong to the illegible and hard-to-grasp arena of the sacred. This year, revelations and new starts might arrive while you sort through another person’s stuff and/or heavy gifts you’ve been given, energetic and/or financial.

LIBRA

Jung says that everything in the dream is you—your enemies, friends, sky, curtains—all of it. This year, tons of planetary energy in your house of THE OTHER: relationships, partnerships, collaborations. Mystical merging, unions with a human other that feels divine, or generative new creative partnerships. Careful not to project your own sh*t onto your partner, collaborator, spouse. One idea: study the mirror and mirror images in fairy tales, movies, and the drama of the dream. All the while: lots of action along your axis of art-making and friends/networking. Translation: a social year. The art of hosting and entertaining. Décor as depth. Gossip as high art.

SCORPIO

Work. Work in service of the other. Work that’s not for accolades or likes. Work that opens you up, helps you forget yourself, and lets the beyond enter your frame. Saturn and Neptune are coming together in your house of service—the house where the self slides away, no longer centered. You might begin to volunteer more or delete your social media. The second half of the year might see unexpected breakthroughs and a ha! moments in your career and public life—

not as a reward, per se, for all your behind-the-scenes work, but as a kind of grace.

SAGITTARIUS

Emily Dickinson (a Sagittarius) said that nature is a haunted house and art is a house that tries to be haunted. This year, there’s new life force (ghost?) in your house of art. It’s melting old structures and making new ones appear. It seems benevolent and joyful. All this haunting, all these ghosts, might help you locate new depths of joy in your creative practice. Collaboration. Letting go. Letting go, especially, of any kind of knowing, and any sort of self-satisfaction. You might want to start by reading Emily Dickinson and paying close attention to the joyful playfulness haunting the houses of her poems.

CAPRICORN

Your year starts off with a big bang—Venus and Mars (emissaries of love, art, action, drive) meet with the sun at the opening moments of your chart and get cleansed, reborn. A brand new direction is felt, but maybe not known. Things start to clarify late February, early March—but might come to you in unexpected ways and hidden messages. Pay attention! Like, to what’s immediately around you, using care not to daydream into infinity while forgetting what’s right under your nose—so close it’s hard to see. From this attention (Weil said attention is the “rarest and purest form of generosity”… new ways of working, being, and finding the mind-bending mystical hidden in everyday muck.

AQUARIUS

Is it the age of Aquarius yet? I forget. But, 2026 is very Aquarius-heavy. Eclipses are coming to your sign this year, beginning in February. And Pluto, Lord of the underworld, is already there—as if you didn’t know—moving glacially as it transforms your body, boundaries, and notions of self. Aquarius is an edge-dweller and eclipses change-up what’s centered. What was at the edges might find centerstage and what was centered may get pushed to the margins. Meanwhile, questions of language, speech, and your past creep up. What were your first words? Who was around when you were first naming stuff? And how does that inform the way you speak and write now?

PISCES

At the top of the year, you might feel you are losing your mind. By March, you might get it back. Mercury will move backwards through your sign—the mind slowing down and going back for what it lost. By early spring, you might re-remember your body and its tremendous connection to your mind—getting grounded and more alive via yoga, running, dancing, jumping! You might find yourself reconnecting, this year, with your finances—daring to look at the numbers each week—maybe even creating daily or weekly rituals around all things $$. Spreadsheets and financial planning might offer unexpected routes into the spiritual.