“Can you sit still on fire? When everything is burning can you think, can you care, can you witness and not run, can you be in the place of no answers with everything on fire all around you as well?”
— Vanessa Veselka, Lit Hub, October 12, 2021
Hooboy. What a TIME we are having here on Earth.
I have sat down to write about this essay often and found myself without, I felt, sufficient clarity to begin. This problem is a collective theme of the 2025-2026 astrology, and personally, a lifelong one: What do we do with existential doubt? How do we take a step when the tide has subsumed our path?
On Feb 20, 2026, Neptune and Saturn came together at the exact first degree of the zodiac, 0° Aries.
We have effectively been living in thrall to this transit since late spring of 2025. Already Saturn is striding forward and away from Neptune, but experientially, the impact is just beginning. Together, these planets symbolize a complex pattern of destabilization, insecurity, and release—processes whose fallout takes years to unfold, and more to make sense of. For now, clarity remains distant.
How do we make a life in a place of not-knowing?
***
This May will, I hope, mark for me 4 years of remission from “incurable” cancer, an era defined by my altered relationship to time and especially to the future. After my cancer advanced in 2022, I learned that typical survival time was 3-5 years and that it was unlikely my remission would last much beyond a single year. In this destabilized reality, I grabbed onto those numbers as my only hope for certainty. I fully expected to be by now, if not dead, then terribly ill. But almost 4 years later, I am healthy, strong, and, despite the lingering damage of the disease and the drugs, feel more well than I did before cancer. My body has emerged from the fire of illness altered but renewed.
One might expect this medical semi-miracle to a sort of end-credits celebration. Nothing need be said, because, as at the culminating “I do” of the wedding plot, one takes for granted the happily ever after of cancer survival. Instead, I felt increasingly disoriented.
Change, even desirable change, is complicated and often upsetting.
As my remission lengthened, my relief grew but so did fear. The ground in which my pre-cancer life had been solidly rooted was gone, erased by floodwaters. And now, as the storm calmed, the board I’d been clinging to, this assumption of certain death, began splintering apart. The water had returned to placidity, but land, if it still existed, was lost. There was no one to tell me when or whether the storm might return.
Meanwhile, the little rowboat of my future that I had so mourned losing had somehow drifted back. It was missing an oar, its contents, whatever had once seemed so precious and which now I could not even picture, dumped somewhere along the way. I was afraid tempt the storm to return, but no one can tread water forever. I had to climb back in and try to save myself.
But how to bear the sight of all that open water and paddle anyway? How to get myself to do such hard and dangerous work with no promise of land?
***
Recently, I got a (welcome) diagnosis of OCD, an illness which runs in my family and unbeknownst to me, has been running my life. OCD is sometimes called the “doubter’s disease,” because it makes the brain treat ambiguity as an emergency. The gold-standard treatment, Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP), forces you to bear the sirens going off inside your head without attempting to turn them off.
Living in a state of emergency is not sustainable. Yet normalizing an ongoing emergency—the predatory hunting down of immigrants, cascading global war—is not sustainable either.
Both approaches undo reality—one through reduction, the other via denial. We are, all of us in 2026, trapped in a geopolitical hell, but this planet-on-fire is also home. It is our nourishment and protector and the only little rowboat we have.
In our astrology sessions this past year, some of you have shared deep suffering that blurs personal and collective heartbreaks. Others have talked about the cognitive dissonance of feeling basically happy in your days and terribly afraid for the world. We can hold opposing truths, but the greater the stress, the harder it is to see all of it. The quiet boat and blue sky and gray plumes of ash.
***
On October 5, 2025, my brave-hearted Boston Terrier Bacon died of an undetected brain tumor.
For over a year, she had been in some pain I could see but not make sense of. The vet, maybe not a great vet, treated her for a nonexistent spinal problem and did not suggest an MRI. Even if he had, the end would have come much too soon. A clock quietly ticking down inside Bacon’s skull, deep in the tissue behind those giant eyeballs she used to communicate her ever-intense displeasure or excitement. She was only nine, muscular, agile, judgmental, and brilliantly perceptive. I expected so many more years. Abruptly, she and this planet parted ways, her body no longer an extension of her spirit.
The loss was uncomplicated, which is to say it was brutally clean. A very sharp blade splitting the tether connecting us. In the days afterward, I saw and heard Bacon as if she were physically near. I felt her still bossing me around, her delight in being able to run and jump like a young dog again. Despite being fundamentally doubtful about the supernatural, I fully accepted Bacon’s beyond-the-veil power. She sent me messages in tarot cards, laid beside me while I clutched her stinky toys and blankets and wept, and arranged, via Petfinder and magic, the adoption of her successor–a joyfully batshit little mutt who is way more of wild thing than I’d have ever picked out for myself. When Bacon’s spirit faced off with my doubt, she won easily. I cannot conceive of a world without her in it and so she persisted.
Bacon’s frequent post-death interventions softened the edge of my pain, but only a little. Death is like this, so often. The absence of our loved one is a yet greater presence which nonetheless creates unbearable yearning. As much as missing my soul-dog hurt, the grief kept her close. Had I pushed the grief away, I would have lost her completely. To block grief is to double loss: first death, and then death of the bond.
So long as we remain connected, grief remains with us.
This is not a bad thing, but it is also not really an avoidable one. It is, time teaches us, the necessary high cost of loving and being loved.
Neptune and Saturn, more than anything, signify this nebulous yet totalizing state of loss.
Such losses can be paralyzing but they can also restore us to ourselves. Renewed and indefinably altered.
***
In an individual birth chart, Neptune’s and Saturn’s placements reveal the experience of unrequited longing.
With Saturn, the yearning can be stoically borne, bitterly accepted, or demanded, or can exist as a belief that if we work hard enough, we will earn (become worthy of) the wish(es) it represents. With natal contacts (“aspects”) to the moon and Venus, we feel a shortage of love, security, and caring protection. In contact with our sun, MC, AC, or Mars, we crave mastery, perfect self-reliance, and respect. With Saturn, we comfort the ache of not-having with the illusion of control (“I can fix this relationship if I just put in the work”) or of determinism (“It’s too late for me”).
With Saturn, we can learn humility, acceptance of what is, and commitment despite adversity. There is no Right way with Saturn, but there are ways that increase self-trust, calm, the ability to show up for what is.
Neptune’s wishes can be ephemeral (a nonspecific ache for something we cannot name) or exalted, imagined in bright color (“My perfect home will look just like X and in it, I will feel awash in contentment”). We often don’t pursue Neptune wishes, preferring to be found by them, called to them. Sometimes, we avoid action or delay it beyond practicality, perhaps subconsciously knowing that to make a wish real is to introduce ugliness, disappointment, and the risk a broken heart.
Over time, Neptunian disappointments and inaction lead to bitterness and a sense of spiritual fatigue. As with Saturn, we may believe, or come to believe, that we are somehow unworthy.
With Neptune and Saturn, we may fail to recognize when the wished-for thing presents itself because it does not take exactly the form, or feel exactly the way, we wanted it to.
The truth with Neptune is that we have confused an emotional state for a material one, a fluctuating experience for a fairy-tale Forever. Life often fulfills our wishes in the moments when we forget to search. Then, because change is a constant, the tide shifts, the temperature drops or rises, and the fulfilled wish is no longer so fulfilling. When we stop seeking rescue from or shutting out discomfort and pain, we find peace in the acceptance of change. To allow ecstasy, we must make space for sorrow.
Making space for sorrow opens us to yet deeper levels of meaning and connection.
Neptune reminds us we are infinite, boundless, and connected, but such truths only ever matter when paired with Saturnian reminders of the opposite: we are mortal, limited, and often on our own. Saturn rejects Neptune’s apparent chaos but Neptune accepts all perspectives, even those that negate it, without differentiation or hierarchy. The finite (Saturn) is, by definition, included in the infinite (Neptune).
When Saturn and Neptune blend energies as they are doing now, we are flattened by the absence of what we wish for, what would bring us safety and peace. We feel the weight of our burdens and may overlook hope.
What if hope is essential, necessary? Can we act on hope while acutely aware of life’s uncertainty?
Saturn is rock and Neptune is diffuse water (mist, fog, condensation) and quiet, infiltrating water (a drip that tunnels through a cliff). When Saturn and Neptune come together, rock is undone by water and water loses its container and reference point. We can become unmoored. Disorientation—spiritual, moral, practical, relational—is inevitable.
How do we live on a flooded, defamiliarized Earth? Can we love here? Can we build? Can we grow our internal stability until it surpasses the idealized security of dry land.
***
I have not touched on the significance of Neptune-Saturn conjoining in Aries, but you can learn more about that the transit’s geopolitical themes here and here. Briefly, we are likely to see the energy of Neptune + Saturn expressed in typical Aries ways—through impulsive action, fight-flight behavior, short bursts of conflict and creation, goal-oriented strategy, selfishness, heart-centered fighting for others, and violence.
In totality, will this crisis will come to seem necessary or will we view it as one of senseless destruction? We can’t know. Anyone who claims to know is clinging to that rotten board left by Saturn, that little bit of conviction and assumption that feeds our desperately vulnerable longing for control.
That’s just the point Saturn-Neptune is making: we can’t know. In the language of Aries, they add, But action is inevitable. Giving up is an action. Even denial and avoidance are a sort of twisted engagement.
So long as we live, we are making choices. We have agency–we act, we pick this thing and not that one. What we cannot choose or control is outward rippling of those actions. This is hard news, and it is good news. Our fears are just as ephemeral as any other certainty. If we fear loss and pain, we might also consider that comfort, care, beauty, and meaning are out there too.
Given time, wonder and connection are as inevitable as sorrow.
Saturn cannot give us permanence or certainty, but it is the meat and bone of our bodies and our bodies remain with us for however long we remain with them. In persisting to live, we carry the Earth, and all she symbolizes, in our cells. Meanwhile, Neptune tethers us invisibly to one another. Neptune is the truth of our inviolable belonging. Wherever we are, whatever literal or psychic walls imprison us, we, finite beings, are contained entirely within the infinite. Given universes of time, there is enough of everything.
It’s hard to stay open, and sometimes unsafe to do so, but living has to be more than just being carried along by indifferent tides. We can try to make it more. By caring, by loving, by helping. By acting in the way we know deep inside is right. And in the spaces where we don’t know, we breathe. In breathing, we bring the infinity of Neptune into our small, purposeful, Saturnian bodies. In breathing, we remember what “enough” feels like. Maybe this is the seed of hope.