Week Ahead Forecast for Leo Risings

Mercury returns home, and what does he find?

Awhile back during the retrogrades of Mercury and Venus, I imagined a conversation between Venus and Saturn. In the conversation, Venus complains about Saturn’s performance in Pisces. Typically, she says, we can expect great things artistically from Saturn’s time in Pisces. Instead, we’ve been witnessing system collapse with little to help us cope but AI-generated slop. Saturn pointed out that he only has the material that Jupiter has given him to work with, and Jupiter has been living a nightmare in Gemini.

At the time, I said that Venus was marching off to have a talk with Jupiter about this. That conversation between Venus and Jupiter will happen. In August. By then, Jupiter will be in a very different place. He will have reached the middle of Cancer, a sign where he is much more comfortable. The tone, I think, will be more like a hospital visit from a good friend than an intervention.

So, how is Jupiter convinced to leave the nightmare behind and go into recovery mode?

I think the answer is Mercury in Gemini.

Yesterday, Mercury slipped into Gemini from Taurus. Mercury is in the same sign as Mercury now. This is one of Gemini’s home signs. He understands this territory better than anyone. It is his right and responsibility to clean house.

When I imagine Mercury entering Gemini after almost a year of Jupiter being there, I imagine an old house that hasn’t gotten care for a long time. The floor is covered with old newspapers, and the walls are lost behind bits of paper and red string.

For the next two weeks, Mercury will be walking through the house like a detective, getting the story of what has happened to Jupiter (and Mercury’s house) over the last year. He will pick through Jupiter’s attempts to understand understand understand and the way that Jupiter has been vexed to nightmare by Pluto’s nightmare visions of the future, nightmares made worse by Aquarius’s calm insistence that we are, all of us, incapable of facing the horror of the last 10 years with emotional honesty.

We know how this story ends. On June 8th, Mercury will find Jupiter, and they will enter Cancer together. This will be a time of care and recovery for Jupiter. In the Leo Risings Guide to World Domination, I predicted Jupiter will remember in Cancer that he is the god of rain, and he will cry, and his tears will water the seeds that bring abundance.

Let us hold that ending in mind, but we’re not there yet. We need to witness with clear eyes. We need to be in the wreck and not the story of the wreck. We need to allow the world to not make sense… even while we begin the process of taking out the trash and putting things right.

Today, there is a New Moon in Gemini. Tomorrow, Mercury will be trine Pluto.

My typical advice New Moon advice is to think about where you want to be in 6 months and take a tiny step toward that future. For us Leo Risings, Gemini is our House of Goals, so I would typically double down on that advice.

With this lunation (and the transits that follow this week) I think that advice would be insensitive and counter productive.

While Jupiter has been in Gemini, everyone has been struggling with Pluto in Aquarius’s prophesies of doom, but the future-casting has been targeting aspirations of Leo risings for the future particularly. How can we move forward with curiosity and playfulness the way we’re supposed to in a climate like this?

The advice I want to give is to imagine Mercury going through the house and turning off all the speakers, closing all the laptops, turning off the TVs, and silencing the phones. But the doomsday signal coming through from Pluto isn’t just noise.

When Saturn was in Aquarius from 2020-2023, he was like an engineer banging on the pipes, stress testing the systems and structures of society. The news he had then was Not Good. Some of us, in our small ways, listened. There are always people who can take a hint. Most of us, as you know, did not.

My advice (instead of blithely hoping or tuning out) is to be where you are now, as present to what is where you are as you can. Look around you. How are the systemic failures impacting you and your neighbors personally? Right now.

You don’t need to do anything. Just watch.

Be present as long as you can, and then it is okay to retreat into your cave and cry.

On Wednesday, the moon will enter our 12th house.

Everyone, even the most extroverted extrovert, needs time to themselves, time to process, time to be emotionally real, even if it means falling apart. Those fall-apart times are 12th house times. For us, the 12th house falls in Cancer.

If you’re the type to keep a calendar, moon in Cancer times are a good time to take a couple days off with some comfy blankets, a pillow, and your favorite sad songs.

That is doubly so if the moon is in its new phase like it is this week.

The 12th house is challenging territory for everybody. For us Leo risings, it has a particularly existential flavor. Leo risings need to retreat as much as anybody, but, as soon as we do, we have the tendency to fall into big doubt.

Does anyone love me? Am I even here?

This happens especially when we don’t take 12th house times to retreat when we should. The trick is to give yourself the rest you need. Try your best not to ruminate. Give your mind a break and let your heart feel.

By Friday, the tide will turn a little.

The moon will enter Leo and our 1st house, a tiny crescent moon will be visible in the sky.

If we do the work of witnessing on Monday and Tuesday and grieving on Wednesday and Thursday, we will have gotten a small preview of the work that Jupiter will be doing as he leaves Gemini and enters Cancer in June.

It is only after we have witnessed and then grieved what we have lost that we can really begin to playfully explore the possibilities for building a better world.