Happy Days—Sagittarius New Moon—November 23rd, 2022.
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again—Katherine May.
A weakened sun lies lethargically on the horizon. Here in the north, the sky story speaks of a season of falling leaves. As winter winds blow this year to a close, glittering party clothes beckon from shop windows; bright lights distract us from the darkness for a while.
This week, the UK government announced a recession as postal and rail strikes reveal the bare bones of collective frustration and discontent. Authoritative Saturn is still square unpredictable Uranus in earthy Taurus (banks, money, climate crisis). Strikes and civil unrest in many countries depict the existential angst and a general dis-trust of authority. “The present convergence of crises—in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, environment and more—is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old-world order into a new,” writes Charles Eisenstein, author of The Coronation.
For so many, this has been a challenging month. The New Moon Solar and Lunar eclipses in Scorpio and Taurus may have culminated in an ending of a way of life—the sudden news of a retrenchment, an illness that initiates us into a new way of being, a divorce that reveals our bare bones. Taurus brings us down to earth—money, property, and those things we value—Scorpio dredges up those things we prefer to keep hidden from view.
The luminous lives of public figures portray the astrology of the moment. Prince Charles became Charles III during this eclipse season, and he will be crowned on May 6th during a Mercury Retrograde cycle and the day after a lunar eclipse—two celestial significators that suggest he will not settle comfortably on the throne. Charles was born on an eclipse, and will be familiar with this energy, so it’s unlikely that he will be beheaded like his predecessor, or banished to Europe. His Solar Return in 2023 (Sun/Mars conjunction in the 3rd house and Neptune on the Descendant) also suggests that his reign will not be an easy one as ghosts from the past return. Already truths blend with fantasy as the acerbic effect of the Mars/Neptune square can be seen in the “dangerous lies” peddled by the media, portrayed in season Five of The Crown.
Jupiter moves Retrograde at the poignant final degree of Pisces until December 20th and will make its third and final semi-square to Uranus on December 23rd, so the cult of progress and growth continues to take its toll on our ailing planet. The astrology describes big wheels spinning, capricious dice that wobble and roll for those who fail to observe the cycles of life and death. Joe Biden celebrates his solar return on Sunday as Mars rises and squares Neptune, he attends to the nation’s petroleum reserves. Jupiter’s Wheel of Fortune turns for nations and humankind, as bellicose Donald Trump thrusts out his chin and turns his best side to the camera. An inflated Jupiter squares his Moon/South Node, and a battle-weary Mars takes a long shot, opposing his Moon, and moving back and forth over his Uranus/Sun/North Node in Gemini until March 2023. Saturn in Pisces will square his luminaries between May 2024-March 2025, not a great omen for a despot. This week, Elon Musk’s fortunes plummet. Rotund Jupiter, purveyor of big dreams and big talk, opposes his power-over Pluto. A disenchanted Mars Retrograde in Gemini conjoins his Venus (money, ruptured relationships, angry words) as his imperious demands for “a loyalty clause” raise mutiny and mass resignations.
The Mars/Neptune cycle began in on May 18th, 2022, and will peak with an opposition in August 2023, coming full circle with the next conjunction in Pisces in April 2024. The shadowy side of Mars Retrograde in Gemini erupts in hate-speak; language that severs bonds of relationship, switchbacks and U-turns, confusion, and utter exhaustion, and when Mars meets Neptune things become murkier, our will may be thwarted, our heartfelt desires swept away by things we simply can’t control. Mars is the war god, and this archetype describes battles, divisons, desire and action. This cycle may escalate a silencing of free speech, more emphasis on the currency of information, data and misinformation; cognitive dissonance, or pivotal events that challenge our beliefs as we defend or assert our version of the “truth”.

Yet the Sun joins Mercury and Venus in optimistic Sagittarius on November 22nd, Jupiter stations direct in Pisces, indicating a shift in circumstances, or perspective is possible. When the Sun moves into Sagittarius, we raise our hearts, our glasses, our vision, find magic in the mundane. The New Moon on the same day escorts us into the season of goodwill and thanksgiving for Happy Days.
As we pare down our expectations of how things “should be”, redefine what is truly important, we can practice being content, even happy, with the way things are. This New Moon wraps endings and new beginnings in the darkness of the heavens, so let’s toast to changing the old stories, finding what is possible within this new normal. As we review this year almost gone, may we celebrate how far we have come. May we give thanks for those bonds of friendship and heartfelt belonging that holds us to what really matters.
May we take time to reflect, to rest and restore, as winter draws us into the crucible of change. And in the intimacy of darkness, may we hold our loved ones close, find hope in hardship, opportunity in obstacles.
May we engage our imaginations in the darkness of the year almost gone, and re-discover joy and abundance in life’s simple pleasures. Here’s to Happy Days.
For a personal astrology consultation, please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

To be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing—Kevin Hearne.
“Everything you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form,” writes Susan Cain in her new book, Bittersweet: how longing and sorrow make us whole. In a world where enforced smiles and white-knuckled positivity clenches against the wild winds of adversity, she reminds us that “light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.” At this in-between time of transition we may feel suspended between life’s crevices and cracks as Jupiter’s lingering longing expands the bitter and the sweet. And as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us, “before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

On the eve of a new Scorpio Moon on October 25th, Sun and Moon hold a séance with Venus in regenerative Scorpio, accenting the cartography of our heart. This eclipse amplifies the finality of endings; fertilises a new cycle of growth with the dust of demolition. Tonight, we come back to what we deeply value. And what we must discard or choose to keep. A solar eclipse is a high-voltage new moon, and a new moon encapsulates the seed of a new beginning, a new shaping of our expectations, though we may not be able to see just what they are until the Moon is ripe and full. And as this new moon travels between the Earth and the Sun, darkening the Sun’s brilliance, something, someone may be eclipsed. This symbolism is made all the more poignant in a culture where the brilliance of externalised power and earthly matters command the spotlight in 24-hour news loops and on social media. The essence of eclipses lingers like an expensive perfume, for two weeks before and after the eclipse. They act as celestial highlighters, amplifying, intensifying energy and they can be game changers.
We may remember that for the ancient Greeks, Fate came in the form of three Moirai, those three sisters who determined the Fate of every living creature. It was Atropos who cut the thin thread of life. We meet Fate when the Nodes of the Moon transit the planets or angles of our birth chart. The South Node draws us back, into the undertow of the past; we hesitate at the threshold, we circle endlessly in our place of discomfort. The North Node is where we see the diamond of our destiny, although the threshold crossing is never easy. Something is calling us to our purpose, our ability as a race to love and heal and to nurture one another and all creatures great and small.
As Nature contracts, exposing an uncompromising knot-work of bare branches and stubble fields; as the primordial pulse of the year stirs deep in our blood and bones, we might sense a slow, steady certainty moving through our body. This lunation carries the seed for repair, for release and renewal, if we trust the instruction of our hearts and know that death, like birth, is both an ending and a beginning. As we pause awhile, in this world of dying things, may those dead places in ourselves open to Love in new and deeper ways.
One wishes that pain weren’t the potent alchemical element that it is―Athol Fugard.
Mars has sovereignty over this warrior Full Moon as she travels in tandem across the night skies with Chiron, the wounded healer, symbolising the grief and suffering so many may be experiencing now, and the promise of deep healing if we are brave enough to move more consciously through painful rites of passage.


A slow, attentive light settles on heather-clad hilltops. In steep ravines that slice the coastline into restless waters of the Atlantic, gilded leaves flutter on the invisible breath of autumn winds. This is the month of changing seasons and changing guardians.
Mars Retrograde in Gemini coincided with the financial crisis of the credit crunch and recession of 2007-08 as Pluto entered Capricorn, a poultice that has drawn to the surface all that festers in big business and hierarchical social structures. This sense of dissolution will continue, peaking with the Saturn/Neptune conjunction in Aries in 2025-26.