Mercury spun back through the last and middle and first decans of Pisces. Taking the mind back and beneath and beyond to realms unseen, realms of intuition, telepathy, ancestral memory. There was contact with spirit guides and with old, old truths in a place where, as in the folktales of all people, you find that you can speak to animals, and they can speak to you, and suddenly you understand each other. The walls fall and you can hardly believe the walls were there at all, or that they were able to separate you from your relatives, from your friends.

When I fed the terrapins and freshened their water, they looked at me deeply, and I looked deeply back. When my daughter fed her aquatic frog from her fingertip, it placed its tiny webbed hand on her finger and floated its belly against her skin, like an embrace. My father in law sat on the steps and the chickens nuzzled beneath his arms as he stroked their wattles.  The dog and the cat curled around each other, between us in bed, and we all breathed together in deep slumber through the moon’s journey across the sky, and in the morning they both came out to lay beside each other in the sunlight inside a hubbub of glittering birdsongs and bug flittings.

I’ll tell you what the animals told me during this interlude when a charm upon me made their language intelligible to me. They told me that war is stupid. They told me that nation states and their borders are weak and cowardly and cruel ideas. They told me that migration and rest and sharing are natural things, not things to be feared or avoided, or laden with shame and secrecy. They told me that body instinct is honest. They told me that what feels true in your body is very likely true. They asked me why our children almost always know their languages and understand them, and speak kindly to them and share with them, and why our adults have almost all forgotten their languages, and so many who were friends with them as children no longer want to be their friends.

They told me they are weary of what we do to the air, and the water with our poisons and our plastics and all the death machines we’ve devised. They’re tired of our noise and our frenetic pursuits of the wrong things.

I told them, you’re right. You’re right about it all. I told them there’s not a lot I can do but I’ll do what I can. I promised to stop eating them (except for the fish, at least for now), and I promised to stop driving a gas burning car except on days when it’s pouring rain (and even then I could take the bus).  I promised to rest more and to spend more time sitting in the sun and playing with them and singing to and with them. I have made these changes because I don’t take promises I make to my friends lightly.  I also changed my payroll withholding so I am no longer contributing my few pennies to paying for the stupid wars that they, and I, hate so much.

The Tarot card that aligns with the first decan of Pisces is the eight of cups- this is where we have backed up to now that the retrograde is wrapping up and mercury will begin spinning forward again. The eight of cups shows a person walking away from eight cups into the wilderness- into the unknown- in search of…something else. This Piscean journey BEGINS with « abandoning (what appears to be) abundance » because instinct and deep intuition, subconscious knowing (or the animals), tells you that no, this is not actually abundance (this meat you’re eating, this convenient car you’re driving, this military you’re funding that supposedly makes you « great » and « safe »). It cannot be real abundance because it does not align with the deeper, older truths that you knew when you were a child before you were forced to forget them. It cannot be real abundance because it is harming and killing countless humans both near to you and far from you in the world. It can not be abundance because it comes at the expense of the well-being of the non-human relatives who you have been separated from and told you have a right to exploit and harm. So although it is difficult, you have to turn away from those eight full cups and walk off into the wilderness. You must trust that you will meet guides who will help you, that your intuition (and wise people, and the animals, if you give them your attention) will continue to tell you which way to go, and that yes, there is true abundance in the world. If you’re committed to seeking and giving your deep attention to your guides within and without, you will find it.

The second decan of Pisces is represented by the nine of cups. The nine of cups represents the beginnings of real abundance- abundance with spiritual and ethical alignment, abundance that comes from honesty and right relation- that awaits the seeker who has the courage to set off into the unknown in the eight of cups.

The final decan of Pisces is represented by the ten of cups. This is a visualization of the goal, the ideal outcome for the seeker who left the solitary « security » of the known, those eight full cups. The ten of cups is the achievement of true abundance because it is a vision not only of individual success but of family, community, peaceful and balanced relation to land and the life it nourishes. There is play here, there is rest and affection, a simple, harmonious life, beauty, love- in short, a life lived in right relation. The kind of abundance that makes sense to all the other animals on earth, which is generous, self-sustaining, natural, and which for sad and infuriating historical reasons, many of us have forgotten is the life we need and want. Until now.

The oil fields are on fire. The refineries are torched rubble. The shipping lanes are closed. The price per barrel goes up every day and so does the price of gas at the pump. Fertilizer is going to be out of reach for many this planting season. The factory farms shovel those heavily fertilized industrial grain crops into what they view as flesh crops before they hack up the bodies and send the chunks to market in trucks that run on gasoline.

I told the cat, « I think people might not be able to afford this anymore. If oil goes to 200+ dollars per barrel and gas is 12 dollars per gallon at the pump, and airline tickets are 10 thousand dollars because of the price of jet fuel and ground beef is 50 dollars a pound, and the cost of intercontinental shipping becomes completely unsustainable and even the military runs out of fuel and ammunition, and it’s impossible to manufacture a plastic container because those are made out of petroleum too- it might just… it could possibly… end. Like waking up from a 200 year nightmare called the anthropocene. »

and he looked up at me, perhaps a bit accusingly, but he had the grace to blink « I love you » .