Brain scramblies

Your girl has Uranus square her sun, which basically means that stressful shit abounds in my life. Some of the recent stress was self-selected: I write you jet-lagged at an ungodly hour after spending two weeks abroad. Weirdly, I bought my plane tickets while Mercury was retrograde and traveled with Mercury retrograde: had two on-time flights and my luggage appeared when it was supposed to, which was shocking in its lack of snafus, and I still don't trust it, even though it's over. For the record, Mercury retrograde ends tomorrow.

Also: in the spirit of random Mercury things, if you're a US resident traveling internationally and not using the Mobile Passport Control app, look into it. My customs line was 5 people long as I looked over my shoulder at the saddest, tiredest 150 people I've ever seen in my life in the regular line.

Anyway, Uranus aspects to your sun tend to reconfigure your life in weird ways, so I self-selected the chaos that is traveling to somewhere I'd never been before as well as living with a toddler for 2 weeks...and then other random shit happened in addition to that, because that's what that energy does.

Here's what I learned while I was out: if you live significantly east or west of where you were born, you might want to check to see what relocating your chart does to it. Moving east or west will adjust your chart: remembering that charts are wheels, relocating spins the wheel one way or the other (east rotates it clockwise and west is counter-clockwise). North or south doesn't do much unless it's *really* significantly north or south. Astro.com will relocate your chart for you, if you're curious, and a lot of astrology software will also do it for you in 2 seconds. If you're taking a vacation, you can do it for fun, but if you've moved permanently, I encourage you to take a gander at your new configuration.

A favorite astrologer of mine, Erin Sullivan, died in December, and I spent some of my trip honoring her by reading books of hers I hadn't previously discovered, and in her book on AstroCartoGraphy (which means astrology + maps and the art of figuring out where you might like to live given your birth chart), she discusses that a way to really learn what different aspects of your chart do is to relocate to places that puts specific planets on one of the 4 angles we care about: the ascendant, descendant, midheaven, and IC (or even moving specific energy into the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th houses). Out of curiosity, I started looking up my friends who live significantly east or west of their birth locations, and what I found was rather stunning: almost all of them have an outer planet on one of those four angles via relocation that they did not have, natally. The 4 angles are linked with public activity, relocation means that their lives change in obvious ways. If you think about your chart as the rules of the game for this lifetime, moving does not alter the core rules of the game (though it's pleasant wishful thinking to think you can outrun your issues), but it will change how heavily certain rules are enforced, or change how the rule applies. The opposite is also true: if you have planets on angles, moving or traveling away from where you live can alleviate the stress associated with that energy. I'm in the latter camp, so it was nice to have a little break.

An interesting example of relocating to change rules is someone I know with a 7th house Neptune who moved in such a way that Neptune's now in the 8th but Pluto's RIGHT on the descendant. If you grew up projecting benevolent qualities on significant others (a 7th house matter) or having really blissful peak experiences with partners (both possibilities with Neptune) and you move to put Pluto on the descendant, well, those benevolent qualities are a thing of the past and now you're dating some really intense people or feeling disempowered because you can't find the right person to date. Or enduring bitter breakups. Or all of those things at different times.

The other thing I noticed is that you should check your lunar nodes' new locations (there's two of them and they're opposite each other) if you move. I did a reading for someone a while back who has a 5th house south node who did not act anything like a 5th house south node: moving put their south node in their 4th house, and they had a LOT of issues with and demands from family members that prevented them from pursuing their goals (north node was in the 10th, as that's opposite the 4th). Relocating the chart showed that and I breathed a sigh of relief that things made a lot more sense.

I'm wandering around learning lots of things as a result of all the Uranian activity I have going on, so we'll see what other random stuff I come up with next.

Happy New Year and thanks for sticking with me!