From the Feminist Killjoy Headquarters | February 21, 2024: North Node Conjunct Chiron in Aries and The King of Cups

This past Monday afternoon, February 19, 2024, Chiron and the North Node came together in a conjunction. In astrology, Chiron is an asteroid known as “the wounded healer.” Transiting Chiron shows us where and what we’re ready to heal. But we also all have Chiron in our natal birth chart, which shows us what we’re perennially working on to heal. It’s a wound that we can learn to work with and tend to our whole life, so that we’re not defined by that wound or hurt. It’s a placement in our chart that allows us to be simultaneously apprentice *and* teacher and share what we’ve learned from our healing journey with others.

The North Node is mythologically represented by a Dragon’s head and it’s a place in the sky where we are insatiable, where we are hungry, where there’s a concentration of energy. When the North Node gets activated fated events can sometimes occur too. So, I don’t know about you, but Monday night there was a pretty spot on, fated moment for me in relation to where Chiron and the North Node are in my chart and of all places it happened at Trader Joe’s.

What I love and find frustrating about astrology and tarot is that ultimately, there are no right or wrong interpretations.There are many ways to interpret a tarot reading or birth chart.

Since the end of 2019, I started taking my studies in tarot and astrology more seriously. I've listened to a dozen or more podcasts, thousands of episodes, Youtube videos, taken a few courses and workshops, and what I’ve come to find is that you just have to find a reader that resonates with you. It’s a lot like finding a therapist or coach, actually. I’m not saying a therapist, coach, astrologer or tarot reader are one in the same. I’m saying that they can all be guides or facilitators on our path to healing. And just like therapists and coaches are not all created equal, neither are tarot readers or astrologers.

Any good therapist will offer you their expertise in how the brain works, theories and concepts in psychology related to your situation (like maybe they introduce you to Attachment Theory or Interpersonal Family Systems), and ideally, some tangible strategies and tools (like Somatic Experiencing techniques), but you are the one who makes the meaning from that knowledge. You get to decide if that information is relevant and helpful for interpreting the events of your life, and relating to your emotions, or not.

There are no right or wrong ways to interpret or make meaning of an emotion or experience. We are meaning making creatures and when we feel an emotion we often desperately search for a reason behind it. We want to know exactly where it came from, what it means, and if it’s not pleasant, how we can make the feelings stop and go away.

Similar to how a therapist will offer their insight and share their expertise with you, astrologers and tarot readers offer their insight and expertise of the cosmos and cards. They offer their perspective and insight about what the cards could mean, or could be showing you in relation to what you’re experiencing and/or feeling. Again, I’m not equating therapists with divinatory practitioners. I think these healing modalities serve different purposes and can all have their time and place.

For me, I’ve found it supportive to invest in therapy, coaching, astrology, and tarot over the years (not always at the same time), and will continue to do so. Some seasons I’ve found myself needing therapy once, even two times, a week. This current season I’m seeing my therapist once or twice a month. Another season found me working more consistently with an astrologer and receiving tarot readings for guidance. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to healing, but our so-called Western-medicine-obsessed society will try to convince you there’s a prescription for every issue or ailment. (Not knocking prescriptions though. I love my 10mg of Lexapro!)

Ideally, therapy, coaching, astrology, and tarot are dynamic processes where the client and facilitator are in a collaborative relationship. It’s not the therapist, coach, astrologer, or tarot reader telling the person what they should do, or how things are going to precisely unfold if they do or don’t do this specific thing. However, if you saw a psychic they could probably help you with that.

But these healing modalities I’m describing are about facilitating a process in which the person struggling comes out the other side more knowledgeable about their skills, talents, and gifts, their pain, their core wounds, and how they can tend to them in the ways they’re able to, and how they can *be* with their experience instead of pushing it away or down. 

The best part about therapy, coaching, astrology, and tarot, when done well, is that it centers your agency. Any worthwhile healing tool, strategy, or approach will do this (center your agency), and will allow you to come to your own conclusions, make your own meaning, and therefore, unfurl the options and choices you have within your current reality.

And this should go without saying: any good therapist, coach, astrologer, or tarot reader will always, always, always approach their work from a lens that deeply considers, acknowledges, and accounts for the systems of oppression we live within that impact the choices we have and/or don’t have. They will always, always, always consider their positionality, power, and privilege within their dynamic with the client.

I pulled the King of Cups in honor of this week’s conjunction of Chiron and the North Node in the fire sign of Aries. I feel that therapists, coaches, astrologers, and tarot readers, and healers of any and all kinds, are in many ways related to the King of Cups.

PSA: Tarot is nuanced and multi-layered. My interpretation of the cards in this moment may or may not resonate with you and that’s okay! Take what’s helpful and leave the rest. What I’m sharing is not definitive. It’s only one way to look at this card. If it was a different season, I might have a different message and interpretation. Tarot is alive and so the meaning is greatly dependent on the context and who’s doing the interpreting. End of PSA.

We can think of The King of Cups as a parent holding our emotions. “Parent” is a loosely defined term here. We can also think of The King of Cups as a leader who is attuned to their emotions as well as their community’s and holds space for both to flow. “Leader” is also a loosely defined term. Jolie Varela (who went from being on the frontlines of Standing Rock to creating Indigenous Women Hike and co-founding the Payahüünadü Alliance) shared with me in a conversation that it was Kathy Bancroft, a water protector and environmental activist in Payahüünadü (so-called Bishop, CA), who said, “You don’t have to be elected to be a leader.”

Both Jolie Varela and Kathy Bancroft are illustrious and powerful examples of the King of Cups.

This card can speak to the ways in which we all have the capacity to re-parent ourselves, so that we may be able to hold space for our emotions in the ways we might have missed out on as children due to being raised by emotionally immature adults (which I assume is most of us).

The King of Cups is associated with the water signs of the Zodiac: Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces. These archetypes are emblematic of having an integrated and collaborative relationship with our intuition and subconscious. Too often our society emphasizes and glorifies the intellect and being in our heads. The King of Cups points to our heart space, gut instincts, and intuition. We need to turn the dial on and up when it comes to these facets of ourselves in order to be embodied. That is where true healing begins, not just for us, but for others’ as well. When we learn to hold the complexity of our own emotional landscape, we can do so for others’ and create more equitable and reciprocal relationships and exchanges in our lives.

Sometimes we’re called to be the container and sometimes we need others’ to contain or hold us, not in a controlling way, but in a gentle, open, cupped-hands kind of way.

Some questions to consider:

How might you be shying away from emotions or experiences you’d rather keep in the closet?

How can you be brave and invite them into the light?

How can you sit with these emotions and experiences and just let them be?

Is this a moment when you need to be the parent you always needed?

Do you need to make a repair or amends with someone?

Do you need to make amends with yourself?

Do you need to release any shame you may have around your feelings?

Do you need to release any shame you have about your vulnerability? Your infallibility? 

Maybe we learned that it’s not safe to feel our feelings. That we have to focus on everyone else because if we don’t manage their feelings and experience then bad things will happen.

Maybe when we had feelings and big emotions we were gaslit and told it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe we got the message that it’s not okay to cry, that we have to suck it up, and stop being so sensitive.

Living within imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy as bell hooks described it (may she rest in power) aims to sever our relationship from our embodied experience and from our intution and emotions, so that we live in a constant state of flight, fight, freeze, or fawn. This has detrimental and deteriorating effects on our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. Our oppressive society favors the thinking mind and the absence of emotions as if our feelings, intuition, and subconscious are not portals of deep knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. In truth, being in an intentional and conscious relationship with these inherent parts of ourselves allows us to notice what’s wrong, what’s unjust, what’s not safe, and on the other hand, what’s aligned, resonant, and life-giving.

Chiron conjunct the North Node encourages us to look, to witness, to hold space, to help others’ heal from a wound that we ourselves know intimately. Our healing can’t be in a vaccuum. We’re not healing anything if we’re just focused on ourselves. How are we taking our healing and helping to heal the collective?

White supremacy wants us to ignore, sweep under the rug, and repress the suffering in the world. As Ericka Hart has pointed out, it wants to distract and de-radicalize us by prioritizing and promoting the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift.

How are we resisting the illusions and delusions of white supremacy, and making space to witness the pain and suffering of those experiencing genocide in Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan? 

In this interview on The Cutting Room Floor podcast, Recho Omondi chats with Yasiin Bey, the rapper, actor, and activist. “The situation in the Congo is dire. The situation in Sudan is gross,” Bey reflects. “And then when you read the record of history, how this is like, par for the course – this is par for the course for what they do. What is known as the United States of America is a colonial-settler project, almost like inherently — the Massachusetts Bay Colony — these were corporate concerns that were charged, chartered, funded to conquer the New World.”

“Yeah, Manifest Destiny,” Omondi responds.

Yasiin Bey continues,

“People already been there, and they paved over it and built the parking lot, and put a mall on top of it, but everybody just blindly goes their way. Now, that’s been working for some time, now. And ‘working’ is a very loosely defined term. Nonetheless, that’s the king, but what’s the crown to the clouds? You know, as the Hopi chief said famously, in one of his exchanges, he said, ‘We were told that America was the thing that we would see come and go.’ So, this idea of permanence via brute force is just not historically supported.”

“And if you doubt it, well then you go to any museum of antiquity and see what all the thuggin’ gets the thugs…Everybody who sells dope is like, ‘Nah, see what I’m gon’ do!’ But it’s like, okay! Well, you know, the dope game is cursed and so is the dope, so good luck with that. They will be punished, and the reckoning is not only coming it is here from ends that the oppressor does not yet perceive.

I know it’s heartbreaking. You should be heartbroken. That means your heart is working. If you’re heartbroken, it is distressing, that means that you are sane. You are a functioning individual. If you are uncomfortable and you’re maladjusted to a sick society it means that you are healthy. Through the demise, my heart is still alive. It looks awful outside, but it’s still worth a try.”

Yasiin Bey is a glorious and glimmering example of the King of Cups.

This card, like Bey, is asking us to remember impermanence. The impermanence of our emotions, the impermanence of empires, and hold space for the totality of our embodied experience, the totality of suffering of ourselves and our siblings near and far, from Turtle Island to Palestine, and not look away.

We must continue to work towards healing for all of us collectively, locally and globally through fighting for a free Palestine, a free Congo, and a free Sudan. Because from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

We need to keep calling for a permanent ceasefire. Let us keep working to end the occupation of Palestine at the hands of the illegal Settler Colony of Israel. All empires and all occupations must end. Let us welcome this reckoning that is already here – this reckoning that is long overdue.

May we resist the capitalist urge to drown out and numb our pain by buying more stuff. May we keep boycotting Amazon, Starbuck’s, and McDonald’s.

May we ask for support when we need it. May we offer support when we can provide it.

May we keep showing up to protests. May we keep sharing and signing the petitions. May we keep having the difficult conversations with our co-workers, siblings, family members, friends, neighbors, etc.

May we be brave and face the suffering of the world, so that we can tangibly contribute to collective healing and liberation.