For the Love of Mars
When our inner warrior is screaming into his pillow.
Howdy Kumquat,
I have been quiet on here mostly because of the energy right now. I realize not all of you appreciate it when I talk about astrology. Perhaps you don’t believe in magic. Or tend to intellectualize the ephemeral, which actually dissolves it. Perhaps you need “facts” to back up the poetic and the divine.
I get it.
I was there once.
But I chose to accept my mission for this lifetime: to use all of my art, energy and talent to bring about a golden age of ENLIGHTEN-UP-MENT that shifts the culture.
What’s the first step required to have a golden age?
RE-ENCHANTING the world with wonder and delight.
When we re-enchant with wonder and delight, we enlighten-up— which lifts our hearts and vibration. And then collectively, we change the culture. You know by now how I feel about the culture….
The culture is the soil our consciousness and our dreams grow in.
It’s why we need real artists making it, not influencers or AIs. Souls incarnate into human bodies here on Earth in order to grow our own consciousness, which needs to develop its own creativity muscles in order to take positive action in the real world. That’s how it works and what human beings are designed to do.
Most people have not accepted their soul’s mission. They avoid their true calling like the plague. In fact, the same souls propped up a plague in the avoidance of their true nature. I’m not pointing fingers. Everything is here for our growth. But I stopped believing that anything but Nature and God and my own internal alchemy will heal my physical body a long time ago. I pulled out of the reward-punishement and everything-is-transactional way of being and replaced it with flow, reciprocity, synchronicity, magic and unconditional love.
I don’t build on bullshit foundations anymore. I can’t trick myself into thinking it will work out. I know better. The only seeds I’m planting and cultivating are going to be planted with a pure heart and a whole, healed hand. But I’m very tired. And I have been missing other Super Friends that can do this work with me.
Unconditional love is not for pussies. (Yes, I said pussies and I have one that I love.) It requires fierce discernment to know when to keep giving to a situation or when to withdraw your resources and wait. Waiting for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Waiting for those who know how to listen to their own feelings and intuition, which has nothing to do with thinking.
When I accepted this mission in 2018, I didn’t really think it would be this hard. LOL. I didn’t understand the distances I would have to travel to pull out of the old way of being, or how alone I would be, for painfully long periods of time. Each stage of pulling out required me to apply my alchemy muscles and transform the shit into gold. Taking only the lesson and leaving the baggage. You only get leave the baggage when you practice compassion and forgiveness. When you use a wider lens and learn to love yourself through anything.
I endeavor to keep my heart as light and bright as possible. To accomplish that, I can’t hold onto anger, shame or regret. Many people think I’m stupid or 1-dimensional because I don’t look like what I’ve been through. As if choosing to be positive every day and doing the internal work it takes for me to stay in this state, means that I must be naïve or just an idiot.
Choosing positivity and loving myself is the fiercest work I’ve ever done. It is not easy, but it is essential. We aren’t here to just feel good all the time, we are here to grow. New skin, new muscles, new bones, new systems, new cells, new ways of seeing-being.
Astrology is one of the primary tools that I used to pull out of the linear time, muggle world. Obviously, muggles don’t really like it when I talk about that stuff. It challenges how their world is constructed. They don’t want to believe that a entire soul map for this lifetime exists in their natal chart. Cause then they’d have to step onto their path and into their true selves.
Sounds like a lot of responsibility!
And it is.
It’s scary, I get it. I’ve been there.
Muggles don’t want to believe that energy is everything and everything is energy. They prefer to think they can control all conditions and like to look at the world through microscopes. Which is like feeling an elephant in the dark, as Rumi explained it.
Admitting the world is much, much bigger than what is visible opens up the possibility that something Divine might be guiding us. That we aren’t allowed to know everything. We each only get to see one facet of the jewel at a time. And yet, we exist in the same energetic soup. Even though I do all this work on myself to stay light, I still experience the shit collective times in our world. For example, the election totally ruined my birthday, AGAIN. Because we are permeable to and effected by EVERYTHING— including dark collective thought forms or the movements of celestial bodies constellating our sky.
My cell phone may ruin my short term memory, but astrology expands my soul’s memory.
Understanding that our conscious attention is what grows the world would require understanding the inverse. The shadow side is that the absence of our attention and focus, lets what we love die. From neglect. We’ve neglected a great many things.
We live in a world of duality by design— there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s actually a perfectly interdependent system of reciprocity when you get the hang of it. It’s always both-and…and yet there is also always a third option that we only receive through intuition, which is the angelic internet.
The shadow side also includes the ways we are focusing our attention on fear, anger, lack and limitation…or living in our trauma too long, or believing that we get locked into any fixed state. We don’t. Plain and simple. So hanging our identity on some disease or mental ailment or life wound— is to choose to live in the shadow instead of the sun. That is not what defines you. What defines you is how you rise to every challenge.
It’s your life, you can do what you want with it.
Even though truth may be hard to swallow, it doesn’t turn your solar plexus to stone. The truth relaxes your nervous system, even when it’s harsh, because then you can make decisions with clarity. Like when you find out you’ve been cheated on, it makes a lot of confusing past things crystal clear and you can see what you need to do to get the fuck out of that situation.
When we focus our attention on the negative, we are choosing to withhold our attention from the positive. Hence the world we live in right now. It fucking sucks pretty hard and it takes a lot of work for me to stay positive. It’s a choice I make every morning when I wake up.
All that said.
What I actually came here to talk about today is this:
Mars Retrograde.
First of all, I’ve got 3 major zodiac placements in signs ruled by Mars. Oooof. Mars is our ‘git ‘er done energy. Mars is the one on the gas pedal in our life. Retrogrades give these energies a well-deserved break. It’s a chance to circle back, pick up pieces, tidy up messes, set things right and re-align with the highest expression of our personal power.
Mars has officially taken his foot off the gas.
These Mars cycles are long too. Whereas Mercury retrogrades go for 3 weeks 3x a year, Mars retrogrades about every 2 years, for about 2 months. These retrogrades tend to either leave me crying in a ball in my bed for weeks or actually injured. The last one in 2022 was notable because I got 2 face injuries back to back that left me with 2 big black eyes for a month. Very humbling, bordering on embarassing. I had to walk around for a whole month looking like I’d been in a bar brawl or was beat up by my boyfriend. LOL / Not LOL.
This time, I’m VERY grateful not to be physically injured, but I am finding a lot of anger bubbling up into actual RAGE— that is making me scream into my pillow a lot and throw things around the room. That’s not my usual. I’m not proud. I’m looking at it, taking my medicine and doing my homework.
I know it’s the Mars parts of me that I allowed to be disempowered that are coming up for me to address. Ways that I am over-giving to situations that aren’t reciprocal— or ways that people have stepped all over my boundaries, and I let it happen. Or the times I failed to assert my needs because I felt hopeless, weak, poor, or whatever.
I take full responsibility though because I participate in those messes with avoidance or by keeping the peace when there is actually purposeful conflict that could transform the unfairness festering beneath the surface.
The healthy expression of Mars is—
Discernment
Not suffering fools
Leading with wisdom
Using the right amount of force with skill
Not wasting any time or energy
Knowing how, where and when LOVE needs to be defended
Mars is not scattershot. Mars does not “throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.” Unless he’s in a retrograde. But even then, it’s more like a temper tantrum, he’s not one to pay attention to the patterns of the noodles.
Mars in his exaltation wants every move to be precise and on target. Mars will wait for the right moment to strike and not use excessive force.
What does it take to have that kind of precision?
Messes, mistakes, freak outs, fuck ups and hard falls.
That’s what.
Mars is a field-tested warrior with the battle scars to prove it.
It’s the same with mastering any skill. Sorry, Charlie— there are no short cuts to the good stuff. Best to do the work with a song and a smile. The hardest lessons will be really funny one day. So, have faith until you’re laughing again.
Using the technology of astrology has re-wired me entirely. Cyclical time is much more forgiving than linear time. I feel part of all of Creation because I can see the patterns playing out in my own life. I’m not separate from the Cosmos, I am part of it. I’m not controlled by something “out there.” All of it is “in here.”
And it’s not about fate vs. free will. Astrology teaches that life is intertwined with fate and what happens is shaped by my free will. By what I choose to accept or reject, I shape my world.
And one thing that is coming up in a very strong way during this Mars retrograde is my rejection of AI. I don’t want to participate in it anymore. It feels disempowering. I’m not interested in seeking answers as to what consciousness even is from AI. I don’t need AI to do work for me. I don’t need it to make art for me or perform dog-n-pony tricks of programming. And I like driving myself around too.
AI is presently siphoning a lot of our time and focus away from Nature and our own creativity. It’s a smoke-n-mirror show. In reality, NATURE IS THE TECHNOLOGY we were given to explore. We are part of Nature, and she/we only flourish through participation.
Learn how to use your own technology properly.
I dare you. I triple dog dare you. It’s much more fun and satisfying. Because it’s a fractal fascinating endless eternal process that never depletes you. That’s worth fighting for.
What are you fighting for right now?
Are you accepting fake feelings and easy answers?
Are you stifling your own spirit with disempowering people, places, things, patterns or programs?
Well…not me.
No fucking way.
Even Substack’s algorithms are feeling too invasive for me and this platform is not sustaining me with returned energy from my readers or much money to eat with— so my Mars parts right now are like— Fuck it, then. Why bother. Retreat.
So, I’m working with the energy. I’ve given in to the quiet.
Those of you who follow Charles Eisenstein here on Substack may also be wrestling with these feelings extra because he’s also been writing about what is at stake with allowing one tool to have so much power. His last 2 essays, combined with my own experiences have been slowly growing the Heebie-Jeebies inside of me.
Recently, I am even more aware than usual of how I’m being harvested without my consent. And how I’m the last person to benefit from it. Like more than I’ve ever seen it before, I see it now. And those of you who have been my readers for a long time know I’ve pulled out of Amazon a long time ago (in 2018 after finding out how they treated their employees at Christmas, so I’m very happy they are striking right now), and out of all Meta social-ills (DELETED not just paused my Facebook and Instagram accounts without so much as a screen shot souvenir) and that I have rediscovered so much joy in analog technologies like records, books, brick-n-mortar stores and rocknroll. I even think my short term memory is improving.
This is now a whole other level of seeing the invisible cost of my half-baked consent.
And who benefits? Only the controllers. Same old, same old. Only worse.
We are frogs in a pot and they are slowly cranking up the temperature. They do intend to cook and eat us. But I’m jumping out of the pot. I hope you do too.
It’s tricky to see it. And sure, maybe I click on the cookie that said I consent, but really my soul does not consent. I can see how my ideas, my images, my tastes, my opinions are being harvested and put into the online meat grinder in a way that demeans, disempowers and disrespects me, my creativity, my life’s work and my legacy. I used to be able to look away. Now I can’t unsee it.
My interactions with these artificial distractions are giving me a feeling in my gut that I cannot deny— an animal reaction that tells me to RUN!!!!
And I don’t really need to second guess a feeling like that.
As someone who has spent a great deal of time getting my muscles of perception turned back on, I no longer ignore my intuition. I don’t need to pull that kind of intel up into my mind. The mind is the dullest knife in the drawer compared to our emotions and intuition.
It’s like seeking answers to life’s questions on the internet instead of living life.
I can’t do it, you guys. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how to proceed in a way that is empowering and doesn’t drain my life force. I’m trying. But right now, I’m just sitting in the shit of all these feelings without any answers. It’s not my favorite place to be, but I want the precision Mars is offering. I want my art to hit its mark.
Part of me wants to leave Substack, which I thought was the last bastion of good-old-fashioned blogging— but where is there for me to go? I wonder if I’d be happier printing an actual newsletter to send in the mail. But they are trying to destroy the postal system too. We’re still just frogs in a pot.
Nothing to do but sort through our feelings and be still.
Wait for intuition.
The Mars energy is what gives us access to our Divine Masculine Super Powers.
Exalted Mars only ever seeks real power— which does not come at the expense of someone or something. Real power is not present in a reward-punishment system. Mars, the king of going-and-getting-it, knows that he can’t do this without his own exalted Venus side. The Divine Feminine. I mean, what is he doing it all FOR??
For Love, of course.
Ultimately Mars is taking action on Venus’ behalf, as well as his own. Mars is a softie on the inside. He’s a lover. He may not be the energy responsible for all the love, beauty and harmony in the world, but he is the one who defends it. And he knows that Love is the secret to his power.
I think of my Divine Masculine way of knowing as being similar to shooting water into a bucket with a garden hose— which can be loud and messy. My Divine Feminine side is more like setting the hose in the bottom of the bucket, where it fills silently. The water just arrives. Intuition is like that.
True power uplifts all. No compromises. The reward for using discipline and discernment (which ARE quite difficult to attain) to find our true power— is precision.
Are you uplifted by all that you are participating in? Are you accepting shit situations and sweeping the compromises under the rug? Do you feel angry, frustrated or disempowered? Well, then, you’re right on time with the energy.
And you’re not alone.
It’s just time to lift that rug up and shake it out.
I hope you are taking the lesson-medicine that’s on offer with any shit in your life.
And I truly hope you had a balanced Solstice.
Much love,
Trixie
I don't try to follow the precise clockwork of newer astrology, which seems sort of reductive. The old Persian astronomers had a broader idea, which was picked up by the west in the 1400s then partly abandoned. The oppositions and conjunctions, along with the unpredictable shapes of the sun's stormy moods, shape the electromagnetic field that we swim in. Most animals, and especially bacteria, have definite ways of sensing the field. They know when an earthquake is coming because the field changes its shape, and they undoubtedly sense the sun's moods as well. We're animals (plus a lot of bacteria in the gut), so our moods are shaped by the field as well whether we have specific senses or not. The gut bacteria may in fact BE our sensor, a sort of permanent prosthetic.
Wait it out. That Martian energy will return. With gusto, I suspect.
We have one wild-ass ride ahead of us. I no longer have any faith at all in my predictions. But I stand by that one.