This Liminal Year: The Astrology of 2024

So bring your sorrow

For everyone out into the street,

in the sun.

-Matthew Zapruder, “Come On All You Ghosts”  

For most of 2023, I was haunted by nuclear imagery. I dreamed about hazmat suits and geiger counters. I poured over event charts for key moments in the Chernobyl disaster, and I ruminated on Uranus and Pluto. 

In December of last year, nuclear winter began to thaw. I took a vacation for the winter holidays, and my dreams changed. I was no longer hiding in a fallout shelter from the storm above ground. I was stumbling out of it, surveying the ruined landscape, noting what had changed, what had been blown away. 

Astrologically, we are in a liminal place in 2024.

The new cycles that began in 2020 and 2021 are underway. It is starting to become clear what it means to be moving from the Age of Earth to the Age of Air. Or, put another way with less jargon, we understand what it means that it is no longer 2019. 

2025-2026 will be another big period of change. All of the slow moving, outer planets are changing signs. Whenever an outer planet changes signs, it is an important event. The outer planets change slowly enough that their movements are the songs of generations. 

To have all of the outer planets change signs at once? That is very rare. 

2025-2026 is less a change of key in the music of the spheres. It’s the beginning of a new song, maybe even a change in genre. 

We don’t know exactly what this change will be. The outer planets haven’t played this particular chord in at least 2500 years. 

But we do know that things will be different. We will not be going back to 2019. Ever again. 

I don’t know anyone whose life hasn’t changed radically since 2020. 

For me, virtually nothing is the same. I have a new marriage, new child, new home, new social circle. Many of the changes are good. I wouldn’t trade my husband and child for anything. I’ve also published a book and seen my business become successful in ways I couldn’t have imagined in 2019. 

And, yet, there has been loss. There are relationships, communities, and hopes for the future that have been left in the before-times. I lost my home and third-places that felt like home.

I am perpetually pulled between the immense joy I feel in my new life and the grief at what has been lost or destroyed.

I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings, and, yet, I don’t see anyone talking about it in public. Maybe, privately, we are grieving and licking our wounds, but the trauma of the early-2020s isn’t private trauma. And it won’t be healed privately.

When World War II ended, people gathered in the streets and in churches to celebrate the end of the war and mourn those who had been lost.

These celebrations and rituals of thanksgiving and remembrance weren’t just theater. They were necessary for the healing of the community. They welcomed home those who fought and survived. They mourned those who left home and never returned. They marked the end of unnatural roles adopted out of necessity. They nudged those who had adopted new roles out of necessity and found they suited them to claim these changes permanently. These rituals and celebrations were a collective exhale, shaking out the tension of sustained trauma. 

It is one of the mistakes of the Vietnam War years that veterans weren’t given the same rituals of reintegration into the community. Those who died weren’t publicly mourned. The collective reluctance in the United States to admit that the war had even begun–labeling it, technically, a conflict–became an inability to bring a clean end to the war, an inability to bring the warriors home.

2025 will mark the 50 year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and the walking wounded are still wandering the streets begging for change. 

The pandemic may not have been a war in the conventional sense, but it still left millions alienated and homeless. For some, the pandemic will never be over. Some will live with chronic illnesses and the pain of their losses for the rest of their lives, but this only makes it more important for communities to come together in mutual support and grief. 

It is essential that we do what we can in 2024 to mourn and release the things we won’t be taking with us from the before-times.

John Beckett wrote about this in his year ahead divination post, and I agree with him enthusiastically.

Next year, a new round of changes will come. We may be crawling out of our fall-out shelters now, but this isn’t a post-apocalyptic movie. We don’t know if there will be more bombs to come. 

What we do know is that the world will not return to what it was. Any grief and release work that hasn’t been done this year will become baggage we carry with us into the future. It will only trip us up as we try to integrate and adapt to the changes that will begin next year.

I’ve written previously about the need to stop, take a break, and assess your current situation. This is necessary from time to time, but it is especially important now. There is work here that must be done privately. You are the only one who knows the true extent of your losses, your true feelings about the events of the last few years. 

But it is important for communities to gather and do this emotional work together, as well. 

Community leaders, I encourage you to talk with your people about the support they need to move on in 2024. What gatherings might you host? What rituals might you perform together? 

If you are looking for community or support, I would like to help. I offer individual, ongoing support through Soul Friend sessions, and you are invited to join the community in the Narrative Astrology Lab. Not sure what you need? Let’s have tea.