PLAN•IT—August Forecast
Life is a delicate balance between holding on & letting go. A reflection on the upcoming eclipses & astrology of August, and how to best work with it.
At the risk of sounding like Kamala Harris, I have been thinking a lot about “the significance of the passage of time”. Tracing the threads between past, present, and future events until the whole thing starts to feel like a cork board with red string across it. Unfortunately for my enemies, I've begun channeling this psychosis into something beautiful. It’s one of those once in a decade moments as an artist where all of your fascinations and your work finally converge into one central thesis, and your quirks start to crystallize as features rather than bugs.
A theory on time…
This is where I get into trouble, because if you asked me to put proof in a basket I couldn’t do it. I'm not Stephen Hawking. If you asked me for the theoretical framework behind my reasoning, the answer essentially reduces down to "vibes". All I can tell you is that time has a shape, a colour, and distinct qualitative flavours. Which, as a visual person, I find endlessly interesting.
In grappling with the concept of time I’ve began to consider, both from a visual and a physical standpoint—What would time look like, if it were not a simple straight line? What if the calendar is just one interpretation? What if it's circular, cyclical, and repeats; circling back and forth and back again and then starting anew? What if every moment that could ever happen, and will ever happen, is contained within this very moment? What does that look like? Not linear and dependent, but interconnected and cyclical.
There's a concept in nature called fractals: patterns that repeat themselves visually at every scale. You see this when you fly over a forest or a jungle and the trees perfectly resemble the lungs of the human body. How river systems resemble capillaries. Nature, by definition, is a perfect and efficient system. At every scale it produces fractals, you can look at the arm of a galaxy or a conch shell, and it produces the same perfect spiral. The Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, the logarithmic spiral: all things nature was already doing long before we had language to name them.
So naturally, in what can only be described as a schizophrenic episode, I started building a tool for understanding time in this same visual context, but with a quantitative, astrological lens. (Yes, astrology is based on actual cosmology and math, not intuition.) What follows is an export from PLAN·IT, an app I'm building that turns your own personal, custom, unique astrological timing into a simple, clear visual you can actually read and understand, and therefore plan around.
I wanted to try it out on the August forecast. My goal here, and really the entire goal of PLAN·IT, is to explain in plain English what to actually do about it. Not as a list of dates to survive, but as moments to make the most of.
“PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE — A STUBBORNLY PERSISTENT ILLUSION”
Albert Einstein
How to read it: the month winds from the outer ring inward, one segment per day. The glowing dots are the lunations/eclipses. You can see the shape of the month at a glance. August is an intense month, and the colours reflect that.
The first half of the month is one long buildup to this eclipse moment. I like to think of eclipses as accelerated portals for change. This one is brand new territory, as this south node Leo eclipse hasn’t happened in almost two decades. You may feel echoes of August 2008, the last one; and of August 2017, when the eclipses in Leo were running the opposite direction. So themes from these times may reverberate.
In astrology, we can think of the south node as the point of subtraction, of letting go. Leo is the part of us that needs a stage, that loves to be seen, that builds an identity out of being recognized for a specific action. We all have Leo somewhere in our charts. Together they ask very bluntly: what roles are you tired of playing? Are there identities or narratives that you’ve outgrown performing? Is it time to put some old beliefs about the self down? This eclipse acts as a doorway, and it requires that you walk through it completely: You arrive through an exit.
Make sure to rest during this week, as the south node can bring that tired-and-wired eclipse fatigue (shoutout insomnia 💃🏻). Luckily, Mercury & Jupiter stand nearby with the next exact transit, lending us the exact clarity needed to spot
the changes and release necessary. This type of reflection isn’t navel-gazing, refining the self is what fuels the collective shift these times demand. As we become more liberated and authentic in the self, so too, we liberate others.
Three days after the eclipse clears space, Mercury and Jupiter meet and hand us a pen and a microphone. This conjunction produces a stretch of mental clarity, welcome in a month where so much feels thrown into the air, and it lands in the exact part of your chart the eclipse just emptied (look to your Leo house). Mercury and Jupiter in Leo make for an exuberant, opulent voice. So say what you want to say, and say it with your whole chest. Write down what you want. Name the new version of yourself you are becoming. This is a powerful window for scripting, vision boarding, and meditation. Just watch the size of what you promise, because the end of the month carries a Mars-Saturn signature known for overwhelm, so dream at full volume here and keep the commitments modest. Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Mars moves into Cancer on August 11, a sign where it is not considered to be at its best. Mars is raw power, and if you think of a crab (Cancer), you can imagine how it moves sideways and around, instead of straight at the thing. Quite an inefficient process if you ask me. On the 17th, it comes into a square (a hard 90° aspect) with Neptune, the planet of dreams and illusions. If Mars is the sharp edge, then Neptune is the mist that dissolves it. The result is a battle fought in the fog. The clarity we had two days earlier slips quickly into confusion and a real loss of direction. Productivity may drop, and it feels annoying and ineffective, none of which is a personal failing on our part. Instead, use the first two weeks of August to get your work done or make serious progress on a project.
There is a poem by David Wagoner, that David Whyte loves to recite, that I keep coming back to in times like this. When you are lost in the forest, it says: Stand Still. The forest is not empty, it is not against you, it already knows exactly where you are. Stillness is how you let it find you. Stay the course, stop forcing a direction you cannot see, and lean on your intuition and your surroundings. They are far wiser than your brain ever will be.
What this is positive for: a mid-month vacation. Or an artistic outlet. This can be a genuinely fruitful time for creative work, anything that does not require a road to be visible.
Two things land on the 27th, and they work as a pair. In the morning, Mercury goes cazimi in Virgo (10:03AM). Cazimi means “the heart of the Sun” in Arabic, and the tradition holds that a planet passing through that exact point is not burned but reborn, & at its most powerful. Mercury is already strong in Virgo, so this is the clearest thinking moment of the month. A Promethean spark. Answers arriving fully formed, before you have finished asking the question. Keep a pen and pad nearby.
Then, twelve hours later (9:18pm to be exact), the lunar eclipse in Pisces closes a story that has been taking shape since September 2024. This is our last eclipse on this axis. In the Virgo parts of our charts we have spent two years shedding the compulsion to fix, correct, and perfect. In Pisces we have been softening into something looser and more dreamlike. This eclipse squares Uranus, so the ending is unlikely to be quiet. Expect a bang, a twist, a wave that arrives quickly. And because it carries the north node, this is not a drain but a tide coming in. Something is being pulled toward you, not only taken away.
The month ends on a lift and then hits a wall, back to back. On the 31st Jupiter trines Saturn, which is genuinely lovely: long-range plans feel not just possible but obvious, and the temptation is to say yes to every single one of them. Twelve hours later Mars squares Saturn, the two malefics working directly against each other, in what is commonly considered by astrologers to feel like “flooring the gas and the brake at the same time”. Urgency with nowhere to go. Effort that makes friction and heat instead of movement.
If you take one piece of advice from me, please let it be this: do not fuck around & find out on Mars-Saturn transits. This is a much better window to offload than to accumulate.
The converse (as nothing is every absolute, no all-good, all-bad) is that you can get an enormous amount done under this. Just not in the easy way. Grit and force will work. But who wants to force anything these days?
Thank you for reading! PLAN·IT, the app all of these graphics come from, is getting closer. Stay here and my instagram for updates. I’ll be at UAC (The United Astrological Conference) in Chicago early September! (Send me your Chicago recco’s please)
Lastly, As cool as AI is—it will never come close in accuracy to a real human walking you through your own chart. I keep a very small number or private consultations spots each month, subscribers can book here.
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