As an unexpected tie-in with the color theme, my partner (who neither knows nor cares about decans) had given me a red, orange, and yellow exercise shirt as an early birthday present to go hiking in that morning. It’s … a lot of color, and it’s a combination I’ve literally never worn before. I didn’t wear it that trip either, but the arrival of such an unusually colorful shirt in those Sun-in-Aries colors felt very appropriate for the decan. It was just a natural synchronicity of that energy.

Does everything tie in? Of course not. But it’s fascinating how your energy and focus shift when you set your mind to shift it. It makes me excited for Aries III, when Venus (the Empress) and Aries (the Emperor) dance together in balanced celebration (4 of Wands), which starts this weekend. And it makes me excited to help more people find new ways of focusing their attention to see how it changes their lives.

Here’s the thing. 

When you pay attention to certain parts of your life, you put more energy into them. Yes, manifestation-type energy, but also work- and mental focus-type energy. It doesn’t have to be all-consuming, but it should be intentional. If you spent thirty minutes every day doing something, you would have spent 15 hours doing that thing by the end of the month. That may not sound like a ton, but that’s 180 hours by the end of the year. You could write a novel or four in that time. (They may or may not be very good, but it’s a thing most people don’t ever think they can do, let alone in less than a year.)

The way I talk about decans now, here on the blog or on Instagram or in my classes, you might think that I’d been studying astrology for the last twenty years. But no. Only tarot has been with me so long. Astrology has fallen into place because it is systematic, and I love learning systems. So once I understood the patterns and logic, things started clicking. 

But it didn’t come easily at first. I actually really struggled with astrology because I thought it should come naturally. I didn’t think it was worth my time to study it.

Here’s another thing. 

When you don’t understand something, it’s easy to assume that the thing you don’t understand is wrong in some way. I don’t mean that it’s false, but maybe it’s badly explained or it’s badly conceived or it’s just for people with strange brains. 

For me, I didn’t understand astrology at first, so I thought it was probably dumb and arbitrary. Instead of thinking about it like anything else I’d ever studied, I just assumed it would be easy or make sense. Maybe that’s because astrology was in the newspaper as horoscopes, and it was given as much value as comic strips. (Fun fact: I studied the rhetoric and art of comic strips for several years, so I should have known that things that seem trivial in newspapers can be full of all kinds of genius.)

At some point, I realized that a lot of people whose opinions and thought patterns I valued were using astrology in interesting and thoughtful ways. It wasn’t just that one artist friend or the kooky intuitive one with all the crystals. It was also the scientifically minded atheist and the practical entertainer. And it was the culturally competent polyglot who could speak to differences in the history of astrology in different regions. There was so much to learn. 

That didn’t mean that I thought astrology was useful or, if it was, that it was right for me, but it did mean that I couldn’t just assume that it was for a group of people unlike me. So I tried to learn it. 

I couldn’t. 

I would read about it online and try to make sense of my natal chart, having to reread portions again and again and wondering how it all worked. I downloaded apps to try to follow along with transits and see how they were determined. And nothing stuck. It was all “in one ear and out the other.”

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