In the couple of years following my ex’s departure, I became kind of preoccupied by neurology: specifically, by the phenomenon of phantom pain, and mirror neurons, and the mirror therapy often used to treat amputees who continue to experience intense, chronic pain in a body part they no longer have. The parallels are obvious, but the neurology is fascinating even separate from the backdrop of calamitous loss: these tiny cells in our brains, the mirror neurons, represent a kind of physiological rebuke to the idea of an individual self, or the notion that any of us could ever be truly alone. Your mirror neurons respond to everything you see as though it is happening to you. When I see someone laugh, or cry, or panic, or die, some part of me experiences it as though I am laughing, crying, panicking…dying. The only way my brain knows that something is happening to another person, rather than to me, is by checking my body for confirmation. This is where the mirror therapy that’s used to treat phantom pain comes in, because phantom pain happens when the brain keeps sending signals to a body part that no longer responds, so one way to treat it is to find a different way of reassuring the brain that the limb is ok. This is done by placing a mirror so that it reflects the intact limb, to give the brain an image of a whole body. Show the mirror neurons that the body is well, and they will stop insisting it is not.

I was so in love with this idea that I wrote a story about a physical therapist who works with wounded vets while also recovering from her own emotionally disfiguring breakup. At one point, the veteran in the story is describing the experience in which he lost his leg, but also saw several of his friends die. Writing that scene, it came to me suddenly, one of the roots of PTSD: that when we see someone die, a part of us responds as though we have, ourselves, died. And so some of us go on to need a kind of therapy that convinces our psyches—or our souls—that we are, in fact, still alive. That it is permissible to continue living.

I’m thinking about this today because (cue the vibe shift) I was just listening to the weekly Chani reading and something she said reminded of the mirror neurons. There’s BIG stuff happening this week in the skies, and whether you “believe” in astrology or not (it would take me a whole post just to clarify how I would answer that question and none of us need to go there right now), you can hardly deny that there is BIG stuff happening in the world all the goddamn time, to the point that we would all probably agree we are way overdue for a decade or so in which not a goddamn thing transpires. But the main thing that’s happening this week—or rather, culminating this week, since it involves two very slow-moving planets and has therefore been unfolding for some time and will continue to do so—has to do with the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune, and what each of these planets represents. Saturn is, of course (if you know your mythology) the figure of time, authority, structure, and institutions; it is tradition, it is the established order of rules, law, and patriarchy (in a birthchart, Saturn is often used to represent one’s father or the role of men in one’s life). Neptune is in many ways the opposite of Saturn: it represents illusion and dissolution, deception, imagination, boundlessness and self-undoing, as well as a kind of cosmic love and impersonal, universal compassion that is generally understood to be feminine. But if I had to pick one word out of all those descriptors to summarize the two energies that are coming together this week, they would be “dissolving” and “structures.” Which I think seems indisputably to be a phenomenon playing out all over the world. Every time I turn on the radio, it seems like somebody is talking about the end of the old world order. Personally, I feel that Saturn clearly has rulership over the billionaire class (entrenched wealth and power being very much part of its domain) and hope that Neptune’s influence, perhaps in the form of their deluded self-undoing via their network of trafficking and corruption, is coming to demolish them once and for all.

The point that Chani was making, though, was about the opportunity this moment presents to imagine new ways of structuring our world. She made an offhand comment about how we are always seeing death and disaster in our newsfeeds and our media consumption, which got me thinking about the mirror neurons, because it works that way, too: if we are constantly watching video of death and destruction, chaos and confusion, then we are naturally going to feel as though we are in the midst of those experiences ourselves even if they are not happening directly to us, and we are probably going to promote and prolong those energies in our own small ways. But conversely, if we are imagining a different future, and projecting it out into the world, then other people are going to take that in as well, and they are going to feel the experience, and spread it through their own networks. This goes back to the idea that artists are crucial to the creation of a new order, because we need people to imagine a different kind of world, and show us what that might look like, in order for people to start actually building it. In the novel I’m working on right now, there is a character who gets kicked out of high school because of a story she writes in which Donald Trump dies while Truthing on the toilet (his final post is Zelensky uses Just For Men on his beard, aging badly, SAD!) and a woman-led revolution known as the Vagina Uprising results in an assortment of bad actors (Elon Musk, JD Vance, Kristi Noem and so on) being loaded onto a Mars-bound rocket that accidentally explodes over the Gulf of Mexico. RFK is sent to a live in a lighthouse off the coast of Maine, with only the seabirds for company. Men are banished from government for ten years.

Is that the future we’re headed for? Well, certainly not if we don’t at least try to imagine it. Trump and his billionaire friends and authoritarian besties are imagining all the time, and none of what they’re working toward is going to end well for the rest of us. The least we can do is dream up some alternatives and feed those into the universal programming.

This week, as some of the year’s most consequential astrology plays out, my invitation to you is simple: imagine the change you want to see in the world, and manifest it any way you can. Write a story or a poem, and share it with the world (or just your corner of it). Make a post on social media. Go volunteer somewhere, join an organization, attend a School Board or City Council meeting. Everybody has a role, and revolutions are built from small gestures by many people. This is the week to figure out your part and start doing it, because when other people see your strength, your courage, your activism, your creativity, they will connect with theirs, as well. As the talmud reminds us all, you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.