Just a short update for the month ahead. The New Moon falls late in the evening of October 27 — 11:38 ET.

Watch your secrets this month. They may be exposed, or you may discover that keeping the secret led to unintended consequences. Or you may blurt out a secret and regret it, or discover someone else’s secret.

All this drama around secrets will be accompanied by sudden, surprising events and/or changes of course, probably from the people you least expected would do that. Whether or not events and changes of course are motivated by self-interested strategy or by a genuine change of heart is yours to discover.

This month also gives us an opportunity to explore what we are keeping secret, and why. Keeping a secret is not always the same as being dishonest — but it can be. Healthy, spiritually-progressive relationships require honesty. This does not preclude keeping some secrets, but it’s worth reviewing which secrets you’re keeping and why.

Keeping other people’s secrets is usually a given. Unless they involve self-harm or harm to others, they aren’t yours to tell.

Then there are the secrets that are protecting you from the reactions of others. For instance, you may be developing your latent artistic talents in secret, because you are afraid negative reactions would crush you emotionally. Or perhaps you and your partner want to keep the fact of a pregnancy between the two of you for a while.

You’re not being dishonest keeping these secrets, you’re just setting appropriate boundaries, which will change over time. An artist eventually wants an audience. A pregnancy becomes obvious. Life brings change, which means we need to change too. This is why secrets need to be regularly reviewed.

There may be some secrets you are keeping that are more problematic — from simple power plays like hiding useful information from someone else, to complex psychological or physical issues you need help with, but aren’t getting, for one reason or another, perhaps because you’re afraid of being judged if you ask. There are ethical issues involved here that need to be faced, or they’ll come back and bite you in the ass. This month, that’s likely to happen sooner rather than later.

Then there are secrets we keep from ourselves, by repressing certain thoughts and feelings. These secrets are usually damaging, though there are things we hide from ourselves because we are not yet ready to deal with them (childhood abuse, for example), and it might be more damaging to face them head on in our current state. Fortunately, this month is also a good time to work with a therapist or counselor on releasing childhood and parental issues, and digging out ancestral patterns that are holding you back.

Pay close attention to how you really feel this month — physically and emotionally. Feel into the depths of your emotions and feel your body and its connection to the Earth. There are some deep shifts of energy going on this month. Let your body help you understand and change old patterns of thought and emotion by sensing and working with these shifts.

Working with our ancestors is an important and too-often neglected aspect of healing our world.  If you are part of a cultural or spiritual tradition that incorporates ancestor-honoring, I suggest looking into your options there. If you don’t have a clue how to do this, I have an article that will get you started here.

You’re also likely to find opportunities coming your way that appear unexpectedly and move quickly towards a resolution. Some of those opportunities will be worth taking, some of them won’t, and doing sufficient due diligence may take more time than you are offered. So that’s your challenge — finding the balance between thinking carefully before acting, and grabbing the brass ring when it comes around.

As always, keep in mind that how you are affected by these shifts in planetary weather depends on your natal chart. If you need some insight into what’s going on in your life, contact me and we’ll set up a consultation..

As I said, this is a short update, but I feel I must say something about what’s going on in the USA right now. Astrologically, our country is undergoing considerable stress (here’s an article I wrote about that back in January), and we are, quite frankly, in danger of losing the Constitutional rights and responsibilities that have been ours for almost 250 years.

Yes, I’m getting political. Please don’t look away. Don’t say that you “don’t do politics”, because, believe me, politics does you every day in every way. If we don’t act when we can, if we let our democracy crumble for our lack of interest and action, then we are complicit in the very political results that follow, that will affect every area of our lives.

Democracy demands an active and informed citizenry, and if you aren’t part of a democratic solution (note the lowercase d), then you are responsible for the oligarchs and dictators that arise from the ashes of a democracy destroyed by apathy.

Don’t look away. Don’t sit it out. Do whatever you do, whatever you can do to ensure our country comes through this transformative time strengthened instead of destroyed. At the least, stay informed, inform others, vote, do magic. This is a critical time, and the future is in our hands.