Feb 2018
Weakness into Strength
This month is awash with water lessons, specific applications of a yearlong theme (see last month’s Skywatch). There are ingresses into Pisces by Venus (Feb 10th), Mercury (Feb 17th) and the Sun (Feb 18th).
In addition, as the month winds down, the ruler of Pisces, Neptune, gets conjunctions from Mercury and Venus, as well as a square from Mars.
All of these will test our understanding of this most inscrutable of the four elements. Our first priority should be to stay afloat amidst the churning mass feeling; to stay open without going under.
Once we have that together, we can practice surrendering to the month’s lessons. They’ll penetrate us by osmosis.
Swimming in opposite directions
These transits make the holistic vision of water easier to access. Their highest potential is a profound psycho-spiritual interconnectedness, whereby we feel at-one with everybody and everything.
Alas, the unconscious potential of water is also easier to fall into. It shows up as confusion, listlessness, a lack of willpower, whereby we just stumble along wherever the hive mind leads us.
Mars, Venus and Mercury
It will probably be obvious which one of these potentials we’re experiencing, once Mars squares Neptune (peaking 2/17).
The yearning to dive into something larger than ourselves will either manifest unconsciously, as the temptation to abdicate responsibility; or it will manifest more optimally, as a desire to surrender the ego to something higher.
Either way, the transit announces itself as a sense of divine discontent. This will continue through Neptune’s conjunctions with Venus and Mercury (Feb 21-25). We may wish we could dispense with the burden of individuality… either by merging with the universal mind on a heart level, or by escaping in blind conformity – which, in these days of digital anonymity, is easier than ever to do.
Soul nostalgia
If we go deeply into them, February’s transits may inspire in us a kind of soul nostalgia: a longing for a time when (or a dimension where) there is no separation between ourselves and the rest of creation.
There is a fine line between this ecstatic vision and profound melancholy. Perhaps the source of both is a sense of loss: the loss of that unity we all once enjoyed before the Fall.
Neptune’s mid-month square with Mars is the trickiest of these transits to maneuver. Mars is the individual will, which Neptune seeks to erase.
Of the conjunctions that follow, Mercury tries to render Neptune’s extravagant impulses rational, while Venus may try to project them onto another human being, putting the person up on a pedestal.
Breaking through
These transits are notoriously misunderstood. But we break through to their core meaning when we realize that they’re not about the singular identity. Nor are they about the physical plane, nor about ordinary life at all.
There’s no use trying to confine otherworldly impulses within worldly experience. They may inspire our physical work, the way an architect’s visions can be concretized into wood and stone, but the meaning of water energy transcends the world of matter.
There’s no use trying to understand this energy through reason, either. Although the mind can create beautiful language as it translates 
water impulses into thought, it remains true that thinking can’t comprehend them.
Hardest of all to remember, perhaps, is that it’s futile to expect other people to personify the magic of water. We mortals can, at best, be touched by the divine. But by definition, we came here to embody human flaw.
Not personal
The teachings upon us this month are not personal, but transpersonal. If we judge these promptings using practical criteria, they will fail us. If we try to express them through ordinary relationship patterns, they will weaken us.
It’s only when Pisces transits are understood spiritually that their apparent weaknesses become strengths, and their strengths become wisdom.