Mid-year vertigo check

It’s July, mid-year, I noted to myself as I was scribbling schedules and ‘to-do’s in my planner. It’s been a wild ride since the year started. Have we not had non-stop exclamations as we collectively watch our world go by? Wait, let me correct this last phrase. It’s all been about experiencing an old civilization slowly break apart, first slow but sure… and now, fast and furious.

The result: Collective vertigo, but with a strange nuance… it is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from living in a threshold. Not the vertigo of falling — that, at least, has direction! This is the vertigo of standing still while everything moves.

The old world does not depart gracefully. It dies the way most things die — slowly, then all at once, dragging its feet through denial, collapse and the long, undignified process of decomposition. Meanwhile, somewhere just past our sight line, a future is already forming. We can feel its outline. We may even be able to describe it, in the way one describes a dream upon waking — vivid, certain and somehow already dissolving at the edges the moment we try to hold it.

This is the space so many of us are living in right now, and by the shape of things, we will be living in it for another year or two yet. Not a season. An era of in-between. In our heads, over our chats, discussions, papers written, strategies we work on – we ask questions like where is the country headed, the world going? What will AI (artificial intelligence) do to humanity and our workforce? What will we do when the ETs (extra terrestrials) make real contact? Can our world even survive the climate crisis? The questions come from an unknown world coming. These numerous questions are asked with the hope of getting an answer to the mother question — how do we actually move toward it?

Personally, I sit with those questions by reading the cosmic energies of the planets and unlocking their storylines. These astrological transits offer a vocabulary for the texture of the evolutionary moment we are in. The planets and astrology do not define our lives; rather, they illuminate the choices available to us.

The second half of 2026 does not arrive quietly. It arrives as a threshold — a season we can call “threshold dwelling.” It’s a period where the cosmos asks us to release what was, and dares us to become what could be.

This second half of the year, we have planets in retrograde motion, meaning, the planets are moving inward that forces deeper reflection. So the old structures (Saturn), the old dreams (Neptune), the old wounds (Mars) — they’re not gone yet. We’re standing in the wreckage and the blueprint at the same time. It is a terrain to be walked, slowly, for as long as it takes the old world to finish its dying and the new one to finish being born.

So in the destruction of this old world around, we must capture ourselves as conscious participants at our own becoming. Not passive witness. Not as someone giving their consciousness away to AI. Rather, as deeply spiritual beings pushing their creative DNA to the forefront.

Our creative fire will be brought in as Jupiter (planet of expansion) has entered Leo, the fire lion sign of creativity, courage, authentic self-expression, and like Leo’s ruler, the Sun, asks us to shine authentically and matter in this world.

Come late July, the nodes of the moon shift axis (to Leo and Aquarius). It’s like a recalibration where our compass points will shift and we will be asked to rewrite the whole map of our personal as well as collective destiny… The terrain is unmarked and unfamiliar, which is why it’s so important for us to be doing self-reflections and inner visioning work even more today. Plus, not to fall back on the familiar comfortable ways of an old identity, lifestyle, mindset, but to recalibrate into where inner expansion and intuition is telling us to move towards.

There is also a unique paradoxical pairing of planets now: Saturn, the planet that demands structure, is the architect that builds with discipline; and Neptune, the planet that demands dissolution, represents the dream world and shows us what is beyond the veils.

Together, they hold a tension that asks: can we each build a life sturdy enough to hold our dreams that have not yet fully arrived? That we build our new structured lives on the faith of the dream and not as a response to it. This is our greatest challenge because it is about Faith. And trusting ourselves in the unknown.

So at mid-year, let us manage our collective vertigo with the conscious discipline of recalibrating our life/ourselves -- clearing all that is of the past and unfinished in our lives, moving with faith even when things seem unfamiliar. To live deliberately in both here now, and the future building…As Jupiter in Leo says, dream big, build with creative authority and dare to imagine your next world into being in full vibrant color!