APRIL FORECAST

the cruelest month

When T.S. Eliot wrote “April is the cruellest month,” he meant April 2024.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot was of course a super Libra. He delivered this passage as a Libra would. Bleak and beautiful. Clear as a setting sun. I know the word “cruel,” doesn’t inspire, uh, hope. But I think this is a both/and situation. For T.S. Eliot then and for me writing to you now. Published in 1922, The Waste Land is a prophetic treatise on post WWI despair, written four years out from the start of a pandemic. (Sound familiar?) In my own Libra way, I begin with this passage to impress that April is a lot, but a lot doesn’t mean bad. “It doesn’t get better / it changes.”

Exposed and vulnerable, new life reaches the surface.  It’s so uncomfortable to be alive. And yet, what’s the alternative? The astrology of April stirs our dull roots. 

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Looking at April, I see a crisis. But not crisis as in a time of strife or difficulty, but rather crisis in relation to its root word (from Latin via the Greek) meaning: a decision. What happens now is a crisis, and what happens after is what we decide.

Poetic rage: Mercury is retrograde April 1-25

This decision begins with communication planet Mercury who stations retrograde on April 1. It was a devilish April Fool’s joke from the calendar gods to have April start on a Monday and reek of fresh start energy only to immediately say “go back instead.”