Grilled Pork Avocado Salad With Sweet Potato Chips

Are your taste buds longing for something really different yet mysteriously pleasing and frightfully healthy? This salad draws inspiration from multiple continents and features an unprecedented ingredient list: the overall inspiration is Mexican with its fajita-like pork strips and guacamole ingredients, but the sumac and coconut amino marinade takes the pork to another level. It is crowned with house-made sweet potato chips dusted with salt and Hungarian smoked paprika.

Taurus New Moon 2024 [Astro Weather]

Are you ready for a Taurus party that has some rambunctious insistent guests?

This month, we tend to want to be left alone, so we can go about enjoying life and being quietly productive, especially around home. We long for peace, creating and surrounding ourselves with beauty. We have an ardent desire to relish spring in all its flavors, scents, and colors.

This overall vibe tends to get bothered by all manner of brusque, sudden interruptions, and that can get trying, even for Taurus, who has a long fuse. We’re trying to get on with creating, nurturing, and being productive in our own terms, but interruptions by often-insistent people can rankle. If you feel this, try to let it roll off your back, although this may require considerable effort on your part.

It is strongly indicated that many of us will feel impatient and insistent on having our own way—but many of us are not aware of it. This can be a recipe for outbursts and conflict.

Perception, thinking, and communication tend to be fast and without much forethought, so try to give your self and others extra consideration although you may not feel like it. If you muster understanding and hold your tongue, it will probably pay dividends later.

Romance and relationships reflect these trends, too. On the one hand, people are quick to judge and speak. On the other hand, the overall pace of making new relationships is slow. If you are interested in someone, make sure to include things that delight the senses, and don’t rush things: the mind and tongue may be fast, but the heart is slow.

At work, we’ll tend to see the same dichotomy, a deliberately slow and thorough pace although fast, unexpected interruptions of all kinds tend to disrupt. If you or others have new, unusual ideas for how to allocate resources and money, lean into them and explore: they could be fruitful.

Read on to delve into a curious cocktail of a month!

Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and Vacuum (Pluto Disruption)

Exceptions are little vacuums.

What is creativity, and how does it relate to artificial intelligence? This week, I attended a design meeting in Chicago in which four “creative” professionals shared their thoughts and reflections. I found the event revealing and perplexing, and there was a herd of elephants in the room that I will call out here. This gets to the heart of humans’ relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). Do you want to understand how you can compete with AI by leveraging something it can never have? Come along!

Aries New Moon Eclipse 2024 [Astro Weather]

Ready, set, GO! Get ready for a surprisingly spiritual and significant month! Aries New Moon 2024 takes place during a solar eclipse, which amps up its significance. How is this likely to play out?

Above all, we want to start things, to have our way in all things. Overall, we are driven to this and insistent, feel a sense of urgency.

At the same time, this energy is likely to be unconscious, under the surface, like magma. We probably experience it underneath, but we can’t see it. Depending on our natal charts, it may feel very calming and natural—or intolerable. Some of us may explode out of nowhere.

It is strongly indicated that we can grow tremendously by experiencing the urge to take the initiative and have our own way, to feel frustration, and to transcend it by realizing that it may not be the end of the world after all if we don’t get our way.

We can grow through acceptance. Paradoxically, when we’re not able to do what we feel we ought to do, want to do, ever so urgently, and we accept it, experience it with detachment, we grow. After acceptance, the friction often lifts, but this acceptance cannot be mental, “If I do this, I’ll get that.”

Perception and communication are likely to be fast, furious, and flawed when we take them at face value. Tech things are likely to be glitchy, so try to exercise patience if you encounter this. Issues may emerge from the past, and people can get very fixed on them.

Romance and relationships are dynamic and may be volatile, especially where money and material resources are concerned. We’re likely to encounter, within our selves and with others, a strong need for fairness. We may vacillate between the desire to be with others and to be alone. We can also find passion, but don’t expect it to last. We may encounter people who are bitter about relationships.

Business is a stage on which these energies play out. Although you may NOT feel patient with delays, interruptions, and obstacles, if you strive to see beyond your frustration, there’s a lot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Try to interact and act without expectation. This is a great month to practice being present with the present.

Read on to dive into a surprisingly deep month with many levels of possible awareness and significance.

Making Death a Part of Life

Me: “Wait! Doesn’t death mean the end of life!?”
Neptune: “It depends on how you define life.”

I have discovered that death is an amazing life partner who helps me create another level of meaning in “life.” In this brief reflection, I’ll share a few things about my daily dance with death in case it helps you reframe some of the ideas you live with.

Special Spring 2024 (Vernal Equinox)

At equinox the length of day and night is the same on planet Earth. In the northern hemisphere, in spring day starts being longer than night while night lengthens in the southern hemisphere. Astrologically, we feel this spring when Sun, Mercury, and often Venus move into Aries from Pisces. As Mercury can only be one sign away from Sun, and Venus two signs away, the three travel together. This year, Sun and Mercury have some esteemed guests in Aries while Venus tarries in Pisces.

This post will reflect on the difference the guests make in terms of the depth of our spring experience. Would you like to explore?

Transits and Intimate Relationships

This year, I have experienced intense transits, and I have noticed how my understanding of transits has enabled me to deepen intimacy in 5th house, 7th house, and 6th house relationships. Immense insight: by understanding how transits’ energies are affecting me and the people in my life, I can increase our understanding of each other’s behavior, and I can have more empathy for them. I can help them increase their understanding, too. Here are some cliff notes and reflections on how I have experienced this miracle.

Letting Go of My Library (Pluto Disruption Scenario)

I have always read voraciously, mostly nonfiction, and I have learned multiple trades and practices through self-study over the years. I have a whole wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Last week, I had this very strong urge to purge it, and I have been giving away paniers and paniers of books all week (by bike, of course). Since this is a process that continues almost every day, I have experienced it on several existential levels that I’ll share because I suspect that some of them might resonate with you. We all feel Pluto’s energy at some level.

Pisces New Moon 2024 [Astro Weather]

Be prepared for weird thoughts and communications, the twilight zone…

Fog alert. We will experience thick fog this month that tends to warp our reality in many ways. As with all things astrological, though, if we slow down, roll down the window and breathe in the mist, we may discover things wonderful and uplifting.

Pisces New Moon 2024 is a special cycle that can present rare visions for making our world better. When we’re in the fog, though, we need to take precautions because fog distorts sight and sound, which is delightful when we slow down and lean into it. The main thing is recognizing that we’re in the fog, so we can relate differently to our perceptions.

We have a weird disconnect between our perception, thinking, and communication and our will and instinct. Perceiving and judgment and communication are fast, but action is disjointed. It’s like Alice in Wonderland.

It’s strongly indicated that we’ll see challenge and even rebellion to established ways of doing things, especially those around money, budgets, and material resources. These tend to come out of left field, and things can get quite ugly when defenders of the status quo try to repel the challenges.

Our projects can be stalled because we’ll tend to experience a lack of decision making. People are nice, but good luck trying to get them to commit to anything until Moon’s first trine to Sun.

The lack of decision making likely involves consideration of others, a sudden concern for users or customers that hadn’t really been taken seriously before.

Romance and relationships are similarly foggy, but you can experience some wonderful idealistic connections. As long as you are present with what seems to be and harbor no expectations, you can co-create some rare connections. Connection in general has an ethereal quality, untouchable but deeply touching somehow, aching.

The energy this month features some deep conflicts, but these tend to be deep and under water; on the surface, interactions are pleasant and considerate as far as they go. Sudden challenges present, but opposition is subtle and passive.

The main thing to keep in mind is not having expectations of anything we might otherwise consider to be “normal” because the fog machine is on. Slow down and notice how beautiful and subtle shapeshifting can be. Read on to examine these dynamics in detail

Refugees as a Vector of Pluto (Pluto Disruption Scenario)

I hesitate to include the growing global phenomenon called “refugee crisis” in multiple locales around the world simply because it is so real—where scenarios are created through a mix of logic and imagination for learning purposes. That said, I think it can be useful and practical to understand the phenomenon in terms of Pluto because that can help us to appreciate its spiritual meaning, which can help us respond, individually and socially. If you’d like to explore this with me, come along, I’m going on a wander…