on the Bedrock

adjusting to pluto in aquarius

Pluto went into Aquarius a couple of weeks ago - for a while, it was fodder for small talk. Pluto moves slowly through the sky, and lives in a sign for about eighteen years. So for those of us with a woo inclination, a Pluto ingress¹ is a big deal.

Pluto is the energy underneath the ground underneath our feet. It is the bedrock of the collective unconscious. It is the boundary of our solar system. Pluto is the planet that rules deep, transformational change. The “generations” as we understand them in the West line up with Pluto placements almost perfectly - go figure. Pluto is responsible for a foundational aspect of how the world feels - everything else is built up on top of it.

Aquarius is a Fixed Air Sign, meaning it is the apex of a season. In the northern hemisphere, that season is winter. Aquarius’s season in the sun just ended. The Air Signs are the element of ideas; they’re all about the life of the mind. The story begins with curious Gemini, who goes from person to person at the party asking people for their life stories. Libra is the initiator - they learn how to bring ideas into relationships. It’s a natural progression. But the distance between Libra and Aquarius is vast.

Aquarius is a full send. She is an astral projection. She launches her mind out to the furthest reaches of the universe, hundreds of millions of years into the future, and brings ideas back with her into the present. The biggest hurdle for an Aquarius is that she is destined to be misunderstood - when you travel that far into the future and come back to the masses with what you found, a lot of people will look back at you with a blank stare.

Before Pluto was in Aquarius, it was in Capricorn - a sign who relishes appearing put together. A sign that has everything ironed out just so, neatly in order, and could not understand how anyone else could live any other way. Capricorn is the sign of tradition, the sign of the patriarch. That was the bedrock for eighteen years. The distance between this energy, and the voyaging energy of Aquarius, is enormous. Aquarius is all about distance.

Today in my dance class, my teacher could not remember the steps she’d choreographed. I saw her do everything that she usually does to remember her steps - she moved through things in her mind, and then when she couldn’t find it there she went through small motions, trying to prompt herself with her hands. When she didn’t find anything there, she did the full embodied phrase, looking for where she had left her idea. Even after embodying a sequence of movement, she turned to us all and smiled. “Let’s go with that!” she laughed, still not totally remembering. That, I thought, is Pluto in Aquarius.

We are used to things being in a certain place. We are used to putting things down somewhere in our mind, and going back to the place where we left them. But now, things have changed: Pluto is in Aquarius, and there is all this new distance between everything. We have to learn how to journey through these new distances.

Pluto in Aquarius is a big change, and a deep one. It’s not on the surface of our lives - nothing has changed that we can quite see, or smell, or name. It is too deep for us to engage with it directly. It’s like the pressure of the ground beneath our feet has changed. I’m finding that I’m bumping up against Pluto in Aquarius all the time - or maybe, that I am used to bumping up against a wall, and now that boundary isn’t there. A lot of the people in my life are having bad sleep; the battery in my laptop died, and so did the battery in my car. All of this to me means Pluto has just moved into Aquarius. It’s taking some getting used to.

This is Pluto’s second flirtation in this sign in our lifetime. It went into Aquarius briefly, from March 23 through June 11 of 2023. And this current stay in Aquarius isn’t final either - Pluto will retrograde in the fall, moving back into Capricorn for one final goodbye, before we plunge into the future for good. This chunk of time is meaningful. It’s more than a curious introduction, but it doesn’t have the permanence of the ingress that will happen at the end of the calendar year. We have yet to complete the story of the Air Signs, when Pluto makes the most Aquarian move and launches a full send. But what we will get from this time is a bit of preparedness - our bodies will learn how to move through this distance, on earth of this density, and with ideas of this ilk. We just have to open ourselves up to the adjustment.

1. Ingress = when a planet moves into a new sign.