Unless you’ve been somewhere very remote this last fortnight, you’ll have caught at least the edges of the online uproar over what Macklemore said at an Ed Sheeran concert, what Pink said about what Macklemore said, what the billionaire stadium owner said about it all, and what Ed Sheeran didn’t say until after everyone else had spoken, and what the whole of the internet had to say about all of it, as people sorted themselves into the right side and the wrong side and set fire to whoever’s left over.
At a glance, this might read like just another celebrity story, but crack the surface and it's a political one, about a war and about who's allowed to say what. Look up, and it's a story about the end of an age, about love, and about how badly most of us were taught to recognise it.
If you’ve missed the story that’s set the internet ablaze this week, we'll unpack it all below, then look at the sky, because the charts of the four people at the centre of this are linked in a way that's quietly profound.
And then we'll step back, because what's happening to Ed Sheeran and Macklemore and Pink right now is a small, loud, public version of something happening to all of us, under a changing sky that's teaching us that love was always more than peace.
Sometimes, love is fire.
Never miss a word.
Taking a Stand
In the first week of September, Macklemore walked out onto the stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, opening for Ed Sheeran, and told a stadium full of people he’d joined the tour "so I can stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.
“I want those words to be loud and clear,” he said, “so that people all the way in Gaza to the occupied West Bank know that we have not forgotten about them.”
“To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters,” Macklemore said, “criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality….So I say free Palestine, I say free Lebanon, I say free Cuba, I say free Congo, free Sudan, I say free all people in America living in fear of this terrorist organization, ICE. None of us will be free until we are all free.”
His speech and the song that accompanied it was met with cheers from the crowd, while others reportedly walked out during his performance. That weekend, Pink re-shared a post by the StopAntisemitism account, accusing Macklemore of ambushing fans at Sheeran’s concert with “anti-Israel propaganda” and saying he had “accused Israel of a false ‘genocide.'” The post called for Macklemore to issue an apology and for ticket-holders to be refunded.
Pink’s reshare drew fire on the internet, so she made her own post, saying “A repost isn’t a statement, and a meme isn’t a spine. Social media makes all of us cheap and fast, and we all know it.”
“I was born a Jew,” she explained, clarifying that she has never spoken for “Israel, or for any government” and that she still believes “Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations. Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child. Anybody’s child.”
She made mention of an incident in 2014 when Macklemore turned up to a surprise show in Seattle in a black wig, fake beard and a big prosthetic nose, and was accused of dressing as a Jewish caricature. Macklemore said at the time that a Jewish stereotype never crossed his mind and apologised. The Anti-Defamation League accepted his apology, but many still saw the costume as antisemitic.
“I let it go, because that’s what we do. We let it go,” Pink wrote. “Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us.”
“That’s what prompted my repost,” Pink explained. “Not ‘Free Palestine,’ and not anyone’s right to say it. I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I’m not asking now. I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund. What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘that scared me, and it scared people I love,’ without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?”
This week, Macklemore posted that he’d been dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour. According to his post, “Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”
"He told me that the words ‘Free Palestine’ and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with," Macklemore continued. "I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn’t get past his public facing, ‘I don’t take sides.’"
Macklemore called Sheeran a brother of 13 years who’d been put in an impossible position. “Taking a side can cost you,” he wrote, “….but there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn’t leave you in the middle.”
Robert Kraft, in his own statement, confirmed he made the decision to bar Macklemore from performing at Gillette, saying it was based on his “recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.”
Controversy around Macklemore’s ousting swirled online for a full day before Sheeran released a post of his own, explaining that he is “appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and that “the suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy.” He explained that it was the promoter’s decision to axe Macklemore, not his, and that he’d spent the week talking to the venues, to Kraft, to the promoter, to activists on both sides, trying to build a bridge, but was unable to. He wouldn’t let down fans who’d made plans, he wrote, and he wouldn’t abandon the crew and the support acts and the musicians who rely on him to make a living.
“I have always used my platform and music to bring people from all backgrounds and cultures together,” Sheeran wrote. “Those who have been to one of my shows will know that they are about unity, joy, escapism, love, and a place for everyone to feel welcome.”
“There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics,” Sheeran explained. “My audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds. Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum….I choose to use my fame and platform to be a place of safety and sanctuary, to maintain diplomacy and keep conversations open, not closed. If we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change.”
“I am not complicit,” he wrote. “Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions.”
Within hours, four of the acts that Sheeran said in his post he would not abandon had abandoned him - Aaron Rowe and Lukas Graham, who’d been slotted in to replace Macklemore, Finneas, who was booked for the South American leg, and Beoga, the Irish trad band who play the Galway Girl stretch of the show, all withdrew citing concerns over silencing political speech and expressing support for Palestinians.
That’s the story as it stands right now, though it still seems to be evolving, and the sky suggest there’s definitely more to come.
The Story in the Sky
While all of this has been playing out in stadiums and across the internet this month, the sky above has been mirroring the firestorm, but also giving it some context - speaking to the deeper layer running underneath it all.
Ed Sheeran was born with his Venus in Pisces - the planet of love in the sign of compassion and harmony, so no wonder he’s the man who writes the wedding songs, who says his job is unity, joy, escapism, and love. But sitting at a hard angle to that Venus is a point called Lilith, which in a chart marks the part of us we’ve exiled, the voice we learned to banish so we’d be allowed to stay. Ed’s Lilith is in Sagittarius - the sign of conviction - so he’s a man whose enormous capacity for harmony is built directly on top of a buried, outspoken conviction that he keeps mostly hidden.
Macklemore was born with his Mars - his drive and his fight, his way of acting in the world - parked precisely on that fault line in Ed’s chart. He’s the exiled voice, walked back in through the stage door. Their Suns sit in a lovely easy angle to each other, which is the brotherhood, and the 13 years - making him not so much Ed’s enemy, as Ed’s missing piece.
Robert Kraft’s Neptune - the planet of fog and dissolving - sits on the same fault line from the other side, directly opposite Ed’s Venus. And Kraft’s Lilith is in Taurus - the sign of property and ownership - at a hard angle to Macklemore’s Lilith in Aquarius - the sign of the collective and the cause. These two were always going to collide over exactly this.
Pink turns out to be standing on the same spot as everyone else. Her Mars - her fight - sits in Cancer, the sign of the tribe, right beside Ed's wound, Kraft's wound and Macklemore's rising sign. All four have something planted in the same few degrees of the sky.
This week, as Macklemore posted, Lilith herself crossed into Capricorn - the sign of the stadium owners and the promoters and the institutions - while Mars sat on Ed’s Chiron, his oldest wound, in Cancer, the sign of the tribe, the crew, the family he’d never abandon. And then he watched that tribe walk out the door.
That’s the story playing out in the charts of the main players this month, but there’s an even deeper story that involves all of us, and it’s a story about love, written in fire.
Love Under Fire
For the last fourteen years, Neptune - the planet of the collective dream - has been moving through Pisces, the sign of the ocean. Neptune in Pisces was the era when love meant compassion, oneness, everyone welcome, no sides, and that was the era that made Ed Sheeran; he released his first single the very year Neptune entered Pisces, and his whole career has been the soundtrack to it. Unity, joy, escapism, love, a place for everyone to feel welcome - that was the collective dream of love for the last fourteen years, and a lot of good came from it…
But now the sky has changed.
Last year Neptune moved into Aries, where it met Saturn in February for the Genesis Reset, which planted the seed of a new age right on top of the old one, and where Neptune will stay until the late 2030s. Aries is fire - the place where things begin by being said out loud, and what Neptune in Aries is doing, slowly and then all at once, is changing the collective dream of what love is.
Most of us grew up understanding love to mean peace, kindness, serenity, harmony, and everybody getting along - the kind of things Ed Sheeran mentioned in his post this week, that he strives for in all his concerts. Love can absolutely be all those things, but at its core, love is truth, and truth isn’t always peaceful, or serene, or harmonious, or even particularly kind. Truth is like fire - sometimes it’s a small fire we can warm our hands by, but sometimes it’s a wildfire that burns the forest down, and the house, and everything in its path. If love is truth, and truth is fire, then sometimes love burns.
That kind of burning truth is the kind most of us like to suppress, and it’s understandable, because most of us would prefer to live in a house where the curtains aren’t on fire. We suppress it for the sake of harmony, and we call the harmony love, and then we bend over backwards trying to maintain that harmony by suppressing the fiery truth, which is actually just suppressing love.
If truth is love, then truth suppressed can never be love, no matter how peaceful, or kind, or serene it is. It’s not actually loving to maintain peacefulness at the expense of the truth - it’s holding back love to maintain the illusion of it. Neptune in Aries will be having none of that.
Truth is like a fire that can’t be put out, and no matter how much we suppress it, it just burns down below, and when we suppress it in our bodies, we feel it as a bubbling anger, deep in our belly where we hid it. That fire never goes out, it just burns wherever we shoved it, and we carry it around as unexpressed anger that most of us believe we can’t express because to do so would be wrong. Anger isn’t very loving, or so we’re told.
But truth long suppressed is a fire that burns as anger.
Anger, very often, is love that’s been told to sit down.
What’s playing out now, in stadiums and in celebrity posts and in the comments underneath them, is truth long suppressed finding its way up and out, burning through everything, even the things we love. While Neptune was in Pisces we could maintain harmony by not saying the thing, but with Neptune now in Aries, the thing is demanding to be said, everywhere, by everyone, all at once. And that’s what this story is, and this month is, and this year and the coming decade is - it’s the ocean catching fire.
The Fate of the Fire
Fire has three fates. We can throw it, and something burns, or we can bury it, and it smoulders underground for years and we feel it as anger we can’t explain. Or we can hold it, and feel the heat of it in our chest or our throat or our belly, and let it be there, burning, and neither fling it at the nearest villain nor shove it back down into the dark. Held fire is the one that warms, like the campfire, but it’s also the hardest of the three, because the mind, pressed up against the wall of its limits, only knows how to throw or bury.
Holding fire is something that only the heart does.
Most of us are no good at holding fire yet, and that’s the point. The age we’ve just entered is the one where we learn, and the sky is going to keep handing us fire until we do. Not to punish us, or to make our life an utter misery, but to teach us that we can hold it, and show us what we’re capable of once we do.
Right now a lot of us are feeling the fire and flinging it at the nearest perceived enemy - the internet is ablaze with people hurling the fire they’ve been holding back in every direction this week. We’ll see a lot more of that before we learn how to hold what’s rising, as the fire of love and truth long suppressed finally comes up and out.
Rather than set the whole world on fire, when we feel that fire rising within us, we can pause a moment to just feel where it lives within us, and ask what it’s there for. Because not all anger is love. Some of it’s fear that’s found a louder voice. Some of it’s the ego, bruised and looking for someone to blame. Some of it’s just the pleasure of the burning, and if we’re honest we’ve all felt that one too. Fear wears the face of fury, and fury feels righteous from the inside no matter what’s underneath it, which is exactly why the internet is what it is at the moment - everyone on it is certain their fire is the good kind.
The heat of the fire tells us nothing, because fire’s always hot. The question is what it's protecting. If we sit with it a moment and find, underneath the heat, something or someone we love - a child, a people, a truth we can’t unsee - then that’s love we’re feeling, and it’s allowed to be hot, and it’s allowed to be said. If we sit with it and find only that we want someone to hurt, or to be wrong, or to go away, then we’ve found fear wearing love’s clothes, and the kindest thing we can do is pause a little longer and let it show us what it’s actually afraid of.
Neither answer is a failure, but taking time to hold the fire and listen before we decide what to do with it takes practice. The fire that is love gets to be spoken, carefully, in the open. The fire that’s fury masking fear gets to be held until it cools enough to tell us the truth. And the whole purpose of this age we’re walking into will be us learning the difference by feel.
Love is what the fire is for.
And so dawns the Age of the Heart.
If this writing resonated with you, please share it with your friends.
If you’re interested in exploring your own natal chart, I was part of the team that built Ask Arion - an app that helps you read what the sky has to say for you personally.
It’s free to sign up, and a great way to start your journey with the stars.
You are talking about the world. You are talking about my 34-year-old marriage. It's astonishing. And it all hits.
Who even ARE you???
🙂
I love this piece SO much. “If love is truth, and truth is fire, then sometimes love burns.” Your ability to see the truth behind all the noise is extraordinary. You’re my absolute favorite writer on Substack, and I follow a LOT of people! Bless you for making our world a better place and thank you for all you do! 💕