The Fire Horse and the Rising Age of Aquarius
The World the Hippies Saw Was Sixty Years Early, But Now It's Right On Time
As lunar new year dawned on February 17, 2026, we welcomed the blazing hooves of the Fire Horse, one of the most volatile and catalytic archetypes in the entire Chinese cycle - a system that has tracked time through elemental rhythm and natural law for over two thousand years.
The Fire Horse doesn’t knock. It arrives at a gallop, breaks the stalemate, scatters the ash of whatever was already dying, and dares you to see what’s still burning underneath.
The last Year of the Fire Horse was 1966, and it lit the world on fire - the Cultural Revolution, the civil rights surge, the youth revolt that swept through the West like a fever. By January 1967, at the very end of that Fire Horse year, 30,000 people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, flowers in their hair, certainty flooding their nervous systems that a new world was being born. Months later came the Summer of Love and a song called “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” which became the anthem of a generation who believed they were about to incarnate the vision of a heart-led world.
But it was not to be. The communes collapsed and the new world they sang about never arrived. The Fire Horse brought the ignition but the seed planted in the 60’s wasn’t ready to germinate. Humanity still had some evolving to do.
The seed was paved over by industry in the sixty years since - the heart-led dream smothered by the rule of the mind. But the seed didn’t die, it just lay in the ground, dormant and waiting for a cue from the sky that it was time to sprout. And now, the Fire Horse returns, along with a historic conjunction in the heavens, calling forth the seed; after all these years, as the old world is collapsing, at last it is time for the vision to rise.
What was seeded sixty years ago is now ready to bloom.
And so dawns, at last, the time of Aquarius - the rising Age of the Heart.
This writing leans on the wisdom of planetary pattern recognition. If you’d like to know more - and why I don’t believe in astrology - read all about it HERE
Portions of this piece appeared in February 15 2026 Weekly Wrap-Up
Humanity’s Long Education
By the end of the last Fire Horse year in 1967, at the time of the Human Be-In, and the Summer of Love, the commune generation had conjured an ecosystem built around genuine heart coherence. They felt it, they lived it, they knew, in the marrow of their bones, that the world didn’t have to be organised around competition and extraction and the quiet violence of isolation. They built communities where people shared land and food and childcare and grief, and tried to prove the heart could lead.
They were ready for change, but the sky wasn’t there yet, and neither was the rest of the world.
Saturn, the planet of structure, was in Aries, the sign of ignition, ready to build, pioneer, and move, but Neptune, the planet of collective consciousness, was in Scorpio, the sign of death, shadow, and transformation. The structure wanted to move forward but the consciousness was still processing through death. The Fire Horse brought the ignition, Saturn in Aries brought the will to build, but Neptune was still doing the death work. The two planets that could have green-lit change were misaligned and working at cross-purposes. They couldn’t integrate. The form was there, but the world couldn’t hold it. It could feel the new frequency, but it was still burning through what it needed to burn through to get where it needed to go.
The vision for a better world was real, but the timing wasn’t.
What followed was not a detour or a failure, but the lesson humanity had to live all the way through before it could trust the heart to lead. Because you cannot just tell a mind-dominated civilisation that the heart matters. It has to feel, in its body, in its children, in its institutions, what happens when it doesn’t.
So we built everything the mind could build. We built it bigger and faster and more efficiently than any civilisation in history. We built economies that turned human beings into units of productivity and called it freedom. We built technology that connected every person on earth and left us lonelier than we’d ever been. We built governments so large that no one could be held accountable for anything, and called it democracy. We built systems of medicine that could extend life indefinitely but forgot to ask whether the life being extended was worth living. We built schools designed to produce more minds for the machine, and graduated generations of people who were brilliant at thinking and had no idea how to feel.
We built a world that worked by every metric the mind could measure, even though it was killing us.
The loneliness epidemic.
The mental health crisis.
The addiction epidemic.
The climate.
The rage that floods every public space.
The children who are medicated for the crime of being too alive for the rooms we put them in.
None of this is malfunction. It is the mind’s world completing itself, revealing its own limit, showing us with perfect clarity what a structure without a heart produces at scale.
A mind without a heart is a brilliant, broken thing. It can solve any problem it can define, but it can’t feel which problems matter. It can optimise any system with no concern for who it harms. It can build a world of breathtaking complexity and efficiency and stand in the middle of it and still feel completely alone. That’s the world we built, and we had to build it - all the way to its conclusion - before we could choose differently.
The structure was always ready. Humanity needed sixty years to learn what it was choosing between.
The Fire Horse Returns
Now, this year, a lifetime later, another Fire Horse year has arrived, but this time, the sky is completing what began in the 1960s. As the lunar new year dawned this year during a solar eclipse in Aquarius - the same Aquarius the elders sang about - the fire horse galloped in to greet Saturn and Neptune, no longer misaligned but in conjunction in Aries at the first degree. Together, at last, both in the sign of action.
These two planets have never met at the very first degree of the very first sign of the zodiac since we started writing things down. To find the last time these two planets met at this degree, you have to go all the way back to March 4361 BCE - approximately 6,381 years ago - and even then the conjunction wasn’t quite as exact as the one we just lived through. 4361 BCE predates written language by nearly a thousand years, meaning no civilization existed with the astronomical sophistication to witness and record it. We are the first people in recorded history to live through such an unprecedented astrological event.
Saturn is the planet of structure. Neptune is the planet of collective consciousness. Zero degrees Aries is the beginning of beginnings.
When these two planets meet, structure meets collective consciousness in the sign of ignition, and the old structures - the ones built on the mind’s frequency, the ones we’re currently watching collapse - meet a new frequency of awareness. This isn’t a renovation or reform - it’s a genesis, a reset, a new start for humanity. A new operating system, seeded into the ground of human consciousness for the first time.
The death work is complete.
The vision is ready to move.
The structure and the dream are finally aligned.
If the Fire Horse year in 1966 was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, then the Fire Horse this year in 2026 is the dawn actually breaking. Saturn and Neptune are ready to run together to birth a new reality.
The generation that lived the preview in the 1960s didn’t imagine it. They just caught the vision early before we walked through the necessary death so the resurrection could happen. They held the memory and buried the seed deep enough to survive the winter.
During that long winter, we watched the communes collapse. We watched the dream get co-opted and commodified and sold back to itself as an aesthetic. We watched Reagan. We watched surveillance capitalism swallow the internet whole, and the mental health crisis and the climate crisis and the loneliness crisis arrive together like a reckoning.
Now, humanity knows in its bones what a mind without a heart produces because it has lived inside it. It has been shaped and damaged and woken by it. Now humanity is fit to ride on the back of the Fire Horse into a Saturn/Neptune conjunction in the sign of ignition.
The hippies of the 60s built the bridge to the new world that we must now walk across. The Aquarian Age they sang about wasn’t metaphor.
It was prophecy.
The Dawning of a New Age
As the seed Saturn and Neptune in Aries germinated starts to bloom beneath the ground, what emerges slowly over the next century will not be a utopia or a fantasy, but something rougher and realer - a world designed at the scale of the human soul, where the systems we live inside are small enough to feel, close enough to touch, and honest enough to hold us without crushing us.
The planetary map from here to the end of the century reads like a building plan for the dismantling of everything the mind built too big, and the reconstruction of something the heart can actually sustain.
From 2026 to 2032, the old mental architecture gets overwhelmed as Uranus moves through Gemini - the sign of the mind, of language, of information - while Pluto continues its long march through Aquarius, the sign of collective systems and networks, tearing centralised power apart and redistributing it across networks. People start solving problems locally because the centre can no longer hold.
From 2032 to 2038, local food systems take root and local governance emerges as Uranus moves into Cancer - the sign of home, roots, family, care, and emotional life. Childcare becomes communal again. Elders are kept close, not warehoused. The pod structure begins - small, self-sustaining clusters of people who chose each other, anchored to the land they live on, contributing to a wider network but never swallowed by it.
From 2038 into the 2040s, the communities that formed out of necessity during the collapse begin to develop their own cultures, their own economies, their own art as Neptune enters Taurus - grounding spirituality into the earth and body - while Uranus moves into Leo, the sign of creative expression and bold, visible leadership. Governance emerges not through elections or inheritance but through trust - people are chosen to lead because they can hold a room with their heart open, not because they clawed their way to the top with it closed.
By 2043, the very concept of the nation-state begin to feel like a relic as Pluto enters Pisces, dissolving boundaries. Borders stop making sense when people are living in interconnected communities that share resources, skills, and care across what used to be called countries.
By the 2060s, everything we currently take for granted will have transformed, not because someone imposed a new system from the top, but because millions of small communities, rooted in the heart, quietly replaced the one that was failing.
The Way of the New World
The world we are now stepping into is not the communes of the 1960s reassembled. It is its completion - the same heart frequency, but forged now rather than innocent, and equipped with every tool the intervening sixty years produced. The heart that leads this world is not soft. It has earned its authority the hard way, by living through what the alternative produces. It builds with a different kind of rigour - not the rigour of efficiency, but the rigour of care.
Centralized government gives way to governance that is local, consensual, and rotational. The idea of one person leading millions of strangers becomes as strange as the idea of one person cooking dinner for a city. Decisions are made by people who eat the food they’re voting on, drink the water they’re protecting, and send their children to the schools they’re shaping.
Living itself transforms. The suburban model - isolated units connected by cars, screens, and the vague hope that proximity to a shopping centre constitutes community - gives way to intentional closeness. Shared land. Shared resources. Shared kitchens, shared childcare, shared grief, shared celebration. Organic clusters of people who chose each other and build something together.
That in itself transforms health, where loneliness - currently one of the leading causes of illness, depression, and early death - becomes structurally impossible. The health system moves from intervention to integration as medicine comes to include the body’s intelligence, not just the doctor’s. Somatic, emotional, and energetic modalities are no longer alternatives - they’re woven into a single approach that treats the whole person, not just the part that’s malfunctioning.
In a heart-led world, justice is no longer a system designed to assign guilt and administer punishment. In a heart-led world, justice becomes restorative. When harm is done, the question isn’t what punishment does this person deserve but what happened here, what was broken, and how do we repair it? In communities small enough that accountability is personal, you can’t hide behind a legal team or a corporate structure. Justice becomes something that happens between human beings who have to keep living alongside each other - which means it has to actually heal, not just penalise. This doesn’t mean no consequences. It means consequences that include the question: what broke in you, and how do we make sure it doesn’t break someone else?
Work in the New World
The transformation of work as we know it is perhaps the single greatest gift of the Age of the Heart. For centuries, we have tied our worth to productivity. The rise of advanced technologies is dismantling that arrangement - disruptively at first, but as we learn to manage the change in a way that benefits the collective, the shift offers the potential to set us free from the bureaucratic grind that has consumed billions of human lifetimes. When labour is lifted, what remains is everything the machine cannot touch: care, craft, presence, creativity. The hand on someone’s shoulder. The meal cooked slowly. The garden tended. The child held. The song written not for an algorithm but for the sheer ache of being alive.
I explained this more fully in the piece below:
Work doesn’t disappear in the Age of the Heart - it transforms and stops being something we do to earn the right to exist and becomes something we do because it’s ours to give. The healer heals. The builder builds. The teacher teaches. The artist makes. Not because a market demands it, but because the soul does. This is not a world without effort, but a world without exploitation, where the question isn’t how do I make a living but how do I make a life, and where the answer is no longer dictated by a system that was only ever designed to extract.
Money follows naturally from there, because once work is no longer the price of survival, the entire economic model has to be reimagined from the ground up. The tools the mind hoarded - artificial intelligence, energy, technology, the infrastructure of daily life - become engines for the collective, not owned by the few but inherited by the many. Like the Alaska Permanent Fund - where every citizen receives a dividend from the state’s oil revenue - the productivity these tools generate flows back to the people, not as welfare, but as a birthright.
The need for money shrinks to something more human-sized that the heart can hold without being crushed by it. The stock market becomes an irrelevant relic of a world that believed the worth of a civilisation could be measured by a number.
And children inherit a whole new system of education where they are taught to feel as skilfully as they are taught to think, as emotional intelligence, somatic awareness, conflict resolution, land skills, and creative expression become the core, not the elective. How a person feels - not how they think - becomes the mark of an educated person.
And the role of teacher transforms entirely. When our technology can answer any question the mind can ask, a teacher in this new age becomes one who no longer imparts knowledge to the mind but wisdom to the heart. They teach not by lecture but by presence. Not by authority but by example. The most qualified teacher is no longer the one with the most degrees, but the one with the most depth - the one who can hold a room not because they know more than everyone in it, but because they’ve felt more, and didn’t close.
In the Age of the Heart, systems shrink until they’re human-sized again. Small enough to feel. Small enough to be honest. Small enough that the heart can actually operate, because you can’t love a system, but you can love a community. You can't feel empathy for a spreadsheet, but you can feel it for the person sitting across from you.
The mind built a world so large that nobody could be held accountable for anything. The heart builds one so close that everyone is.
It may not feel like it right now, here in the midst of collapse, but this is the world that’s coming. It’s written clearly in the stars.
The Long Walk from Here to There
That new world with the village councils and the restorative justice circles and the children learning to feel doesn’t arrive tomorrow. It arrives after a passage that will be, at times, the hardest thing any of us have ever walked through.
Because the old world doesn’t step aside quietly. It thrashes and it clings. It weaponises its own collapse against the people trying to survive it. And we - the ones alive right now, the ones reading this - we are the generation that walks the bridge between the two worlds. We don’t get the old one back, and we won’t see the new one fully formed. We get the in-between. The rubble and the seedlings. The falling beams and the first green shoots.
That is not a punishment. It’s a calling.
But it comes with a cost, and the cost is grief.
Over the next two decades, we will watch systems we grew up trusting hollow out and fail. Governments will lose the ability to function at the scale they promised. Courts will buckle under the weight of their own contradictions. Healthcare systems already stretched to breaking will snap. Economic models built on infinite growth will meet a planet that is very, very finite. The institutions we were told would always be there - the ones we paid into, planned around, built our lives against - will, one by one, stop holding.
And for a time, it will feel like freefall.
There will be periods in the years ahead where nothing seems to work. Where the old way has crumbled but the new way hasn’t arrived yet. Where we are caught between a world that no longer functions and one that hasn’t fully formed, and the temptation to panic will be overwhelming. The mind will scream that we need to fix it, control it, force it back into a shape we recognise, but you cannot reassemble a caterpillar once it has begun its metamorphosis into a butterfly.
This is the part no one wants to talk about. The vision is beautiful, but the passage is brutal, and we owe it to ourselves - and to each other - to name that honestly. Not to scare or to paralyse, but because grief that isn’t honoured becomes bitterness, and bitterness is the mind’s way of slamming the heart shut when it can’t bear what it feels.
We will grieve careers that no longer exist in systems that no longer function. We will grieve financial security that was always more fragile than we were told. We will grieve the story we were sold - that if we worked hard enough, followed the rules, paid our taxes, trusted the process, the system would take care of us. That story is over, not because we failed it, but because it failed us. Because it was never designed by the heart, and so it was never designed to hold us.
We will grieve relationships that cannot survive the frequency shift - friendships, partnerships, family ties that were built on the old signal and can’t find their footing on the new one. Not every bond will make the crossing. Some people we love will cling to the dying world because it’s the only one they know how to navigate, and we will have to let them, even when it breaks us. That is perhaps the deepest grief of all - watching someone you love choose a frequency you can no longer live on.
We will grieve certainty. The mind craves it, and in the years ahead, there will be precious little of it. The ground will keep shifting. Plans will keep breaking. The future will refuse to come into focus no matter how hard we squint. And we will have to learn - slowly, imperfectly, with shaking hands - to be okay with not knowing. To trust the body when the mind has no map. To follow the heart when the path is dark.
And we will grieve for the world itself. For the species we’re losing. For the ice that’s melting. For the rivers that are drying and the forests that are burning and the children in every country who are growing up in a world that the adults around them broke. That grief is not weakness. It is the heart, wide open, doing exactly what it was designed to do - feeling the full weight of what is, without looking away.
But grief, when it’s held properly, is how the heart metabolises change. It is the soul’s way of composting what is into fuel for what’s coming. Every tear is a softening. Every ache is the old structure loosening its grip. Grief is not the opposite of hope, but the passage to hope - the narrow door the heart walks through on its way to something it can’t yet see but already knows is there.
We are the bridge generation. The ones laying foundations we won’t personally stand on. The ones steadying the beam while the next generation builds the house. We came for this - not to live in the finished world, but to make it possible. Not to see the harvest, but to break the ground.
And there is grief in that. Real grief. The kind that deserves space and tenderness and time. The kind that can’t be rushed through with affirmations or repackaged into forced optimism. But there is also something else - something underneath the grief, if we’re willing to feel all the way down.
Pride.
The kind that comes from knowing you said yes to the hardest shift in human history, and you showed up anyway. The kind that comes from planting a seed that will grow into a tree whose shade you’ll never sit in, and being at peace with that. The kind that comes from choosing the heart - again and again, in a world that punished you for it - and refusing to close.
We are not the skyline. We are the scaffolding.
Not the door, but the hinge.
Not the destination, but the turning point.
And that is no small thing to be.
For Those Who Were There
Some of you reading this were alive in the 1960s, and were at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park or went to Monterey Pop. Some of you were the ones with flowers in your hair protesting the Vietnam War, the ones who saw the vision first, who knew with absolute certainty that a new world was possible.
You weren’t imagining it.
You weren’t naive.
You weren’t high on something that wasn’t real.
You were early.
You arrived at the frequency before the world was ready to receive it. You felt, in your bones, something that was completely true - that human beings were capable of living differently, that the heart could lead, that community and care and shared life were not idealistic fantasy but the actual shape of what we were made for. You weren’t wrong about any of it. You were just sixty years ahead of the rest of us.
And then you had to watch the dream get crushed by backlash, co-opted by capitalism, buried under decades of Reagan and neoliberalism and the slow grinding return of everything you thought you’d left behind. You watched the world choose, again and again, the thing you already knew wouldn’t hold. And you had to carry the knowing alone - that it was possible, that you’d felt it, that it was real - through every year the world spent proving you right the hard way.
That is not a small thing to have carried.
The vision was true. The world just hadn’t suffered enough yet to choose it. So you held it in trust, through all the suffering that followed, until enough of humanity had felt in its own body what you already knew.
That’s not failure. That’s an act of heroism on behalf of humanity.
The cycle that began with your generation has now completed. Saturn has met Neptune in the sign of action, and the world you saw in 1967 is no longer ahead of its time. It is exactly on time, and now the rest of humanity is finally ready to catch up to what you were carrying.
You won’t see it fully realised, not in this life, but your job was never to build the whole world. Your job was to hold the frequency long enough for the ones who came after you to find it. To keep saying, through every decade of forgetting: I felt it once, and it was real.
Your final and most sacred act is now to pass that down. Not the ideology or the specific forms, but the frequency. The lived, embodied, unshakeable knowing that it’s possible.
We need that from you.
We need you to hand it to us.
The Summer of Love was not the failed attempt.
It was the first transmission.
This is the world finally receiving it.
You built the bridge. Now we must walk it.
Walking the Bridge Between Worlds
But how exactly does humanity make this cosmic crossing?
The mind wants a plan - a ten-step guide, a strategy, a checklist for surviving the collapse and inheriting the new world. But the heart doesn’t work that way. The heart doesn’t need a map - it just needs permission.
Permission to feel what we’re feeling right now without trying to fix it or file it or turn it into something productive. Everything you felt reading this piece is not a problem to solve. That’s just your heart, already open, already doing what it came here to do.
Somewhere beneath the noise and the news and the doom-scrolling and the exhaustion, there is a part of you that has been quietly waiting for this moment - not with fear, but with recognition. The part of you that looked at the collapsing world and thought: this cannot be what we were made for.
That part of you is not naive.
It’s not weak.
It’s not bypassing the darkness.
That part of you is the seed.
The same seed that was germinated by Saturn and Neptune this month is the one that’s alive in you - the knowing that something deeper than the mind has to lead now. You didn’t learn that from reading this - you came in with it. These words just gave it a name.
So here is how we walk the bridge, together.
We stop asking the mind to make sense of a transition the mind was never built to navigate. We stop doom-scrolling until our nervous system is so flooded it shuts our heart down just to survive. We stop waiting for the right leader, the right party, the right election, the right policy to come along and fix what no external force can fix. The change doesn’t start out there. It starts in the place we keep avoiding - the quiet place beneath the panic, where the heart has been holding steady this whole time, waiting for us to come home.
Put your hand on your chest.
Breathe.
Not to calm down.
Not as a technique.
But as an act of allegiance.
A declaration that you are choosing to lead from the heart instead of the mind.
That you are done letting fear be the loudest voice in the room.
That you are willing to feel the full weight of this moment without closing.
Without hardening, without retreating into cynicism or rage or numbness.
Because you know, somewhere deep, that the world being born on the other side of this collapse needs every open heart it can get.
You don’t have to do anything extraordinary this week. You don’t have to march or organise or post or perform your awakening for an audience. You just have to stay open. That’s it. In a world that is doing everything it can to shut you down, the most revolutionary thing you can do is keep your heart open.
Feel the grief, and let it move through you.
Feel the rage, and let it fuel you, not consume you.
Feel the overwhelm, and then put down the phone and go outside.
Touch the earth. It’s still here. It’s still holding us, even as we fail it. It hasn’t given up on us, and we must not give up on it - or each other - or ourselves.
The old world is dying loud. The new one is being born quiet. And the ones who will carry it forward are not the ones with the sharpest minds or the loudest voices or the biggest platforms. They’re the ones who kept their hearts open when everything told them to close.
That’s us, all together, already standing on the bridge.
We’ve been here longer than most of us realise, ready to make the crossing.
Now, at last, it’s time to start walking.
My intention in my writing is to lessen the climate of fear around world events by offering clarity and cosmic context for what’s unfolding; to bring context to the chaos. I believe our highest calling right now is to anchor in the vibration of love & truth and call in a more beautiful world, and to do that, we must lean out of fear. I hope you read this with an open, uplifted heart.
Yes. Thank you for wording it. I was there. And I'm here now.
I chose, it seems, to time this incarnation so I could ride both fire horses.
To hold the vision. Heart open.
I was there.
And I'm here.
For those who feel disheartened by timelines like 2030s to 2060s, I would just like to inject some hopium. We are already seeing examples of heart centered leadership right now including in my home city of New York. For those who don’t want to wait, consider moving to areas that have this kind of local leadership now and help to build it, amplify it and replicate it. We can grieve the collapse or marinate in the idea that we won’t live to see the new, or we can look for the new alive and well in our country right now and join in the fun!