Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: The Hollow Tower and the Stumbling Strongmen
Xi's Summit, Trump's Humiliation, Thucydides Trap, and the Wound Beneath the Throne: The Week That Was May 10-16 2026
This week the performance grew louder while the substance drained away, as the men who run the old world reached for bigger statues, brasher headlines and grander parades to drown out the hollow ring of a tower going empty beneath their feet.
If you were to sum up this era in a single object, it would be the Trump phone, which - eleven months after it was announced as a gold-plated, proudly-American handset - finally began shipping this week. Somewhere along the way the "MADE IN THE USA" promise quietly softened to only “assembled” in America, as the phone that thousands paid $100 pre-order deposits for now turns out - in all likelihood - to have been built in China. It’s basically Trump’s entire presidency in miniature: the costume American, the substance imported, the loudest promises attached to the emptiest core.
Meanwhile, the man himself - just like his presidency - is coming apart at the seams, posting a flurry of unhinged social media posts all through the night, accusing Barack Obama and a roll-call of other perceived enemies of treason, demanding their arrest, insisting again the 2020 election was stolen, and asking aloud why his own acting Attorney General hadn’t indicted anyone yet. The advertising is louder than it’s ever been, but it appears the marketing magic is no longer working. The showman’s dazzle can no longer hide the numbers.
Inflation has now hit its highest mark since 2023. Gas has passed $4.50 a gallon, up more than half since the Iran war began. The national debt has rolled past $39 trillion and is reaching for $40 trillion before the midterms. Farm bankruptcies are up 46% in a year, corporate bankruptcies sit at a decade high, and 70% of Americans now disapprove of how Trump handles the economy. In a shockingly truthful exchange with reporters this week, Trump - ever the wordsmith - explained his presidency in a nutshell: “I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody.”
The war he keeps declaring over keeps refusing to end. Iran dismissed the latest American framework, Trump called their reply “a piece of garbage” and the ceasefire “on massive life support,” so Trump scurried to China this week, in the hopes that maybe Xi could bail him out of the mess he’s made in the Middle East, but no such luck. Trump left empty handed, after Xi took every opportunity to telegraph to the world that the United States under Trump is an empire in decline, and the world nodded in agreement.
But beneath the noise of collapse, the hollowing-out is being monetised in plain sight. The Justice Department is moving to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS - a case in which he is essentially both the plaintiff and the defendant - before any judge can rule whether it was ever a real case at all; one option reportedly funnels $1.7 billion of taxpayer money to Trump allies, including nearly 1,600 people convicted over January 6. Miami residents are suing over roughly three acres of prime waterfront handed to Trump’s library foundation for ten dollars - yes, just ten dollars - while a new filing shows Trump or his advisers made more than 3,700 stock trades in three months in companies with business before his own government, no blind trust anywhere in sight. The June UFC bout on the White House lawn has become a donor turnstile, with ringside “sponsorships” going for a million dollars and up. The strongman is no longer hiding the machinery - he’s selling tickets to it while syphoning the strength out of the structure he’s standing on.
The strength that’s left is being spent in ways that give the game away. This week, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly recalled 4,000 troops bound for Poland just weeks after pulling 5,000 out of Germany, blindsiding even Republican committee chairs, one of whom called it a slap in the face to America’s allies. And in Tennessee, the House Speaker stripped every Democrat of their committee seats - and with them every Black legislator in the state - for protesting a redistricting that erased the state’s only majority-Black district.
In Israel, Netanyahu’s playing the same strongman game. After the New York Times published a column carrying the accounts of Palestinians who say they were sexually abused in Israeli detention, his answer was not to rebut the reporting but to announce it would sue the newspaper that printed it, promising that "Israel will not be silent." The newspaper says it stands by the column, and the suit, for now, exists mostly as a threat - a government confident in its own account answers the account, it doesn’t reach for the writ. None of this is the behaviour of power that’s winning. It’s the behaviour of power that can feel itself losing, and is roaring to cover the sound.
The tower’s wobbling across the pond in Britain too, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer - less than two years after a landslide victory - finds his own party trying to prise him from office. A fifth of Labour's MPs have called for him to go, four Cabinet ministers resigned to force the issue, and this week his Health Secretary Wes Streeting quit too, declaring it would be "dishonourable" to serve a leader he no longer believes in. Starmer's answer was to dig in and insist he will "get on with governing" - and in the week's most telling image, he stood in silence beside his ministers as King Charles read out their agenda from a golden throne in a diamond-studded crown, the full pageantry of power performed at maximum volume while the floor gave way beneath the man it was meant to honour.
The fractures even found their way to Eurovision this week, as Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain staged the largest boycott in the contest's seventy-year history, refusing to compete or even air the show at all after Israel was allowed to participate - their entry drew audible boos inside the arena while thousands marched outside under the banner "No stage for genocide," and Eurovision’s insistence that it’s "not political" rang hollow, set against the swift expulsion of Russia in 2022 for invading Ukraine. A song contest built seventy years ago to reunite a continent torn apart by war has become, instead, one of the clearest mirrors of how deep the new fracture runs - the spectacle blazing away on stage while the structure beneath it quietly gives way.
The noise of the news right now is the sound of an entire civilisational architecture going hollow - the same structure cracking in Washington and Moscow and Westminster and Vienna and everywhere, all at once. The tower is falling, and despite all their bluster that might suggest otherwise, so are the strongmen who have stood atop it so long. While those like Xi may point to an empire in decline as proof that another empire is rising to take its place at the top, what’s actually coming apart right now is the idea of a top at all. The sky is calling time on towers and strongmen all together, and asking us to heal the wound that allowed both to rise in the first place.
If you’re feeling exhausted by the news or like nothing makes sense any more, or you’re worried for the future and want to know what comes next, then read on, dear friend. As always, the sky is showing us exactly where we are, where we are headed and what’s required of us next. Let’s look up and find the way through, together.
Thank you for being here, and for reading and sharing this writing - it's your presence that makes it possible. If you'd like to go deeper, there's a whole community waiting in the Inner Circle, and you're warmly welcome to join us.
The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here
The Trap of Thucydides
Twenty-five centuries ago, in a world that was tearing itself apart, a soldier-turned-historian named Thucydides sat down to make sense of the war he’d just lived through between the two great powers of the Greek world, Athens and Sparta, that ended the golden age of classical Greece and broke the civilisation that had produced Socrates, Sophocles and the Parthenon.
What Thucydides wrote became the most clear-eyed account of political collapse the ancient world ever produced. Sparta was the established power that had ruled the Greek peninsula for generations. Athens was the rising one, lit up with the new ideas of democracy and philosophy that would echo through the next two thousand years. As Sparta watched Athens rise and felt its own position slipping, the fear of being displaced grew into something - as Thucydides wrote - “that made war inevitable.”
The pattern, Thucydides argued, was almost mechanical. Put a rising power next to a ruling power and let them feel each other’s pressure long enough, and eventually the fear and the ambition will culminate in war.
For twenty-five centuries that observation sat in the historical record, quietly waiting, until in 2012, a Harvard political scientist named Graham Allison gave it a name. He called it “the Thucydides Trap,” after looking through five hundred years of history to see how often the pattern held, and finding that in almost every case the result was war. France versus the Habsburgs. The Dutch versus the British. France versus Britain twice. Germany versus Britain twice, producing both World Wars. Japan versus the United States, producing Pearl Harbor. The pattern was so consistent, Allison argued, that it deserved to be treated as a kind of historical gravity - the default outcome whenever a rising power and a ruling power found themselves in the same room.
In 2017, Allison wrote a book called Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? in which he applied the framework explicitly to the contemporary moment - America was the ruling power, China was the rising one, the pattern was already running, and the only question was whether the two countries could be wise enough to avoid the war the pattern usually delivers.
The book was read carefully in Washington, but even more so in Beijing, as evidenced this week when Xi Jinping invoked the “Thucydides Trap” to Trump’s face in the opening minutes of their historic summit.
“Currently, transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe,” Xi said, through an interpreter, “and the international situation is fluid and turbulent. The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations?”
Trump, almost certainly, had no idea what Xi was talking about, and he answered with his usual kind of pablum - “You’re a great leader, we have a fantastic relationship, this is maybe the biggest summit ever” - while Xi sat across from him smiling, the way a cat smiles at a bird that has not yet noticed it’s in the room.
But every foreign policy analyst on the planet recognised what had just happened. Xi had reached into the deepest well of Western political thought, pulled out the most loaded historical frame available, and placed it on the table in front of the American president like a chess piece. Xi was telling Trump - and the world - that he sees America as the falling power and China as the rising one, that the trap is running and the only way to avoid war is for the falling power to step aside gracefully while the rising power takes its place. It was, in the language of strongmen, a threat dressed as philosophy. The closed fist wearing silk. One strongman telling another strongman that the top of the pyramid is changing hands, and the question now is only whether the handover happens peacefully or in flames.
In the moment, Trump just absorbed it, but later, once his advisors had presumably explained what had actually happened, Trump took to social media to explain, “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct….Two years ago, we were in fact a nation in decline. On that I fully agree with President Xi.”
Trump closed the trap Xi set by publicly agreeing with the Chinese leader that America has been a declining nation. Xi didn’t need to fire a shot - he just placed the frame on the table and waited for Trump to climb inside it and pull the lid shut.
By every visible metric, Xi won this week’s summit. For the first time in decades, it is he - and not the President of the United States - who appears to be the leader of the world, as the “Thucydides Trap,” after twenty-five centuries of patient waiting, looks finally to have closed its jaws.
But the deeper story of this week is not that one strongman is tumbling while another takes the reins, or that one tower is rising while another is falling, but that both towers are crumbling and all the strongmen are stumbling, and the very idea that there is a top to fight over is dissolving in our hands.
Trump may be the visibly weakened strongman that makes Xi look as if he’s prevailing by comparison, but even Xi can feel the ground moving beneath him, just like all the other strongmen right now who are vying for the top of the crumbling tower, as the whole structure they’ve sought to dominate gives way under their feet.
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The Strongmen on Show
It seems that right now there’s a staggering number of world leaders who fit the definition of a “strongman,” ruling by force rather than by service, and by concentrating power rather than distributing it.
Strongmen are nothing new. History is littered with these kinds of leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Gaddafi, Pinochet. Despite the name, there have been plenty of female strongmen, too - the archetype transcends gender. Indira Gandhi was India’s own strongman in a sari. Golda Meir was Israel’s grandmother warrior who oversaw the Yom Kippur War. Imelda Marcos married into strongman power in the Philippines and is still wielding it forty years later.
For most of the modern era, the strongman has been the villain of the West’s political imagination - the dictator, the junta, the regime we were taught to fear - while our own leaders, the elected ones, were sold to us as the opposite; servants of the people who governed by consent, not by force. We looked up at them and we believed, mostly, that they were the good guys, and that strongmen were the ones somewhere else, in the other countries, on the other side of the wall.
But peer behind the curtain and the actual record tells a different story. The American presidents we admired were the ones who dropped the bombs on Vietnam, who installed Pinochet in Chile, who armed Saddam in the 1980s, who invaded Iraq on a lie in 2003, who droned weddings in Yemen, who looked away from Rwanda, who built the Guantánamo cages, who flew the rendition planes. They didn’t look like strongmen. They wore the language of democracy and the costume of service, but the system they presided over operated by force - by coercion and sanction, and by the closed fist applied wherever the cameras didn’t reach. They were the diplomatic face of a strongman architecture; the mask that let the machinery keep running.
What’s different today, here in 2026, is that the mask is coming completely off; the strongman - both the person and the system - is throwing off the costume of service and standing atop the pyramid, in plain view, naming what they are. Donald Trump openly calls himself a strongman and his supporters cheer. Xi Jinping does not pretend his is a representative government. Vladimir Putin does not pretend to be a democrat. Benjamin Netanyahu wages a war that has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza and dares the world to stop him.
The architecture has not changed, it’s just taken off its costume and what we are looking at, in the leaders running most of the world right now, is the strongman frame that’s always been there finally showing its actual face.
A century of pretending to be something gentler is over.
The Loud Death Roars at the End
Despite Xi this week invoking the “Thucydides Trap” as an indication that he is now ascending to the top of the pyramid, the sky is telling a different story - ever since Saturn met Neptune at the gate of Aries in February, the costume has been coming off power itself, and what we are witnessing is not the rise of strongman power, but its end.
Every element of Xi’s choreography this week was loud - always the giveaway that the strongman’s power is slipping. The flag-waving children lining the tarmac at Trump’s arrival instead of a dignified greeting from officials. The tour of the Temple of Heaven, with the cameras finding Xi in dignified profile and Trump trailing behind him. The state banquet with Xi in a high-backed throne and Trump in a low seat beside him, looking up at the Chinese leader the way a supplicant looks up at a king.
That’s not the choreography of a confident power - confident power doesn’t need to choreograph. The British Empire at its height didn’t seat visiting dignitaries on stools. The Catholic Church in the thirteenth century didn’t need to parade trophies through Rome. Real power doesn’t need to brandish or roar - it governs softly because nobody seriously contests it.
But power that knows it’s losing is a different animal entirely. Power in its terminal phase becomes theatrical - it performs and struts. It builds enormous statues of itself in the year before the statues are pulled down. It holds elaborate parades in the year before the parades become mockery. It passes harsh new laws in the year before the harsh new laws cannot be enforced. It executes its critics in the year before its critics outlive it. The dying system roars when it can no longer reign.
The British Empire built its most elaborate colonial bureaucracies in the decades just before the independence movements dismantled all of it. Apartheid South Africa was most repressive in the decade it ended. The Berlin Wall was at its tallest the year before it fell. Mussolini was loudest in the months before he was hung upside down from a meathook in a Milan square.
The roar is the death rattle, never the heartbeat. The performance of strength always grows loudest when the substance of strength is at its thinnest. Right now - not just in China and the United States but in multiple nations worldwide - the closed fist is being held up so visibly because it can sense it’s running out of time.
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Putin’s Pitiful Parade
For some, like Xi, the performance seems convincing, but for others, like Vladimir Putin, it’s lacking its old lustre as was evident when he fronted up to his annual Victory Day Parade in Red Square over the weekend - the most sacred date in the Russian calendar commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.
In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary together - George W. Bush, the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Denmark, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the President of the European Commission. The reviewing stand was a who’s-who of global power and Putin was its host.
This year, the reviewing stand was bare - none of Russia’s allies showed. Xi Jinping, who came last year, skipped this year’s ceremony. The Iranian leadership are either dead or hiding from American bombs. Venezuela’s Maduro is sitting in a prison cell, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is licking his wounds after his recent humiliating electoral defeat. The parade itself, usually a display of military might, was scaled back because there’s no military hardware to spare - every working tank is at the front in Ukraine, being destroyed by drones piloted by twenty-two-year-olds in Mykolaiv. North Korean soldiers marched along Russians to bolster numbers and pre-recorded videos of submarines played on screens above the square, because the actual submarines cannot be moved into central Moscow without revealing that there are very few left. Foreign reporters were largely barred and internet was restricted, so the eyes of the world wouldn’t see the pitiful display.
And then, instead of walking the 600 metres to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as he has every other year, Putin took an armoured bus - a clear sign that the man who has spent twenty-five years performing strength is, for the first time in his life, visibly afraid of his own people.
This was not the Victory Day of a confident leader, but that of strongman whose war has lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany, who has lost 1.2 million Russian soldiers killed or wounded, who has watched his economy hollow out and his allies disappear one by one, and who can sense that his end is closer than his beginning.
Putin in his fortified bus was not strength, but terror dressed as ceremony - a frightened leader whose power is slipping hiding behind the armour in his own capital. Putin performed Victory Day this year in the same way a failing theatre company performs Hamlet - with whatever costumes are left in the wardrobe and whatever actors are still showing up for rehearsal. The performance is loud to mask that it’s hollow - the facade is a front to hide the frightened little man behind the curtain.
Netanyahu Cuts the Strings on His Own Parachute
And while Putin clutched at the ceremonies of past glory in Moscow, in Jerusalem a different strongman was reading the same writing on the wall and reaching for a different escape, as Israel’s strongman - Benjamin Netanyahu - took to 60 Minutes in his first American broadcast interview since the war he and Trump launched in February, in a noisy display of dominance designed to mask defeat.
In the eleventh week of the war, with bombs still flying, the Strait of Hormuz still essentially closed, the Iranian regime not fractured, and Trump scurrying off to China looking for ways to wind the conflict down, Netanyahu declared the war was far from over, because “there’s still nuclear material, enriched uranium that has to be taken out of Iran.”
When asked how he envisaged the uranium should be removed from Iran, Netanyahu replied, “You go in, and you take it out,” and then proceeded to suggest, in contradiction to Trump’s declared position, that the war in the Middle East must continue, and he will continue dropping bombs regardless of what Washington wants. He even went so far as to say he wants to draw down American financial aid to Israel to zero over the next decade.
The most subsidised client state in the American imperial system - the country that has received more American aid than any other nation in the history of American foreign policy - announcing on prime-time American television that it wants to end the subsidy was Netanyahu’s version of what Xi did to Trump; the strongman telegraphing that the American age of dominance is over, and pre-positioning for the new era on his own terms rather than be caught flat-footed when Washington’s cheques stop arriving.
But the strongman writing his own divorce papers from the strongman structure that has bankrolled him for sixty years is not a confident move. It’s a man who can hear the storm brewing reaching for whatever shelter he can build before the first lightning strikes.
All the Towers, All at Once
Even the fact that Trump visited Beijing at all this week - a rare journey for an American president to make - gave the slipping strongman’s game away. Though Trump noisily sold the summit as some kind of landmark event signifying his supremacy, in reality, it was little more than a desperate errand from a man seeking rescue from the building he lit on fire.
Trump went to Beijing because he needed Chinese mediation to manage the retreat from a war his own neoconservative establishment has now publicly declared lost. He arrived offering compliments, calling Xi a great leader and a friend, hoping to come home with some trade deals and an Iran face-saving framework, but all he got was humiliation, and strong-arming from Xi not to interfere if China invades Taiwan. For all Trump’s bluster, this week’s theatrics only served to demonstrate he’s not a man at the height of his powers, but a failing leader at the end of his tether, grovelling before the man who appears to be the new leader of the world.
But look even closer, and it’s clear that even Xi is standing atop a precarious pedestal, presiding over a country whose economy is in its worst sustained downturn since the reform era began. Youth unemployment in China is so high the government has stopped publishing the figures. Property prices have collapsed. Foreign capital is fleeing. Deflation has set in. The demographic clock is winding down - China’s population has been shrinking for three years and the workforce has been shrinking for fifteen.
And Xi has spent the last five years purging his own military leadership. The two most senior commanders of the People’s Liberation Army responsible for China’s nuclear arsenal were removed on charges of corruption and disloyalty, his defence ministers were purged in succession, and their replacement has reportedly been under investigation for the last two years. A leader who purges his nuclear-command leadership suggests a leader who does not trust the people closest to the trigger.
Xi may be a strongman who has learned not to show his fear in front of the cameras, but the fear is there all the same, which is why the purges keep coming, and why Taiwan keeps being escalated as the most important issue even though the People’s Liberation Army has not been ready to take Taiwan in any of the last forty years, and is still not ready now.
Xi is performing strength on the world stage because the substance of strength inside his own country is bleeding away in ways the cameras cannot see. The photographs of him towering over Trump this week show the picture of a man who knows he is in the late chapters of his own story, and who is using every diplomatic instrument he has to slow the page-turn.
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Two Wounds, Working Together
This week, as we watched the world’s most prominent strongmen performing dominance in exact proportion to how little of it they actually hold, what we were really watching was the wound of our world exposed.
The strongman has always been the wounded masculine made manifest - the closed fist that wields, and dominates, and rules, and says “I will protect you by force, I will sort the world into us and them, I will tell you who belongs and who does not, I will redraw the map, and close the border, and bomb the enemy, and silence the critic, I will make the decisions and you will live with them.” And just as the strongman can be both male and female, the wounded masculine can take both forms - Putin, Trump, Netanyahu and Xi are loud and powerful examples, but so are figures like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, or even American figures like Tulsi Gabbard, or Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem before the fall. The body is just the costume that the closed fist wears, though the underlying wound is the same.
But the wounded masculine is not the entirety of the world’s wound - there’s a deeper layer that’s often overlooked. The wounded masculine is just the outer shell - it’s what people often point to as the source of all the world’s ills, but it’s just the container holding the spoiled contents, just as the strongman is the visible front for many invisible hands. No strongman ever stands alone. They are hoisted high by hands that are not theirs - voters, cabinets, courts, generals, party machines, media outlets, pulpits, donors, soldiers, judges, journalists, families, marriages, silences. They need the great invisible architecture of people who agree to host them, and these hosts are the deeper layer, and the wound only stands because both halves hold it up.
We’ve been trained to point at the strongmen and feel righteously appalled, but the strongmen are just the container for the hosts - the great quiet collaborating mass standing behind the strongman. The hosts are the half of the wound that has gone unnamed in our political language for centuries, and until we name the whole of it, we cannot heal any of it.
This deeper layer is the wounded feminine - the open palm held upward to receive, that hosts, and enables, and accommodates, and says “I will let you rule if you keep me safe, I will not look directly at what you do, I will defend you in public and complain about you in private, I will mistake proximity to your power for power of my own, and trade my agency for your protection.” It doesn’t wield - it hosts the wielder. And just as the wounded masculine can wear any body, so too can the wounded feminine. Lindsey Graham hosts, and so does Mitch McConnell, as did Mike Pence and Kevin McCarthy. Marco Rubio hosts, and so does JD Vance and Mike Johnson. The entire Republican congressional infrastructure hosts, as does the American evangelical leadership that calls Trump chosen.
The hosts come in every body, every gender, every nationality, every faith. What unites them is the posture - the open palm, the will to be safe, the dressing up of collusion as virtue. The body the posture wears is irrelevant.
And both wounds - masculine and feminine - need each other. The wielder cannot wield without the hosts lending their hands, just as the host cannot host without the wielder doing the dominating they can’t do themselves. Neither is the victim of the other - they are both accomplices - and the pyramid we have all been living inside for centuries is built out of their partnership, brick by brick, marriage by marriage, party by party, generation by generation.
The World Made Whole
Our world was not always wounded in this way, though we have carried the wounding for so long that even our history books cannot remember when we were whole. Divine masculine and divine feminine are designed to live in harmony - two halves of one whole, the container and the contents, one lovingly supports while one lovingly protects. That’s the original design, but the two halves have been so out of harmony with each other for so long - so wounded and distorted - that we’ve nearly forgotten what living inside a healed whole looks like.
The divine masculine is the container - the structure that holds, the boundary that protects, the frame that initiates and builds and makes space for something to happen inside it. In its healed form, it’s steady without being rigid, strong without being domineering, protective without being possessive. It says, “I will hold this so you can be safe inside it. I will build the walls so the home can exist. I will set the boundary so the field can be planted. I will go first into the unknown so the path can be made.” The healed masculine is not the closed fist, but the open arms that encircle. It contains without crushing what it contains and serves what it holds.
The divine feminine is the contents that fills the container - it flows and feels and creates and connects, and lives inside the structure the masculine has built. In its healed form, it is receptive without being passive, nurturing without being self-erasing, connected without being merged. It says, “I will fill this space with what is real. I will bring forth what wants to be born. I will feel what needs to be felt. I will name what needs to be named. I will speak the truth into the room you have made safe for me to speak in.” The healed feminine is not the open palm of surrender, but the open palm of receiving and giving in equal measure. It fills without flooding and speaks true into the container that holds it.
Neither is above the other - both are partners. The container without contents is a hollow architecture, and the contents without container is energy with nowhere to land. Each requires the other, and each completes the other, and the whole is built out of their partnership, just as the wounded pyramid is built out of their wounding.
Right now, we are living under a sky that is calling us back to whole, asking us to remember the original design. We are not being called to let one half dominate the other - that’s the wound we’re being asked to heal. We’re not being called to replace patriarchy with matriarchy, or strong men with strong women. The pyramid is not being handed from one set of hands to another; the entire wounded architecture is being composted into something else entirely.
A leader who holds the country without ruling over it.
A government that serves what it contains rather than dominating it.
A church that protects the vulnerable instead of the abuser.
A home where everyone in it is safe to speak true.
A workplace where the structure holds without crushing.
A marriage where the container and the contents are not assigned by gender but offered freely by whoever can hold them in any given moment.
That’s what rises when the two halves heal and become whole. That’s what emerges when both masculine and feminine work together as they were designed. We have all been cooked in the wound for so long that we struggle to imagine a world without dominance - a world that operates less like a pyramid and more like a circle, where none is above or below, and none is oppressed or oppressor, but each of the two halves works together as intended, in the harmony that is our original design.
Not Them, But Us, Not Out There, But In Here
That original design - both halves working together harmoniously - is not just how we were intended to operate as a society, but how each of us is designed to operate individually as well. We each embody both divine masculine and divine feminine - it’s not about gender, but the dual energies that live within all of us. The divine masculine is our container for our divine feminine contents, but since both have become so wounded, we are at war within ourselves.
And so the story playing out on the world stage this week is playing out within all of us. The flailing strongmen are pointing us all toward our own wounded masculine, and the many hosts propping up the strongmen invite us to look at the wounded feminine within - they are holding up the mirror so we can see ourselves more clearly.
The wielder out there is a magnification of the wielder in us.
The host out there is a magnification of the host in us.
The pyramid out there is built from the same bricks as the pyramid in here.
And if we want the pyramid out there to fall, we have to look at the bricks in here first.
The wounded masculine in us is the part that grips. It’s the inner voice that says “push harder, control more, never show weakness, never let them see you flinch.” It’s the part of us that overworks to avoid feeling, that performs strength to mask fear, that closes the fist around our own contents so nothing tender can escape. It’s the perfectionism that won’t let the project be finished because finished means seen. It’s the rigidity that won’t let the plan be changed because changing means we weren’t in control to begin with. It’s the inner ruler that has spent so long defending the borders that it has forgotten there is anyone inside the walls worth defending. It dominates our own inner life the way Putin dominates Russia - by force, by suspicion, by the conviction that any opening is a vulnerability and any vulnerability is the end.
And the wounded feminine in us is the part that hosts the gripper. It’s the inner voice that says “don’t make a fuss, don’t take up space, don’t name what you saw, don’t risk the safety of being small.” It’s the part of us that abandons our own knowing to keep someone else comfortable. It’s the truth we swallowed at the dinner table because saying it aloud would have cost too much. It’s the dream we set down because the people who loved us couldn’t see it. It’s the body we stopped listening to because what it was telling us was inconvenient. It’s the rage we apologised for, the grief we hid, the desire we mistranslated into something more acceptable, the brilliance we dimmed because someone in the room couldn’t bear it lit. It hosts our own inner wielder the way the host nations host the strongmen - by going quiet, by looking away, by mistaking proximity to power for power of our own.
Both wounds live in every one of us. We have all wielded against ourselves, and we have all hosted what we should have named. We have all built tiny pyramids inside our own lives - in the job we won’t leave, the family member we won’t confront, the friend we won’t call out, the political identity we won’t question, the relationship we won’t end, the institution we still believe in because building something better is hard. Each of us has rooms inside us we have not yet walked into, where the wielder is still ruling and the host is still surrendering, and the same architecture that is cracking on the world stage is cracking quietly in there too.
And so the question the sky is asking this week is not what we should do about the strongmen on the world stage, but where in our own lives is the same architecture still standing, and what would it take for us to let it fall? Because the strongmen out there cannot be unseated by us pointing at them from the safety of our living rooms. The pyramid out there only falls when the pyramids in here fall first. The wielder in us has to soften its grip before the wielder out there will loosen its grip on us. The host in us has to find its voice before the host nations will find theirs.
The mirror is being held up - the question is whether we will look into it.
The Healing, and the New World Rising
The sky has been telling us repeatedly that this year the world’s wound would become visible, and that this would be the year we could no longer look away.
Back in February, Saturn and Neptune met at zero degrees Aries for the first time in recorded human history - the Genesis Reset. Aries is the gate of initiation, the raw spark that becomes a new world. Saturn is structure. Neptune is dissolution. When these two meet at the gate of the warrior, you get the dissolution of how power works, the dissolution of the costumes power has been wearing for centuries. Saturn cracks the structure, Neptune dissolves the veil, and together they unmask the wound.
And ever since the Genesis Reset, the sky has been doing exactly that. Pluto in Aquarius - the structural rebirth of the collective, the slow annihilation of captured institutions, the soil of the people being turned over. Uranus in Gemini - the shattering of the binary mind that the dominance frame requires to function. The lightning strike against us versus them, friend versus enemy, winner versus loser, ruler versus ruled. All of it being broken open in the part of the mind that built the pyramid in the first place.
The same Saturn-Neptune that is unmasking Putin in his armoured bus is unmasking the part of us that grips when we should be opening. The same Pluto that is composting the captured institutions of the world is composting the captured rooms inside our own lives. The same Uranus that is shattering the binary mind in the collective is shattering the binary mind in each of us - the inner ruler and the inner host, the wielder and the wielded-against, finally being seen as two halves of one wound rather than as separate parts of separate people.
The sky is not punishing us - it’s showing us the beginning of the healing, out there and in here, at the same time, because they are the same wound. The strongmen on the world stage are roaring so loudly right now because they can feel what we can feel - that the wound is rising for healing - and they know the old world they have dominated won’t hold its shape when the wound it’s built on finally heals. But alongside their noise is evidence of the very healing that threatens them most.
When strongman Viktor Orbán was toppled last month after the Hungarian people gave Péter Magyar a two-thirds parliamentary majority, Magyar walked out of his inauguration last week and declared, “I will serve my country, not rule over it,” in one of the most stirring examples of the healed masculine speaking our ears have heard in years. Not weaker or softer - just the container holding without crushing. And as he walked out, the Roma singer Ibolya Oláh - a lesbian, the kind of person Orbán’s laws had been written to make invisible - began to sing the Hungarian national anthem, and the crowd surged across the reflecting pool to reclaim their parliament. That was the healed feminine speaking true into the public square the strongman had tried to make her disappear from - the contents filling the container with only what is real.
The healed masculine and the healed feminine stood in the same square, in the same week the wielders were flailing in Moscow and Beijing and Jerusalem and the Temple of Heaven. The new operating manual arriving not as theory but in practice - a living example “out there” of what’s now required “in here.”
Every time one of us moves from wounded to healed in any room of our own life, we are doing the same work Magyar and Oláh did in that square in Budapest. In the moment we set a boundary without closing the fist, or speak true into a room that has been silent too long, or allow the wielder inside us to step back, the contents fills the container the way they were always meant to. Every healing in here is a brick removed from the pyramid out there. Every brick removed from the pyramid out there makes the healing in here a little more possible.
This is what is coming, dear friends - not all at once, and not by overthrow or violent revolution. Not by a new pyramid with kinder bricks at the top, but slowly, country by country, household by household, soul by soul, as each of us begins to do the patient inner work of looking at where we are wielding and where we are hosting, and beginning to withdraw the hand from the bricks we never really wanted to be holding up.
We are watching the old order die this week, as the wound becomes visible, and the sky is showing it to us not to frighten us but to free us - because what we can finally see, we can finally choose.
The pyramid falls when the hands stop holding it up, and the circle forms when the people who used to hold the pyramid up turn and face each other instead. The Age of the Mind, which built the pyramid out of either-or and us-and-them and ruler-and-ruled, is handing in its resignation, and the Age of the Heart, which builds the circle out of both-and and us-and-us and serve-don’t-rule, is walking in to take the post.
We are not downstream of the weather - we ARE the weather, and dear friends, the weather is changing. A new world is rising - moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat - and that world is built by those of us who are willing to look at the wounds we carry, name them, and choose to heal.
If you need a place to land after reading this, or if you want some support as we step boldly toward a new world, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you, or if you prefer it in an audio listening format, head over to the Resonance Room.
See you next Sunday, friends.
Onwards!
You have spoken to my bones. I have carried this wisdom and knowledge with in me not knowing how to express it and when I did offer glimpses of myself I was ridiculed ignored and made small. The pieces of my mosaic are making sense. Thank you. I don’t know who you are or how you do what you do, but I embrace the mystery .
I really enjoyed what you had to say about the divine masculine and divine feminine. “Neither is above the other - both are partners… Each requires the other, and each completes the other, and the whole is built out of their partnership.”
This seems important in the building of what comes next. We have grown too far apart from one another. It’s time to explore discover what true partnership can look like. (I believe our best future depends on it.)