The Pleiades • 51.432° – 64.287°
November 17 – November 28
My husband shot the deer on November 17th. The exact day Earth entered this sanctuary. I didn’t know that yet, but my body knew. Something shifted that evening, as the sun was fading in the sky, as he walked down the trail to sit in the deer stand. The air felt different. Everything felt closer, more immediate, like the membrane between me and the world had suddenly become permeable.
I heard the shot. It was felt inside of my being. I saw him go down the ladder, and waited. It was a good 15-20 minutes before he came to get me and my son, to help carry the deer up the hillside. I felt everything at once. Gratitude that we’d have meat for winter. Grief at this animal’s death. Relief that the hunt was successful. Heartbreak at the weight of its body. These weren’t separate emotions happening in sequence. They were simultaneous, existing in the same moment in my body, and I couldn’t choose one over the others. I just had to feel all of it.
Then we started processing the deer. From the moment it was hung, the realization that this was a mother. As my husband skinned her, milk poured from her mammary glands, mixing with the blood under her skin. Hot tears poured from my eyes. I couldn’t hold back my tears, my shame, my heartache. We did this. We took her life, to feed ourselves. A child is now motherless. Wondering our woods, forever feeling unsafe.
Everything started unraveling from that moment. Not falling apart, but unraveling like a thread being pulled that makes the whole pattern visible.
I went live while fleshing the deer hide. I wasn’t performing, I was just working, doing what needed to be done with this animal’s body. Honoring what we’d taken by making sure every part served. The membrane and tissue, the scraping, the physical intimacy of working with what this deer was when it was no longer animated by life.
And thousands of people showed up. Over ten thousand throughout the 2 hours of working with hides. Not to watch me entertain them, but to witness this actual work. To be present with the reality of what it means that our food was alive before it fed us. I could feel them there, not as an audience but as witnesses to something real.
There was no distance between what I was doing and who was seeing it. No buffer. Just this raw visibility of private work suddenly being completely public. And it felt connecting in a way I can’t fully explain. Like the Pleiades were saying “nothing is separate, not even this, not even the intimate work you do with your hands and the grief you carry about taking this life.”
I tried to make bone broth, to utilize every part of the animal. I thought I was being respectful, honoring the deer by using everything. I burned the bones. The smell filled the yard, acrid and wrong. I stood there staring at these charred bones that were supposed to become nourishment, and instead they were just… destroyed. Ruined by my attempt to do the right thing.
It felt like a metaphor I didn’t ask for. Everything exposed, even my failures. Even the ways I try to honor something and accidentally harm it instead. No hiding from that either. Just the burned bones and the smell and the recognition that I don’t always know what I’m doing, even when I’m trying my hardest.
I was making baked potatoes for a potluck. Simple, right? Except the oven wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t get above 200 degrees. So over an hour of cooking, and having started 2 hours before having to leave, I had no potatoes to bring. So I had to bring raw potatoes to the event and cook them over the fire there, in front of everyone. Another thing that should have been private preparation becoming public process.
Sitting by that fire, tending potatoes while people gathered around, I felt it again. This sanctuary doesn’t let you prepare things in advance and show up with the polished result. It makes the process visible. It makes you do the work in front of witnesses. It strips away the option of having everything sorted before anyone sees you.
Two months ago, my son went on his first sleep over. He was there with his sister but something happened that made his friend feel uncomfortable. She didn’t say anything at the time. She told her mom right away. Then her mom told other people. Then they talked about it for months. No one said anything to me, to him, or even brought it up. And then, this week, it surfaced. Suddenly. Urgently. In a way that demanded immediate attention. We went on a walk, away from the group but witnessed by all. Again, something that could have been done in private months ago, revealed loudly in this sanctuary.
I’m still processing what this means. My son didn’t know she felt uncomfortable. He thought everything was fine. And now I’m looking at their friendship, at what happened, at what was invisible for two months and is now unavoidably visible. At the ways young people don’t always have words for their boundaries until much later. At the ways we can hurt each other without meaning to, without even knowing.
The pattern emerging here isn’t simple. It’s not “my son did something wrong” or “this girl overreacted.” It’s more complex than that. It’s about silence that couldn’t stay silent anymore. About discomfort that needed two months before it could be named. About the ways we’re all learning how to navigate consent and boundaries and speaking up, and how messy that learning is.
But the timing. The fact that this surfaced now, this week, while I’m feeling everything else surface too. That’s what the Pleiades do. They don’t let anything stay buried. Not grief about the deer, not burned bones, not broken ovens, not discomforts from two months ago. Everything comes up. Everything becomes visible. Everything demands to be felt and acknowledged and integrated right now.
I’m looking at people differently this week. Not seeing their presented faces but seeing their patterns. Their energetic signatures. The ways they move through the world, the ways they relate, the ways they protect themselves or expose themselves or manipulate or connect. It’s like suddenly having x-ray vision for relationship dynamics, and I can’t unsee what I’m seeing.
Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is uncomfortable. Some of it makes me want to move closer. Some of it makes me want to protect myself. But all of it is true in a way I couldn’t see before. The Pleiades are showing me what was always there but usually stays beneath the surface of polite interaction.
I feel contorted by this. Twisted into shapes I don’t know how to hold. Because you can’t unknow what you’ve seen. You can’t pretend the patterns aren’t there once they’ve become visible. And I don’t know yet what I’m supposed to do with this information. I just know I’m seeing it, and it’s changing how I understand the relationships around me.
What My Body Knows
I’m not remembering things through words this week. I’m remembering them somatically. The weight of the deer’s body. The texture of its hide. The smell of burned bones. The heat of the fire cooking potatoes. The contortion in my chest when I think about my son’s friend. The expansion I felt when thousands of people witnessed me working.
These aren’t stories I’m telling myself. These are things my body knows. Cellular memory. Animal knowing that doesn’t need language because it exists as sensation, as felt truth that predates the ability to articulate it.
This is what it means to be the human animal connected to everything all at once in this space. I’m not thinking about interconnection, I’m experiencing it as physical reality. The deer’s death is in my hands as I work with its hide. My son’s friend’s discomfort is in my nervous system as a contortion I can’t release. The thousands watching are in my body as a feeling of exposure and connection simultaneously. The burned bones are in my gut as recognition of my own capacity to destroy what I meant to honor.
Nothing is separate. Not action from consequence, not my private feelings from their public expression, not my grief from my gratitude, not my mistakes from my intentions. It’s all one continuous experience, and the Pleiades won’t let me compartmentalize any of it.
The Physical Difference
I can physically feel the difference of this sanctuary compared to the last four. This isn’t subtle. This isn’t me projecting meaning onto neutral events. Earth moved into a different region of space on November 17th, and my body registered that shift immediately.
The previous sanctuaries had their own qualities, their own textures, but nothing like this. Nothing this relentlessly exposing. Nothing this visceral. Nothing that made separation this impossible.
It’s wild. That’s the only word that feels accurate. Wild like an animal that can’t be domesticated. Wild like weather you can’t control. Wild like being fully alive without any cushioning between you and reality. I am the human animal right now. Not the civilized version that knows how to maintain boundaries and keep things appropriate. The actual animal that feels everything and can’t pretend otherwise.
Elated, Sad, Grieving, Frustrated, Grateful: I’m all of these at once. Not cycling through them, not managing them one at a time, but holding all of them simultaneously in my body. Elated that thousands of people wanted to witness real work. Sad about the deer’s death. Grieving the loss of innocence in my son’s friendship. Frustrated by burned bones and broken ovens and patterns in relationships I can’t unsee. Grateful for winter meat and fire-cooked potatoes and the privilege of being alive enough to feel this much.
The Pleiades don’t care if this is too much. They’re young massive stars burning through their fuel at incredible rates, flooding this region of space with ultraviolet light and stellar wind, ionizing everything in their vicinity. They don’t do gentle. They don’t do manageable. They illuminate. They expose. They make everything visible whether you’re ready or not.
And I’m not ready. But I’m in it anyway. Feeling everything. Seeing everything. Unable to hide from anything. This is what Earth is experiencing as she moves through this stellar field, and I’m experiencing it through her because I’m an animal on her surface with a nervous system sensitive enough to register these shifts.
I’m writing this while it’s happening. While Earth is still moving through the Pleiades sanctuary. While I’m still feeling contorted and exposed and connected and overwhelmed. This isn’t reconstruction. This is documentation of what it actually feels like to be here, now, in this stellar environment, in this body, in this life that won’t let me separate anything anymore.
The deer fell on the 17th and everything unraveled from there. The hide being witnessed by thousands. The bones I burned trying to honor them. The oven that forced me to cook in public. My son’s friend’s discomfort finally surfacing. Friends revealing their energetic patterns. All of it happening in the span of days, all of it connected by this underlying quality of absolute visibility and visceral interconnection.
This is what makes embodied cosmology different from astrology. I’m not reading about the Pleiades and deciding how to feel. I’m living through what this stellar environment actually creates, and I’m writing it down as it happens so I remember next year when Earth returns to these coordinates. So I know what to expect. So I can prepare myself for twelve days of being the human animal who can’t maintain separation from anything.
What This Sanctuary Is
The Pleiades are young. Maybe 100 million years old, which is nothing in cosmic time. They’re hot, blue-white stars with surface temperatures over 10,000 Kelvin, still embedded in the reflection nebulae of their birth. They’re burning fast, radiating intense energy, creating stellar winds that collide with the dust and gas still surrounding them.
Earth passes through this section of the ecliptic for twelve days every November. When she does, she’s moving through a region of space characterized by extreme luminosity and active electromagnetic transformation. The photon flux is different here. The stellar wind density is different. The ionization state of the local interstellar medium is different.
And we feel it. Or at least I feel it. My body registers the shift when Earth enters this sanctuary. The membrane between me and everything else becomes transparent. The buffer between action and consequence dissolves. Everything I do immediately affects everything around me, and everything around me immediately affects me, and there’s no distance, no delay, no protection from the full intensity of being completely embedded in a living system.
This is what the Pleiades create. Not through mystical influence but through actual electromagnetic environment. They illuminate everything. They don’t create shadows where things can hide. They’re too bright, too young, too active. Everything in their vicinity becomes visible, and Earth experiences that visibility while she moves through their stellar field, and I experience it through Earth because I’m an animal on her surface paying attention to what she’s showing me.
For Next Year
When November 17th comes around again, I’ll know what’s starting. Earth will begin moving through the Pleiades sanctuary, through 51.432° to 64.287° of her yearly journey, and everything will become visible again. Not the same events, not the same specific circumstances, but the same quality of relentless exposure and visceral interconnection.
I’ll prepare differently knowing what I know now. I’ll expect intensity. I’ll expect things I’ve been avoiding to surface. I’ll expect the membrane between private and public to become permeable. I’ll expect to feel everything at once without being able to choose which emotions to keep and which to suppress. I’ll expect to be the human animal who can’t pretend she’s separate from the living world.
And maybe knowing that will make it easier. Or maybe it will just make it conscious. Either way, I’ll have this documentation of what happened in 2025. All of it captured while Earth moved through these coordinates, all of it showing me what this sanctuary actually does to a human nervous system when we stop pretending we’re not embedded in the cosmos.
Twelve days. The Pleiades. Everything visible, everything connected, everything felt in the body before the mind can make sense of it. This is what Earth shows us when she passes through young stars still burning off their birth clouds. That nothing is separate. That the human animal is capable of feeling this much. That being fully alive means holding the entire emotional spectrum simultaneously without needing to resolve it into something simpler than it actually is.
I lived it. I documented it. And now I know what to expect when Earth returns here next November. Welcome to Sanctuary 5. It’s exactly as potent as it feels.