on uranus

A few months ago, I had a vivid dream. I woke up and wrote what I remembered of it in the notes app on my phone: “i dreamt last night that i was downloading instructions from uranus,” i wrote. “i was floating out there like. communing with the planet. … it was giving me downloads for uranus in taurus for this last final stretch.”

I took this note on the morning of November 20, 2025, just about two weeks after Uranus had retrograded back into Taurus and the day of the new moon in Scorpio sitting opposite Uranus in Taurus. I had no conscious recollection of what exactly the planet had told me, but I felt this clear sense that it had imprinted this calling on me to be as honest and odd and open and strange as I possibly could be. I have thought about it almost every day since.

Uranus initially entered Taurus in May of 2018, where it stayed until July of 2025 before briefly dipping into Gemini and then retrograding back. As I write this, the planet sits at the 29th degree of Taurus, the final, anaretic degree of the sign before it enters Gemini April 20. It will be there until May of 2033.

Astrologers are funny anytime we talk about Uranus. It is the planet of weirdness, strangeness, unexpected happenings, revolution. It’s hard to predict what it spells for us, because its most inherent quality is unpredictability.

Astronomically, this feels exactly right, because the planet itself is bizarre: Uranus is the only planet in our solar system that rotates on its side, rolling like a ball in its orbit around the sun rather than spinning like a top like the rest of the planets.

Astrologically, as astrologer Liz Greene writes in her book The Art of Stealing Fire, it is a planet associated with Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Enlightenment, the Hebrew Yahveh, the Pythagorean numbers, Plato’s ideal forms, ritual magic, the Egyptian goddess Nut (who ruled over the sky, stars, the cosmos and mothers), the Tower card in the tarot, the emanation of divine light or “Chokmah” in Kabbalah, the Hindu Brahma (the god of creation) and, among other things, the American, French and Bolshevik revolutions. You see the vibe?

Uranus is pure creation — and the suffering associated with it (think birth, think building a house, think writing a book). It is divine and all-seeing in a way that is often uncomfortable, in human form, to come face to face with. It’s a planet of revelations and revolutions and reorganizations.

“Uranus doesn’t recognize the value and nature of time, or the importance of slow growth and compromise. Nor does it recognize the reality of individual human feeling,” Greene writes. “The vision of the future must happen now, and anything standing in the way must be annihilated or, at best, reformed. This can result in enormous suffering, for individuals as well as the collective. The basic philosophy of Uranus is that, to make an omelette, one has to break eggs. The problem is that the eggs are the emotional and instinctual needs of individual human beings. Revolutions always have a way of going out of control.”

I am a Taurus rising, which means for the last seven years, Uranus has been in my first house of self, identity, body, and I can say this definitively: I have loved it.

In May of 2018, right as Uranus entered my first house, I took a job at BuzzFeed News covering Congress. It was a role that challenged and expanded me, and I spent the first year getting dress coded in the Speaker’s Lobby (for a faux fur coat, for Air Force 1s, for denim). I was entrenched in power and chaos in a way previously unparalleled in my life, covering two impeachments and writing a series of stories about Congressional corruption, witnessing a country coming apart at the seams.

I was, meanwhile, in eating disorder therapy, completely rewiring my relationship to my body and food. I stopped wearing a bra. I got really into my newsroom union, became our chair, bargained our contract and healed my fear of conflict in the process. I embraced my natural curls, got burnt out and bought out, and lived through a pandemic and gained and lost and gained weight and did psychedelics for the first time and smoked a ton of weed and then stopped smoking weed and made a career pivot and ended a long relationship and moved across the country and made another career pivot and wrote a book about magic and got a bunch of tattoos and piercings and stopped dying my hair and fell in love.

And all the while, I was having a spiritual awakening: I met my guru, I started to meditate seriously. I started to read, and study, and meet myself in a new way. I learned to hone my intuition, learned to relate to my ego and my anxiety and my heart in a new way. I watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of Ram Dass talks. I learned from great teachers, I tried mindfulness meditation and kundalini and katonah and iyengar. I did breathwork and saw other dimensions. I cried. I got really, really into astrology. I started to pray, for real, for the first time, and I started to feel the presence of God in my life.

In all of these ways, the last seven years have been the strangest and most interesting of my life. I have gotten weirder and weirder with each passing day, and, in the process, I have become more and more myself. I am so, so thankful for Uranus.

When the outer planets move, they give us this opportunity to reflect. Think about the last seven years of your life: What kind of revolutions and strange unfoldings and general weirdness have you experienced? What surprised you? What did you learn from it? What have you learned about finding flow amidst chaos?

These questions are likely particularly salient for the fixed rising signs — Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. And as Uranus enters an angular house for the mutable rising signs — Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces — these questions will become inevitable. For cardinal signs — Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn — these revolutions might feel somewhat more subtle, but no less worth exploring.

For all of us, Greene describes a healthy relationship to Uranus as learning to “travel light.”

“This doesn’t necessarily mean eschewing material security,” she writes. “It has to do with an attitude toward life. If you are prepared to allow fluidity, and can accept changes in plans with equanimity rather than a ferocious determination to exercise control, you may not have to be uprooted all the time on a concrete level. This is learning to carry a light psychological suitcase.”

Beautiful.

I am imperfect: I am still anxious, perfectionistic, obsessive, neurotic. But when I think about what the last seven years have taught me, it was that. I carry a much lighter psychological suitcase than I once did. A new part of me has come online — a part of me that gets excited when things go off track, a part of me that wants to talk to the things that go bump in the night rather than hide from them, a part of me that knows that the heart of any plot is problems. I have a looser grip on the whole thing.

There is much to be said about Uranus in Gemini. This is where the planet was during the Civil War, and I expect the next seven years will be intense for the collective, disturbing for the world. I expect great technological advancement, for better or for worse. I expect crazy electronic music and flying cars and the unexpected. But we can discuss that more another day. Today, I’m just thankful for the lessons of the last seven years, and thankful for this weird, wonderful planet, and I hope you all can feel that, too.

Call me (or email me (addysbaird@gmail.com) or DM me) if you want to set up a reading, whether Uranus-specific or otherwise. I’m open for booking through mid-May. I love you all so much. Stay weird!!!!

XO,
A