How to ride a boat during the Saturn-Neptune convergence (and not drown)

At the edge of the known universe lies the shipwreck of those who got close enough to see beyond it.

If you looked outside to check the weather during the last week of June, you would have seen the cold shock of sobriety gusting through the room while many of us, no doubt, were experiencing some of the most extreme heat of our lives. For USians, it was somewhere between the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron deference, the presidential immunity ruling it issued just a few days later, and a debate performance from Joe Biden that launched a thousand takes on “the emperor has no clothes” that a fresh wave of dread rolled over a weary people. Some of them heard about Project 2025 for the first time. Then the Supreme Court said, “by the way, having nowhere to sleep at night makes you a criminal in America 2.0. More on that soon. Stay tuned.”

What’s it called when you’re not surprised, but still stunned by the sensation of the numbing agent wearing off? I can’t speak for anyone but myself here, but I suspect there are a lot of people who had been paying attention from a vaguely dissociative fugue state. Every day, a fresh hell on the little screen, a flood of misinformation, a tiny drop in the bucket of “here’s what you can do to help,” but it’s July and I’ll think about that other slow-motion trainwreck in November.

For a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, existential malaise on a societal level is a canon event. So is the exhaustion of not knowing what to believe, or when it officially is time to panic. But as Saturn and Neptune stationed retrograde in tandem during the last days of June and the first days of July, synchronizing their duet for the first time since they entered the orb of their conjunction, it felt as though the thin veil of dissociation was ruptured momentarily, and a collective dam appeared to burst. The makeshift stop-gap of our performance of normal gave way to a flood of uncertainty, dread, and grief for the future we thought we’d have. All anyone could talk about that week was how narrow our window for escape was.

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I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but I woke up the next morning and I felt legitimately paralyzed by fear. Not because I had been waiting for presidential politics to save us, or because I was somehow under the impression that fascism had never been visited on an American before, but because the weight of the ambient nightmare felt as though it had finally somatically penetrated down into my body, like sediment collecting at the bottom of a lake, or energy condensing into matter, the densest layer of reality.

At 29 degrees of Pisces, where Neptune spent all summer loitering, sits the fixed star Scheat. Among other things, Scheat is associated with danger at sea and shipwrecks, with drowning and floods, with tragedy and a loss of direction. The last degree of the zodiac is where you get wrecked and swallowed, the annihilation necessary for birth to emerge again. The end of the zodiac is the conceptual “end of the world,” and the myth of the Great Flood is a persistent trope throughout the lore of humanity.

In 2023, the first retrograde station of Saturn in Pisces brought accidents at sea and the infamous OceanGate Titan submersible implosion, so it felt like a form of dark humor to spend the literal day of the 2024 Saturn retrograde station riding around on a speedboat, but it’s not like I planned it that way on purpose. I was in Split at that time and everyone says you should see the islands when you’re in Croatia, so I made sure to do that on one of the days I’d have free. Lately, in this era of American collapse, it has been a small comfort to visit places that were also dragged through various forms of apocalypse and are still around to prove that life goes on, that spring can arise out of winter. Next door in Bosnia, the remnants of genocide and war were more palpable than here, 30 years later. That was what a lot of locals told me, at least. Sometimes people speculate that the U.S. will balkanize, and they say this kind of casually, and I think, “Oh, what was it like in the Balkans when the Balkans were balkanizing?”

The skipper was a young guy, probably early 20s. He was born after the war, and only knew about it through other people’s stories. At the tail end of our journey from Hvar back to Split, he gunned it extra fast and made sure to hit the swells so that the boat would skip along the surface of the water, barely levitating. He cranked up the Jon Bon Jovi. We all screamed with delight, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine for a moment that we might reach escape velocity, I’m not sure from what. From Earth? From reality? From this timeline? What’s happening here is what’s happening everywhere. Even worse, the rest of the world is situated downstream from America’s sewage system: our shit washes up on everyone’s shores eventually. And anyway, the planet is melting. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just a frog on a stupid little joy ride inside a giant pot that was gradually rolling to a boil.

I just wanna live while I’m alive.

When it was released in 2000, “It’s My Life” was actually the perfect encapsulation of white America and the spirit of somewhat defiant, self-absorbed, hyper-individualism that dominated the airwaves then. It made sense for that period of time. In 2024, this bravado registers as feeble next to the task of what’s in front of us, which will require us to move in more communitarian ways and kill the cocky exceptionalism that lives inside us. Either that, or I was suddenly hearing it in a new way, now that the question of refusing surrender has taken on a new urgency.

The flood had already been sent for that version of America, but the illusion that was reaching its high water mark was that it’s possible to escape a shared fate, to separate yourself from tragedy happening in a place you’ve never been to, or to somehow strongman or spend your way out of feeling the effects of collapse. Pisces is ruled by Jupiter, which is about cohesion, the totality, the gestalt. Water droplets can’t help but bind to one another. In the sign where Venus exalts, humanity becomes One Thing, one nervous system that feels love, and feels pain, as a body system. But in addition to Saturn in Pisces as “the weight of collective dreams and sorrows and vulnerabilities,” I also was starting to recognize it as a symbol of what it means for the Piscean to organize itself according to the Saturnian principle of stratification and hierarchy: we all suffer, but some of us suffer more, and often at the hands of those facing the least consequences. Contaminated water is one of those textbook Saturn in Pisces delineations, but all this does is raise the question of who pissed in the pool and will we ever get to hold them accountable while we’re all dealing with the fallout?

Over the course of a few days, the wave of collective panic crested across the ether, but then I noticed a slightly different frequency emerging. I started seeing sentiments about how it pays to be a little delusional, about how you can choose either courage or nihilism, because either is contagious. Saturn’s four-month retrograde proposed more options and opportunities for course-correcting around the iceberg, if you were able to see it that way. Some people seemed encouraged by the outcome of the elections in Mexico, the U.K., France. Perhaps the far right wasn’t as globally ascendant as it seemed. In the U.S., this span of time encompassed both Brat Summer and the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris. Anything seemed preferable to awaiting the certain death of losing a terrible option to another terrible option. And for a second, it did seem like maybe we’d narrowly miss ending up on the worst possible timeline.

In the months that followed, Harris reaffirmed her commitment to arming Israel as the bombing spread to Lebanon. She doubled down on her pro-fracking stance and courted the Republican vote and ultimately still lost the election to Trump as Saturn stationed direct again in November. Meanwhile, historic floods wrecked entire swaths of Appalachia, Chad, Bangladesh, and Spain.

For more than one person I spoke to in the weeks following Hurricane Helene, Asheville had represented the possibility of refuge as the climate crisis worsened. The flooding wasn’t supposed to happen there, or that high. As news of the extent of the devastation reached those of us on the outside, so, too, did stories of communities coming together to lift each other out of the mud and scrapping together a mutual survival effort. Hotels became makeshift shelters, kayaks were deployed as rescue boats and supply delivery vehicles, mules from a nearby ranch delivered insulin. It felt, to me, as though the microcosm of this daunting recovery process represented the macrocosm of the Saturn-Neptune symbolism once the floods of Pisces recede to reveal the Aries long-road-ahead of rebuilding and bootstrapping. Saturn in fall in Aries, as in the systems and structures we used to rely on are no longer load-bearing. Saturn in Aries, as in “there are no prefabricated parts to assemble, and no assurance that a government body will be able to better accomplish what we’re capable of doing with our own hands.” Especially once those bodies are intentionally kneecapped.

I know this is a bleak metaphor to propose at a time when literal reality feels colorless, and alarming given the scale of the destruction it references. I don’t think the Saturn-Neptune conjunction will deliver biblical disasters to every shore it touches, but I do think this is an extreme example that is somewhat instructive too. The unthinkable just happened. Now what? We are never out of options or things we can tangibly do — perhaps things we might have to do given what the options are. Maybe the only safe bet is that you’ll make it harder on yourself if you try to do it all alone.

In “Born By Water, Made For Air: On The Fixed Stars Scheat And Markab,” Chloe Margherita situates the symbolism of Scheat within the constellation of Pegasus. Scheat exists in a context, and the context of the Pegasus stars is that they’re upwardly mobile like the winged horse itself, but baked into this symbolism are the inherent risks that come with flying too close to the sun. “When you are in the realm of Pegasus, you are amongst the clouds, able to traverse great distances and see far, but you are also at the mercy of gravity and the long fall down,” writes Margherita. In this sense, “seeing far” has a lot to do with the limits of logic and the known — Scheat in particular seeks to transcend them. “Those touched by Scheat have an innate sense of how to find the unknown terrain and begin mapping it.”

When I think about combining the more doom-pilled version of Scheat with this visionary one, I think about a person on a sinking boat with the audacity to envision how they’re going to swim to shore. I think about someone in the midst of a great tragedy but also sensing that this isn’t the end of the story, maybe nursing a vision of the future that could be irrational cope or could be a lifeline to “better.” I imagine someone with a lot to lose still shooting their shot regardless.

Throughout 2025, the collective boat of time will be swaying back and forth over Scheat as Saturn and Neptune both track, and retrack, across 29 degrees of Pisces. There will be more “floods,” more demoralization, and more washing away of what’s familiar. And also, there will be faint outlines of Mount Olympus legible to those with the eyes to see it.