Yesterday morning two people climbed out onto the needle of the Empire State Building, more than a quarter mile of open air under their shoes, and unfurled a black banner over the most watched city on earth. White letters: when the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace. (Jimi Hendrix) Then, up there on the spire with the wind and the helicopters and half of New York filming from below, he proposed to her. She said yes! They were in handcuffs before lunch, facing eight charges, and I would bet money neither of them regrets a single second.
And I can't stop thinking about the timing. Because the night before they climbed, Jupiter crossed into Leo for the first time in twelve years, and it's staying for a year. Sometimes the sky writes its own headlines.
The oldest version of this is a kid on a swing
She gets the swing going higher than she has ever gone, feet up at the treetops, stomach dropping out from under her, and the first thing out of her mouth is a command: Look at me. Look at me. And every adult within earshot turns and gasps on cue, because some old animal part of us understands exactly what she's asking for, that the flying only counts once somebody sees it.
For it to be real, it has to be witnessed. That's worth reading twice, because it's the entire engine of Leo. Attention is a life-giver in this sign. Being taken seriously is a life-giver. What the kid on the swing is doing has nothing to do with vanity, she's feeding herself something as necessary as food, and so are you every time you show someone a thing you made, a feeling you've been carrying, a version of yourself that hasn't been approved by committee yet.
And the reverse is just as physical. You know the moment. You run into the kitchen holding something tender, a plan, a drawing, a small strange hope, and the person you hand it to glances up, says that's nice, and goes back to their phone. Something in you closes a few millimeters. Do that to a person enough times and they stop running into the kitchen. Most of us walking around calling ourselves private or low-key are really just people who stopped asking to seen.
The biggest yes in the sky just picked a stage
Now add Jupiter. It's the largest thing in the solar system after the Sun itself, and in a chart it works the same way it does in the sky: it's the part of you that says yes, that wants the feast instead of the crumbs, that would rather regret the things it did than lie awake with the life it never tried. Whatever sign Jupiter moves through, it expands what that sign is hungry for. For the next year, it is expanding this one: the hunger to be seen. The year is asking you to shine, and it is going to be very honest with you about how long you've been rationing yourself.
If you want to feel the size of this, look backward one cycle. The last time Jupiter walked through Leo was the summer of 2014 into 2015. Where were you? What were you making, who were you becoming, what did you dare that year? For me the memory is almost embarrassing in its clarity, and most people I ask can name that chapter fast, because Leo years leave a mark. For me, it was the year I went to acting school in the Big Apple. (Talk about Leo energy haha) Either way, these are the chapters where life got bigger in exact proportion to how much of yourself you put on the table.
And here's the part I keep coming back to. Jupiter has two faces, and the old astrologers knew both. The Teacher face brings opportunity dressed in every costume, including crisis, and asks only that you recognize it and move. The Trickster face works differently. It doesn't wreck you with bad luck, it wrecks you with feeling lucky. You get expansive, you get charming, you start believing your own show, you coast. Steven Forrest says working with Jupiter means one discipline above all: you have to actually know what's good for you, because Jupiter will hand you what you ask for without checking whether it feeds you. Most of us make the opposite error from asking too big. We settle. We ask for a smaller life than we want because the ask itself feels safer, and Jupiter's whole year is about correcting that error.
Visible is not the same as beheld
Here's the uncomfortable part. We are the most photographed, posted, streamed, and surveilled people who have ever lived, and somehow the loneliest. The feed sells visibility by the pound, and the metric it pays you in was designed in a boardroom to keep you producing more of yourself. That machine is real, it profits from your hunger to be seen, and at the very same time the hunger itself is not the disease. The hunger is ancient and it is yours and it deserves better food than a like count. Even that banner knew it: the love of power is what the machine runs on, and the power of love is what the climb was actually for.
You can be seen by ten thousand people and witnessed by none of them.
Because there's a test, and it's simple. Applause only feeds you when what got applauded was true. Those two have built a whole career on being watched, and still, what they hung off that spire was the most exposed thing two people can do in public: a proposal, a yes, hearts out at 1,400 feet. Forrest, my teacher's teacher in this lineage, has a line I've never shaken: if there are no butterflies in your stomach, it isn't the Leo road. There were butterflies on that needle. That's what made it more than a stunt.
The two ways to waste this year
One is hiding. You keep the swing low, you post the safe thing, you sit on the song, the business, the confession, the ask, and you tell yourself nothing happened. Something did happen: the year came for you and you declined it. The other is glitter, all flash and angles and pretense, seen everywhere and known nowhere, the version of you that photographs well and feeds nothing. Both fail for the same reason. Neither one ever risked the real thing, and Leo pays out on risk alone.
I know both moves from the inside. I edit every video I put out myself, which means I spend hours alone with my own face, choosing what you get to see. The polished takes always survive the cut. The take where something in me actually shows, where my voice goes soft because I mean it too much, my cursor hovers over that one every time. Jupiter walked into Leo and the first thing it did was ask me why.
The one question I'm leaving you with
This is the part of every letter where I hand you the thing I'm carrying, and this year it's this: who actually witnesses you? Sit with it, because the answer isn't a number, and for a lot of us the honest answer is shorter than we'd like. Then do one thing with it. Sometime this week, show one person one thing before it's polished. A draft, a half-formed want, the sentence you keep deleting. Let it be seen with the butterflies still in it. Nobody needs to climb anything.
Tell me in the comments one place in your life you're ready to be witnessed this year.
And if you want to spend this fire year learning what shining looks like in your own chart, that's exactly what I built Elemental Fire for. Six weeks, live, in a small circle of people doing the same brave thing, finding where the fire actually lives in your chart and how to feed it. The next cohort is open now at the early bird price, and there are thirty seats total. Joining is also what keeps everything else here free, the letters, the videos, the horoscopes, so if this work has fed you and you want more of it in the world, this is the way you say so.
Claim your seat in Elemental Fire
The next letter comes with the Cancer New Moon. I love you. Go let somebody see you.
Daníel
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