Lena Tichy

Tag: power

  • something endangered, something extinct

    something endangered, something extinct

    The day before Christmas last year, my nearly six-year-old nephew announced that he had prepared a surprise for everyone. We were about to start dinner when it was my turn to be surprised. ‘Close your eyes and pick something,’ he said, holding a small carton box. I closed my eyes and fished out a lime green toy car. ‘Aha,’ my nephew said, and told me to follow him upstairs to his room.

    There, he opened his closet, revealing a shelf full of animal figures, some large, some small. ‘You picked the car from the box, that means you can now have one of my animals,’ he explained. I looked at him for a moment, wondering if he really meant it. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Which one do you want?’

    ‘I think I need a strong animal,’ I said, picturing the year ahead in my mind. My nephew is a passionate collector of Pokémon cards and thus deeply understands the mechanics of danger, protection and magic. ‘Take the elephant and the mammoth’, he said. ‘They’re the strongest ones.’ He handed me a plastic elephant the size of a large pillar candle and a mammoth that just about fit in the palm of my hand. I lightly pushed my fingertips into its sharp tusks.

    ‘You mean I can take them both home with me?’, I asked. ‘Yeah,’ my nephew said. ‘For as long as you need’.

    The elephant and the mammoth are now placed on the sideboard in my hallway and one of the first things I see when I come home. In some mysterious way, they remind me that this year calls for a very different kind of logic. You might call it dream logic or childhood logic. Conventional logic and pure rationality will not entirely cut it for the months ahead, I think. Not because 2026 is not a serious year; it is deeply serious, and dangerous too. But you already knew that. And when you’ve felt all the panic and outrage you can feel at the state of the world, what is left? What feeds your soul?

    It might be something endangered, something extinct. Most likely, it won’t be grand, loud or shiny (unless we’re talking about real elephants, of course). It might have lived for a long time in a box in your attic, waiting to be found again.

    As we move into the second half of January, you might notice a rising of the tension within and without. I say this because all of the personal planets – Venus, Mercury, the Sun and then Mars – will form a conjunction to Pluto in the early degrees of Aquarius over the next nine days. It’s a very distinct all-or-nothing kind of energy that can kick up our survival mechanisms and make us obsessive in our thinking. But on a personal, psychological level, Pluto also may unearth something that has tormented us for a long time and finally reveal its true unscary shape and size.

    In ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: ‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’

    It’s no small feat, to confront the things that frighten us. But the next couple of days invite us to do so. So here’s to trying, to staying with it. And to being surprised at what we dig up.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in January 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • singing in the dark

    singing in the dark

    March is closing out, how are you? Rattled, tired, or generally okay? No matter the emotional temperature, the skies gave us one more gift yesterday: A Partial Solar Eclipse in the sign of Aries, visible in the Northern Hemisphere.

    Eclipses used to be feared in ancient times: they were seen as a bad omen. It’s understandable our ancestors would think this, given that watching a Solar Eclipse can rob you of your eyesight and life on earth depends on the light of the sun (and the moon, of course). If we lose this light, even for just a couple of minutes, in the middle of the day, things start to feel very strange.

    For over a century now, citizen scientists have studied the behavior of animals, especially birds, during Eclipses. They found that, although a certain silence descends over nature during a Solar Eclipse, the Sparrow, Goldfinch and Thrush keep on singing as the moon travels before the sun and starts to block its light. Even at totality, birdsong continues. There are also other species, such as Swifts or red-winged Blackbirds who, instead of singing, completely abandon whatever foraging mission they were on and return to their nests. Over and over, this kind of behavior has been described as ‘confused’.

    But nature rarely is. Every time we pronounce some animal or plant behavior confused or strange, we end up finding a few decades later that the strangeness was underpinned by more-than-human wisdom and intelligence. We’re just playing catch-up.

    When the sun is eclipsed, the birds are singing in the dark. Perhaps they do it because the sudden darkness feels like the hour before dawn. Perhaps they have a wiser reason than that. But they sing. And if they don’t sing, they return to their nests, close their bird-eyes and huddle. Perhaps they do it because the darkness feels like the night. Perhaps, perhaps. We also know most of these birds will experience a Solar Eclipse only once in their brief lives, unlike humans. That must be strange.

    So, what about us? I think both huddling in whatever nest you have made for yourself or breaking out in song are great things to do during an Eclipse. The days surrounding a Lunar and Solar Eclipse are powerful, often bordering on overwhelming. Instead of a regular Full Moon and New Moon, March gave us a Lunar Eclipse in Virgo on the 13th and this Aries Solar Eclipse on the 29th. The next time we’ll get a pair of Eclipses like that is September 2025.

    Eclipses are a good time for doing a little less of everything and really trusting your gut. And although this newsletter seems one day late, I maintain this advice, including the huddling and singing, can easily be taken into the new week and the first days of April. If you feel like it, maybe you also want to look back. What started to appear in your life around the 20th of April 2023?

    This was the date of the first Solar Eclipse in Aries, lighting up a new place in our individual birth charts. For the last two years, several Eclipses have worked this terrain in our psyche and our lives, until yesterday, when the final Solar Eclipse in Aries closed out the cycle (and the month of March!). We won’t have another eclipse in Aries until 2032, which explains why astrologers make such a big deal of these things.

    So, here are some Aries Eclipse questions:

    How have you learned to honour your individuality and your own freedom since April 2023? Has someone or something entered your life and acted as a teacher on this front?

    Where in your life have you become more courageous, asking for forgiveness (if needed!) rather than permission?

    What have the last one-and a half years taught you about trusting your first impulses?

    This might be in your one-on-one relationships, your public roles, your work, with your family, your health, your own mind or your creative work and self-expression.

    The sun’s and moon’s light will continue to disappear on us, in regular intervals. And we need not fear it. Instead, we can use these moments to illuminate the progress we made, the ways we changed and grew. How we fought for what’s good and reached for what we yearned.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in March 2025. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • a coat that fits

    a coat that fits

    You could say we live in dangerous, revolutionary times, and I’d agree. I’m an astrologer and a writer; I see meaning in the movements of the planets and try to find language for what I see.

    Ever since dwarf planet Pluto moved into Aquarius last November, but even more so in recent weeks, I started to think about power again. My own and other people’s. The power of a collective. The way that the word itself is so slippery and, at least in my mind, inspires caution: damp fingertips hovering near a wall socket. A river, fat with fresh rain, tearing through the landscape. Power has an untameable core, which begs the question: what place do we give it in our lives? What shape? The death-dealing faces of power are all around us. But what does life-giving power look like? A power that is self-directed but not self-interested? A power tuned to liberation instead of oppression?

    As I thought about this, I pulled J. Ruth Gendler’s The Book of Qualities down from the shelf. It came out over forty years ago but you wouldn’t know it. In that one slim book, Gendler poetically describes 84 different emotional experiences such as Doubt, Trust or Ecstasy. Here’s her entry on Power:

    ‘Power made me a coat. For a long time I kept it in the back of my closet. I didn’t like to wear it much, but I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.

    I was afraid if I wore the coat too much someone would want to take it or else I would accidentally leave it in the dojo dressing room. But it has my name on the label now, and it doesn’t really fit anyone else. When people ask me where I found such a becoming garment, I tell them about the tailor, Power, who knows how to make coats that you grow into. First, you must find the courage to approach him and ask him to make your coat. Then, you must find the patience inside yourself to wear the coat until it fits.’

    What strikes me about Gendler’s vision of personal power is the subtlety: The tailor’s coat is a gift. You cannot buy it. It’s a piece of power but not the whole, raw thing. It’s as much as you can safely handle and the shape is as individual as your fingerprint (‘it has my name on the label now’). Whether your power is deeply quiet or loud and fierce doesn’t matter. It’s yours.

    I first read those words about ten years ago, in my late twenties. I had not yet found the courage to approach the tailor. But I thought that, perhaps, if I found a way to avoid any further grand mistakes in my life, I’d finally qualify for a coat and wear it proudly. It wasn’t so. I turned thirty, then thirty-five, I made more mistakes, I failed and I fucked up and Power made me a coat, despite all my flaws. And I started wearing it, awkwardly. I started to claim my power, awkwardly. It was confusing at first: I had spent so many years trying, and failing, to ‘be better’, to control things and engineer perfection because I thought that would give me access to my power.

    But as my coat started to settle on my shoulders it slowly hit me that power, the kind you have to grow into, is not about control at all. It is about being rooted in a fluid, bright place within yourself. From that place you can face reality, which is the one thing that will bring each and every one of us to our knees. But we can rise in it, too.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in February 2025. Subscribe or head to the archive here.