Side Notes
by BB Soto
The thoughts that don’t make the main text—but matter anyway ♥️
Cosmic Currents: February & March 2026
Pisces season is upon us—a time of intuition, compassion, and dreamlike reflection. After Aquarius's clear-eyed focus on progress and ideas, Pisces dissolves boundaries and softens the pace. Every Pisces season is one of surrender, imagination, and emotional connection. But this year, this energy is amplified. Like the knobs in This Is Spinal Tap, this year we go up to 11.
2026 Astrology Correspondence Timeline
This year, I’m keeping a living timeline—a kind of cosmic, digital field journal—that tracks the major astrological movements and aspects as they unfold. Sometimes I feel like reading ahead feels ambiguous and foreign, whereas reflecting in hindsight opens understanding. Think of taking a bird’s-eye view rather than nose pressed to the glass—a way to look backward and forward at once. Along the way, I’ll be layering in correspondences from mythology, folklore, tarot, literature, and art—not as decorative vibes, but as symbolic translators—so the movements in the sky start speaking a language that actually relates to daily life.
Tarot Symbolism: The Empress
“She is above all things universal fecundity and the outer sense of the Word.”
—Arthur Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1909
To say the Empress is a fertility goddess archetype isn’t quite capturing the depth of her essence. When Waite describers her as “universal fecundity,” he is bestowing her with the possession of not only the ability to be fertile, but to produce and reproduce in plentitude.
It’s the difference between a woman who has one or two children—she had to be fertile enough to become pregnant and therefore had the ability—and the fecund woman who would be the mother with thirteen children.
No, the Empress is more than just fertility. She is the be all and end all of a nature/mother/love/fertility goddess. She isn’t just the mother of new life personified; she is the action that brings about new life personified. Even more, she is the energetic force that drives all creation and growth through all through all seasons through all the years—she is the force that turns that seasonal wheel.