Content warning: this article briefly discusses sexual assault.

In the beginning, there was a spark. And everything else that followed was an attempt to feed the flame, to notice its absence when it diminished, and to grapple with the question of pursuing it once again, even if it means abandoning the known for unfamiliar territory, and even (and especially if) it leads to trouble.

When planets conjoin, there is a beginning taking place between them. And in the case of Venus and Mars, that beginning often feels like a spark.

One of the more unusual features of 2022 is the agonizingly long conjunction taking place between Venus and Mars from late January through the end of March, more or less. For context, it helps to remember that a Venus/Mars conjunction usually happens in a matter of days. But thanks to the irregular speed of Venus as it stationed direct in January and gradually began to pick up speed again — which just happened to coincide with Mars catching up in the nick of time — Venus and Mars are traveling together within 1 degree of each other for a full month, and are in range of each other for even longer.

What this means will vary greatly from context to context. In mundane astrology, we’re seeing a pronounced tension on the world stage between acts of war (Mars) and calls for peace (Venus) play out in real time as I write this. Your mileage will vary for the way that this sort of thing is experienced on a more personal level, but the word a lot of people circle back to is usually “passion.”

“Passion” is one of those words that has largely become flattened with overuse. What do we know about passionate people? They care a lot. They move in accordance with what they care about. They don’t understand boredom or indifference. And they don’t generally have a lot of chill.

If you look into the etymology of the word “passion,” this last part begins to make a lot more sense. The word “passion” comes from the Latin patior, which means “to suffer,” or “to endure.” It also means “to allow,” or “to acquiesce.” “Passion” not as in your favorite hobby, but “passion” as in “passion of the Christ.”

This immediately makes me think about the relationship between desire and suffering in Buddhism. Venus and Mars are both planets of desire. If Venus turns you on to what you like, Mars turns you up to actively pursue it. To be human is to want things, and wanting most often occurs where there’s an absence of having. Wanting also becomes stronger the less easily we can have it. And so we often choose suffering over satisfaction, not because we have to necessarily, but because so often, it keeps us honest. Yearning is a sharp sensation that contradicts the placid listlessness of not wanting for anything. Yearning has a way of keeping us embodied. Maybe at the end of the day, hunger is just what reminds us that we’re alive, in this physical form with all its perils and vulnerabilities.

In the nativity, the Venus/Mars conjunction often shows up in people who are intensely creative, intensely driven, or intensely horny — and not always in the fun way. This by no means describes everyone, or even most people with this placement, but there’s something to the fact that a lot of people who become embroiled in sex scandals (or are outright sexual predators) have this in their birth charts. This is talked about at greater length in the February 2022 episode of The Astrology Podcast, and it’s noted that Prince Andrew, Jeffery Epstein, Eliot Spitzer, and Anthony Weiner all have a Venus/Mars conjunction. So does Bill Clinton, by the way. Ghislaine Maxwell has it as an out of sign conjunction. Louis C.K. has a Venus/Mars square.

Venus/Mars is, in some capacity, a Sex Pest Signature. On The Astrology Podcast, Patrick Watson describes Venus/Mars as a signifier of sexual and social transgressions. We can’t ignore the dark extremes that this sort of thing can be taken to. But in the middle of the bell curve, maybe there’s a slightly inappropriate slide into someone’s DMs, or a crass joke cracked in a professional setting, or excessive PDA (“Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s”).

A transgression can occur when you merely want something you’re not supposed to want. Especially when it compels you past the breaking point of all the “shoulds” that surround it. In mythology, Venus and Mars were having an affair that literally ended with the two of them ensnared in a net. Is the message here that every forbidden love is a trap, or is the process of feeling drawn to something that doesn’t feel completely familiar, or allowed, necessarily a form of entanglement? That wanting necessarily comes with risk, because we may soon be caught in a web of consequences that isn’t shaped quite like the one we’re already used to?

I spent this winter’s Venus in Capricorn transit unintentionally observing Venus through the lens of television. As the planet of art, it makes sense that Venus would speak to us through the great works and pop culture contributions of others.

In November, maybe about a week after Venus made its initial ingress into Capricorn, I decided to take on the project of watching the entire Twin Peaks franchise from start to finish. What I didn’t realize at the time was that its creator, David Lynch, has his natal Venus at 26 degrees of Capricorn, which is the very same degree where Venus was getting ready to station retrograde in December. By consuming his work, I was somehow participating in, or understanding through, David Lynch’s Venus Return.

This was also during the part of the Venus Retrograde where Venus was hanging out with Pluto for a long time. And in so many ways, Twin Peaks is a Venus/Pluto story. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s basically a story about the many stories that intersect with the murder, or abduction into the underworld, of Laura Palmer, a small town’s homecoming queen. And as we gradually find out, that underworld is a very real alternate dimension. It’s Hades kidnapping Persephone all over again.

One of the main story arcs involves an FBI agent, Dale Cooper, being assigned to the case. Agent Cooper is not just a good detective for the normal reasons, but also because he uses dreams and omens to circle in on the mystery and eventually track Laura down in the underworld. In some ways, you could say Laura Palmer kidnaps Agent Cooper. Their bond, or the intersection of their fate, transcends dimensions and time. In Twin Peaks, time occurs on the level of eons. This is Venus conjunct Pluto in a Saturn-ruled sign.

The Venus/Pluto dynamic, to me, was also about loving someone for their ugly parts. Laura was not a wholesome small town darling — she was deeply troubled because of the way she had been violated, and she occasionally corrupted the people in her orbit. This becomes more and more apparent as the story unfolds. There are many other versions of Venus/Pluto living on in the secondary relationships that make up the ongoing drama, including outright domestic abuse and more subtle forms of entrapment.

But maybe what’s even more relevant is that Lynch didn’t originally want the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer to be solved. He wanted there to be an element of the unknown present to provide the tension, and maybe to keep the focus on Laura’s humanity and complexity. But we also know that power and control (Pluto) flourishes best in secrecy. Naming a demon or a monster tends to strip them of their power.

At some point in January, right around the time Mars was about to enter Capricorn and Venus was stationing direct in anticipation of their long conjunction, I switched gears and started in on the equally big project of watching all of Sex and the City from start to finish. Similarly, it started to feel like Venus was switching gears — away from the heavy, covetous, intensely brooding mood of deep winter and into a more lighthearted version of someone who’s “excited to get out there again.”

As it turns out, New York City itself is a prime example of the Venus/Mars conjunction — in the chart of its consolidation into an official city on January 1, 1898, Venus and Mars were exactly conjunct at 29 degrees of Sagittarius.

I couldn’t help but wonder (lolz) if Sex and the City was really just a decades-long meditation on this configuration in New York City’s birth chart. And I want to give props to Margaret (@madmarg_) on Twitter for asking if the premiere of the show had any relevant synastry with the astrology of NYC, which is what led me to discover that the Ascendant of the premiere was conjunct the NYC Venus/Mars. It doesn’t really get more on the nose than that.

The writing is loudly written on the wall with this show, but I thought Carrie distilled it into a pretty succinct thesis once or twice.

Here are a couple quotes of hers I simply had to write down because they seemed to drive at the essence of what I’m talking about here:

“New York City is all about sex. People getting it, people trying to get it, people who can’t get it. No wonder the city never sleeps. It’s too busy trying to get laid.”

"I am someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't live without each other love."

Later, I watched Inventing Anna, which is also, in some ways, a show about the restlessness of New York City. In Inventing Anna, Neff says:

“Everyone here is running a game. Everyone here needs to score. Everyone here is hustling. Everyone here wants something. Money, power, image, love."

So there you have it. In order to stay hungry, you can never be full. In order to stay hot, you have to be okay with feeling a little bothered too.

People always talk about the elusive “spark” — the zesty feeling of good chemistry on a first date, the little flame of inspiration that compels you to create something, the antidote to dullness and monotony and lifelessness. We are either slaves to desire, or we use our dissatisfaction as an inflection point, an impetus.

What does it take to keep the spark alive? What happens when you finally get what you want? The fact that we meet the Sex and the City characters again and again as they age means we get to see them go through the cycle of “happily ever after” to “needing out of this marriage” and back again.

This is a moving meditation on the fact that passion is inherently unstable. Some people, depending on who you ask, say that too much chemistry right off the bat is a bad sign. What this really clues us into, though, is that as much as we might think we want to feel satisfied, at our core, we really don’t, because satisfaction is inherently unstable too. When Venus conjoins Mars, the muse meets the action hero to inspire us out of a rut. This is the beginning of trouble, maybe. But it’s also the beginning of creativity and devotion.

And so as we experience this myth-making in real time during the first months of 2022, we’re basically getting a master class in how to sustain that spark, how to sustain that high note until everything rearranges itself around it. With the involvement of Pluto and Saturn, the net of entrapment encircles itself around us, but maybe we walked into it on purpose, too. Until Venus breaks free at the very end of March after facing Saturn — aka “the consequences” — we might not fully understand the nature of the trap we’re creating for ourselves, nor how preferable it is to the trap of our previous circumstances. Still, something about this extreme vexation is setting us up for the limitless sea of love that is April 2022. Your discontent holds the key to everything you’ve ever wanted, and maybe quite literally everything you didn’t know you wanted.

P.S. I talk a lot about some of the thinking that went into this post on my recent guest episode with Bad Astrologers! Listen here.