The Covid pandemic changed everyone and everything. Who can doubt the idea that as years go by, memory will turn the pandemic into one of those “January 1, 1 A.D.” kinds of dates – pivot-points in history, like the birth of social media or Beatlemania. I never caught Covid myself, but I’m no exception when it comes to my life being “pivoted” by it – for one thing, pre-Covid, I was on the road non-stop for forty years. It’s a crazy way to live. After Covid, my passport has cobwebs forming on it and the Transportation Security Agency has barely crossed my natural boundaries in three years.

The roots of these changes in my lifestyle actually go back a little further than Covid. Late in the previous decade I saw Pluto and Saturn bearing down on conjunctions with my Sun, plus the progressed Moon about to enter my 12th house. Many astrologers would have suggested that Fear might have been my best strategy, but that’s not how I live with the planets – I feel that  they’re up there to guide me, not to scare me. I saw that to head off danger, I needed to make some changes. I was turning seventy. Maybe it was time to travel less. The planets asked me that question – I answered it in my own way with a big Yes.

At that time I had half a dozen apprenticeship programs going around the world, each one meeting once or twice per year. I took those responsibilities seriously, so I gave a couple years’ notice on ending them. Around the same time, with Catie Cadge and Jeff Parrett, I began to lay the groundwork for my online school – the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology. In January 2020, I did my last public program before the Plague struck – it was a synastry class in Palm Springs, California. We had over a hundred people signed up – and something like thirty of them dropped out, many citing “the flu.” That was my first inkling of what was to come.