State of the Union: 2026 Fire Horse Edition

There was a moment in early August when I felt a strong desire to write this blog post. To pause, check in with myself, and with all of you as we entered the Earth element season of the year. This is important work to be done as the energetic blueprint for the upcoming year is being conceived at this time. Themes and intentions and what we are working through in late summer helps set the stage and ground the energy for the next year. Part of that work is also to process, digest, integrate, and settle emotional debts from the energy we have been working with in the current year.

Unfortunately this Earth element season of 2026, I was still deeply in it and not at all in a place to process anything quite yet. Only maybe now, in the beginning moments of the Metal season, am I beginning to digest and integrate. I blame it on this dang Yang Fire Horse. Maybe it's just me but from my conversations with others over this year, I highly doubt it.

I'll tell you what the Yang Fire Horse year felt like for me and what I witnessed collectively. But before I do so I want to refer you back to this blog post that I wrote as the Yang Fire Horse year was beginning.

As a quick reminder, here were some important points: "The deeper shadow of the Yang Fire Horse is disconnection: from consequence, from interdependence, from the slow intelligence of Earth. It can seduce us into believing that speed equals progress, visibility equals value, and freedom means doing whatever we want, whenever we want. It exacerbates our cultural tendencies of only valuing productivity - even when that productivity is empty. Again moving just for the sake of moving. It's important to remember what burns brightest also burns out fastest. On a personal level, we may experience this year with burnout disguised as passion. Overcommitment justified as 'alignment.' A restless need for novelty, visibility, or affirmation. There may be a temptation to bypass reflection in favor of motion, or to equate intensity with truth. The Horse wants to move and it does not naturally pause to ask whether the direction it’s running is wise."

In this moment, the small, victorious child within me says, "I told you so!" Although that child (and my whole self) truly wishes she had been wrong. But what I saw then and what only has been confirmed now is that the energies of the Yang Fire Horse were and continue to exacerbate the energies of our society, amplifying the tendencies that include disregard for consequence, a prioritization of individual desire over collective wellbeing, and an excessiveness that mirrors many of the cultural, ecological, and political imbalances we have been witnessing. Themes of toxic masculinity, toxic success, hyper independence, extreme self-centeredness divorced from relational and ecological responsibilities, extraction, global warming, and feelings of urgency/emergency.

What I wrote in the blog back in January was that I was fearful that it would take the toxic, oppressive, imperialistic ways of being that are rampant within our world and just tip the scales. I wrote that Taoism teaches us that freedom without balance is chaos. And this is precisely what I have witnessed. In my life, in other's lives, and within the collective. Businesses ending (often due to burnout), business relationships ending (often for self-serving reasons that don't serve the common good), oh so many marriages and partnerships ending, communities falling apart, no one having time for each other, more and more burnout, more and more oppressive imperialism, more technological gains at the expense of life, and the planet truly shifting to a point of no return with landslides and hurricanes and the impending doom of an apocalyptic el niño. I can't say I'm surprised but honestly it has been so much worse than I even expected

I am truly not a fan of the Yang Fire Horse, but I do have to admit he has been doing his job. And despite how painful that job has been to experience, at times truly existential, dark-night-of-the-soul experiences, I can see now that there has been a purpose to the burning. The vision that kept coming to me throughout this year was of the Yang Fire Horse, so freedom-loving, so fiercely independent, that he quite literally bucks off whatever is not in alignment, whatever excess weight is holding him back. Often, he illuminates the situation while simultaneously bucking it off, and we are left standing there watching it implode the moment it hits the ground. And it can happen so quickly that there is a real sense of whiplash. It takes time for the smoke to clear before we can gain any clarity about what just happened and why.

These endings, these burnouts, these things falling apart have been truly painful. But the Horse has been doing us a favor. I can see that now.

I recently came across a quote that said, “God has removed you from a table where you used to sit in order to save you from a host who was serving you poison.” Replace “God” with “Yang Fire Horse,” and suddenly this becomes a strangely validating way to look at what has been happening throughout this year. Sometimes the thing we experience as loss is actually an intervention. Sometimes the table has to disappear before we understand what we were being asked to consume.

Earlier this year, my warning was to cultivate humility, patience, and balance as a counterweight to the energies of the Horse. I asked: "How might we honor the vitality and liberty of the wild horse while also embodying the humility of the tame horse - willing to carry weight, to serve relationship, and to move in harmony with others?"

I probably did not begin this year particularly focused on those virtues. But watching so much burn to the ground has a way of forcing humility upon you. It has forced me into patience. It has forced me to find balance, not because I necessarily chose these things, but because there was nowhere else to go. I don't think I am the only one. And I truly hope we remember these lessons, because they will serve us well in the coming year of the Yin Fire Goat. The collective energy of the Goat feels welcome to me. In many ways, it feels like a natural response to, or perhaps even a symptom of, the collective disillusionment created by the sheer mania that has been highlighted by this year. Cosmologically, the energies are always moving toward balance. The Yin Fire Goat brings a very different quality: harmony, community, kindness, sincerity, justice, warmth, and a quieter kind of strength.

The Yang Fire Horse year feels like a tipping point. A pressure release. He was the poor soul sent in to do the dirty work of illuminating the life-oppressive ways of being that have become so normalized around us, and then breaking them apart in an attempt to create re-alignment. We have seen what happens when independence becomes hyper-independence, when vitality becomes excess, when freedom becomes separation, when desire becomes extraction, and when our relationship with the living world is replaced by outright disregard for life. And we cannot keep building from those foundations.

Perhaps that is the gift the Horse leaves us with. He has not necessarily shown us what to build but, instead, he has helped us see what can no longer remain. He has cleared a path for us to not only recognize the need for more life-affirming ways of being, but to begin the work of creating them. And the Yin Fire Goat will help us with that.

My vision for 2027 is that we all simply “maw” away by a hearth fire. Healing, connecting, warming ourselves. But in a very simple, nurturing way. Slow and steady, like a Goat. We sit by the fire and reconnect. And perhaps, with patience, humility, and balance, we realize that this is the only work that needs to be done for now. Before we rebuild, we heal. We slow the fuck down. We remember our place here. We remember who and what we share this place with. And we remember that perhaps there is nothing more we need to add.

Maybe our purpose is to reconnect and tend to the simplest threads within the tapestry of life.

If the Yang Fire Horse came through and unraveled it all, then perhaps it is time to begin reweaving but in a new way.

Earlier, I wrote that the medicine for 2026 was not suppression, but containment. Fire does not need to be extinguished; it needs a hearth. The Yin Fire Goat may provide the hearth and containment that were difficult, perhaps even impossible, to create for ourselves this year. I had imagined that containment was meant to give the Horse a clear direction, but perhaps the direction was always pointing toward what comes next: toward the Goat. And if this year has felt directionless at times, perhaps that is okay. Not everything needed to make sense while it was burning. Some things need to burn before we can see what remains.

I, myself, am remaining humble and patient (I feel like this is not even a choice at this point) as I process this last year, sift through the ashes, and wait for the smoke to clear. I have been meditating on:

What will remain from before, if anything?

Or is the point to let the ashes be ashes? To let go of it all, trusting that what has burned can become compost, and that compost can become fertile ground for something entirely new to grow?

Maybe I am a little late to the process of digesting and integrating all of this. But I remain deeply optimistic and hopeful about the Yin Fire Goat.

And perhaps this is also why the direction my own life is taking feels so meaningful right now. So much of what I am being called toward in eco-spiritual leadership is about this very movement: from separation back into relationship, from extraction toward reciprocity, from domination toward humility, and from trying to control the living world toward learning how to listen and participate within it. I don't feel called to build another system on top of the ashes. I feel called to help create the conditions in which we can remember how to belong to one another, to place, to the Earth, and to the larger web of life that has been here all along.

Perhaps that is the work of the Goat. Not rushing to rebuild or trying to fix everything. Just tending the hearth, tending the relationships, tending the soil, tending ourselves...and slowly, patiently, beginning to reweave the threads of a life-affirming world.