In the past, I was used to guilt and duty as the way I showed up, where I would bring structure, solidity, integrity, and behavior in exchange for acceptance and love. Right now, what people respond to is when I open my heart, and that’s where I feel much better. I just have to slowly start trusting myself to move from one side of the neural axis to the next.
Bitcoin is love. That’s how I felt this weekend.
This is lived experience.
I’m in Medellín, the last hours before I take the flight back to Miami Beach. The city is so luscious, so beautiful. The tropical vegetation just makes you want to be so appreciative of life.
Beauty settles my nervous system, and from that place appreciation becomes effortless rather than aspirational.
What I’ve been experiencing lately when I meet my friends at conferences is this underlying respect, and feelings of love, collaboration, and compassion. It’s not fake. We’re actually building friendship across ages. It doesn’t matter. We’re fun, we’re funny, we joke, we help each other. It’s a beautiful family.
Formed through presence, humor, and mutual regard.
I’ve never been idealistic about these things, but it makes me feel very hopeful. Before coming here, I had written an article about hope, optimism, and dissolution. I don’t know if I’m going to publish it. I want to be honest.
I don’t know if I’m going to publish it or merge it, because the feeling has shifted a lot. It’s been three or four days that I don’t watch news, I don’t go on Twitter or Instagram. No Substack, no nothing. I’m not engaged with the world outside. I’m just being very present with others, speaking.
Attention returned to the immediate, and I felt how much clarity arrives when I stop narrating experience and simply stay inside it.
Something happened to me. I became very vulnerable, and I decided to show that vulnerability.
Exposure became a conscious choice, something I could enter deliberately rather than spill unconsciously.
While at the conference, I was in two panels. I do very well in panels. Dialogue suits my way of thinking.
I do very well when people ask me questions. I’ve been doing this for a long time, especially as an artist. Since last year, I’ve wanted to do presentations, but the subjects I choose are very layered, very deep, and synthesized. If you don’t have the kind of mind I have, you might miss the connection. Maybe I’m too ambitious. I want to write like a thesis and spell it out in twenty minutes, hoping people will get into it. I was told by someone I trust to write a script so I don’t lose myself in time. I tried it twice, both at Adopting Bitcoin and here in Medellín. I love challenges, yet I have to be honest, it doesn’t feel like me.
It doesn’t feel like my essence.
Synthesis moves quickly for me.
Just before getting on the main stage, I bumped into Jeff Booth and Kent Halliburton, and I expressed that I realized I was very nervous. I didn’t want to read, but I couldn’t trust myself not to read. I had the slides. I had a script.
Trust became the central axis, trust in my voice, in my pacing, and in letting meaning arrive without forcing it. They said, go for it. Jeff told me his mind is similar, always synthesizing, connecting dots across subjects. I heard him say while talking to Frank Corva, “Let me unpack this in three stages.” That was the lesson I received.
I stood up and explained to everyone that I wanted to be vulnerable. I said that even though I would love to speak freely, I was going to read. I knew it wouldn’t be the same experience. I asked for feedback, and I decided to do it that way.
In my astrology, transiting Chiron is sitting on my natal Mars in the third house, squaring transiting Jupiter in Cancer in my sixth house, and also being squared by Mars, the Sun, and Venus in my twelfth house. There’s something courageous I feel I’m doing by showing up without perfection. In the past I was always performing, In New York, it was all about the persona I needed to embody.
Courage expresses through communication.
I was so nervous that I started shaking. I wasn’t in a great place.
The body was actively participating, signaling that something deeper was reorganizing before language could catch up.
I did it. I read it. It wasn’t a bad read, but it was clear I’m much better when I’m spontaneous. After that, I invited some close people to give me feedback. They were honest. I’m grateful. I’m grateful to myself for allowing feedback, because that’s a vulnerable spot for me. I used to attract a lot of criticism. I asked for this, and they gave me what I asked for.
Discernment is now available, because I can receive feedback without breaking up or becoming defensive, and let it refine rather than fragment me.
Some ideas came back to me. One is to do fire chats, inviting another Bitcoiner to have a conversation with me on stage. You pick a subject and riff.
Conversation carries intelligence in real time, allowing synthesis to happen live rather than being pre-compressed into a performance of what is “correct”.
Another idea is to make small animations and present the material as a short film, with a different rendering.
Some material benefits from temporal form.
That’s what I’m thinking.
I am refining how my work moves through others, and that refinement requires speaking less, editing more, and letting things condense before they are shared.
“Condensation is when experience level is small enough to be compensated.”
As an afterthought, I see this clearly through my nodal axis. I come from Capricorn in the eleventh house, where duty, responsibility, and contribution to the collective shaped how I belonged. Structure, integrity, and usefulness were how I learned to be accepted. My North Node in Cancer in the fifth house is asking for creative expression, emotional risk, presence from the heart, and joy that does not need justification.
Both ends of this axis are being squared by Neptune, dissolving old motivations and making guilt visible. Saturn is approaching the same point, about to meet Neptune at zero degrees Aries. This feels like a threshold. Something new wants to initiate directly from me, without proving itself through structure. This helps me understand why showing up from duty no longer works in my body, and why opening my heart feels exposed and true at the same time.
Thoughts after the New Moon in Capricorn
As of today, Venus is in a balsamic relationship with Pluto at three degrees of Aquarius in my twelfth house, making a perfect square to my Jupiter at three degrees Taurus in my third house. I feel this as a new beginning in how I value my words in the world, and it starts by speaking less, by being more quiet. This is how it is being initiated in my body. Jupiter adds meaning to this square by asking me to be precise about what deserves expansion and what needs containment. On Thursday, January 22, Mercury in Aquarius conjoins Pluto. Words will want to come through, and shortly after they will square my Sun and Mercury, creating that familiar ninety-degree tension that snaps awareness into clarity. These squares feel like pressure points that wake me up rather than obstacles to avoid. Last but not least, the Sun will conjoin Pluto and square my Jupiter a day after, Sun, and Mercury, completing a full initiation. This is showing me how it feels to be myself in relationship to the whole, and how that relationship is being purified as transiting Pluto continues its approach to my Ascendant.
This week also brings the WEF at Davos. Davos is the annual gathering of political leaders, central bankers, corporate heads, and institutional voices that, for decades, set the tone of global coordination under the promise of stability, growth, and shared vision. Its original purpose was dialogue, alignment, and long-term planning for an interconnected world. These are the same circles that promoted mass vaccination campaigns, dietary substitutions like insects away from animal protein, and narratives around immigration and climate that were presented as inevitable and unquestionable.
What feels different now is that even within that space, there is an open admission that the frameworks no longer hold, that something fundamental has shifted and cannot be patched or narrated back into coherence.
This aligns precisely with Neptune entering Aries on Jan 26th. The illusion no longer fits our eyes or our ears. The stories stop working at the sensory level. Fantasies that once sustained authority, progress, and inevitability lose their charge because they can no longer be embodied or believed. I’m leaving a few videos here so you can make up your own mind and feel into what is happening. I’m not in the mood to explain or persuade, and I’m not at one hundred percent. This feels like something to be observed carefully, taken in quietly, and processed without commentary.
“It works when you take time. It works when you take discipline to rewire your nervous system, to reload a new way of relating to your thoughts.”
Kyle and Luke 😀👇
Let’s listen to her 😳 👇
Steven E kuhn 👆
