This past weekend, and the one before it, I found myself immersed in the most soul-satisfying, chaos-reducing way to do my reading and notetaking. Notes, you see, were already living cozily in my Samsung—great for sorting, archiving, color-coding. Under the last transiting Mercury trine Pluto—an alignment perfect for poking about in one’s intellectual habits—I underwent a sort of metamorphosis. A successful transformation. The notetaking process was reborn! Beautiful, it was… until the inevitable betrayal. Because then—crash of thunder!—I discover that Samsung won’t let me access my notes from a desktop or laptop unless said computer is also in its little ecosystem. A subtle hostage situation masked as software convenience. You’re locked into their world.
Now originally, I’d bought the Kindle Scribe out of sheer paper-fatigue. I was tired of hauling around half-forests’ worth of notes, scribbles that then had to be retyped, deciphered, and rearranged. But then I thought the Scribe would be too slow, too clunky. But lo! As transiting Mercury has now conjuncted my Pluto, I found myself intensely ruminating deeply on how to actually read more and take better notes. Initially (the origin story), I imagined a seamless digital utopia: the small Kindle for reading, the Scribe for jotting thoughts, musings, astrological insights—Scorpio here, Mercury-Neptune hallucinations there, a passing Pluto transit on the Moon like a shadow in a dream. Lovely, right?
But then came the seduction of speed. A faster Android tablet! Lightning-fast notes! And, of course—I overthink everything. It’s part of the joy and curse of being intellectually curious with a tendency toward existential spiral. But you know what? It turns out I actually prefer handwriting my notes. On the Scribe. It feels more grounded, more real. So here’s the thing: I only write the note once. Just once. Right there, in the moment, as it bursts forth from the stream of consciousness onto the screen of my Kindle Scribe. No more duplication, no rewriting it. When I’ve filled enough digital pages, like inspiration always does, it’s enough for an article. A proper, coherent piece. And the Scribe can convert that handwritten scrawl into text with a bit of magic. I email it to myself, and done.
Now, about Amazon’s clippings—these turned out to be miserly little snippets. Infuriating. You read, you highlight, you think you’ve saved something valuable, only to realize later it’s vanished into the ether. No alert, no warning. Just gone. But this very limitation broke me of a bad habit. I used to hoard notes, endlessly saving, never sorting, procrastinating the great “write-up” that never came. But now, thanks perhaps to Transiting Mercury conjunct Natal Pluto—my little therapist—I’ve had a breakthrough. The focus it’s given me is oddly specific. Laser-focused, obsessive even. And for once, it’s working in my favor.
So what’s next? I’ll revisit my astrology library. The books are old companions now. And in this return to them, a kind of second sight, I’ll draw out anything I missed. Bits of gold that slipped past the first time. Because a re-read, done with a fresh mind and a new sense of purpose, can feel like meeting the same soul in a different lifetime. All this alongside my regular Kindle reading, of course—new knowledge and old staples of knowledge, intertwined like the double helix of understanding.
A side note, though it may soon become the main topic: while perusing the transits over on Astrodienst—I saw it. Transiting Uranus entering Gemini. Cue ominous strings. I’ve been dreading it, if I’m honest. A kind of soulful bracing, knowing my roof isn’t as secure as I’d like. I’m a mutable creature. Virgo to Pisces, scattered like stars across the axis of adaptability. And here comes Uranus, the Great Disruptor, the shock planet of the sky, about to go full mischief-maker on my Sun, Saturn, Ascendant, Moon, Mercury—all queued up for some kind of electric karmic intervention. From Gemini, it’ll T-square and square. But here’s the strange mercy of it: being inside a transit often makes me write about it better. Living the madness firsthand. A transmission from the eye of the storm.
What will these Uranus transits mean for us mutables—the adaptable, the restless, the spiritually amphibious. It’s going to get madder than usual, no doubt. Shocks, shakeups, and rapid changes. But perhaps we, of all signs, are better suited to the chaos. Meanwhile, Neptune’s drifting across the cardinals bringing a spiritual fog for Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn. Dissolution and redemption, confusion and longing. A long strange trip. And Pluto is aiming its dark little telescope at the fixed signs, setting up slow-moving transformations that grind down to the bone. It knows exactly where you’ve been hiding your emotional baggage. You don’t notice it until the walls of your inner life start to lean a little funny.
Just ask Jennifer Lopez, J.Lo—a glamorous embodiment of Sun in Leo-fixed energy, recently caught under Pluto’s evolutionary glare. Public image shaken, old patterns exposed, divorce, control unraveling. It’s pressure. And from pressure, diamonds—or breakdowns—are born. Fixed signs—Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius—you’re on Pluto’s hit list now. But fear not. These transits are soul-level deep. They’ll change your life in some irrevocable way, but it can be part of the evolution. I’ve only got Mars in Aquarius in this domain, and it’s poised at the 29th degree—far, far from the jaws of Pluto’s evolutionary purge. Safe, for now. But you never know with the outer planets. They’ve got long arms and terrible patience.
To cap it all off, fittingly, my notetaking has changed again under this Mercury-Pluto mini transit. It’s like I’m going round in a circle, returning to the original method I’d first set out to escape. But something’s changed. It feels cyclical. More like a spiraling staircase where each turn brings me back to the same view, but from a higher floor. What began as a rebellion against clunky systems, incompatible apps, and the tyranny of over-clipping has now become a kind of synthesis. A rebirth through friction. Perhaps that’s what a Mercury-Pluto conjunction really is: a slow-burning recalibration of thought. Digging, refining, destroying only to rebuild something that works.