In July 2025, Uranus, the planet of disruption, innovation, and revolution, entered the sign of Gemini, beginning a cycle that will run until 2033.

In a few days I’ll be standing in Washington, D.C. for the 250th anniversary of American independence — and I can’t stop thinking about what the sky was doing the last time this particular astrological moment came around.

According to astrologer Nick Dagan Best, author of Uranus USA, this Uranus in Gemini transit has a track record: it correlated with the American Revolutionary War (1774–1782), the Civil War (1861–1865), and World War II (1941–1945). These three cycles are the most most disruptive, identity-defining chapters in America’s history, all under the same planetary signature.

We are, right now, at the start of a Uranus in Gemini cycle again.

There’s something strange and clarifying about planning a trip to celebrate the nation’s founding while standing inside the very transit that, by this reading, attended its birth.

Whatever else 1776 was, it was Uranus-in-Gemini energy: disruption in communication (pamphlets, printing presses, town squares full of argument), a radical break with old structures, a generation willing to risk everything on the bet that things could be organized differently. That’s the frame for the holiday I’ll be marking this week.

It’s not lost on me that I’m doing this while consumed with opposition to the current administration — grossly incompetent people occupying the highest offices, daily disruption that doesn’t feel like liberation so much as chaos.

Disruption is hard. It’s hard for most Americans living during this moment of our nation’s history. But the same planetary signature that’s overhead today was overhead in 1776, and in 1861, and in 1941 — moments this country eventually moved through, however imperfectly, toward something on the other side.

If I can hold onto that pattern instead of just the fear, there’s hope in it.

This July 4th, walking around the monuments and museums of the capital, it’s worth recalling that the people who founded America were themselves living through a Uranus in Gemini transit — their own chaos, their own disruption. They left us a gift: proof that destruction and loss can become opportunities to rebuild something better.

That feels like the right frame for the 250th: not nostalgia, not despair, but a reminder that this exact astrological weather has visited before — and we’re still here, still revising the experiment.

In September I’m heading to Chicago for the United Astrology Conference — the largest gathering of its kind, and itself a kind of pilgrimage for Uranus-in-Gemini thinking. While I’m there, I’ll visit the Obama Center.

The Obama Center isn’t a monument to a finished story — it’s a bet on the next one. That’s what I want to carry with me through this whole Uranus-in-Gemini cycle: not the fear of what’s breaking, but faith in what people keep choosing to build anyway.

That’s the hope I’m packing for this trip — not naive optimism that everything will be fine, but a stubborn, planetary-scale faith that disruption and renewal have always traveled together, and that we get to decide which one we lean into. I’m choosing renewal. I hope you will too.