THRESHOLD WRITINGS FROM THE FIRE

We Are Standing at a Threshold: The Most Sacred Week in 6,000 Years

Published February 16, 2026

Dear Ones,

I am writing to you from a place of deep reverence. As I sit with what is unfolding in the heavens right now, I find myself at a loss for ordinary words — because what we are moving through this week is not ordinary. Not even a little.

This is, by every measure I know as a healer and student of the cosmos, one of the most spiritually charged passages any of us will live through in our lifetimes. And I want you to understand why — not as a collection of cosmic statistics, but as a living, breathing story of which you and I are a part.  All of you who know me know that I embrace and work within multiple traditions:  Shamanism, Buddhism, Animism, Celtic Paganism, and Astrology (both Western and Chinese/Daoist).  Mystics of every lineage have whispered across the centuries: that beneath every apparent division, every boundary, every distance between self and other, there is only one living web, and it has never been torn.  Unity is not something we are working toward — it is the only thing that has ever existed; everything else is a forgetting.

Come with me now into the deep. Let us descend together into the mystical ocean of this week's sacred convergence — feeling our way through its currents, breathing in its medicines, and opening ourselves, fully and without reservation, to every force, every intelligence, every gift that is being offered to us in this luminous passage of time.

[If you prefer to listen to this teaching, the audio recording is here.]

⬡  THE RING OF FIRE: NEW MOON SOLAR ECLIPSE IN AQUARIUS

Tomorrow, on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, the sky opens. A New Moon Solar Eclipse arrives in the late degrees of Aquarius — what astronomers call an Annular Eclipse, and what mystics across centuries have called the Ring of Fire. In this rare configuration, the Moon passes directly before the Sun but does not fully cover it. Instead, it leaves the Sun's outer corona glowing around it like a crown of light, a halo of gold suspended in the darkened sky. From Antarctica — Earth's own southern axis, the pole of stillness and silence — this ring is visible in its full annular glory.  

An eclipse of this kind, in Aquarius, at 28 degrees — the final deep breaths of the Water Bearer — is not a gentle nudge. It is a portal activation. The New Moon would normally invite new beginnings, fresh intention, the planting of seeds. But eclipsed, those energies become supercharged, accelerated, and in some cases, destabilizing to what is already crumbling so that something truer can rise. The scales fall from our eyes. The systems we have been operating within — the outdated patterns, the collective agreements we never consciously signed — are suddenly, vividly visible. Eclipses do not cause endings; they illuminate what was already ending, so we can choose how to meet it.

This first eclipse opens a new Leo–Aquarius cycle that will unfold across 2026 and beyond. At its heart is the great Aquarian question: Who are we to one another? How do we build the communities, the systems, the futures, that serve not the few but the whole? How do we honor our individual uniqueness — our soul's distinct voice — while weaving it into something greater than ourselves?

For those of us working in the shamanic and animist traditions, the answer to that question is one we have always known: we look to the web. The web of life. The living intelligence of the world around us.

If you feel something shift this week — if you notice old stories rising up, or feel a strange electric clarity arrive, or if sleep brought you vivid, portentous dreams — you were feeling this eclipse doing its work. Breathe into it. Do not rush to resolve what is still unfolding.

⬡  LUNAR NEW YEAR: THE YEAR OF THE FIRE HORSE

Also, on February 17th — in a cosmic synchronicity that takes my breath away — the Lunar New Year begins. We are now living in the Year of the Fire Horse.

This is no ordinary Horse year. The Chinese (Daoist) zodiac runs on a 12-year cycle, but the elements rotate alongside it, meaning the same pairing of animal and element returns only once every 60 years. The Fire Horse last walked among us in 1966. The next time will be 2086. Many of us will not live to see it again. This is a once-in-a-lifetime threshold.

I confess this one is personally meaningful to me, because I was born in the Year of the Fire Horse. I came into this life carrying this energy — and I have spent decades learning to ride it rather than be consumed by it (and those of you who know me will not be surprised to hear I've come perilously close to being set ablaze!). Because the Fire Horse is not gentle. It does not wait for permission. It does not accommodate hesitation or passivity. And now it has returned.

The Horse in Chinese cosmology represents freedom, vitality, and movement — the sacred forward momentum of a being that was built for the open horizon. In ancient Chinese culture, horses were revered as creatures who made civilization possible: the messengers, the warriors, the bridge between worlds near and far. There is a saying: 马到成功 — ma dao cheng gong — "Upon the arrival of the horse, success is secured." This is not passive success. It is success that arrives on hooves, moving, breathing hard, eyes bright.

When Fire becomes the element of the Horse year, something extraordinary happens: what the tradition calls "double fire" ignites. The Horse already carries fire in its nature — it is associated with the Wu Earthly Branch, itself a fire-natured energy. Add the Heavenly Stem of Fire, and you have amplification upon amplification: passion doubled, momentum squared, intensity magnified. This is solar energy. High-noon energy. The kind of fire that transforms — that clears the old growth and makes room for what wants to be born.

But fire also burns the one who grips the reins too tightly — or lets them go entirely. The great teaching of the Fire Horse is not recklessness. It is directed, purposeful, courageous movement. It is the difference between a wildfire and a forge. Both are fire. One destroys without vision, the other transforms with intention.

For all of us, this year is an invitation to move. To stop waiting until you feel ready. To take the thing you have been incubating in the Year of the Snake — all that shedding, all that inner work — and gallop with it. The Snake asked us to go inward and shed. The Fire Horse asks: Now what will you build from what you have become?

In shamanic and animist practice, the Horse is one of the great power animals — a spirit ally of tremendous potency. In many indigenous traditions across Asia, the Americas, and beyond, the Horse is a guide between worlds, a being that carries the shaman across the threshold of ordinary and non-ordinary reality. The Fire Horse is a Horse whose hooves strike sparks. When we call on Horse medicine this year, we call on the transformative fire of movement itself.

⬡  IMBOLC: THE FIRST STIRRING OF LIGHT

We are still moving through the sacred window of Imbolc, the ancient Celtic festival of first light. Celebrated on February 1st and 2nd — the astronomical midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox — Imbolc marks the moment when the Earth, though still outwardly cold and dark, begins to stir within.

The very word comes from the Old Irish i mbolg: "in the belly." It is the time of pregnancy. The seeds are not yet visible above ground, but they are alive in the dark soil, gathering their strength. The ewes have begun to produce milk. Life is returning — quietly, tenderly, in secret — before it is ready to be seen.

This is the holy season of Brigid — the great Triple Goddess of the Celtic tradition, daughter of the Dagda, keeper of the Sacred Flame. Brigid is the goddess of poetry, of healing, and of the forge — three domains that seem different but are, in truth, the same. All three require that you take raw material — raw feeling, raw ore, raw experience — and apply heat, intention, and craft until something new and useful emerges. She is the goddess of transformation through fire and through care (are you seeing the synergies of this sacred time?!).

At her sacred temple in Kildare, Ireland, a flame burned for over five centuries — tended by her priestesses, never permitted to go out. This was not religious theater. This was the embodiment of a spiritual truth: that something holy, once lit, must be tended. It cannot sustain itself without daily devotion. The flame of healing, the flame of wisdom, the flame of relationship with the living world — these require tending. I ask you, what are you tending to right now?

At the Mound of the Hostages on the Hill of Tara — a Neolithic passage tomb over 5,000 years old — the rising sun at Imbolc illuminates the inner chamber, just as it does at Samhain (and just as it does at the more well-known tomb, Newgrange, on the winter solstice). Our ancestors built their sacred architecture to receive the light at exactly these moments. They were not primitive. They were listening. They had aligned themselves to the breath of the Earth and the movement of the cosmos with extraordinary precision.

I have a special connection with Brigid and I’ll write about that in a future teaching (this one is already long!).

Imbolc holds a particular gift. It is a reminder that even in the deepest winter — even in the most dormant season of our personal lives — life is moving in the darkness. Imbolc is when that invisible world begins its return toward the visible. We honor it by tending our own inner flame. By asking: what is gestating in me? What am I being asked to protect and nurture, not yet ready to show the world, but alive and real beneath the surface?

Light a candle this week for Brigid. Set an intention. Hold it gently, as you would hold a small animal, or a new seedling, or a child not yet born.

⬡  THE SATURN–NEPTUNE CONJUNCTION AT 0° ARIES

And now I want to speak to you about what arrives on Friday, February 20th. Because it is, in the fullest and most sobering spiritual sense, the event of a millennium.

On that day, Saturn and Neptune will meet at 0° Aries — the very first degree of the very first sign of the entire zodiac. Astrologers call this the Aries Point, or the World Point: the precise degree where the Sun crosses the celestial equator at the Spring Equinox, marking the birth of the astrological year. It is the threshold between what was and what begins. It is the point where all potential gathers before it chooses a direction.

Saturn and Neptune meet approximately every 36 years. But they have not met at this exact location — 0° Aries — since approximately 4,361 BCE. More than 6,000 years ago. The beginning of what we call recorded human civilization. Mesopotamia. The first cities. The first writing pressed into clay. The moment when, for the first time, thought left the body and lived in the world beyond it.

We are living the return of that moment.

 To understand what this means, we need to understand these two planets as the great archetypal forces they are.

Saturn is the principle of form. Structure. Boundary. Accountability. Time itself — not as punishment, but as the container that makes a thing real. Without Saturn, nothing takes shape. Without Saturn, a dream remains a dream. Saturn is the god of karma, of consequence, of the laws that hold civilization together. In Aries — the sign of primal, unmediated will and identity — Saturn becomes the force that asks: What am I willing to take responsibility for? Where does my courage require discipline, not just impulse?

Neptune is the principle of dissolution. Of the infinite. Of the ocean of consciousness that existed before form and will exist after. Neptune is mysticism. Compassion without walls. The vision that arrives before you know how to build it. It is the dreaming layer of reality — the place where shamans walk, where ancestors speak, where spirit has not yet condensed into matter. Neptune in Aries brings that vast, boundless awareness right to the threshold of individual identity and says: Remember who you are before you were named.

When these two forces conjoin — at the zero point, the beginning of all things — something extraordinary becomes possible. Neptune provides the vision; Saturn provides the bones. Neptune asks, "What could the world be?" Saturn says, "What are you willing to do, day after day, to make it so?" Together, at 0° Aries, in the warrior's fire, they call for nothing less than the manifestation of spirit into matter. The making-real of what was once only dreamed.

In shamanic terms, this is the moment when the dream of the lower world must be brought up through the middle world and planted in the upper world — integrated across all three realms. The vision and the vessel. The spirit and the spine. The infinite and the bounded. This is the great medicine of this conjunction.  

The Sabian Symbol for 0° Aries is remarkable: "A Woman Just Risen from the Sea." Consciousness emerging raw and luminous from the primordial waters — not yet dressed, not yet named, not yet claimed by any structure — proclaiming only: I am. This is the first breath. This is the moment before the story begins.

We are in that moment.

⬡  WEAVING THE THREADS

 My dear ones, let me bring this together now, because I believe these are not separate events. They are one story told in four movements.

The Eclipse opened a portal and asked: What are you finally willing to see? What has been hiding in the blind spot of your life, your community, your world?

The Fire Horse arrived and declared: Now move. Not recklessly, but boldly. The year of inner work is complete. The year of courageous action has begun.

Imbolc whispered: Even as you move, protect the tender thing. Honor what is still gestating in the dark. Tend your flame.

And the Saturn–Neptune conjunction at the World Point commands: Make it real. Bring the dream all the way down into the bones of your life. Do not settle for spiritual awareness without spiritual embodiment.

What is happening this week is not metaphor. The Earth is alive. The stars are alive. The relationships between celestial bodies are not imaginary — they are part of the living web that connects all things, the same web our ancestors read in animal behavior, in weather, in the fire, in the movement of birds. We have always known that the macrocosm and the microcosm are in constant dialogue. As above, so below. As within, so without.

The animist knows that every event in the seen world has a spirit dimension — and every shift in the spirit dimension eventually reverberates into matter. What the cosmos is arranging this week is a realignment of the deepest order. The old dream — the one that has structured human civilization for the past 6,000 years — is completing its arc. A new one is being seeded.

And you, my beloved community, are not passive observers of this. You are its midwives. You chose to come into this life at this time. The spiritual path — the path of walking between worlds, of maintaining relationship with the living intelligence of the natural world, of offering your energy in service to healing — is precisely the work this moment is calling for.

This week, I invite you to:

— Find stillness in the mornings. Even ten minutes before the noise of the day arrives. Sit with what is asking to be seen.

— Notice what in your life has already been ending and let it end with grace. The eclipse has illuminated it. You do not have to hold it any longer.

— Feel the Fire Horse energy in your body. Move. Walk outside. Let your feet carry you somewhere your mind had not planned to go. Ask Horse to accompany you.

— Light a candle for Brigid. Speak aloud something that is gestating in you — something you are not yet ready to share with the world but that needs to be spoken to the flame, witnessed by fire.

— On Friday. February 20th, sit with the Saturn–Neptune conjunction. Ask yourself: What is the dream I carry that I have been afraid to make real? What one step — however small — would make it more embodied, more concrete, more alive in the world?

I love each of you. I honor the path you walk. And I am deeply grateful to be walking this extraordinary passage alongside you.

This is, in every sense of the word, a sacred time.

With all my love and in deep service,

Elizabeth  xo