ASTRO-ARCHETYPE OF THE WEEK // THE FREE SKATE

August 30 - September 5, 2026

Item [1]:

Until 1990, competitive figure skating required something called compulsory figures: hours spent tracing prescribed patterns into the ice before a skater was ever allowed to perform. Judges checked the tracings afterward, on foot, for wobble. After these requirements were released, skating was called "free."

But the free skate had restraints. It's four minutes, sometimes four and a half, with required elements — jumps, spins, a step sequence — and a deduction if you run long.

Item [2]:

​Empire Roller Skating Center in Brooklyn ran for over sixty years before it closed in 2007. For decades it was one of the country's few rinks that centered Black skate culture — a specific style, a specific music, a specific way of moving that developed in that neighborhood. The documentary United Skates (2018) exists mostly because the rinks kept closing.

Item [3]:

​Wordsworth wrote a sonnet defending the sonnet, arguing that nuns don't resent the narrow room of their convent, nor do students mind their cell's confines. He goes further: some people find the walls a relief. Not everyone wants the open field.

You have before you the floor, the rink, the shape you are able to work in. Establish how long you have to skate. Think not of the future where there is more space, endless. Focus on where your feet are today, now.

This week: Sun trine Uranus, Jupiter trine Saturn, Mercury sextile Mars, Mars square Saturn

When in light: the boundary is what lets you finish the program instead of skating forever without a shape.

When in shadow: you mistake the clock for the enemy and spend the four minutes fighting the four minutes instead of using them.

​Skate it out -->​

XOXO,

KPK

astrologer, poet of birthdays, developmental editor