Into the Heart of the Sun

The Horse in Chinese astrology is an endurance animal, characterized by being robust, industrious, and persevering. Reflecting the Horse’s physical and speedy nature, 2026 will be a year of high momentum and swift action. In order to hold on to the reins, we will need to have healthy routines, discipline and direction. The energy of this year can be seized by those who have established a clear track for the steed to run.

2026 is the year of the Yang Fire Horse 丙午. Fire is the native element of the Horse, bringing us the Horse in its full capacity. The Yang Fire nature of this year is represented by the sun itself, which is the very source of yáng 阳 - light, warmth, movement, expression and vivacity. In fact, the script for the Horse branch in Chinese astrology wǔ 午 is still used in modern day to represent noon, the time of day when the sun is at its highest point in the sky and yáng is at its peak.

In fēngshǔi 风水, depictions of horses in paintings, sculptures or talismans invokes the element of fire - boosting vitality, productivity, and creativity in a space. The heat and aggravation of Fire is channeled through the active character of the Horse - the doer, maker and builder of the zodiac. The Horse is sometimes described as a terrestrial dragon, accessing constant transformation through creativity and form. While the Dragon represents grand vision and creating endless potential through ideation, the Horse gives inspiration materiality through hard work and embodiment.

We are currently in the midst of the transition from the Snake year to that of the Horse. Archetypally speaking, this signals a metamorphosis from the year of the mystic (Wood Snake) to the year of the artist (Fire Horse). This progression marks the emergence from a dark and enigmatic dream-like state, where illusions are dispelled and outmoded skins are shed. We emerge into a vivacious and energetic dawn, where the revelations we received in the Snake year can be expressed and implemented into action.

While we are still in the wintery grasp of the Snake’s tail, it is a wise prescription to reflect on all that has been injured, lost, shed and destroyed in the previous year. The mysterious profundity of this time is such that the deeper meaning and lessons of 2025 may not entirely reveal themselves for another 3 or 4 years. The dark time of the Snake may have us mired in what was relinquished and disintegrated, leaving many of us in anxiety or a nihilistic state regarding the state of the world. The initiation of the Snake year represents both poison and medicine, as well as using poisons to purge and cure. Remember that shedding is also revealing and this time has provided new levels of transparency. The events of the previous year have unveiled the truth of who people are and exposed the truth of the situation we are in.

Current affairs have been very emblematic of the transition from Snake to Horse. Like the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” we are seeing the regime in the nude: the emperor and all of his chamberlains parading their delusional mirage - an invisible cloak that onlookers pretend to admire. Suddenly, a child shouts out to the crowd that the emperor has no clothes, shattering the illusion. Collective delusion can only be upheld by subjects that refuse (and are too fearful) to speak the truth. We can all harness the power of the young bronco this year, breaking the spell of deception by speaking truth to power and bucking off false leadership. The lesson of the Fire Horse adds another layer to the story. Rather than relying on impulsive outcries alone, we can also harness action through skill and artistry to create and reveal a better world. The shedding of the Snake year can feel punishing and painful, but if we can embrace the reality of what remains, we can actually show up for it. The Horse year opens the path of the artist to us all - to act as a mirror to society, uniting people with their reality.

Like the child pointing to the naked emperor, this year is a testament to the power of the young. The Fire Horse in the developmental cycle is likened to the life stage of adolescence, wielding innocence, the capacity for renewal, and possessing nerve and gusto. Discontented youth this year will be mobilized to disrupt our crises in leadership as well as become easily radicalized. We are already seeing this emerge with mass protests led by students all around the world, as well as ICE targeting young far-right groups in their recruitment strategies.

Power and influence this year will follow youth movements, youth-led organizations, and youth culture. If you’re wondering who to put on your board or advisory team, provide positions for the youth. The more young people find themselves disparaged or feared by society, the more likely they become recruits for extremist and sectarian groups. Yang Fire accentuates the naiveté of adolescence, including lack of impulse control, being easy to aggravate and short-sightedness.

This year emphasizes the importance of training and education that empowers the youth. In our personal spheres, we can all become young again through taking a class, learning a new skill, and becoming a student. The qi of this year is found in the beginner’s mind - through engaging in curiosity, openness and humility.

This is also the year to take inventory of the skills and gifts you already have and apply them. The contribution of each of our particular abilities is actually something quite plain and ordinary - it is not about being acknowledged for how special you are. Remember the horse is a herd animal, so we will find momentum not through self-promotion but through joining with others and teamwork. This will be the year for skill sharing and creating your own classrooms. Learn a new language by convening with native speakers for conversation, start a tool library with your neighbors and teach each other how to use them, learn a new instrument by joining an impromptu jam session, gather with friends to cook and learn each other’s family recipes - these are just a few ideas.

The qi of this year is characterized by the Chinese idiom “The Eight Immortals Cross the Sea” 八仙过海，各显神通. In Daoist legend, the Eight Immortals must traverse the vast sea in Penglai. Rather than using their usual method of riding on clouds, they challenge themselves to use their individual skills and tools to cross - playing the flute, using a magical fan, riding a flower basket or gourd. The idiom is still used in vernacular Chinese to mean that the collective power of teamwork comes from each individual’s unique contribution. We can therefore creatively meet challenges through implementing a diversity of perspectives and abilities in order to achieve a shared objective.

The Horse totem in Chinese astrology comes from the cavalry horse, a result of a thousand years of intentional crossbreeding between the highly trained Arabian military horse and the Mongolian wild pony. The Horse thus embodies two distinct capacities - an innate desire for boundless freedom as well as the ability to be trained and bridled. These dual characteristics are imaged as the nomad in the vast steppes along with being a symbol of the cultivated scholar-warrior.

The freedom to do endows the Horse with incredible robustness. The untamed horse demonstrates its power through action and productivity, not thought. The Horse is not attached to the idea or reason behind the action. It is liberated by the exertion of galloping itself, not the destination. The Horse character can take on many projects without any interest in finishing them. Whether it's constantly renovating a house, repairing a car, tinkering with a gadget, or creating their next magnum opus, it’s security for a Horse to always have a project to do.

The Horse has the quality of a certain kind of inner emptiness - it is a high-octane vehicle with no driver. The Horse is the only animal in the zodiac that can run at top speed while wearing blinders, vigorously racing ahead while someone else directs them where to go. When this raw power can be reigned and bridled through committed practice, we can train ourselves to get into the driver’s seat. Although not emotionally attached to the concepts behind actions, the Horse is gallantly generous in character, inclined to riding into tragedy to rescue others. If we can saddle up and get on the Horse’s back this year, it would behoove us to consider who else we can carry with us.

The shadow qualities of this year include impatience, aggravated attention deficiency, inability to follow through, unfettered competition and ambition, addiction to achievement and productivity, depletion and exhaustion (getting trampled). Enoughness is not only an experience of self worth but also a discipline in appetite, meaning adherence to our natural intelligence that feels both hunger and satiation - knowing when to stop, reconsider, recover and rest. We will be liberated this year if we don’t compete or chase after exceptionalism. We can take the lesson from the Snake to not be excessive and actually act on it in the Horse year. Your practice becomes: whatever we are doing is already enough. There is satisfaction to be found in every action if we are not rushing to get through it. If you don’t want to be left rough and ragged, don’t try to keep up with the race this year. Freedom will be found through our sense of sufficiency.

The danger of 2026 is “going for a ride” in the spring, and by the autumn not knowing how you ended up where you are. You may find yourself confronting the “blinders” in your life by running on a track where you don’t belong or rushing down a path of injury, illness and burnout. The hazard of the year lies not only in the possibility of breaking an ankle but continuing to walk on it. When a horse becomes lame, often the most humane course of action is to euthanize it. This is because the horse naturally cannot rest a broken leg and will continue to use it, leading to immense pain and oftentimes fatal complications, making recovery impossible.

The “training” of this year occurs through discovering the freedom that is afforded by practicing an internal sense of discipline. In this way, a mature Horse can avoid unnecessary peril and carry things to completion. Through discipline and commitment, we develop a sense of inner authority. A disciplined person can link their actions together, creating coherence, rhythm and purpose in their life. Purpose is not something that is granted by the gods above, giving us permission or telling us what to do. Purpose reveals itself to us over time through dedication, hard work and perseverance.

Every year we seem to get busier and busier, our tasklists become an endless chase of getting through everything just to get to the next. Even our spiritual practice makes us busy - meditation, qigong, yoga fills up our schedules while we rush to the next destination. We forget that in life there is only one destination and it is the same for everyone. Death is the only thing we are rushing towards. Meanwhile, we make the bed, commute to work, take out the trash, and we are already expecting the next thing as we do it. This year, when you make food, don’t just get through cooking in order to eat. When you fix your meal, cooking becomes your practice. It teaches us that every act we do is an expression of our sincere nature. The Horse exemplifies simple honesty in all of its actions. Practice becomes daily, repeated appreciation for each thing we do.

Artists know that practice through repetition can lead us into a flow state. My dance teacher described it as “You are not moving; it is moving you.” This is another way we can ride the Horse, allowing an inner emptiness to liberate us from overthinking, analysis, and critique. In the flow state we have external movement with internal stillness and awareness. This is the state of wúwéi 無為, or effortless action. Being totally immersed in the present, we are free from the hallucinations of our mental formations.

This year, we are reminded that there is no creation without action and that ordinary activities are a creative act. Embracing the plain and ordinary becomes transformational and profound on a personal and collective scale. In the time of the Fire Horse, a new dawn arises through implementation and praxis - the integration of insight and reflection with our ordinary, daily work. It is through stringing together all the thousands of myriad choices and actions of each day that gives our lives influence, meaning and coherence over time.

In the Fire Horse year, we create a better world not through our ideologies but through our daily conduct. The Chinese word for conduct, li 禮, is not mere adherence to moral code - it is essentially a creative act, a multilayered concept that also means propriety and ritual. Our conduct is characterized by the appropriateness and timing of our daily actions, becoming our everyday rituals. In traditional East Asian thought, our conduct directly creates our reality.

In Chinese cosmology, the harmony of totality means that one can feel and experience the presence of the whole within each and every part of the whole. This insight into the organically interdependent and reciprocal nature of reality is actually a moral experience. Acting with virtue and benevolence towards others is a natural response in a reciprocal world because the self is in constant interplay and mutual determination through its relationships. Our conduct is how we experience immediate congeniality and consanguinity with the whole universe. In this way, we humanize the world and the world is humanizing us, back and forth in mutual transformation. Our conduct is how we creatively engage with the world that is constantly shaping us and that we are shaping, back and forth into each other.

If you include the elemental makeup of each sign, there are 60 animals in Chinese astrology. This sexagenary cycle means there are 60 kinds of kindnesses, 60 styles of tolerance, 60 flavors of being human and expressing humaneness. It is a vision of diversity and an exercise in empathy for the creative makeup of our humanity. Ideological disputes are masks for supremacy and will land you nowhere. We all have something to contribute and this is the year to practice and apply.

Don’t be enslaved by statistics or disempowered by the cynicism of the dominant intellectual and cultural mindset. Next time you experience media fatigue, remember that everything we are stressed about is already happening. In a world that is already inflamed, being hesitant to heat it up further can have a medicinal effect. In the Fire Horse year, we are easy fuel for the conflagration of the rage-bait machine. We also carry within us the spark to create the world we want through every action and interaction.

Economics this year will make the most sense if we follow the math of generosity, the exponential abundance that comes from sharing. If we can acknowledge the true spectrum of our resources - our skills, time, abilities, knowledge - then we all have something to give. Giving is the natural prophylactic to the plot of decline. Be reluctant to reiterate the dominant narratives about the market and we can divest from making the world only about winners and losers, haves and have-nots. In the Fire Horse year, we can all use the sun as a model: the sun has an indiscriminate and autopoietic generosity. It renews and sustains itself by giving light and warmth to all.

This year, direct action is your answer to overwhelm. Action is how we build confidence in our beliefs by implementing our values into reality. Exchanges with our neighbors, the delivery driver, the grocery cashier and all direct in-person interactions is how we build confidence in our humanity. If you experience doubt this year, remember that action is how we find where we belong. The work of building a better world is a shared creative project, requiring the collective application of everyone’s unique skills and abilities. These are disclosed not in grand gestures of heroism or saviorism but through our ordinary, everyday conduct.

As a source of creative inspiration to start off the year, I would like to share a few Fire Horse 丙午 works of art from my community:

Yin Wood Snake: A Strange Unfurling