In Order to Let the Sun Shine In... We Have to Clean the Windows

 

When I was nine or ten, my mother took me to see the Broadway musical, Hair. There’s a moment in the show where the cast famously disrobes on stage. Whether she knew it was coming—or cared—is unclear. Were we scandalized? No. Our seats just weren’t that good.

The moment didn’t stick because of what was happening on stage. It stayed with me because of the atmosphere in the room. The show carried itself like a movement — bold, loud, insistent that it stood on the brink of something beautiful. It wasn’t just trying to entertain. It was trying to mean something. And even at that age, I could feel the gap between the message and the moment.

Most people remember two songs from Hair: “Aquarius,” and “Let the Sunshine In.” Songs that became part of the cultural wallpaper — still repeated whenever someone wants to reference peace, unity, or some imagined age of enlightenment. But there was a third song, a song not as closely identified with the musical. A cover by Three Dog Night reached #4 on Billboard. Easy to Be Hard, the one hiding in plain sight, told a different story. “Easy to Be Hard” didn’t float on optimism. It asked a quieter, more pointed question: why is it so easy to talk about love, and so hard to show it?

The lyric frames it as hypocrisy — as if the failure lies in individuals not living up to their message. But the real indictment is deeper. That coldness isn’t personal. It’s structural. It’s the shadow of the very field being hailed. Aquarius doesn’t care about the wounded person. It cares about the cause they represent. It will march for the ideal. It will build for the many. But it will step over the one who bleeds quietly, inconveniently, outside the frame of collective progress.

Even this song, discerning as it is, still carries the Piscean optimism that the ideal can be reconciled with the personal. It still assumes that Aquarius cares. But Aquarius cares about systems — not about feelings. It sees the suffering of the crowd and calculates its weight. It doesn’t reach for the hand of the individual left behind. That, too, was being revealed. Whether they knew it or not, that song diagnosed the field itself.

Before I go further, let me be clear: this isn’t about Aquarius as a sun sign. I’m not dragging individuals. Astrology doesn’t work like that. Each sign is a field of energy that influences us all, and nobody is made of just one. To be truly, overwhelmingly Aquarian in your chart would require an impossible stacking of planetary placements. What I’m talking about here is the field of Aquarius—the archetypal energy that defines a larger cycle of time: an age.

We are not in the Age of Aquarius—not yet. That may come as a surprise to those who believed it began sometime in the late 1960s, thanks in part to the same show that gave us “Let the Sunshine In.” But the astrological ages move in reverse. Because of the Earth’s axial precession, the vernal equinox point slowly travels backward through the zodiac, shifting from one constellation to the previous over a span of roughly 2,100 to 2,300 years. The equinox hasn’t entered the Aquarius constellation yet. We are still, firmly, in the Age of Pisces. And to be clear, ages don’t change like a switch being flipped. The shift between them is long and tumultuous. Their edges blur. The influence of Aquarius has already begun to seep in — but we haven’t crossed over. Not yet.

Astrological ages don’t just mark time — they shape tone. Each one is filtered through the field of a different sign, and that field sets the energetic climate for centuries. The Age of Pisces, like every age before it, brought its own signature into the world — one marked by sacrifice, spiritual longing, martyrdom, belief, and illusion. Pisces didn’t act alone, but its influence permeated everything. The institutions, myths, and global belief systems that rose in that time reflect the Piscean field with uncanny precision: expansive, emotional, faith-based, and often abstracted from reality.

Pisces is the catalyst for all the religions and spiritual movements that have risen in the last 2000 plus years. But Christianity in particular, with its fish symbol and messianic framework, is textbook Pisces—born into the field, shaped by it, and spreading its values globally as that energy dominated the collective tone of human history. Pisces gave us compassion, yes, but it also gave us fanaticism, blind faith, and a tendency to abandon the self in pursuit of an ideal that can never be proven or questioned.

So when Hair burst onto the scene, declaring the dawn of a new age, it wasn’t a declaration—it was a projection. A Piscean fantasy cloaked in Aquarian language. The singers wanted to believe that the shift had already occurred, that the future had arrived, and that love had won. But buried in all that was a quieter song, asking a harder question. “Easy to Be Hard” didn’t point toward hope. It pointed toward contradiction. Not the contradiction of people failing their ideals — but of ideals failing people. It wasn’t about vision — it was about consequence. It caught a glimpse of what most of that age couldn’t name: that the pursuit of equity and liberation could be conducted without empathy or care. Detachment can be embedded in the blueprint. Emotional vacancy isn’t the exception. It’s what leaks in when the structure favors the message over the moment.

And what’s coming next? That’s where Aquarius actually begins to take hold. If Pisces gave us messiahs and martyrs, Aquarius offers something colder: systems. The age ahead will not be led by faith or prophecy, but by mechanism. By reform. By logic. Aquarius is fixed air—it values structure, idea, and architecture. It looks to the future and sees something to be engineered. It doesn’t seek salvation. It seeks efficiency. And what doesn’t serve the system? It’s deprecated.

This is the age of artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms, digital surveillance, decentralized identities, and collective decision-making that flattens individual nuance. Progress will be real—but it won’t be soft. Utopian language might still circulate, but the reality will feel colder. In its brightest expression, Aquarius offers reinvention, liberation from outdated structures, and the vision to build something equitable. But in its shadow, it replaces empathy with data, intimacy with interface, and compassion with conceptual distance.

The belief systems built in Pisces told us that love redeems. Aquarius doesn’t refute that—it just doesn’t find it relevant. It’s not hostile to emotion. It simply doesn’t pause for it.

That’s why this matters now. Because people feel something shifting. They know we’re entering new territory, but most of them are still operating on a fantasy about what that means. They believe we’ve entered an age of enlightenment, connection, and global harmony—when in reality, we’re being pulled into a framework that redefines what connection even means. We are being restructured. Not awakened. And if we keep telling ourselves that the Age of Aquarius is all love and light, we’ll be caught off guard when it delivers circuitry instead of sanctuary.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about clarity. Pisces gave us stories. Aquarius gives us systems. Both have their beauty. Both have their shadow. But only one of them is ahead of us now, and it’s time we name it for what it actually is.

We’re not in Aquarius yet. Not really. So maybe this bleakness isn’t a verdict — it’s a warning. A call not to surrender the tenderness of Pisces too soon. Not to lay down empathy just because the algorithms have taken the wheel. Pisces still has time on the clock. And that means we do too — to love out loud, to believe, to sacrifice, to feel. We may not win the next age with feeling. But we might survive it because of what we held onto in this one.