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| Rowena Winslow is a professional astrologer and the author of the Astrology Made Easy series. |
Because transits are where astrology stops being
flattering and starts being useful.
I asked Rowena Winslow to explain what transits actually are, and what they do to a person's life. She did not soften it.
Okay, it's official. I booked the flights.
Germany has been on my list for a long time — embarrassingly
long, honestly. But between life doing what life does and never quite finding
the right moment, it kept getting pushed. Not anymore. Flights booked, dates in
the calendar, mild panic beginning to set in.
And with that panic comes the part of travel I
actually love: the preparing. The researching. The deep-diving into "what
do I actually need to know before I get on that plane?"
I've been collecting notes, tips, tabs, and recommendations for weeks now, and I thought — why keep all of this to myself? So here's an honest look at how I'm preparing for a trip to Germany, from the practical to the slightly obsessive.
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| Rowena Winslow is a professional astrologer and the author of the Astrology Made Easy series. |
I'll be honest — I've never taken astrology
particularly seriously. Sun sign columns, "Mercury is in retrograde"
jokes, personality quizzes that tell you you're a typical Scorpio. That was my
entire frame of reference.
Then I met Rowena Winslow.
Rowena is a practicing astrologer and the author of
the Astrology Made Easy series — a set of books that reads nothing like
what I expected. No mysticism, no vague reassurances. Just very precise,
sometimes uncomfortably accurate observations about how people are built and
why they do what they do.
We sat down for a conversation, and I came out of it with a lot to think about.
Most retirement planning advice is written for a
hypothetical person with a continuous career, steady earnings growth, a spouse
with similar financial standing, and a retirement that starts at 65 and lasts
about twenty years. That person exists. She's just not the majority of women.
The structural realities of women's financial lives
make retirement planning a genuinely different exercise — not harder,
necessarily, but different in ways that require different analysis. The
standard advice isn't wrong. It's just incomplete.
The longevity gap is the most significant difference
and the most underplanned for. Women live longer than men on average — not by a
little, but by several years. That means a retirement that needs to fund more
years, more healthcare costs, more inflation exposure, and a longer period of
solo living. A plan built on a twenty-year retirement horizon that actually
needs to cover twenty-eight years isn't just slightly underfunded. The
compounding effect of that gap is substantial.
The answer everyone knows: Bonjour. Pronounced bohn-ZHOOR.
Two syllables, stress on the second. It means hello, good morning, and good day
all at once, and it works in virtually every situation from 6am until early
evening.
But if you're preparing for a trip to France, knowing bonjour
is only the beginning of the story — because in France, the greeting isn't just
a word. It's a social contract. And understanding that contract is what separates
travelers who find France warm and welcoming from those who come home saying
the French were rude.
There's a particular quality to the late twenties that
almost everyone who goes through it recognizes in retrospect, even if they
couldn't name it at the time. A pressure. A sense that things which used to
work no longer do. Relationships that had been fine for years suddenly feel
unsustainable. Careers that seemed like the right path feel hollow or wrong.
The structures of your early adult life — the choices made at 22 or 24 when you
were still figuring out who you were — start coming apart at the seams.
It's not a coincidence that this happens when it does.
In astrology, this period has a name: the Saturn return.
Most travel language preparation focuses on phrases
you say. Very little of it focuses on what happens after you say them — the
response you'll get, the follow-up question you'll need to answer, the rhythm
of an actual exchange in Italian. That gap is why so many people prepare for a
trip to Italy, feel ready, and then freeze the first time someone speaks to
them at full conversational speed.
Basic Italian conversation is a skill slightly
different from knowing Italian phrases, and understanding the difference is
what makes preparation actually work.
If you've ever had a period in your life that felt
unusually intense — a stretch of months where everything seemed to shift at
once, where relationships changed, career moved in unexpected directions, or
some long-standing pattern finally came to a head — there's a good chance that
period was marked by significant planetary transits in your birth chart.
Transits are one of the most practically useful tools
in astrology, and also one of the most misunderstood. They're not predictions
in the sense of "this will happen to you." They're more like weather
forecasts — descriptions of the energetic conditions you're moving through,
which inform what kinds of situations are more likely to arise and what inner
work is most relevant right now.
Most people who get into astrology start with their
Sun sign. They read about being a Scorpio or a Virgo, recognize some things
that feel true, and stop there. What they don't realize is that the Sun sign is
the beginning of the map, not the destination — and when it comes to career and
money specifically, there's a completely different layer of the chart that's
far more precise and far more useful.
That layer is the houses. Specifically, the 2nd, 6th,
and 10th houses — what astrologers sometimes call the professional triangle.
Each one covers a different dimension of work and money, and together they give
a picture of your vocational life that's genuinely specific to you rather than
to everyone born under the same Sun sign.
There's a version of meal planning that looks like
this: a color-coded weekly schedule with every meal accounted for, a detailed
grocery list organized by store aisle, a running pantry inventory, meal prep
batched by type, and a monthly overview for bigger picture planning.
I have done that version. It works, when I do it. The
problem is that it requires about forty-five minutes on a Sunday and a level of
sustained enthusiasm that I do not consistently have. Weeks go well, weeks go
sideways, and the system that requires a lot of me starts getting skipped on
the weeks when I have the least capacity — which are exactly the weeks I need
it most.
I want to be upfront: I spent a long time being deeply
skeptical of anything in this category.
Every time I saw something about making money from
home, it felt like a trap. Either it was obviously a scam, or it required
skills I didn't have, or it turned out to need forty hours a week of
"passive" work before anything actually happened. I'd click away
feeling vaguely annoyed and vaguely hopeless at the same time.
What changed my mind wasn't a headline or a YouTube
video. It was that phone call from my friend S. — the one I wrote about in my
previous post — and the free guide she sent me afterward. I finally read it
properly, and it reframed something I'd been thinking about wrong.
For a long time, "what should I do with my
life" was the question I came back to constantly. Not in a dramatic,
crisis kind of way — just that persistent, low-level hum of not being quite
sure if the work I was doing was the work I was supposed to be doing. Whether I
was in the right place, building toward something that made sense, using the
things I was actually good at.
I tried various versions of figuring it out.
Personality tests. Career assessments. Reading about different fields. Talking
to people who seemed to have it figured out. All of it was useful in small ways
and none of it quite answered the question, because the question was too big
and too personal for any of those tools to fully address.
When you're traveling to Spain with kids, the packing list looks different from any trip you've taken before. You have the obvious things — snacks, entertainment for the flight, a change of clothes in the carry-on because something always spills. What I didn't think to add, until the trip that made me realize I needed it, was a phrasebook built specifically for family travel.
Not a general travel phrasebook. I had one of those
and it was fine for checking into a hotel or ordering at a restaurant when it
was just me. But traveling with children introduces an entirely different
category of situations, and most of them require very specific language that a
general phrasebook simply doesn't cover.
I counted calories for about three years. Not
obsessively, not every single day, but enough that I always had a rough number
running in the back of my head. Enough that I'd do quick mental math before
deciding whether to eat something. Enough that dinner felt less like a meal and
more like a subtraction problem.
The easy answer: Hallo. Pronounced exactly how
it looks — HAH-loh. It works in almost every situation, with almost
anyone, at any time of day. If you only learn one German greeting before your
trip, this is the one.
But if you've arrived here, you're probably looking
for a bit more than that. Because hallo gets you through the door and
immediately into the part nobody quite prepares for — someone responds, and now
you need to know what comes next.
Okay so this post started with a phone call.
My friend — let's call her S. — called me a few months
ago and casually mentioned she'd been making some extra money on the side.
Nothing crazy, but enough to notice. And when I asked her how, she said: "AI.
I'll send you the guide I started with."
I honestly rolled my eyes a little. We've all seen
those "make money online" headlines, right? Usually it's either
something that stopped working in 2019, or it requires you to basically become
a content creator full time. Neither felt realistic for someone with a normal life
and, you know, actual things to do.
But S. is not someone who falls for hype. She's
practical, she's busy, she has two kids and a part-time job. So I listened.
For a long time, I had a love-hate relationship with
astrology. Like many, I grew up checking my "daily horoscope" in the
back of magazines, only to find vague advice like "Today you will meet
someone new" or "Be careful with your finances." It
felt like a game—fun, but ultimately empty. I kept asking myself: Can
astrology predict the future, or is it just a clever way to tell us what we
want to hear?
As someone who values professional-grade tools and
deep knowledge, I was tired of the "pop-culture" version of the
stars. I wanted to know if astrology can be tested. I wanted to know if
it could actually help me plan my life, my career, and my personal year with
the same precision I use in my business.
That’s when I stumbled upon a tool that changed my
perspective entirely: AstroCore.
Every time I visit my four-year-old niece, I face the
same "cool aunt" dilemma: what do I bring her? I’m always on the
lookout for gifts that are more than just plastic toys that will be forgotten
in a week. I want something that sparks her curiosity, something we can do
together, and—if I’m being honest—something that gives her parents a bit of a
break!
On my last visit, I decided to try something a little
different. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of raising bilingual kids,
but most of the "educational" books I found felt like, well...
school. Then I stumbled upon a series by author Sophie Redmond called Learn
Spanish with Stories.
I was intrigued by her "Spiral Learning
Method," so I grabbed the set for my niece. The result? She was obsessed
with the illustrations, her parents were thrilled with how easy it was, and I
officially won the "Best Gift" award for the month.
I want to talk about something that happened to me a
few weeks ago.
I was curled up on the couch with a cup of chamomile
tea, feeling a little overwhelmed — not for any dramatic reason, just that
quiet, low-level anxiety that seems to come with the territory of expecting a
baby. You know the feeling. There's so much information out there. So many
"shoulds." So many perfectly curated images of glowing women who seem
to have it all figured out.
I picked up a book almost by accident. A friend had
mentioned it in passing, and I'd downloaded it without much thought.
By the second chapter, I had to put it down just to
breathe.
Do you ever get that feeling where your soul just
starts itching for a new adventure? That restless,
"I-need-to-smell-fresh-croissants-and-get-lost-in-cobblestone-streets"
kind of energy? Well, it’s officially happening! I am finally packing my bags
for France, and I am beyond excited to share my prep process with you.
If you followed my journey last year, you know I had
an absolute blast exploring the sunny coasts of Spain. But let’s be real for a
second: the one thing that truly saved my sanity during that trip was a little
book by Sophie Redmond. I fell head-over-heels in love with her Spanish
phrasebook—it was so practical and easy that I didn't feel like a confused
tourist for once. So, when it came time to plan this French getaway, there was
no question about it. I went straight to the source and grabbed her English-French
Phrasebook for Travel and Everyday Situations.