Free souls live dangerously: how invigorating to stand at the precipice of all you know and turn your face to the wind of Mystery.
Yes, fresh air, what a relief.
But what is that niggling? What is that incessant anxiety like white noise in the background?
Quincuncx the Moon, a triple conjunction between Venus, Saturn, and Pluto speaks to closing a cycle. It’s the end of a chapter with regards to how we relate to and in relationship.
This Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio hit me hard. (And how are you faring?) As a Scorpio rising, my scorpion instincts flared up and before I knew it I’d scurried under a rock. I thought perhaps I needed a day or two of rest, but no. Apparently human-sized scorpions take many days to moult their outer layer. So under the rock I stayed, working some deep transformative magic. And I’m just now poking my head out into the blinding light, still shaking my tail free of its outmoded exoskeleton.
The Aries Full Moon is here to say “fuck ‘em”. Those people who don’t get you; fuck ‘em. It’s not worth wasting your life trying to please people. There are billions of different perspectives on this Earth. If you try to satisfy all of them you will be nothing in the end. Be yourself and fuck the people who don’t like it. They aren’t your people. And in the process, you will find YOUR people.
Libra seeks collaboration and cooperation. And with Libra’s ruler, Venus, sextile to Jupiter on the day of the New Moon, this is an especially beautiful month to make connections. But a sextile is an aspect that we have to act on. It’s not going to hand us gifts, we have to go out and make the magic happen. Venus and Jupiter together, speak to abundance, love, and connection. To allying our worldview with our values, and our resources with our beliefs. Libra also wants justice and values dialogue and the law and civil disobedience as means to achieve it.
One belief I’m grappling with now is: does everything happen for a reason? Is there some divine plan for us? Is there an order of things beyond what our will can comprehend? This idea is central to all mystical traditions. And I think if we take our spiritual lives seriously, I don’t see a way to avoid it. And yet, the difficulty with it is that is seems to imply that there is a reason for injustice and suffering. Are we supposed to think that people deserve to be oppressed? That is clearly wrong.
For all the faults of this culture extending from Greek and European thought, there are nonetheless threads of wisdom and spirituality that we might draw on as resources. And we might even use those very resources to reflexively analyze the traditions they derive from--that reflexive process is actually definitive of the tradition. We are not floating, without ground, in some new-age soup. There are roots, thick and deep, that we just need follow down a little beneath the surface to find life-giving wisdom and spiritual nourishment.
This Full Moon in Aquarius is the third lunation in a row with the Sun conjunct Venus. The lessons in love are not over. Mars, Mercury, and Juno are all also in Leo, bringing the heat and upping the fun factor. With the Moon opposite all that in Aquarius, we’re called to investigate the relationship between Leo and Aquarius.
This Leo New Moon is a gateway which we may choose to step through into an altogether new land. We’ve been through much in these last two months. The Cancer-Capricorn eclipses, in line with Saturn-Pluto, came with much deep inner churning and trying transformation for many of us (especially for those of us with important points in the Cardinal signs: Cancer, Capricorn, Aries, Libra). And whatever was stirred up in these past couple months, we’ll be working with for another year, as the Cancer-Capricorn eclipses play out.
These last few weeks have been rough for many of us (Saturn-Pluto business). And yet, I feel such healing energy coming from this eclipse. Cancer is the energy of the Great Mother, the Cosmic Mother, that birthed this world, that creates existence itself. The eternal presence of this energy holds the fabric of existence together, supporting all life and creation in every instant.
At the peak of the Gemini cycle, Sagittarius offers a breath of fresh air, an escape from the city, an expansive view. It’s a moment to pause and take it all in. An opportunity to grasp the bigger picture before going back to the details and business of it all. As we talked about two weeks ago, this lunar cycle is about stories, and how the stories we tell shape our world and experience. Sag helps us to glimpse what world we are creating, whether intentional or not.
Gemini’s great gift is as storyteller--the one who weaves the cloth of cosmos through word, who literally creates worlds--not in a grand scheming overarching theory-of-the-universe kindof way, but through shooting-the-shit. Through chit chat. Through myth, and jokes, and fairy tales, and long yarns, and tall tales. Through all the ways of sharing story.
Some of us love to suffer. We’ve grown so accustomed to our pain that we come to like it, on one level--at least it’s familiar--at least it confirms our understanding of the world--at least we have the validation of being right. The thought of giving it up can be terrifying. Not only would it mean visiting its source, but it would mean being in an altogether different way.