Weekly Astrology

“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you’ll have.”  Anna Quindlen

A watery, emotional Full Moon leads into the Fall Equinox in the northern hemisphere.  As we prepare to formally leave summer and quarter-turn toward the next three months, this Pisces/Virgo lunation lights the Equinox threshold, asking we heal the polarity of heart & soul/ mind & matter.   With both Moon and Sun at ending degrees of Pisces/Virgo, the energies push us to move on into the next thing, AND to deal with present oppositional energies. The Pisces Moon embraces our inner journey, the desires of spirit, peace and creativity.  It dissolves, releases, and deals with loss and confusion.  The needs of a Pisces Moon are met more by gestalt, or wholeness, while the Virgo Sun analyzes, discerns, and prefers perfection.  They both ask for a spiritual journey; Virgo through service, and Pisces through unity and interconnectedness. You see the difficulty, and the magnificence lying within their face-off, if we can but be magical alchemists!

Celebrate September’s song, 
By sail or oar moved along, 
Released of summer heat, and gentle day
Sun-filled, replete, 
We turn again into unknown seas
And unknown lines of far degree.
I wait upon the wind to rise, 
Call my name, my True North guide
Compassed toward new tides of time.
This shift holds gale force storms,
Blown by passion’s angry fears 
Of what awaits those held dear~
 
When all we have is one another.
 
 

 I’m writing you on Friday the 13th, and I see that August 2021 is a ‘universal 13’’ number’. (8+2+21=13)  Thirteen governs the Moon’s cycles.  It is a number of the divinely empowered feminine. Reduce the 3 and 1 and you get   4, which is Saturn’s number; not feminine or divine but worldly, tough, top-down, and realistic.  Already we have an interesting conundrum.  The energy for empowered femineity, along with a sensibility of tough realism.  The Moon travels 13 degrees in 24 hours. The number thirteen connects to the 12 Moon cycles in a year.  With 13 weeks in each season, and four seasons, multiplied by 13, we have 52 weeks in a year.  The Moon is about fertility, mom, family, emotion, and the birth-death-rebirth cycle.  These cycles are about CHANGE. 

August is a month when we must change, reorganize, re-invent, and realign yet once again.  Thanks to four outer planets being Retrograde – until October, and Uranus, the Sky God of Chaos and Change going Retrograde Thursday, 19^th,  there are few choices but to stop, re-calibrate, and surrender.  These are the most important ingredients in an ability to truly change.  Using the deep femininity of the Moon’s guidance, we open hearts, hands, and ears to listen, to be Leo-childlike in wonder, in the joy of creating anew.  Take advantage of Leo’s Queenly guidance, good until the 22^nd, when under the Aquarian Full Moon, the Sun moves into Virgo. 

Testament to a mother’s death

We circled and grew, danced and withdrew

Sidelined as witness

To the matriarch, the queen.

“Long live the Queen”

In life after life.

Her lineage gave stature

Where none existed.

Her death absolves barriers

Battled for years.

 The shuttered room of what was unlived within,

Rings out as a wild bell.

Time to break fragile frontiers

Of hell and paradise

Now bending to Grace.

The luminous sheen to the night sky sheds energy into bright beginnings, fresh perspectives., and complex illusions.  The Full Moon on the 23^rd—24^th, in first degrees of Aquarius, offers an opportunity of fiery beauty to integrate heart/Leo and head/Aquarius.  To up its power are three complex ‘planetary quincunxes’ connections galvanizing not only the oppositional forces in the Sun-Moon face-off but refining and integrating dissimilar elements and polarities.  They are a prompt for the world to adapt, refine, and adjust old habits and attitudes. It is yet another potent moment in the revolution in consciousness, asking we to move from the materialism and domination of ME to the interconnection and equality of all. 

“To be human

Is to become visible

While carrying

What is hidden

As a gift to others.”

David Whyte, from “What to Remember When Waking”

Before Covid I would not have paused over this stanza.  But in the aftermath and clean up, in the misunderstandings, and frazzled anger generated by the epidemic I find the vision revelatory to what we can do to help heal ourselves and our world.  So many feel so lost.  Too many have fallen by the wayside of what used to be their life. A vast majority seem to have lost their compass of kindness.’   How can we resurrect the best of what was while turning toward the unknown with courage?  I return to Whyte’s following stanzas of the same poem: 

“To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritances.  You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.  Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be, what urgency calls you to your one love?  What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?”