On the Edge

Sitting down to write today’s daily astrology, I checked my animated chart in Io Sprite and noticed the aspect I had been feeling: Venus in the last degree of Aries, the Moon in the last degree of Libra.

The last degrees of signs can feel edgy, unstable, uncertain and like there’s imminent change coming. There is: bodies are changing signs, but that’s a symbol for something else. Today the two making sign changes have a feminine resonance.

This suggests that their state or condition will harmonize with the feminine side that astrology reminds us we all have. Human is not a polarity but rather a complex mix of mental state, emotional state and gender. Note that the zodiac as we know it is a mix of six different shades of yin and yang — each of the different sign pairs (Aries/Libra, Taurus/Scorpio, and so on).

Mercury is close behind Venus, and will enter Taurus, where it will remain for about eight weeks (an unusually long time for Mercury through a sign) as part of its retrograde cycle (but normal for Mercury retrograde, which is another way of saying Mercury hangs out in a sign or narrow sector of the zodiac for a while). Mercury retrograde involves Mercury slowing down and changing directions. In Taurus, we have an image of becoming aware of and then loosening up thought forms that previously seemed intractable.

Saturn is also on the edge of a sign change — retrograde back into Virgo. This is the brief conclusion of Saturn in Virgo, an approximately 30 month experience that has been here to teach us how to use our minds effectively: less judgmentally and more rationally; less critically and more constructively. Saturn [not Mercury!] tucks into Virgo on April 7 and promptly makes another opposition to Uranus in Pisces. If you ask me, this is the aspect in the spotlight, with its hyperactive, exaggerated, even frantic sense of polarization.

Uranus is a sense of needing a revolution without any idea of what the new order should be; for that it needs information from Saturn, which is in a kind of review phase at the moment (in retrograde). We need these review phases — with some of the larger aspects this year (this is one) they become critically meaningful on the way to sizing up whether what’s happening to us and around us is progress or something else.

The difference is usually determined by our guiding principle. I’ve spent a lot of time considering the Abraham-Hicks material (sample below) and it’s beginning to seem obvious that what we want is the force for change. Mars is slowly gathering fire in Leo and the suggestion here is that we focus on desire as a path to where we want to be. We’re conditioned to think or feel that circumstances are the prime directive, but that’s like saying soap suds get the dishes clean. What gets them clean is the desire to have them be so.

Of course, we run up against questions like, “What will I let myself want?” But these questions beg for a reality check about the nature of their own existence. (Until we figure out otherwise, we usually experience desire up to the limit of what our parents said it was okay to want, and spend a lot of time defending that position.) The alternative requires learning, but moreover it requires daring to do something different.

Speaking of the edge, one other planet is ready to change signs, for a little while — Chiron enters Pisces on April 20 where it stays through July 20. That’s 90 days this year of Chiron in Pisces, which many people reading were born with (approx. 1961-1969). You might say that this is an exploration of our ability to dream, to vision and to apply imagination, despite the circumstances, the limits or the thought forms that might otherwise get in the way. Chiron is “already there,” in the last degree of Aquarius; what I consider the degree of the avatar, of awakening to individual consciousness wherein we recognize that we’re not the only one paying attention; or that we were the only one not paying attention. And it’s fine to wake up.