Today is Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012. The sky is presenting us options in how we handle ourselves in our encounters with others – we would do well to consider them carefully and choose consciously. On one side of the zodiac, Venus is entering Aries; from the other, Mars is making an uncomfortable aspect to its mythological sister, Eris.
Venus in Aries can be challenging. But today Venus is on the Aries Point – that special first degree of the zodiac in which the personal and the political have a particularly symbiotic relationship to each other.
As if in preparation, recent events served up a helping of women’s health issues in the news, via the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood brouhaha over breast cancer screening funding to clinics that also provide abortion services. The incident has had a bonus effect of getting the issue of women’s health – and the war against it – into millions of households. It completes the loop from personal space out into ‘the world’ and then back into personal space again.
Uranus (in Aries) and Pluto (making a square from Capricorn) have been keeping the Aries Point warm with revolutionary/evolutionary energy. What does it look like when Venus joins in? Well, one image is that Venus joins the revolution one orgasm at a time. Self-loving could change the world (just ask Betty Dodson, whose video about her famed bodysex workshops was just released). Betty has been working since the 1970s to help women understand – and love – their bodies. Forty years later, with right-wing factions in the U.S. ramping up their efforts to de-fund health services for women and keep teens in the dark about the sexual power of their bodies, Betty’s work is as critical as ever. Sex is still a widely misunderstood and feared topic for many; transmuting that fear is a delicate procedure best done with empathy – a form of love.