From now through Monday, we’ll be in a zone of heightened emotion and intuition about how you really feel about some matter. It’ll be key, however, to move slowly and carefully in thought, speech and action. The Sun, Moon and Mercury, plus planets in the Moon’s ‘home sign’ of Cancer, are all getting busy — with Mercury leading the parade.
Retrograde Mercury is in its storm phase, stationing direct in Cancer at 2:22 pm EDT Saturday (July 20). From now through early next week, you’ll want to observe all the typical Mercury Rx cautions about verifying information, communicating clearly and focusing when it comes to technology, money and travel (which includes just driving across town).
This retrograde has brought our attention beneath the surface of our feelings about safety. What makes you feel safe? Is it being financially stable or having locks on your doors? Is it having a physical ‘home’ or feeling ‘at home’ in your own skin? Is it holding your spiritual ground or knowing you are loved by family and friends? Do you need a sense of stability or of freedom in your relationships to feel safe?
Have you been questioning your assumptions about what ‘safety’ means and how to get it? When Mercury stations, there can be a moment of truth finally emerging. And that truth will likely be about how you feel.
Many people walk around without really knowing how they feel — or that they might be able to feel a wider spectrum of emotions than they tend to allow. Our inner compasses get corrupted and spun easily by obsessive thought loops, guilt, needless fears and ingrained parental messages.
With all the other astrology ramping up, you’ll want to pay extra attention during Mercury’s station, lest a subtle insight get lost amidst everything else. Intuition is your friend this weekend.
That ‘everything else’ includes Mars conjunct Jupiter in Cancer, just past Black Moon Lilith. That trio seem to be saying, “This is what you have not dealt with, all of your disowned stuff; how would you like to deal with it?” You may be surprised to find that Mars and Jupiter are stirring up your need and desire to finally do so.
The Sun is wrapping up in Cancer, ingressing Leo at 11:56 am EDT. The last couple days of the Sun in a sign can have a slightly antsy quality, another reason not to rush things. The Sun will not make any aspects to major planets for these last two days before it enters Leo. Eric has written before that this kind of void-of-course Sun can have an unusual quality in terms of what can happen. Keep your subtler Spidey-senses (intuition) on.
Just over two hours after the Sun ingresses Leo, it opposes the Moon in the first degree of Aquarius for the Aquarius Full Moon just before 2:16 pm EDT. If you look at the full chart here, you’ll notice that two planets, Venus and Pallas Athene, are also at 1 degree of their signs, with the Sun exactly between them.
It looks something like a satellite dish, with Venus, the Sun and Pallas focusing their energy on the Moon across the wheel (this is a yod aspect).
That Aquarius Moon is either a conduit for humanitarian energy, or it’s all caught up in being one of the ‘cool kids’. Will you allow yourself to feel deeply enough to care about the social issues that are on your mind, and let it move you? It’s your choice. Mercury stationing direct will be giving you hints about how you feel if you’re willing to listen.
Be: I hadn’t thought that the big bad wolf in the dream might be the passionate romantic entanglement that I simultaneously really want and want to run away from, but it could be that my intuition has been warning me off. I tend to just think I’m a big chicken and it’s a bad thing, but maybe I dodged a bullet there. Thanks for your insight.
Thanks Amanda for this article. Lately the best, and seeming only way for me to approach my feelings is through the sensations in my body. I rediscovered an old essay by a guy named Don Weiner, that is chalk full of useful little practices. One of them involves communing with those loud sensations in parts of the body ( for me its usually the upper back or solar plexis) and describing them in terms of color, sensation, texture, location, size, shape, temperature. And later you can even visualize changing say hard to soft, hot to cool and so forth. This has been helping me when I can find the will, grace, ability somehow to do it in the face of uncomfortable sensations and obsessive thought/emotion loops. Interestingly Hazel, one of the images which came to me recently while doing this was a dark shepard dog. I’m wishing the best for all of us right now.
Wow, I’m amazed. I now remember reading that this week would be about ‘feeling safe’ but I had forgot it.
And guess what – I’ve been releasing a lot too, and this brought me to realize how I *always* feel subtly unsafe, disconnected from a feeling of warmth, comfort and love. I mean, I more or less knew it, but I really saw it ‘in the face’. And how certain foods connect me with that comfort, via memories. It’s really not the food!
So I started a new dialogue with this un-comforted inner child and it didn’t go as I expected: it seemed that I was not able to comfort her or to feel relief, but I kept just listening.
And the relief came a few hours later, when I was not thinking of it any longer.
Wow, a new world!
Good one Amanda, “intuition is your best friend this weekend”. Love Hazel1’s parable too, but had that dream of hers been mine I would surely have thought the “big scary crazy dog” was the “proposed romantic thing” that had sailed ship, and would have thought Good Riddance! (Intuition-Best-Friend perception of the day)
Your inference that the Mars conjunct Jupiter could mean (paraphrase) “this is what you need to deal with and how about dealing with it now” is brilliant because Mars and Jupiter will be conjunct the USA (Sibly) Jupiter (a new cycle – the Jupiter Return for our country) which means all of us here (U.S.) will be facing that very thing for the next 12 years.
So in 2025, when the USA has another Solar Return it will also be having a Jupiter Return, and this time there won’t be a grand water trine to support it. (There will be a conjunction of Saturn+Neptune stationing retrograde on the USA IC 4th house cusp though!) Once again, Mercury will be conjunct the North Node (as in the previous two birthday charts of 2011 and 2012) so I guess even then, we will still be learning how to evolve.
Which makes this weekend all the more important because Monday’s Full Moon (0 Aquarius 5′ 33″ – thanks bma!) will occupy the same degree as the next Jupiter-Saturn (20 year cycle) conjunction 7 1/2 years from now. So all of us would benefit from following your suggestion to ‘git her done now’ while the cardinal signs are pushing for reform and the water signs are making it easier than ever to do so. Trust your intuition and trust your gut and trust that the Universe has your back.
be
hazel1 — thank you for the parable about the old guru with the stick. (and happy to know this has resonance with others.) 🙂 it’s amazing how many times some of us need to get whacked on the head before we figure out just how much power we have in our own lives.
i, too, am in a space of trying to discern the undermining beliefs of others from my own; to be able to step back out of their field of energy/influence/life and fully into my own. it’s amazing how easily and insidiously the judgments and fears of others (parents, esp) can slip in before we even realize they are there, throwing us into a chaos of self-questioning.
practicing stepping over that threshold out of another and into myself is part of my homework right now, as i listen and feel for the information that gesture and feeling has to offer…
This is so on target for me right now. I’ve been kicking myself over a proposed romantic “thing” for months and I’ve been so frustrated with myself about being so scared of the whole idea. I feel that I’ve missed the boat on it, ship has sailed, etc. and it makes me frustrated and sad because I know that for my part I’ve been running like a rabbit whenever it seems that it might be real. So last night about 3 a.m., I’m lying there, fretting and feeling sorry for myself because of the screw up that I am and I got this idea (from the back of my brain where ideas wait for me to shut up and let them talk) that I could release pain as it comes instead of bearing it and becoming this pack mule of pain. So I practiced just saying “I release it” and as another pain came up I did it again. Well, I went off to sleep eventually and I dreamt that I was in the front yard with my current animals who are all pretty sweet natured and there was this extra dog out there, a largeish black shepherd type guy. He was friendly at first and then his eyes got wild and he started attacking my animals, the loves in my life. I pulled him off and he just was crazy, attacking the door to the house, which was shut, he was just crazy. I’m thinking that this big scary crazy dog might represent in my mind some of the pain I had just started releasing, he was definitely on the loose out there but he couldn’t hurt my “kids” and he couldn’t get in my house. As disturbing as the dream was I woke up thinking “hey that worked” (the releasing thing) and nobody got hurt, cool. I know it’s not as pretty a dream as my dream about the eagles fishing in the river that I had a while ago, but this one had some uplifting qualities as well. It’s like the parable of the guy who goes to the guru to learn the secret of happiness and as they’re walking to the guru’s cave the guru stands aside to let the younger man through. As the young man goes by the old man hits him over the head with his staff. The young man says “ow! what was that?” and the old man says “nothing, go on in” and they do their talk. The next day the young man comes over again, same thing, old man whacks him on the head, young man asks why, old man says go ahead. This goes on for a couple more days, same old. Finally the day comes when the old man steps aside, young man goes by, old man raises his cane to hit and the young man turns and grabs the stick and throws it away. The old man says “that’s it, you’re done with your teaching. You’ve learned the secret”. The young man says “why, what did I learn?”. The old man says “You’ve learned how to stop the pain”. I;’ll keep my antennae up this weekend and I’ll keep releasing.
And yesterday, the Moon also joined the Grand Trine at 13-14 Scorpio while conjunct NN
Let’s not forget that, apart from the famous Jupiter-Mars-BML-Saturn-Neptune Grand Water Trine, there is another Grand Trine in Water: Chiron-North Node-Mercury SD. And on August 1st, Mars-Chiron-North Node
Wow, this is spot on for me right now. For the past couple of days I’ve been wondering how exactly it *is* that I’m feeling. Some (limiting) core beliefs are making themselves pretty obvious & I’m seeing my reactions mostly for what they are. I count this as progress, though it certainly isn’t comfortable.
Today was a lesson in being cautious about what I say and how I say it. Taking a breath then taking the high road is always a good approach; now especially.
What a great piece and photo, Amanda! Thank you so much for this. My Mercury is in Cancer, and boy do I know it….
Thank you, Amanda. Concise, yet lyrically executed with a theme tailor-made for our time. Enumerative, yet holistically conceived. As much a pleasure to read as your sublime photograph is to view. A truly remarkable achievement, Amanda! And that’s how i really feel.
Wednesday 17 July 2013
17:19:39 UT – Uranus stations retrograde (12 ar 31’19″)
17:31:28 UT – Jupiter (4 cn 53’33″) trine Saturn (4 sc 53’33″)
Thursday 18 July 2013
00:13:49 UT – Jupiter (4 cn 57’16″) trine Neptune (4 pi 57’16″ Rx)
Friday 19 July 2013
13:19:54 UT – Saturn (4 sc 55’26″) trine Neptune (4 pi 55’26″ Rx)
Saturday 20 July 2013
10:39:41 UT – Mercury (13 cn 21’59″ Rx) trine Chiron (13 pi 18’56″ Rx) – Near Miss Only
17:43:02 UT – Mercury (13 cn 21’42″ Rx) square Uranus (12 ar 31’6″ Rx) – Near Miss Only
18:22:05 UT – Mercury stations direct (13 cn 21’42″)
19:42:14 UT – Mars (4 cn 53’54″) trine Neptune (4 pi 53’54″ Rx)
21:33:56 UT – Mars (4 cn 57’1″) trine Saturn (4 sc 57’1″)
Sunday 21 July 2013
10:08:36 UT – Occultation of Pluto by the Moon (9 cp 48’49″)
12:58:13 UT – Pallas enters Cancer
Monday 22 July 2013
07:34:46 UT – Mars (5 cn 54’3″) conjunct Jupiter (5 cn 54’3″)
12:40:57 UT – Venus enters Virgo (direct)
15:55:58 UT – Sun enters Leo (direct)
18:06:45 UT – Moon enters Aquarius (direct)
18:15:31 UT – FULL MOON – Sun (0 le 5’33″) opposite Moon (0 aq 5’33″)