Today is Thursday, August 11, 2011. The Moon is in Capricorn most of the day before transitioning to Aquarius just before mid-night at 11:48 pm EDT. The Capricorn Moon usually feels more than a little cautious and serious, and for now that is a perfectly good thing for you to connect with. After leaving a conjunction with Pluto in Capricorn yesterday, the Moon is now plowing through the territory between Pluto and Uranus in Aries, whose square aspect is beginning to rear its head. In the end, the Uranus-Pluto squares will in many ways define this entire decade. For now we are just beginning our initiation into what this will look and feel like in our lives.
As the Moon waxes toward Full (on Saturday at 2:58 pm EDT, at 21 degrees Aquarius) it is now activating these squares via their mid-point. In other words, it is stirring up the interior of this aspect, the heart and soul and guts of what it is, and lighting that up for all the world to witness and become aware.
This territory that the Moon is crossing right now is home to the constellation Cygnus, the graceful swan who flies above us, and brings to mind the myth of Leda and the Swan. In that myth, Zeus came to Leda in the guise of a swan and seduced her. Swans and ‘swan medicine’ are also associated with shape-shifting and profound states of awareness and transformation in the shamanic traditions of other cultures. And the theme pops up again in The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen.
Transformation is the name of the game when it comes to Uranus-Pluto. As noted in the Tuesday subscriber issue of Planet Waves:
Anything at that midpoint comes under the spotlight of the Uranus-Pluto theme, which is about crisis bringing about deeply necessary structural change. There happens to be a slow-moving minor planet right there, conjunct the Full Moon and right at the midpoint: Nessus.
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Nessus has a theme of the cycles of karma, or as author Melanie Reinhart puts it, ‘the buck stops here’. One other attribute of Nessus is ‘potentially inappropriate sexual conduct’, a theme that shows up in the Leda myth. Nessus is, on many levels, about responsibility coming home to roost. We can use the wisdom of Swan to navigate the entry into the powerful combination of Uranus, Nessus and Pluto, which will have effects well into the end of the current decade.