Today is Friday, July 22, 2011. The big news is the Sun entering Leo overnight at 12:12 am EDT. During its last hours in Cancer, it’s void of course. Use a little caution. Let the Sun get into Leo before launching anything too ambitious, but relax enough to let interesting things happen to you. Perfect for a Friday, right? Just don’t let that be an excuse to blow your paycheck out on the town — Mercury is slowing down to station retrograde soon, so it’s a good idea to slow down your spending too.
In lunar news, the Moon is in Aries all day today and is entering a trine to Mercury in Leo. This offers some serious initiative and some flowing hands-on energy to get all the chores done. This will help create some space within which to relax and reflect over the weekend.
The Moon then moves into Taurus tomorrow just before 1:00 am EDT, where it will stay for the rest of the weekend. Once there, it squares the Sun (fixed sign to fixed sign), makes a conjunction to Jupiter and an earth trine to Pluto in Capricorn. The Moon conjunct Jupiter could equal some exaggeration, so keep an eye on your emotional reactions to any tension or sense of change. Since the conjunction is in Taurus, we have another reminder that spending cash is not the answer to everything. If you do shop this weekend, focus on quality and consider whether a prospective purchase is truly in line with your values somehow.
The move into Taurus also puts the Moon in the same sign as the fourth brightest object in the sky, Jupiter. If you are out past midnight this weekend, look for the Moon and Jupiter rising in the East. If you are up before dawn, look for them high and in the South.
As Moonrise disappears from our evenings and moonlight becomes more an early morning affair, the last quarter Moon represents a kind of crossroads. You have spent a good deal of psychic energy at the Full Moon and now you may find yourself tired of talking about it and moving into a quiet reflective phase, looking back on your Full Moon adventures and trying to figure out what they really mean. This search for meaning is not just in terms of a better understanding of what actually happened, and the deeper undercurrents within that action, but also a search for the encapsulated wisdom, the moral of the story, which represents more of a seed of the future.