By Len Wallick
Welcome to another Monday after a weekend which was not, by all indications, the same-old same-old. Here’s to hoping that the quad conjunction New Moon was a rewarding time for all of you. If not transcendental, at the very least gentle in its manifestations. Here’s to hoping that all and each of us have had the opportunity to thank someone for caring about us. Finally, here’s to hoping we each had our piece of chocolate and that none of us overdid it.
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As has been the pattern since the lunar nodes transited into Capricorn and Cancer last year, the New Moon is still taking place relatively late in a given sign. This month is no exception, the Sun will ingress Pisces on this coming Thursday or Friday depending on where you are. Today however, the vibe of the Sun-Moon-Neptune-Chiron conjunction is carried forward vividly when the Sun forms a sextile to the galactic center in Sagittarius. There is something sweet and chewy about this aspect.
The collection of rocks, ice cubes and gas balls that orbit the Sun, form our solar system. The Sun, currently in the sign of the collective (Aquarius) is the thing that all these objects have in common. The local collection of stars in this corner of the universe, nearly everything you can see in the night sky, constitute our galaxy. The thing all those stars have in common is the galactic center.
If the New Moon lived up to its potential for you, you may have experienced the combined energies (conjunction) of the your higher self, the Sun, and your feelings the Moon, working to make the implications of the outer planets (longer term trends) more immediate. In addition, the precipitating nature of this lunar event may well have carried over to condensing the foggy nature of our psychic environment (Neptune) allowing us a moment of awareness (Chiron) that will clarify the choices before us.
With the Sun in a communicative relationship to the galactic center we are presented with the opportunity to expand the perspectives gained from the weekend and get a glimpse or a feel of the greater forces at work behind the events that reach our consciousness. The wholly may indeed become holy. Those of us who are situated to receive it may be in store for a revelation. All of us would be well advised to keep at least one foot on the ground at all times for the sake of practice and good form, ok?
Meanwhile, over the weekend, the Moon moved on from its conjunction with the Sun and into Pisces. Today finds it crossing the mid-point of that sign after having conjoined Venus and Jupiter yesterday. This may leave us a little tender but also more receptive to the higher spiritual notes of the solar sextile. Therefore, in dealing with others, be gentle as you would with someone who is in prayer.
Mercury in Aquarius started the weekend with an opposition to Mars, sharply setting off the events to follow. Today it is well separated from that aspect, clipping along at a degree and a half a day and accelerating. A week from today it will form a brief but telling conjunction with Nessus. More on that as we get closer.
Venus in Pisces is also separating from a late weekend aspect, its sextile to Pluto in Capricorn. Hopefully this served to keep things interesting after Valentines Day, but if you are a bit sore this morning please don’t take too much time to dwell on it. You won’t want to. Venus is quickly moving on to its conjunction to Jupiter. More on that tomorrow.
Retrograde Mars in Leo forms its own sextile to retrograde Saturn in Libra today. If in deed this transit of Mars is working concurrent with a period of figuring out what we want, this aspect may herald a realization of limits. By bringing stricture and structure, the restrictions and boundaries that characterize Saturn, we can start to narrow things down to what is practical and achievable. We each may want to be queen or king of the world with the power to enforce what we see as right and proper.
Mars sextile Saturn would respond that ain’t gonna happen, better to focus on the unique influence each of us have to find balance with the people around us. We may yearn for immediate world peace and an end to hunger everywhere. Mars sextile Saturn says no way beauty, better to make peace in our own house and feed those we actually come into contact with. As aspects between malefics go, this one is not so bad. The fact that it takes place at the same time as the Sun sextile the galactic center, it may bring balance and grounding to the moment, even while our head is in the stars.
Finally, today is President’s Day, a federal and state holiday. Your aged correspondent can remember before it existed, before the separate holidays of Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday were cynically condensed into one bureaucratically efficient date. Nevertheless, there is some meaning still there. The so-called highest office is weird when you think of it. Imbued with more expectation than power, stressful beyond what most of us can conceive, a thankless job that pounds the pemmican and squeezes the juice out of even the very best to try.
No women have held the office so far, a mockery of our nation’s promise, but the ethnicity of our current President holds hope open that any citizen can aspire realistically. Why anyone would want to take it on is a very good question. That there are still some sane and confident enough to do so is encouraging. Good or bad, the United States has managed to survive them all thus far and we have been blessed with enough of the gifted, wise and kind to keep us going.
Do your level best Mr. President. We know that our hopes and dreams are a burden. We hope that our respect and prayers will lighten that a bit. We know you have a lot on your plate. May you find sufficient love in your heart to be equal to the tasks.
Offered In Service
Len, dearheart — reading your stuff is like going for a walk in the forest, impacted by the enormity around me, finding things to note and admire, discovering little spots I want to revisit. You speak to the journey; as well, your use of language makes me happy. I can think of no greater compliment.
I have a tendency to check in with Planetwaves every day, right after I get my own sense of the patterns of that particular day. It’s as if I look around and go ‘yup, it’s definitely a shade of purple today,’ and the Planetwaves community at large explains the purple, giving me new ways to think about it. Please pardon the simplistic, colour-oriented explanation. Just know that I thank you for what all of you do, all the time.
When I moved back from Europe, I felt overwhelmed by a kind of widespread emotional and cultural adolescence here, a sort of stuck at 13 feeling. I know it’s not a question of Europe being better, or America simply being younger. It very much lies in our ability, or inability, to take responsibility for our actions, own up to what we really want, and get down to manifesting it with minimal petulance. Our fundamentally work-in-progress government is very, very broken, and howling when one person, or even party, doesn’t fix it is somewhat reasonable for about five minutes. Until you dust yourself off from the tantrum and realize you have options, things to do (realizing that sometimes the only thing you can change is yourself), and a community like this that makes you more than just a lone voice.
Victoria Lynn,
I think you’re spot on with the daddy issues involved in the US presidency. The expectations are ridiculous, and as a result, we have a lot of problems that emerge from our inability to properly hold the person in office to any real accountability.
With Obama, it’s his economic policies that are the most troubling — Bernanke and Geithner, for example.
So most of the country plays rebellious youth, while the problems of corporatist capitalism mount and the right wing press calls him a socialist.
Thank you for those last two paragraphs, Len. I’ve been (deeply) discouraged by how many of our “siblings” have been acting lately – squabbling, name-calling, self-centeredness. In many ways Americans act like little kids; we look to our president as our “big daddy” who is a “jerk” when he chastises us or tells us we need to clean up our room, but who is expected to keep us safe and make all the tough decisions so that we can spend our time hanging out with our cliques and poking fun at the losers in the other groups.
Mars sextile saturn is practical too. Maybe if everyone took care of their own houses the world would be a better place. The sign is right for root crops and a trip to the local garden store is as good a place as any to lift spirits on yet another snow day here in zone 5. Think I’ll start my farm market onion seeds today. While we are being practical, lets hope all energy directed at Palin dissipates into thin air – kapoosh. How much of that boring conversation do we have to take? Give teeth and legs to things that matter – like root crops – potatoes and onions in the back yard garden.
So I leave an interesting quote from a blog about fair trade and Valentine’s Day, and whether selling flowers is the way to develop a nation. http://rajpatel.org/2010/02/14/o-rose-thou-art-sick/
“The question is whether locking rural people into producing fripperies for the rich is the best way of doing it. And that’s precisely what one does when one promotes the pesticide-soaked jet-sent cut flowers industry, whether in its rapacious Dole-shaped form, or its more guilt-friendly ‘VeriFlora’ form.”