Respect Your Tools
I introduced a friend to my favorite YouTube channel, featuring a man renovating two stone cottages in the Italian alps. She’s similarly taken with the videos, except for one thing. “I don’t like the way he treats his tools,” she says. “He just tosses them off to one side when he’s finished using them.” Damning words, coming from a practical Capricorn Moon!
Mercury is the planet that rules tools, and not just the kind you need to renovate a centuries-old Alpine cottage. If you’re an astrologer, your tools include your ephemeris, your software, your library of astrology books and years of study; a writer has a favorite keyboard, a pen that suits them perfectly, and a vocabulary gathered over decades; a mechanic has a treasured collection of his favorite tools and an intimate knowledge of motors and makes; a guitarist prefers a specific gauge of pick and of strings, and has internalized an enormous catalogue of music.
But your tools aren’t what make you good at your craft; they are designed to assist you, invisibly, while you focus on the real work at hand.
When Mercury conjuncts Saturn (Feb. 25, 2025, 4:02 am PST, 20º15’ Pisces), we gather and evaluate our tools. Are they up to the tasks we demand of them? Are they worth the time and effort of maintaining them, or should we upgrade to something that is? And above all, are they suited to serious work?
The Catalyst
Where do ideas come from? Ask anyone in the idea business, anyone whose livelihood depends on coming up with them, and I suspect you’ll hear a variation on this:
The raw material of ideas comes from hours, days, years of gathering information and impressions. We don’t even realize we’re doing it, until one day we find ourselves calling our pet by the name of someone we worked with years ago and weren’t even close to – they just had a sticky name.
Anyway, that’s Mercury’s job, gathering all the data. But how do those pieces of information come together to form something more interesting than a crossword response, something that’s entirely new?
All that data needs a catalyst, a prompt, a match to ignite it. And when Mercury sextiles Uranus (Feb. 27, 2025, 1:38 am PST), something in the imagination spontaneously combusts. So, grab a pen and find a napkin to scribble your great idea on the back of. This is lightning, so be prepared to bottle it up while you can.
Start with the Ending
How do we make sense of a New Moon in Pisces (Feb. 27, 2025, 4:45 pm PST, 09º40’ Pisces) the last sign of the zodiac, the one devoted to letting go of old baggage and releasing attachments? How do we make a new beginning when we’re knee-deep in endings?
The delightful songwriter David Wilcox has a song that says, “Start with the ending, it’s the best place to begin.” He posits that a marriage, for example, could be much better if you begin by breaking up, because at the point, “there’s no pretending, the truth is safe to say.”
Endings are a process. This is the New Moon to initiate that process, and it begins with letting go of pretense and saying the truth. Each New Moon can have a shelf life, not just of 29 days, but of three years. We step out onto the precipice here and begin a long, slow fall – and this New Moon is very much about how we begin the process.
What a Pisces New Moon this is, with the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, and the Moon’s North Node all in this sign! What you are, what you feel and think, your worldly plans, your spiritual core – they’re all holding hands and preparing for the leap.
But from 90 degrees away, Jupiter in Gemini pipes up with a stream of questions, outbursts of curiosity, and distractions, all designed to keep us attached to this present moment. How to fall into a dream of release when a magpie is squawking in your ear?
I suppose the reminder is about letting the old stories go. Blocking out the hurtful voices. Ignoring the squawking. Refusing options.
Focusing on the letting go. Focusing on the fall.
Confinement
A century ago, the term of a woman’s pregnancy was referred to as her “confinement,” when she retreated to her home for the sake of modesty and to take extra care of herself and the child she was carrying, in advance of the Big Event. In a way, this concept, while outmoded, is instructive for Venus’ retrograde times.
Venus in Aries stations retrograde this week (March 1, 2025, 4:36 pm PST) and will station direct in Pisces on April 12, 2025. While Venus is retrograde, we should take good care of her, guard her. But Venus turns retrograde in Aries, which is a rootin’, tootin’, highly independent kind of Venus, and she doesn’t take kindly to be cossetted. She’s in a hurry. She’s determined to go after what she wants – a partner, a home, a raise – and she won’t let anyone get in her way. But she’s also, maybe, just a little bit prone to leap before she looks. She could use a little time out, perhaps, to avoid missteps.
Whatever the position of Aries in your own birth chart, for the next 40+ days we are, to some extent, under the sway of this Venus in Aries and it would behoove us to step back for a minute or two and enter our confinement. In Venus terms, this might mean trying not to shop so much. Refraining from buying something costly, like a house or a new car. Not calling that cute person whom you wish to date; they’ll still be there in mid-April, and if they’re not, well, I guess that’s telling you something.
Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean that you’re weak. It just means that every now and then, it might be best to back off, rest a little bit, and prepare for the next big thing that’s coming.
Move Your Tools Around
It was time to make room in my cabinet of active client files. So, one afternoon I went through and culled the files of everyone I hadn’t heard from since 2021, putting them into a long-term storage box.
By dinnertime, two of those clients had booked readings with me.
I mean, it seems magical. And why not? In feng shui, moving objects around is thought to activate their chi. Moving a cat’s neglected toy or cardboard box reignites their passionate interest in it. And as Mercury, god of logistics, conjoins magical Neptune (March 2, 2025, 8:22 am PST), something in me believes there actually was magic afoot. Mercury is the tarot’s Magician, with all his tools laid out before him; but Neptune is the magic that is summoned with those tools.
When Mercury conjoins Neptune, move your tools around and summon some magic.
“Yes” Woman
Every now and then, I become inspired to say “yes” more. It happened a few years ago when I read Shonda Rhimes’ The Year of Yes, detailing the marvels that came from saying yes to more things in her life. It happened again the other day, when a YouTube video popped up in my feed about how the creator’s life had been fatefully and positively impacted by saying “yes” to more things.
The granddaddy of these affirmative messages is Danny Wallace’s 2005 memoir Yes Man, about how a chance encounter on a bus led him to pledge to say “Yes” to everything for a whole year. That book details a journey of excitement and self-discovery, but also describes the emotional toll of agreeing to everything from credit card offers to dubious social agreements, and losing control over his choices.
Those are the potential pluses and minuses of the Sun’s square to Jupiter (March 2, 2025, 10:19 am PST, 12º25’ Pisces and Gemini): the excitement and new possibilities of embracing Jupiter’s giant YES, but also the danger of saying yes to too much, or to things that are not helpful, healthy, or safe.
But how about this: In a couple of weeks (March 12), the Sun will make a conjunction with Saturn, the hall-monitor of the solar system. Any excesses, any poor choices you make this week can be reined in then. So this week, go ahead and say “yes” a little more – but with the knowledge that you’ll have to answer to Saturn soon!
Writing and images © 2017-25 by April Elliott Kent
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