Cleaning out the Closets
The Sun squares Pluto this week (Oct. 26, 2026, 5:11 am PDT), at 3º05 Scorpio and Aquarius. It’s one of two times each year when the Sun makes this aspect to Pluto and offers an opportunity to discover which parts of you are true and which ones may just be habits that you’ve adopted to make life easier. When the Sun squares Pluto, it gets a lot easier to tell which ones are really you.
At this square, the Sun is on the Sabian symbol 4 Scorpio, A youth holding a lighted candle, a symbol of light and fire. As my colleague Michelle Gould once said, Pluto is like a fire that burns away whatever isn’t true about the planet that it connects with. And in the case of the Sun, it’ll burn away whatever is not truly you. In your personality and in the life that you’ve built for yourself, there are almost certainly some qualities that just don’t match who you are on the inside and your sense of integrity.
Maybe you’ve adopted certain behaviors to fit in, to keep the peace, or make life more manageable. That may have served you once, but does it still serve you now? Here’s an opportunity to figure out which ones have outlived their usefulness and to start cleaning out the closets of your personality and your life.
I love that image of the young person holding a candle. A candle doesn’t illuminate everything at once. It gives us just enough light to see what’s immediately around us – which is sometimes the way self-discovery works.
Chemistry
Mercury squares Mars (October 30, 2026, 10:20 a.m. PDT) at 17º58’ Scorpio and Leo. Mercury squared Mars pretty recently, on October 2, and it’ll make one more additional square to Mars on December 9. This time around, we might look back to the period around October 2 and find that maybe we made a tactical error or two. Mercury square Mars can describe using words that are a little too direct even blunt, and that isn’t always the most helpful approach. Now that Mercury’s retrograde, it’s a good time to review these things and consider how you might choose your words a little more carefully in the future.
Mercury is on the Sabian symbol 18 Scorpio, A woods rich in autumn coloring, and Mars is on 18 Leo, A teacher of chemistry. Now both of these symbols invite us to think about chemical processes. Leaves change color in autumn because the days are shorter and the temperatures are cooler, and this contributes to the breakdown of chlorophyll, and that reveals other pigments that were there all along.
Mars’ symbol, A teacher of chemistry, could no doubt explain this connection better than I can, but the astrologer in me would put it this way: Mercury and Mars in a square have a particular effect on each other. They rub each other a certain way and potentially produce a kind of chemical reaction. In the signs of Scorpio and Leo, Mercury’s sharpness can injure Mars in Leo’s pride, and this can lead to a little crankiness on both sides.
The colors that emerge in fall were hidden beneath the green of summer, and sometimes it takes changes in conditions for us to see what was there all along. Maybe there were conversations around October 2nd that revealed something about ourselves or about somebody else that we hadn’t fully realized before. Maybe we discovered that a minor disagreement touched off a larger nerve or that maybe our own certainty about something made us overlook somebody else’s point of view.
Mercury Retrograde offers a chance to revisit those moments, not to beat ourselves up over what we said or didn’t say, but to understand the reaction that we set in motion. What was the real issue beneath the argument? Did we need to be so blunt, or were we simply reacting to something? And if we had the conversation to do all over again, what might we say differently?
Leo in the Early Morning Dew
The Last Quarter Moon is the moment in the lunar cycle when we take a look at what we set out to accomplish at the New Moon (in this case, the October 10th Libra New Moon) and decide whether we need to make some changes to produce the outcome that we had hoped for.
The Last Quarter Moon in Leo (Nov. 1, 2026, 12:28 pm PST, 9º26’ Leo and Scorpio) brings great warmth. If you were hoping to, say, form new relationships or improve old ones at the Libra New Moon, here’s an invitation to bring some fun and charisma to the table.
The Leo Moon’s Sabian symbol is 10 Leo, Early morning dew. And the Sun is at 10 Scorpio, A fellowship supper. That Leo symbol is so tender and innocent, and so quiet for a symbol in Leo. Picture Leo in a private moment, maybe refreshed after a night’s sleep, not yet in the spotlight or trying to be noticed.
And that’s the insight for the end of this Libra New Moon cycle. That maybe the best way to be in relationships, is just to be natural and warm without trying too hard to impress anybody. The Sun’s symbol is the scene that comes later that evening when everyone gets together for a fellowship supper, relaxed and warm and friendly.
It’s the kind of situation where Leo might be tempted to hold forth with a good story. But fellowship doesn’t really work like that. A fellowship supper is about sharing something with other people, not being the star of the show. Here’s an opportunity for Leo to express itself a little differently, more open, more generous, interested in everyone around the table.
At this Last Quarter Moon, think about how you might bring a little more of that “early morning dew” Leo to your relationships. You don’t have to be entertaining all of the time. Sometimes, just relaxing and being yourself can be the best way to connect with other people.
© Words and Illustrations by April Elliott Kent
