Expanding Your Vistas
By the time I first flew in an airplane as a teenager, I’d taken innumerable road trips with my family and was used to that slower pace of travel. Now, for the first time, I covered territory in two hours that would once have taken two days of driving.
Unquestionably, there’s something nice about a road trip. You gain an intimacy with the terrain, which was fascinating in the 1960s and 70s, before every city and town in America looked mostly the same. You savored every inch of the journey. And I missed that by flying, but my vistas increased dramatically.
Sometimes, making a bigger life for ourselves requires that we let go of some of the treasured minutia of each mile so that we can cover new ground, and more of it. This First Quarter Moon (Sep. 10, 2024, 11:05 pm PDT) positions the Sun in down-to-earth, eye-on-details Virgo against the Moon in Sagittarius and its wider lens. Taking a leap of faith can be scary. But if you’ve paid attention to detail and planned carefully, now is the time to trust that you’re ready to jump in a plane and fly into your future.
Harmony After the Struggle
Mercury making a sextile aspect to Mars (Sep. 11, 2024, 8:42 pm PDT) presents opportunities to put words and ideas into action – opportunities set up in two previous sextiles on June 21 and Aug. 23. Mercury in Virgo, however, likes to do its research before taking action. That’s fine, but this is a quick aspect, and we could miss some opportunities altogether if we deliberate for too long. At least, grab a couple of nascent possibilities and throw them into Mars in Cancer’s oven until they’re fully baked.
Any combination of Mercury and Mars can bring confrontation – but sometimes, confrontation is necessary, and the sextile is a friendly aspect that usually brings harmony after the struggle. So if you have to clear the air, go ahead. But bear in mind that Mars is in sensitive Cancer, and others might take offense where none was intended. Fortunately, Mercury in Virgo tends to choose its words with care.
Flappy vs Focused
Hummingbirds are built for motion. Flight muscles comprise 25-30% of their total body weight. They can hover in midair for over 90 minutes. One group of Ruby-throated hummingbirds launches from the Yucatan peninsula and flies 500 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico in a 22-hour nonstop flight, at 100 wing flaps per second.
As Jupiter travels through Gemini, we’re like hummingbirds furiously flapping our wings, drawn to long journeys that expend great energy at an exhausting pace, flapping even as we hover over a group of flowers. This is a Jupiter that is not built to pause and focus, but to constantly explore new possibilities.
On the other hand, the Sun in Virgo devotes total attention to the task at hand. It is the programmer who stay up all night long, hunting for the glitch in a piece of software; the writer, seeking the perfect word with which to finish an essay. The Sun in Virgo seeks perfection, and doesn’t always know when to quit searching – even for a good night’s sleep.
The Sun in Virgo squares Jupiter in Gemini this week (Sep. 12, 2024, 3:53 am PDT), which means the flappy and focused sides of our nature are in conflict. Neither wants to give an inch. But we need them both, and they need each other – to coordinate restlessness with focus, and obsessive attention with movement and variety.
Do What You Love
There’s an oft-repeated adage that if you do what you love, the money will follow. As someone who’s spent half my life doing what I love without having grown rich, I usually roll my eyes at such platitudes.
But substitute the word “money” with something like “satisfaction,” “compelling interest,” or simply “joy” – well, then I think you’re on to something.
Venus is the planet that explicitly points to the “love” part of that equation. And as it joins in a happy trine to prosperous, curious Jupiter in Gemini this week (Sep. 14, 2024, 10:34 pm PDT), love might indeed lead to financial gain, or it might not. But it will almost certainly lead to new interests, broader horizons, and hearty laughs with good friends. And this is all marvelous stuff, even if it does nothing to enhance your bank balance.
Mama Bear
Mars squares the Lunar Nodes this week (Sep. 15, 2024, 7:25 pm PDT), and here’s a little story to illustrate the aspect.
Let’s say a young woman has spent years in a marriage to an abusive partner. With small children and no source of personal income, she’s stuck, paralyzed by fear.
But one day, in a fit of rage, her partner strikes their youngest child. And in a single moment, she is unstuck. While her partner is at work, she packs a couple of bags and straps her children into the car, and leaves. She may have nowhere to go and $6 in her pocket, but the path ahead is the one with at least a possibility of a healthy, hopeful outcome.
Sadly, this isn’t an unusual story. And it perfectly illustrates the shadow side of the South Node in Libra – co-dependence, being stuck in a toxic relationship, when it meets the Aries North Node, the scary, unknown path with the possibility of self-sufficiency, and Mars in Cancer, the roaring, mama bear instinct that breaks the impasse.
You are, hopefully, not in anything like so perilous a position. But you may be stuck, somewhere in your life, afraid to change, and conditioned to pacify others at the expense of your own best interest. This week, Mars in Cancer will find a way to provoke the mama bear in you, by awakening protective instincts toward your family, your home, your safety, and your sources of food and income. Move toward the true path, however scary it might seem.
Writing and images © 2017-24 by April Elliott Kent
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