Unwinding, Having, & Getting
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Unwinding your thoughts
Is your brain tired? If your days are an endless, repetitive loop of chores, tasks, analysis, and wordslinging, you could benefit from a little unstructured dream time about now. Enter Mercury in Pisces (Feb. 3, 3:37 am PST, through April 12), which favors a more poetic, less linear form of processing and communicating with the world. It will almost immediately sextile Uranus (Feb. 5, 1:43 am PST), so if you can give your mind a little space, inspiration should strike you fairly quickly.
This year, Mercury will spend much longer in Pisces than it normally does in a sign, nearly ten weeks versus its typical three, because it will be retrograde between Feb. 17 and March 9. Mercury’s “extended-stay” signs point us toward our best tactics for accessing inner knowledge and making sense of external messages. This year, all Mercury’s retrogrades take place in sensitive, intuitive water signs (Cancer in June/July, Scorpio in October/November); rational thought, computation, and the scientific method are all well and good, but this year we’re meant to spend more time in the realm of the senses.
Pisces speaks to us in images, music, and art. My Pisces-rising godson, when he was a toddler, couldn’t walk by a television without stopping in his tracks and becoming immediately enthralled by the images on its screen. A dear Pisces friend spent as much of his adolescence asleep as possible; when he wasn’t napping, he was playing music. I’ve got Mercury in aspect to Neptune, the modern ruler of Pisces, in my birth chart; as a kid, it took herculean effort for me to pull myself out of my daydreams.
Ideally, we’d absent ourselves from the mundane and spend Mercury’s Piscean seasons at the easel, or maybe at Esalen, seated in the lotus position overlooking the Big Sur coastline. Unfortunately, most of us can’t get away for ten-week retreat at an exclusive meditation center. We can, however, make an effort to loosen our grip on schedules and to-do lists a bit more than usual for a little while. A little time reading a novel, walking in nature, meditating, and otherwise unbending, is time well spent while Mercury is in this sign. A little time to unwind your thoughts, following the thread that connects them back to its origin, so you can come up with a different dream for your future.
Rational thought, computation, and the scientific method are all well and good,
but this year we’re meant to spend more time in the realm of the senses.
It’s the Getting
Venus enters Aries this week (Feb. 7, 2020, 12:02 pm PST). One of western astrology’s few feminine symbols, Venus is ill-at-ease, we’re told, in the very masculine sign of Aries. But maybe ease is not all it’s cracked up to be. Venus in Aries symbolizes the kind of tough, pioneering, warrior-spirited women whose passion makes a difference.
Venus is considered in her detriment in the feisty, masculine, warrior sign of Aries. but that doesn’t mean she’s weak here – far from it. Like all planets in the sign of their detriment or fall, her efforts to express herself in an incompatible sign usually make her more prominent in one’s character, not less.
Actress Elizabeth Taylor, best known for her many marriages, is nearly as well remembered as a ferociously loyal defender of close friends like Montgomery Clift and Michael Jackson, and as the face of White Diamonds perfume (diamonds are ruled by Mars and the birthstone of April, Aries’ month). Venus in Aries loves passionately, but it savors the chase most of all. As Taylor once said, “It’s not the having, it’s the getting.” Spoken like a woman who married eight times!
She also showed Aries grit by overcoming adversity time and again – health problems, failed marriages, ups-and-downs at the box office. When asked how she kept going, she said, “You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.”
I couldn’t have said it better.
One of western astrology’s few feminine symbols, Venus is ill-at-ease, we’re told, in the very masculine sign of Aries. But maybe ease is not all it’s cracked up to be.
An intoxicating Full Moon
At the Leo Full Moon (Feb. 8, 11:33 pm PST) what is revealed is whether you are being true to yourself, and whether you are summoning all your gifts to best advantage. The degree of this Full Moon, 20.00 Leo, is on the amusing Sabian symbol Intoxicated chickens and trine Mars in Sag on the degree, A Flag Bearer. After a tough few months out to sea in choppy, Saturn and Pluto waters, most of our flags are a little tattered. In fact, the Sun’s Sabian symbol at the Full Moon is A woman disappointed and disillusioned. And coming on the heels of a couple of Neptune-heavy weeks, “intoxicated” and “disillusioned” are adjectives that could apply to many of us.
But what about those intoxicated chickens? The lower expression of Leo is all bombast and drama, thrashing about wildly like a chicken with its head cut off. But Leo’s noblest expression is true leadership, the kind that inspires rather than commands, and this is a Full Moon that will let true leadership shine for all to see. So if you stand tall in your unique, passionate, Leonine self – even as others around you are losing their heads – you’re the tonic we’re looking for after a long, difficult January.
If you stand tall in your unique, passionate, Leonine self – even as others around you are losing their heads – you’re the tonic we’re looking for after a long, difficult January.
This week on the podcast, Jen and I explore all the week’s highlights,
along with discussions of Saturn Returns and astro*carto*graphy!
© 2020 by April Elliott Kent
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