Handling Your Baggage
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The fog
Venus and Mars, the lovers who generated sparks in last week’s square, take on Neptune this week. As I’ve noted before, a bit of Neptune in a relationship is a good thing, just as a little morning haze over a sunrise-dappled meadow is lovely. But when a thick fog rolls in, visibility is poor and you can easily drop off a cliff.
Enter Venus conjoining Neptune (Jan. 27, 2020, 12:00 pm PST), which is just possibly too much of a good Neptune thing. The fog is a little on the thick side, if you will. There’s a fine line between believing the best in someone and seeing something good that really isn’t there. This conjunction forms on the Sabian Symbol degree An Easter Promenade; it’s a celebratory image, with everyone dressed up in their finest bonnets and looking their best; but Easter itself, of course, has a very sober side.
Fortunately, perhaps, Mars squares Neptune the very next day (Jan. 28, 2020, 2:34 am PST). If anything will help pull you out of a haze, it’s Mars in Sagittarius squaring something, especially Neptune. Mars is on the Sabian symbol degree An Easter sunrise service, and as it squares Neptune, the sun rises and all is clear. What looked impossibly enchanting just yesterday is brought into the light today to be better scrutinized – and possibly to help us avoid disaster.
Handling baggage
The First Quarter Moon in Taurus (Feb. 1, 2020, 5:41 pm PST) demands practical, quantifiable, observable action, whether it’s building the first side of a garden wall or obtaining a piece of paper that proves you’re officially in business, a homeowner, married, or a college graduate. And since the First Quarter Moon makes a supportive trine aspect to Jupiter, and the Sabian symbol for this degree is A man handling baggage, it’s a good time to travel for business or to kick any enterprise into high gear. And remember, getting things done doesn’t always mean doing every bit of the work yourself: Taurus is a sign that knows how to attract the help that it needs and to balance hard work with enjoyment of the finer things in life.
Inhabited Islands
Venus makes a friendly sextile aspect to Pluto (Feb. 1, 2020, 11:07 pm PST) on the Sabian symbols, An inhabited island and A woman entering a convent. These images seem utterly unrelated until you notice that both the places described are actually “inhabited islands.” In a convent, as on an island, a small group of people live in a community that in many ways is cut off from the rest of the world. Within those cloistered walls, we would no doubt find as many personality conflicts and power struggles as one finds anywhere – intensified, as in any small community, by the intimacy of close quarters.
In this set of symbols, the wildcard is the woman who’s entering the convent. Represented by fey, gossamer Venus in Pisces, she’s something new – a little jarring, perhaps, in her free-spirited, ocean-sprayed giddiness – entering a tightly closed ecosystem. Will she blend in? Will she be allowed to shine her brighter countenance into dark, dusty, unused corners, or be seen as a threat?
As Venus sextiles Pluto on these degrees, a new person, a new piece of information, a new opportunity, is introduced to your familiar world. Unless you fan its flames, that new light will gradually extinguish itself. But if you welcome it in, your world can grow larger, and its darkest corners brighter.
This week on the podcast, Jen and I explore the Venus/Mars/Neptune connection
and indulge in an extended discussion of one of our favorite movies, Groundhog Day!
© 2020 by April Elliott Kent
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