Highlights for May 16-22, 2022: Like Sweet Children

Like Sweet Children

Dates and times are given for U.S. Pacific Time zone.

Love It Anyway

This Scorpio Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse (May 15, 2022, 9:14 pm PDT/ May 16, 0:14 am EDT) conjoins the Moon’s South Node, a point of release. It’s time to lose ourselves a bit in order to conceive a new self. So much of our energy is spent pushing uncomfortable, embarrassing, human truths into the shadows. If your life were a house, there would be one room where you keep all this Scorpionic stuff… your altar, your baptismal fount, your terrors, your secret, sexual excitements. Everything is sacred in this room of your house, and what’s sacred we keep secret—and we protect our secrets, and our uncomfortable, embarrassing humanity, because they reveal what has power over us.

There’s something a bit supernatural about Scorpio, too, that entices us to imagine that we might find a way to outwit the overpowering laws of nature. Astrology emphasizes the “transformational” interpretation of Scorpio, inviting us to entertain the notion that we can harness its power to beat the odds. Maybe all those vampire and zombie movies are right, and we can cheat death. Maybe we can have unprotected sex with numerous opposite sex partners of child-bearing age and never experience an unintended pregnancy. Maybe we can figure out how to conceal our secrets in one big ironclad room, safe from prying eyes.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. But while I’ve lost many more loved ones than seems fair, and I’m in no hurry to lose more or to die myself, I don’t want to live in an immortal world. I want to mourn my dead, savagely, because I had the pleasure of loving them so dearly. I want to fight death because I’m determined to embrace life ecstatically. I want to proceed with joy into everything that makes life difficult, because they are the same things that make life dear. And I want to be brace enough to look life straight in the eye, see it for what it is, and go ahead and love it anyway.

Like Sweet Children

Children play make-believe. It’s a wonderful way to try out what it’s like to be something, or someone, else. Even if the games are warlike, as they sometimes are, they provide a way of developing imagination and empathy.

As grownups, many of us can’t or don’t make time for imaginative play. Special dispensation is given to those who produce especially fine fiction, music, or film for the rest of us. But consuming entertainment created by others doesn’t serve the same function as playing ourselves. And at least in the modern world, we’re often kept too busy earning a living to give ourselves over to leisure.

As Mars comes together with Neptune in Pisces (May 17, 2022, 11:33 pm PDT, at 24.59 Pisces), it begins a new 2-year cycle with Neptune. At its core, that’s a cycle about fighting for our dreams – but we first have to take time out to conjure those dreams. Next week, Mars enters its home sign of Aries (May 24), where it will team up with Jupiter to undertake big adventures. But this week, Mars in Pisces takes a soak in Neptune’s tub, and then we sleep like sweet children, dreaming deeply – so that we wake up next week refreshed, happy, and ready for play.

Power That Can’t Be Given

If you’d asked me when I was young whether I’d rather be rich or famous, fame would have won handily. Today, I’d lean the other way.

But actually, an extreme amount of either wealth or fame seems to come with its share of problems. It seems that our happiest, lightest, most joyful characteristics risk being dimmed or obliterated in either situation.

This week, as the Sun – symbol of the happy, full-hearted child within – trines formidable Pluto (May 19, 2022, 5:11 am PDT), true power comes from neither wealth nor fame, both of which make us vulnerable to the whims or avarice of others. Rather, the Sun trine Pluto illuminates the power that comes from joyfully embracing our authentic selves. That’s power that can’t be taken away.

In the end, this kind of power can’t be given to us. We can become obscenely wealthy and still lose a partner. We can be elected to office or crowned a monarch, yet lack the love and respect of our constituents. Pluto reminds that real power can only come from within.

Road Trip

The Gemini season, colored by Mercury’s current retrograde in this sign, begins in earnest as the Sun enters Gemini (May 20, 2022, 6:23 pm PDT). It’s a social season, and as mandates related to the pandemic have eased, many more of us are gathering with friends and considering the usual summer getaways. It’s Gemini’s job to connect people and their ideas with one another, and at this time of year the mild weather and natural beauty draw us outdoors as surely as a spring flower attracts bees.

Each year, when the Sun enters Gemini, we embark on a metaphorical road trip, and the destination is entirely beside the point. Gemini’s season is geared toward the process rather than a particular outcome. It’s the season of summer camp and internships and backpacking across Europe, and long drives across desolate highways, where there is nothing but room—room to be someone different for awhile, to let your imagination breathe, and to create a new story for yourself.

Open Windows

I‘m not sure I can explain why, but sometimes I find myself awash in nostalgia for some of the least wonderful moments of my life. Not the truly tragic ones, mind you. Just snapshots from an unhappy relationship or a vexing job, perhaps, or from a financially strained youth.

I find this weird wistfulness a pretty good analogy for the Pisces Last Quarter Moon (May 22, 2022, 11:43 am PDT). Each month, the Moon’s Last Quarter phase directs our gaze backward, and the Pisces Last Quarter heart remembers every hurt as well as every moment of ecstasy. Over time, when past pain dominates the present, it prevents us moving forward.

The Sun in Gemini rules with the head, but the Moon in Pisces rules with the heart. It’s the sign of letting go, of faith and forgiveness. Maybe that nostalgia I feel is just a final step in processing – of assimilating all the psychic nutrients from an experience before letting it go.

This Last Quarter follows an especially turbulent eclipse season. Eclipses have a way of closing doors, in order to encourage us to move through newly-opened windows. Find the old feelings that are holding you back (the Feb. 23, 2020 Pisces New Moon offers a clue). Bow to them, then let them go.

How we look at things

A few planetary developments this week call into question what is authentic and what’s false. As Mars sextiles Pluto (May 22, 2022, 3:15 pm PDT, at 28.28 Pisces/Capricorn), the planet of anger opens a dialogue with the planet of power. Mars is on the Sabian Symbol, A prism, reminding us that there are a lot of different ways we can look at a matter, rather than fixating on what makes us angriest. Pluto is on the symbol 29 Capricorn, A woman reading tea leaves, and Pluto would like us to believe that our fate is out of our hands (or our cup). But the sextile from Mars means there’s an opportunity to influence what would appear to be out of our control. It all lies in looking at things in the right way.

The same day, Mercury retrogrades back into Taurus (6:15 pm PDT), recovering recent ground. The only thing slower than Mercury in Taurus is Mercury retrograde in Taurus. Time to retrace our steps to the last week in April; something left unfinished then may be tripping us up now.