The Price of Everything
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The irrational world
From time to time, even the most rational person must grapple with the messiness of the irrational world. Not even the most formidable intellect immunizes us from falling in love, mourning a loss, or grinning at a gamboling kitten – however hard we might fight those impulses.
Mercury recently entered Gemini, which by rights should favor our rational selves, the selves that play with new apps on our phones and split the atom. But this week, it approaches a conflict-charged square aspect to Neptune (May 29, 2019, 6:22 pm PDT), the planet that’s as ethereal and imaginative as Mercury is logical and linear.
The Sabian Symbols for this Mercury/Neptune square focus on learning: A large archaic volume, and A master instructing his pupil. Each of us knows how we learn best, some from books, some from one on one tutoring, others by rolling up shirtsleeves and diving in. This week, the best learning pulls from many approaches, and ends in a thunderclap of inspiration.
Taking it to a new level
For example, I’m the sort of person who, once I decide to learn to do something, just shuts herself into a room for two or three years and emerges having figured it out. This approach has its strengths; it lends itself to original thinking, but also to blind spots and reinventing the wheel. It’s always a shock to launch yourself out into public, doing the very best you know how, and then encounter someone who just takes it to a whole other level.
This, in a nutshell, is the story of Mercury in opposition with Jupiter (May 30, 8:12 pm PDT). Mercury is the scrappy, DYI mind that delights in figuring things out on its own. But Jupiter is the accomplished scholar, the Masters candidate who has invited the knowledge of previous generations into the room.
Honestly, my approach is better for me. But I do wish sometimes that I’d gotten that Masters degree, or at least let someone else teach me to play lead guitar.
Your finest forever
Sometimes, we get lucky, and find that we want the right things. We’re happy in the job that we do well, that pays a good salary and brings respect. We desire the partner who brings stability and teamwork to our lives instead of drama and angst. We crave the food that’s healthy for us.
You may get a taste of that kind of luck this week, as Venus makes a trine aspect to Saturn (May 31, 8:26 am PDT). It’s a quick transit – strongest from May 30 to June 1 – so pay attention or you might miss it. Enjoy the calm and sense of purpose that comes when your desires align with the part of you that has your best interests at heart.
Venus also makes sextile aspects to the Moon’s North Node (May 30, 4:51 am PDT) and Neptune (May 30, 9:51 am PDT) this week. So it won’t all be about eating your veggies and getting eight hours of sleep. Squint a little and you’ll see enchantment in those best interests, and maybe even the road to your finest forever.
The price of everything
Reading the Sabian Symbols for this week’s Venus trine Pluto (June 2, 8:38 pm PDT), A jewelry shop and Two awards for bravery in war, kept bringing a vivid image to mind for me of walking into a dim, dusty pawn shop and spying two war medals in the jewelry case along with rings and watches.
Oscar Wilde wrote of a man who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” When Venus comes together with Pluto, we might adapt that expression to something like, “knows the price of everything and that nothing has value.” Pluto, when it connects with Venus, can suggest that even the things that we should like, that society says we should value, feel oddly unsatisfying.
The fact that the two come together in a trine aspect, though – the aspect of ease and blessings – suggests that maybe that isn’t all bad. To have caught the object of your obsession gives you the opportunity to see, up close, that nothing outside of you has the power to make you happy. And that’s both a little bit sad, and a good reminder that life has only the meaning that we bring to it.
©2019 April Elliott Kent
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