“When does real love begin?” she asks. “At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity. At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?” – Anais Nin
This Full Moon in Aries Eclipse is like a birth as much as it is a harvest. Relationships have been in deep focus and revision since Venus retrograde, and now Libra is beginning it’s season in the Sun while Venus (the ruler of Libra) is in Leo and trining Uranus in Aries. This is a lot of brightness and illumination of Venus, so I had desired to find a beautiful and realized Libran voice to take us into the interior realm of Aries, as it is the brilliance of the Sun in Libra who illuminates the inner vulnerable experience of Aries this Full Moon. And not just an ordinary illumination, but the Sun will be tinting the Moon red. Anais Nin came staunchly to my mind. She is a talented artist who does happen to have her North Node in Libra in the 1st (Aries ruled) house along with her South Node in Aries in the 7th (Libra ruled house). And she has the passion of a Red Moon to match. So I’ve decided to collaborate with her, since in many ways she holds a vibration similar to this Eclipse.
Between the Aries and Libra archetypes we find instinctual attraction. Aries and Libra are both very instinctual energies – Aries is instinctual about its own desires and will, while Libra discovers itself through its instinctual attraction to other. Together they form a world of mirrors, in which we attract people into our lives that initiate us into a self-awareness at the time we are ready to receive it. That time is now. Whether it is a person or something else that is ‘other’, we have the capacity to be blasted with inspiration and then to internalize it in a very active way.
This Full Moon is a time to be especially aware of our perceptions of others and especially what seduces us, as the Sun in Libra creates a point of heightened illumination of the innermost self that is emerging (Aries). This is a time in which we may come into contact with people who inspire us creatively, people whose very projected essence has us realize a seed within ourselves that has not yet germinated but wishes to. This Full Moon is about the courage and self-allowance to take the first steps toward becoming. As Liz Greene emphasizes in many of the interpretations of face cards within the Tarot, if [such person] is to enter our lives, it is “not mere chance. It is rather an augury for the emergence of these soul qualities within the individual.”
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” – Anais Nin
During this Full Moon, the Moon is in tight conjunction to Vesta, the keeper of the sacred flame. We are literally being shown at this juncture what is sacred to us to develop within the self, but as anything with Aries, it requires courage. Plucky little Aries, with its ruler Mars freshly in Virgo: the time is ripe for not feeling good enough, for feeling like one little piece of sand amidst an entire continent. Snap out of it, friend. You are vast and you are infinite. (Saturn in Sagg IS squaring Mars after all). The sense of awe here is good. But measuring yourself up to it is useless unless you are to take action to become that which is pulling at your capacity for fantasy and admiration.
Even though you are already all the things you desire on one plane, you do have a moment on this plane of birth. This Full Moon, while a ‘harvest’ on one level because of the nature of Full Moons, is really a birth as well because of the Aries element. This is tender. The Moon does not always feel secure in Aries. In Aries, the Moon is experiencing the sense of being fresh and new, just born, just separated from the proverbial or literal womb.
“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.” – Anais Nin
If this process is going to be enjoyable, rather than terrifying, it has to be honored via the Vesta function which is refined and intentional about its energy in a way of keeping alive something vital. The most nascent yearning within you is a gift, not something to be scared of or to run away from just because it is so small (yet) in comparison to the bright, brilliant light of the realized creative energy of the Sun.
“In art, in history man fights his fears, he wants to live forever, he is afraid of death, he wants to work with other men, he wants to live forever. He is like a child afraid of death. The child is afraid of death, of darkness, of solitude. Such simple fears behind all the elaborate constructions. Such simple fears as hunger for light, warmth, love. Such simple fears behind the elaborate constructions of art. Examine them all gently and quietly through the eyes of a boy. There is always a human being lonely, a human being afraid, a human being lost, a human being confused. Concealing and disguising his dependence, his needs, ashamed to say: I am a simple human being in a too vast and complex world. Because of all we have discovered about a leaf…it is still a leaf. Can we relate to a leaf, on a tree, in a park, a simple leaf: green, glistening, sun-bathed or wet, or turning white because the storm is coming. Like the savage, let us look at the leaf wet or shining with sun, or white with fear of the storm, or silvery in the fog, or listless in too great heat, or falling in autumn, dying, reborn each year anew. Learn from the leaf: simplicity. In spite of all we know about the leaf: its nerve structure phyllome cellular papilla parenchyma stomata venation. Keep a human relation — leaf, man, woman, child. In tenderness. No matter how immense the world, how elaborate, how contradictory, there is always man, woman, child, and the leaf.” – Anais Nin
How is the gift honored? Practice. Not only is Vesta herself a fan of intention and ritual, but Mars, the ruler of Aries, is in Virgo, which is a sign through which we discover alignment and refinement through our practices. This Full Moon does not magic up creative realization for you. It can even hit you in the face with an awareness of the vastness of that which you wish to become. But it is going to be your actions, on the small and daily level, that get you there. The wisdom of Aries, where it can charmingly lack so much of it, is at least in its sheer courage to be new, to take a leap, to be the novice with a chip on their shoulder.
“It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anais Nin
Let yourself be inspired. But also, let yourself venture out on the epic that is your reaction to such inspiration. A musician struck with a lightning-like creative impulse may hear a symphony in their mind but they still have to show up to create it. If beauty is entering your sphere of life, take it as a sign of your own emerging blossoming. You cannot see something that is not a part of you.
~Monarch
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