This is an evolutionary and growth-heavy week with Mars freshly in retrograde and Pluto joining existing Mars, Saturn and Jupiter retrogrades. We have Venus squaring Pluto and in conjunction with Uranus, playing off the Uranus-Pluto square and creating confrontations in which we will have the choice to grow into something new, or to employ old defense mechanisms to stay on top and seemingly in control. While trying new things may be a simple idea enough, the trigger point of it this week (via the Uranus-Pluto square) makes this defensive move deeply unconscious, and attached to psychologically loaded patterns.
So whenever you feel on the defense this week, it’s not just you – you’re tapping into this dynamic astroscape. The defensive, but also courageous, aspect of life is engaged with this Aries astrology. This week prompts us to be a beginner at a new threshold, rather than a tired champion defending an old title. I’ve got ideas for you on how to recognize this situation as it comes up & meet it with the attitude of a liberated warrior.
“You can’t beat death, but you can beat death in life” – Bukowski
April 18
Pluto in Capricorn stations retrograde: 12:23 AM PST
Planets that are stationing feel heightened in their expression, more potent. Venus is squaring our week’s slowing, halting, Pluto, so we will meet the dimension of Pluto directly in the realm of love expression, what we value.
(Image: Masaya Hashimoto Sculpts Plants out of Deer Bone and Antlers)
Venus in Aries trine Saturn in Sagittarius: 7:38 AM PST
Venus in Aries is a force helping us visualize and plant seeds for our future – creative projects, love affairs, building wealth. With this Saturn trine, the mood becomes more serious on getting things done, and not just remaining in headspace about it. The nature of the trine is that it is a subtle influence, unlike squares, oppositions or conjunctions (hard aspects) which tend to hit us in the face. With this transit, self-image and our perception of others can darken when we are not actualizing our potential, if we are remaining in dream space too long and not acting on our visions.
The astrology of the week is slow and potent, with fresh Mars retrograde (ruler of Aries), and active Jupiter-Saturn square, Pluto retrograde, so “action” here can be as simple as making decisions. With Saturn, we can think about cutting the deadweight, or getting rid of what is no longer essential. This transit is helpful for reality checks and deciding to step into new paradigms or new levels of growth, and this necessarily involves an ending of something familiar, or maybe something we’ve invested time and energy in. The practicality of Saturn in Sagittarius as it trines Venus in Aries is favoring endeavors that keep our fires alive. We need to protect our new visions from the gaze of those who would disempower them, judge them, or simply not understand. This is a two-sided issue: one is the strength and inner-resolve to be able to believe in ourselves no matter the external feedback (without becoming rigid), and the other is managing our environment, such that we are not interacting and engaging excessively with people who project limiting realities onto us.
Aries can burn hot before it realizes its time to back off, so some reality checks that come with this transit feel like getting burned. You can handle it. In the bigger scheme of it, you’ll be better off when you are following your guiding light of destiny. In differentiating yourself and valuing your unique path (Aries/Sagittarius) there is always alienation, people who don’t get it, haters. But the grit of Saturn in Sagg can help us see the bigger picture, and not take so personally (or get so defensive) when this issue arises. A bigger, and more subtle danger, lies in allowing the external environment to dictate our inner environment to the point where we face no resistance, but wonder what we have done with our lives as time goes on.
(Image: The Huntsman: Winter’s War)
April 19
Sun enters Taurus: 8:30 AM PST
If you were feeling the grind of Aries’ ruler, Mars, stationing retrograde close behind Saturn & the Pluto retrograde, you will feel another slowing energy with the Sun entering Taurus. Taurus is a little more well-suited to this stationing energy than Aries (who just wants to go), and it’s possible that we have burned ourselves out in some regard as we finish off Aries season. Aries is an athletic energy that loves a challenge, loves courage, and hates to back down from a fight (and Aries can see a fight in anything).
Aries cardinal fire energy is like a fire that scorches an entire forest, so if you think to the last zodiac month (beginning March 19 when the Sun entered Aries), what in your life has been scorched with new vision that has also consumed or destroyed something in its path? With Taurus, we can cultivate the new seed represented by Aries, and hopefully we have recycled some stagnant energy.
Taurus is a sensual sign, and is an inward-reflecting Venus energy (Libra is the external one). Taurus can be hermit-y or into self-reliance to a detriment. The self-love and solitude potentials of Taurus can enhance our relationship to ourselves (which in affect enhances our relationship to everything else). It becomes out of balance when our ideal of self-sufficiency keeps us stubborn and reserved in the face of positive energy exchange.
Taurus love magic is like getting to a place where you’re in love with yourself and enjoying your own company so much (nice dinners, ambiance set, etc.) that you invoke the Taurus polarity – Scorpio – and begin to emanate an attractive magnetism to others, and soon enough you are unexpectedly in love. It doesn’t need to be directly romantic energy, but any kind of external collaboration that occurs as a harvest of self-work and self-endeavor.
Venus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn: 1:49 PM PST
This transit is an invitation to give up a defensive stance on life. The way we feel it will likely be through challenge or confrontation, some kind of scenario that forces us out of our comfort zone. The question will be, how good are you at maintaining the status quo of your life such that you don’t have to feel uncomfortable? As you find something that challenges your value system or self-image this week, it’s likely you will also have a swift solution, which, if you will feel into it at the bottom arch of this vibration, feels like resurrecting something dead. Venus in Aries thinks, “I’ve never been in this situation before,” and Pluto in Capricorn answers with, “I’ll help control the situation.” It’s toolkit is made up of things that have worked in the past.
The other way around, Pluto in Capricorn can realize there is some kind of depth work to do, and Venus in Aries can feign innocence and choose to stay immature.
So now that I’ve covered the shadow side of this transit, there are other potentials worth mentioning. Pluto in Capricorn energy is really tight and controlling on maintaining structures of power, and unconsciously this energy also desires for these structures to crumble. Capricorn and Saturn energy can calcify matter and lock it into place, which although this energy supplies a sense of security, it is also responsible for the ways in which we get locked into systems that don’t work, while not knowing of any other way to live.
Venus in Aries is innocently and bluntly aware of itself, and in confrontation with Pluto in this way, it will also understand more likely the why of its uncomfortableness in a situation that challenges us. If this insecurity is seen as something exciting and a messenger of positive change and growth, Aries can engage its athleticism and optimism, while Pluto can understand that there is empowerment in change, that change breathes life into structure, and that maintaining the status quo is a form of suffocation.
It’s possible that humans are not as wired to be afraid of change as it seems, but that we just lack cyclical perspective of what change really is in our lives. When we are myopically focused on heights of the past, and can only assess the future from that stance, we are disconnected from the natural wheel and flow of time – a source which asks us to trust, but rewards us with the ability to be intimate with life from an adventurous standpoint, rather than a fear-based one. From fear, we are always at risk of losing what we have built, rather than athletically situated to stay current with the Tao.
The landscape and the rules of the game have shifted. If you approach the challenge from the headspace of the past, a landscape of the past is projected and superimposed onto the present, obscuring the reality altogether. Take in your new surroundings and embrace being the novice.
(Image: Fortesa Latifi)
April 21
Full Moon in Scorpio: 10:24 PM PST
A few factors (and retrogrades) already make this week so deeply internal. The Sun in Taurus shines its light fully on the Moon in Scorpio, each in only 2 degrees of their sign. So we are still at the beginning of this Taurus/Scorpio journey, and we can anticipate this Full Moon to give us some downloads on how we are deepening into life, or what fears are standing at the gate marking our way in. Listen to your relationships for cues – goddess of soul contracts, Juno, is in conjunction with the Moon in Scorpio. Look to the people in your life who you are intimately connected with – how are they prompting you to change and to grow? Are they conscious agents in your life (above-water, loving intentions) or unconscious agents (murky motives, power plays)? We attract either for different reasons. This Moon provides new light on our own motives as well, empowering places we are already standing in our power, and shedding awareness on aspects of ourselves that are manipulative or thorny, hooking energies. Perception is an agent of evolution with this Moon – that which you can see, you can change.
April 22
Venus in Aries conjunct Uranus in Aries: 2:00 PM PST
This pairing can help us perceive ourselves and those around us with a radically fresh lens – without conditioned preconceptions. But this is also a triggering energy – we can also perceive everything around us from the filter or prior trauma, prior heightened, heated moments of life in this life or in past ones. This similarity can be seen in the way of taking the energy temperature of bigot, and then taking the same energy temperature of a radical activist who is hateful of those who hold different beliefs of opinions than they do, even though they claim to be championing values of liberation (but in practice, are becoming what they hate). We get out of negative cycles of Uranus when we are open to view reality from a deconditioned lens, where we can view phenomena with increasing objectivity.
In alignment with the Uranus-Pluto square, this pairing is ambivalent and is mutable as to how we are going to access it. It’s electric energy can be used to uphold a value of the past (such as recreating a city exactly as it was in the aftermath of a natural disaster), or it can be used to move bravely into the future.
A joyful energy that can come out of this transit is in liberating self-discovery. If this energy is projected onto others, turning into dictates or judgments, the point is easily lost.
Someone told me recently that the path to freedom is correlated to what a person is leaving behind. Some people might wake up refreshed one day and see into a new way of reality – and others might have more cords and attachments, more to fight, a higher, thicker, ceiling to break through. Some stumble upon it innocently. Others fight for it. (Both options sound pretty Aries to me.)
~Monarch
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