With this First Quarter Moon in Scorpio, I want to reflect on the essence of commitment. This is a Saturn and Venus heavy week, and the astrology of this week is potent in a way that can be used for actualization, when we are pragmatic or committed, or I do see potentials for it being distressing when these potentials aren’t wielded with care.
The First Quarter Moon represents a turning point in the month – where we take the energy from the last New Moon and make some kind of decision or take some action with it. If you begin to track your New Moon intentions, you may see that the First Quarter Moon presents you (or carries through with you) opportunities to take some action relative to your goal or wish.
In Scorpio, the Soul merges with something outside of itself to expand past its limitations. This is when the Soul takes inside of itself a symbol or a person or an organization – anything extrinsic – and joins forces with it. This is an incredibly powerful process, and it is one that we often do unconsciously. And, even doing so consciously, we lose a sense of boundary between who we are and what we have taken in, and if we lose the thing we joined with, it cuts as deep as we let it in. It’s no better to be jaded and closed off to life so we avoid being hurt, but there is something to be said about being aware of what we are forming bonds and alliances with, and how we intend to see it through. Can we experience something fully and consciously without becoming attached to it at the level that it becomes a need, a fixation, an obsession? (Scorpio) We may look at this process as playing with fire – letting ourselves be drawn to the things that compel us, but understanding that there is an art to bonding and to letting go. Consider what you are drawn to and how you may be in relationship with the things that both scare and entice you…. this intensity is Scorpio, and it’s how we grow, but also how we die (psychic death, shedding skins)…. and then yet again, how we are reborn (the phoenix rising from the ashes). The nature of change, even when it is becoming something we are desiring and aspiring to be, involves death of some kind. Or if it is death and letting go we are doing first, we are paving the way for something new. On and on it goes. It is easy to get stuck in this process by holding onto what we’ve gained, or holding off from experiencing something new, but it is an active cycle. The First Quarter Moon in Scorpio suggests some movement on this front – so whether you are making the move to go deeper into a goal, a project, a relationship, to commit, or you are needing to really let something go, consider the sex-death-rebirth cycles at work.
With Mars and Saturn, a theme of this time is very much in having the courage to walk our individual truth. The nature of this transit being in the balsamic phase (Mars approaching Saturn, not yet having passed it) will speak to a shedding or letting go of the will acting according to certain belief structures or calcified patterns. This can be felt on the level of no longer having motivation toward something that once compelled you, or feeling that to continue extending yourself toward something that once had meaning creates a deep sense of “Why am I doing this?” This doubt is opening up room to consider new paths, which may show more visible starts when Mars catches up to Saturn on the 24th.
Venus in Virgo squares Saturn this week (on the 13th) shortly after Saturn stations direct on the same day. Saturn went retrograde on March 25 of this year, which began a re-envisioning process for what we are doing with our lives in a structural sense, perhaps relating to career or anything we do publicly. On an inner-level, we’ve been reworking our judgements and our perception of boundaries. Venus opposes Neptune on the 14th, and trines Pluto in Capricorn on the 17th. This is basically a stressed-out Venus – and she’s right on the North Node, so it’s big karmic work she’s doing with us right now. This is playing out in the realm of our values and our love life, which includes how we regard ourselves.
(Soichi Sunami. Dancer Agnes De Mille, 1929)
Virgo is about articulation, practice, alignment, paying attention to detail, taking care of tasks and errands and to-do lists, the mundane, with the possibility of elevating the mundane into something beautiful through our care toward and attention to it.
The arrangement of Venus and the nodes, and Venus playing into the Saturn-Neptune square, and Saturn squaring the nodes as well, makes me think of a spinning pottery wheel with wet clay being formed into a vase. If the clay is centered and handled with care, it will become a vase. If it is off-center, and not brought back into alignment, it flies off of the wheel and onto the wall.
A lot of self-criticism or criticism and judgment of others can come up with Venus in Virgo squaring Saturn in Sagittarius. There may be a clear awareness of what feels lacking or what feels off, and there can be a lot of mental obsessing over wrongdoing, and pointing fingers. An issue that can really come up with this is avoidance – finding ways that one is a victim of circumstance and therefore, going to accept their fate as it is. Or, being so overwhelmed by the work one feels they need to do to get to where they want that they feel incapacitated to even try. Likewise, if you accept the challenges as they arise, this can be a week of breaking through limitations by re-organizing consciousness and taking action accordingly. The confrontation of this square makes situations of crisis around feeling overwhelmed likely.
I hope that knowing that part of it is a transit may help you take those feelings less seriously when they arise, not in that they aren’t real, but that they will pass. One way to take advantage of these insights though is to get organized and start to take practical actions toward improvements, step by step. Virgo’s propensity for anxiety is diminished by being busy and productive, as long as these acts are in alignment with a higher vision (Sagittarius) that one resonates with. It’s so much easier to be motivated to do what’s hard, when we know it’s for a reason we truly identify with. So finding the intersection between our responsibilities and what it’s all leading to, will be good medicine and motivation for the week.
Once these little tasks and chores and improvements are set in motion, it will open and make space for the more dreamy elements of the week to come through. The magic this week is in the details and the Earth plane, meaning that which you can see and touch. The emotional, ethereal layers of reality – the ability to relax into all of this – will follow the health of the tangible, with this Virgo energy.
This week can initiate or see through some REAL change – use its momentum for healthy re-visions of your relational life, your health, your career – any place in life that you are starting to see issues and problems with. Virgo relates to the gut and digestion, so whether you attend to your diet on a literal level or think of it metaphysically – what practical acts organize your reality into better functioning? Virgo can ignore its own systems – eat a bunch of cookies, get a stomachache, and claim to have no idea why the stomachache. The challenge of this week’s astrology is to attend on a deeper level to reality, and the very core truth of why we are experiencing the challenges we are experiencing. In what ways are we responsible, and how can we make a change?
Thanks for reading and taking the time and heart space to meditate on the planets with me. If you’d like to receive these forecasts to your inbox each week as well as special offers regarding astrology readings, sign up for my mailing list!
~Sabrina Monarch
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