A First Quarter Moon of Deep Relating

Wednesday morning's First Quarter Moon makes for an interesting juncture, especially considering the intensity of these times. This is reflected in the current lunation cycle that involves Saturn in Scorpio and also Venus, Mars and Neptune, reflecting depth and idealism in personal relationships, as symbolized by Venus. With this lunar phase, we are reaching a time of tension in attempting to resolve interpersonal conflicts and may also be reflecting on the collision between desire and practicality. There is emphasis as well on Chiron, the Wounded Healer, indicating that as we move forward with our lives and attempt to resolve issues as they arise, we are coming from a very deep place indeed, and have the opportunity to work with old patterns arising from former trauma that may have been holding us back from the fullest expression of who we really are and how we intend to relate to others.

It is in fact a strong Venus cycle that we find ourselves in all this summer. After the recent New Moon that exactly aspected Venus, we find in this current configuration Venus drawing near to Jupiter, only a few degrees away. In recent days, we have been able to see Venus and Jupiter as quite brilliant in the evening skies, drawing closer, heading to an exact conjunction just before the July 1st Full Moon, when these two are also in extremely close trine with an empowered Uranus in Aries. There is thus currently an innovative spirit at work in all our relating, and our attempt to better understand the way that relationship patterns work themselves out in our lives. This is even truer over the next two months, as we head into the late-July retrograde of Venus, beginning in Virgo, and traveling backward through Leo. She will disappear from the evening skies to begin her sojourn "in the underworld," when closest to the Sun, from August 9th to the 21st. August 21st is the time of her Heliacal Rise when she reappears as the Morning Star to begin a new 584-day cycle, associated with the sign of Leo.

With this current dramatic focus on relating comes also the emphasis on depth associated with Chiron, and with Pluto. These two planetary archetypes correspond to researches into underlying realities operating at the deeper levels of our psyche, and are each aspected by both Venus and Jupiter in this quarter moon configuration. We are attempting to move on ahead with our lives, with key relationships seen in a new light, in which the underlying motivations for how we connect may yet become more clear. This is to our great advantage as we come through another intense year of personal transformation and soul growth.

The Sabian Symbols for this First Quarter Moon have, as usual, something to contribute. They are, for the Sun, in the third degree of Cancer, "A man bundled up in fur, leading a shaggy deer," which might remind us of protection in the face of difficulty and of the many layers of the psyche, tender within us. Marc Edmund Jones has "the pioneer or trail-blazing instinct in the human heart" and "the self's insistent determination to strengthen itself in its own highly individual roots" and refers to "an unlimited self-reliance." For the Moon we find the hopeful symbol "The dawn of a new day, everything changed," reminding us of transformation. Jones has "the illimitable potentialities to be found [in] personal participation in everyday affairs... and the consequent need to blaze a path of special recognition for each particular characteristic of selfhood." Indeed we must forge ahead with our spiritual journey into wholeness, and our own individual evolving understanding of what we came into this earthly life, uniquely, to accomplish.