Can you feel it? A sense that forward progress — maybe even (gasp!) momentum — is not only possible, but potentially enjoyable? Are areas of your life or your psyche that had been intensely feeling and absorbing and reacting for a long time finally starting to dry out, spark up, or stabilize?
Your answer may be a solid “no.” And that’s more than okay.
So many familiar facets of reality are destabilizing and are no longer “a given.” Staying oriented is becoming a full-time job. (Or maybe feeling oriented has become the new luxury vacation 99% of us can’t access?).
But if you narrow your focus to your personal day-to-day, in the moments between doom-scrolling and political/social commentary podcast listening, can you sense something reviving in you?
All the major planets are in direct motion, and will be for a solid couple of months until mid-July. (With the exception of Pluto, which will station retrograde again in about a week. But Pluto spends a lot of time retrograde, so I don’t usually focus on its back-and-forth too much unless circumstances warrant it.)
Mercury is completely free and clear of its recent retrograde landscape, and picking up speed in Aries. Venus will fully clear its retrograde path on May 15, and just moments ago it exited dreamy Pisces to join Mercury (and Neptune) in Aries. With Mars in Leo the last two weeks (and also free and clear of its own retrograde territory come Friday), that’s some lively energy.
Fires burn best when the right materials are dry and have enough oxygen around them.
How can you give your mind some space? If you’ve ever built a campfire, you know that packing the logs tightly won’t build an efficient blaze. The same goes for piling too many thoughts on top of one another.
What would let your heart-center receive the warmth of others, and extend that warmth to those you care about in a very intentional, proactive-yet-gracious way?
How can you use your emotions like just enough lighter fluid to get the grill going — without making the food taste like petrochemicals or singeing your eyebrows (or the entire front porch)?
Who or what is lighting a fire under your butt to get in motion? How badly do you want to, and how much are you willing to give yourself over to it? Can you march toward what you want without leaving scorched earth in your wake?
Fire is a brilliant tool. A little of it, used properly and given some space, can accomplish quite a lot. But a lot of fire, used with abandon or left to its own power, leaves nothing left.
To me, the shift to warm and dry so far feels like a reprieve. Thankfully, the Sun is only a week and a half into Taurus. Earth can support fire but cannot itself burn (think bonfire on a sandy beach, or the stones and brick of a fireplace). Earth thrown atop a fire can also smother a blaze in its tracks — very useful should water be too scarce.
For another month we’ll still have Saturn in Pisces, offering structure to our imaginations and asking for continued discipline in our spiritual seeking. Saturn can be the wet blanket on a fire if needed, or the bucket of rainwater kept handy by the campfire.
Offering some air is our favorite blowhard Jupiter, in Gemini, operating the bellows to keep air circulating: the thoughts and words we share at lightning speed during these digital days. Or perhaps the mental space needed to hold two opposing truths at once.
As Venus sidles up to Neptune in early Aries through the weekend (exact May 2), idealism and love appear to heat up. Is that steam I see rising?
People generally toss around the phrase “rose-colored glasses” as a pejorative; a description of someone failing to see reality. That may be the case, and one way Venus conjunct Neptune could play out. Reality matters, and I fear we lose touch with it too easily these days.
Yet without that rosy glow once in a while, we might never view anything as worth pursuing, worth attracting, or worth even dreaming about. This, too, is Venus plus Neptune in Aries: idealism and attraction in action.
Without dreams — without some idealism — we might never start the things we end up loving and valuing the most, the things that light us up from within. The match needs something to strike against, and care taken to connect it with a reason to burn, for fire ever to light up the night and keep us warm.
With love,
Amanda
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