The Road Forward Transforms

Full moon at 9° Aquarius

This Tuesday, August 1st, at 11:32am PST, the moon peaks in fullness at 9° of Aquarius, the water-bearer and collective-consciousness-traveler and star-eyed future-tripper. While Aquarius is associated with the mind, and with technology invented by the mind, if there is anything this moment calls for it would be looking away from the screens, and also from anything fixed and certain and right in front of us, and to just let ourselves look really far away. Like literally let your eyes find how far away they can look from your current position, whether it’s a far corner of the ceiling, or a view of the sky out the window, or an actual vista. And if you aren’t satisfied, get up and go find a more satisfying, faraway view. Notice how orienting to physical distance takes the edge off a bit. Then take a breath on purpose, because you’re doing great, being a human with a mind and a body and a heart and a lot of other stuff, and this astrology is actually pretty helpful.

Like any full moon, we might feel very full; full moons tend to exaggerate all the ways we are out on the edge of our capacity. But this one is also providing some illumination at a moment when we could really use it. Venus is retrograding in Leo, the sign opposite Aquarius, and she’s still in her descent, emotionally-speaking, but she’s also finally arriving somewhere. She’s down in the dark of Leo’s shadows, and the full moon is handing her a fat moonbeam to flashlight around. We’re likely to receive some important insight that helps us work with what’s going on. The Leo and Aquarius opposition teaches us about the tension between our instincts for authentic self-expression (Leo) and our instincts to cultivate and create collective cultures (Aquarius). It also might highlight the conversation between our feeling self (hot-headed hot-bodied Leo) and our thinking self (cool, far-out Aquarius). There is something we need right now that will come from the Aquarius end of things; from tapping a larger, more radical, more out-there perspective. What has been evolving for you in the last 6 months in the part of your chart influenced by Aquarius? How might that balance out some of what’s going on for you right now in Leo?

I saw a post recently (that I now can’t find) that observed how in all time travel stories, everyone is really concerned that a small change might irrevocably alter the future, but hardly anyone believes that a small change made in the present could dramatically alter the future. It’s been haunting me ever since. I am a practicer of small changes, and also I am a chronic underestimator of the power of small changes. As this moon has been waxing and brewing, I’ve been wondering about this fragile fractal of our collective future.

Around the same time, I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest article in The Guardian We can’t afford to be climate doomers. She’s once again calling out the “doom evangelists” on the internet and the eagerness she sees in them to despair that all is already lost, to surrender in advance, and to analyze our situation with a “strange combination of confidence and defeatism” about what we can do to make a livable future. What’s so dangerous about this, she argues, is that it saps us of our motivation to participate in finding and implementing solutions. And by doing nothing, we ensure the worst outcome; we are all but working towards it. Her piece reads like evidence of Iain McGilchrist’s theory he laid out in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, that a dominant left-hemisphere too cut-off from the right creates these exact kinds of distortions in perspective, namely a paranoid distrust combined with an unwarranted certainty and optimism, the product of the left’s fragmenting approach to knowledge and its need for control.

The Aquarius full moon loves all of these critiques. These are the kinds of thoughts Aquarius wants us thinking. And if any of this is resonating on a personal level, if you have been suffering from feelings of dread or doom, or an overly paranoid or fearful or certain mind, or from a persistent belief that your own small adjustments in attitude and action won’t make any difference, you are officially invited to take a step back. One of the tricks to being a human with a mind is knowing how to keep your beliefs and understandings a little unfinished or incomplete; how to stay a student if not a beginner exactly, using curiosity and wonder to continually discover and update what you think you might know. A rigid or out of control mind can be disrupted in any number of ways, but one of the quickest is actively admitting and embracing ignorance. If you can say “I don’t know,” and let go of the need to know right away, or to be right, you are on your way to increasing your intelligence.

Ultimately, Aquarius is trying to liberate us psychologically; to get us out of the myth of isolation and into the myth of interconnectedness. We are not really alone; this whole world is alive, and we are a part of it. Antero Alli, author of Angel Tech and other books on consciousness, writes that “the kind of discipline it takes to liberate ourselves psychologically requires a total commitment many of us remain quite unfamiliar with.” True. But all big changes start small. As this full moon completes a current of manifestation, and activates a current of liberation, consider what greater freedom and liberation and interconnectedness might mean for you right now, and then feel into what it might mean for the whole collective. Then see if a small, meaningful act is presenting itself in the coming days—both as a ritual of beginning a healing process, but also maybe as practical step, one of thousands, that has the potential to transform your life and the world.

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Ritual and Creative Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what sounds good to you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit.)