The Voice, Unafraid, Changes Everything

Full moon at 6° of Aries

Art by Fran Rodríguez

In the early hours of Friday morning - 2:58am PST - the moon goes full and bright at 6° of Aries. Aries is the fiery, holy-shit-starting ram. It’s the first sign of the zodiac, and in the northern hemisphere, the first sign of spring, and it has to have enough physical energy to get us through the crisis of rebirth. Try to imagine what it takes for the life in a seed that’s been buried in the dark, in the stiff frozen earth, to break through its protective shell and push itself upward toward a warmth and light it cannot feel or see, but knows is there. That’s Aries — pure, personal, irrational, ecstatic, life-making instinct. Cardinal fire.

Arriving a week into Libra season, where the general call is for dim golden tones and smooth background jazz and pleasing social harmonies, the Aries full moon turns on the hot bright lights and blasts the horn. Where Libra centers empathy and relationship, Aries centers agency and the individual self. Where Libra uses honey, Aries uses charge and heat. Whether we love or hate this kind of energy might just depend on the quality of our connection with our physical bodies and action impulses and power, or how far we’ve progressed in healing our shame and people pleasing, or the current condition of our sympathetic nervous systems. Full moons in general can have us feeling a little full, a little overwhelmed and over it, and if we are arriving in a state of burnout, it exaggerates that state. An Aries full moon is definitely going to try us in that way, and it’s often best to just hideout a bit, and wait for the extremeness to pass. If that’s not you, if you’ve been careful not to overtax your capacity, or you’ve just been blessed to be in a time of fewer demands, you might enjoy the urgency and turned-up-ness of it all. These full moon days could just be a portal to some passionate agitation, some self-loving push for more freedom.

This moon, like all moons, is part of a larger story or unfolding. We are more than halfway through Chiron’s transit of Aries—it entered Aries in 2018 and will move into Taurus in 2026—and so there’s been an ongoing healing here of our self definitions, and anything painful we were taught to believe about ourselves. The north node also moved into Aries earlier this year, and the south node into Libra, setting into motion the next series of eclipses, and a time of increased hunger in Aries. We received two new moons in Aries in March (The Gospel of Neuroplasticity) and April (Quantum Leaping), the second of which was a solar eclipse. Those built on the themes of Chiron’s transit, and gave a big finish to Jupiter’s expansive year-long transit of Aries that completed in May, but with even more emphasis. You might feel like a living exclamation point right now in the part of your chart Aries rules. I wrote at the time it was like this “chord of agency and initiation is getting played an octave higher, with a backup choir.” Whatever is coming from that double initiation, it’s redefining you.

We’ve all in some way been pushed in the last six months, and the year before that, to clean up this relationship with our own agency and power, and to heal from any painful beliefs about who we are, what we are worth. We are actually sacred beings, deserving of being treated like sacred beings. Our value is inherent. We don’t have to earn it. When we know this with total clarity, we can put an end to the unhealthy power dynamics our relationships. We can enter and nurture relationships where we share power, relationships where no one dominates (*without consent), where everyone is treated with respect, and where no one is allowed to shrink from the task and responsibility of knowing themselves and exercising their own power. This is certainly necessary and beneficial on an interpersonal level, but it’s on the collective level that I really feel the stakes of it.

The Sabian symbol for 6° of Aries is “a square with one of its sides brightly illumined,” which James Burgess reads as “crystallization of life-purpose,” so this is also about that reckoning. There is a light trying to come through each of us. This full moon wants you to bask in that light a little more than you have; to believe in your own gifts, and your own unique way of giving them. Whatever is still hesitating in you, about being yourself more honestly and radically in this life, about showing up more fully and taking up some space, this is the moon wants you to let it go. It wants to give you the bravery and the foolishness and the fuck-it you need to be speak truly, beautifully, and unafraid.

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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.)