What Lights Us Up in the Dark

Solar eclipse at 9° of Aries

Artist Kate Jarvik Birch does studies of physical objects in ways that reveal their aliveness. This post contains some of her studies of matchsticks, a little Aries inspiration, as we watch our own fire go out and relight, over and over, finding new reasons and new ways to burn.

Saturday morning, March 29th, at 3:57am PST, the first eclipse season of 2025 peaks with a solar eclipse at 9° of Aries, cosmic sign of the instinctual self. Aries is the first sign of the Zodiac, and in the northern hemisphere, the first sign of spring. It’s cardinal, initiatory fire, represented by the charging ram, an image of physical force unleashed. When Aries lights up in the sky, it’s time to reconnect with your innocent core self and your physical intelligence—with the actual specific embodied being that you are, and what you need and want and like and don’t like, and how you can tell. Ruled by Mars, it would be Aries’ preference to follow all impulses immediately, without having to think or plan or consider consequences. That’s how life gets it done as it’s coming out of winter—it just starts growing, and moving, and acting out, and figures out the rest as it goes along. Wherever Aries leads in your chart and life, you might need a lot of independence, possibly more than than you’re getting. At the very least you will thrive with explicit freedom to experiment and follow your own instincts, to find your own way. It also might be where you display courage and fuck it more easily. Aries’ spiritual teachings are about how to stay playfully present; how to stay not just in beginner’s mind, but in beginner’s heart, in beginner’s body, and beginner’s spirit. These are foundational lessons in learning itself, in how to be a learner. Like what if, right now, you were brand new, and the world was brand new? How you would you go about finding out who you are?

The new moon in Aries moment can be such a sweet one in the cycle. I used to kind of hate it, as a person with a heavy Taurus stellium; I didn’t like how sudden and spontaneous and intense and inconstant Aries’ energy was. But over the years I’ve learned to welcome it, and to welcome how uncomfortable it is for me to be a beginner, how gross and sweaty it is initially to not know what is happening or what I am doing. When I let go of trying to “know” and trying to be cool and collected and competent, that’s when I start to get somewhere interesting, somewhere beyond where I’ve already been. So in my experience, a renewal in Aries can be very activating, in both good exciting ways and scary uncomfortable ways, and it’s wise to try and welcome that activation, since it’s happening whether we want it to or not. If we spend less energy resisting it and allow some of its natural playfulness and fearlessness in, it will get things unstuck and get things moving.

And—this isn’t that sweet Aries new moon moment. We are in the deep end of an eclipse season. Eclipses are power outage-y and power surge-y. They interrupt the ordinary flow and temporarily destabilize current energies and forms to effect rapid change. Aries energy is already like this, right? A little unpredictable, destabilizing, working to effect rapid change? So an Aries eclipse is just extra. Where the recent total lunar eclipse in Virgo occurred on the south or clearing lunar node, and was all about releasing/cutting ties with unhealthy systems and unholy habits of mind, this solar eclipse in Aries is happening on the north node, the node of increase and desire. This is our third rodeo with a north node solar eclipse in Aries—we received one in 2023 and 2024. The north node has moved on to Pisces—but Pisces and Aries are in a radical quantum entanglement right now, so here we are again. These Aries eclipses have been drawing in fresh reserves of courage, personal power, self-curiosity, and self-regard for two years now. They’ve all been in collaboration to some degree with a transiting Chiron, the wounded healer, so they’ve also been helping us heal from patterns of self-wounding. Some of us have had to look freshly at how much of who we think we are is actually just old stuck trauma responses or social conditioning; how many of our self-definitions are actually the internalized judgements of others; how often we speak to ourselves without warmth or love. And then hopefully we’ve been working on all that, allowing more of our authentic self-expression out, even the stuff others don’t like; talking to ourselves like we would someone we love; remembering who we really are, and redefining things on more self-accepting, self-respecting terms.

So we are getting one more dose of this Aries solar eclipse medicine; a coda. The message could not be clearer with this one: you are in the right place, the right time, the right body, the right life. You are here on purpose. Fully incarnating, being exactly who you are so you can become who you are, is your purpose. And when you take it far enough—and you will! you have to!—you are able to show up in relationships with others and the world in a better, more honest, much holier way. You start learning, more rapidly, all that you have been longing to learn. You are also, paradoxically, able now to transcend that self. You are able to relax into being alive with all of these other living beings, relax into the work of surviving, relax into fighting even, for all that you know in your heart and soul to be good and right and true. And then a whole other level of this life party finally gets started.

This particular Aries solar eclipse is happening in the midst of a massive liminal vortex that has stretched itself over the threshold between the end of winter (Pisces) and the start of spring (Aries). If you’ve been in the upside down, or feeling like everything is going backwards or so slowly it may as well be going backwards, not sure what to do or if what you’re doing matters, that’s right on schedule, I’m so sorry. Venus, planet of love and beauty and relationships, has been retrograding through Aries and is now back at 28° of Pisces. It’s been bringing up feelings from the recent and distant past, likely old forgotten wounds, for fresh empathy and healing. Mercury, planet of magic and travel and communications, is also retrograding in the same pattern as Venus. It’s forcing us to pause and reflect and and see what we’ve missed. It will be nestled at 0° of Aries during the eclipse—the degree of reincarnation, possibly giving us a premonition of what’s to come from the Saturn/Neptune conjunction there—and then Mercury will move back into Pisces just after. There it will make a conjunction with Neptune, who is hovering at 29° of Pisces and getting ready to enter Aries just one day later. Neptune is the great water god and planet of imagination, intuition, and spiritual transcendence. It’s a dissolver of boundaries and definitions, an eater and creator of realities. It’s been in Pisces since 2011, and it is entering Aries this weekend for the first time since the 1860s, which is at least partly responsible for the surreal, chaotic, ungrounded quality of this time.

Also significant — Aries’ ruler Mars is at 22° of Cancer, our cardinal water sign, and is in a loose trine with the last third of Pisces, where Saturn, Venus, the north node, Neptune, and soon, Mercury, are all gathered. We started the fall last year with Mars in Cancer—it entered Cancer on September 4th, entered Leo November 3rd, then stationed retrograde December 6th, re-entering Cancer on January 6th, and we then we had a Cancer full moon conjunct a retrograde Mars. It stationed direct on February 24th, but will not be back in Leo until April 18th. That’s so much time in Cancer for Mars, who typically transits a sign for 45-60 days. The Mars in Cancer themes are all about being a warrior of care, infusing our courage and fight with compassion, and our compassionate care with more courage and fire. Interestingly, Mars was in Cancer during the first solar eclipse in Aries in 2023, and it was in Pisces during the second one in 2024. So in every possible way, this fiery solar renewal moment is brought to you by both fire and water.

One of the foundational teachings of alchemy was encoded in this mysteriously saying: water is the secret abode of fire. It means many things at once, but is essentially a reference to primal water being the “female/yin” element, and primal fire being the “male/yang” element, and that together they symbolically told the story of a universe that comes into being through the oppositional interaction of form (contracting/receiving/matter) and force (expanding/emitting/spirit). To know that water is the secret abode of fire is to know that fire on its own cannot create. It needs the womb, the limiting container, a body, a place to be received; it needs water. And in the Zodiac system of symbols, these two meanings are effectively completing entangled and co-arising in Pisces, the water sign of pure spirit, and Aries, the fire sign of pure embodiment. Take from that what you will, but we are living in epic times. And it’s requiring that we tolerate brand new levels of complexity, which needs brand new levels of integration—particularly of spirit and matter, of meaning and form.

Some questions and wonderings it brings up for me: if Aries is the fire of spirit and instinct and action, the centrifugally spinning fire that moves from the center outward, and acts upon the world, then how can we support our own freedom and ability to act on the world by residing more deeply within the home of our limited bodies? What if these north node eclipses in Aries have given us the secret to falling a little more in love with this incarnation, with this life, in a way that once seemed impossible? What if they’ve been slipping us some life fuel?

Yes, the empire of the United States is failing and falling—that’s what empires do. And yes, it’s increasing the danger and stress of life in this world for the foreseeable future, as systems and societies respond and rearrange, and the stress and stakes of the work for liberation. Yes, our own fire has probably been going out, a lot, in response to all of this. But Aries doesn’t really do doom and cynicism. Aries does hope. Hope in the way Vaclav Havel meant it, hope as “not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out.” Hope as a kind of pure bodily certainty that there is something you should do, and maybe keep doing. We are going to lose, and we are going to win, both, so it can’t be about that. It’s more elemental. Maybe notice how every time your fire goes out, something or someone eventually lights you back up—notice what those things and people and emotions are. Notice what makes you want to live, and what feels worth fighting for, no matter what. Decide to go towards all of that, and let yourself have what lights you up, so you can keep lighting others up too. Give yourself a break from internal judgement if your fire is not constant right now; no one’s is. And then choose—just today, since today is all we have—to embrace the hope and fear of being a beginner, again; of having so much to learn about how you work, and how life works, that you may as well have a little fun doing it.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

For paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of writings on Aries in In the River of What’s Happening Now and as always, a generative creative writing prompt brought to you by my mind in collaboration with the current astrology. While we are taking a break from ritual prompts during eclipse season, I am throwing in some poems that have lit me up in the past few weeks - spreading the kindling around.

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, relate with it and adapt it in any way you see fit.)

The Aries archive

Your One Wild and Precious Life - full moon at 24° of Aries (Fall 2024)

Remember Who You Are - new moon solar eclipse at 19° of Aries (spring 2024)

The Voice, Unafraid, Changes Everything - full moon at 6° of Aries (fall 2023)

Quantum Leaping - new moon total solar eclipse at 29° of Aries (spring 2023)

The Gospel of Neuroplasticity - new moon at 0° of Aries (spring equinox 2023)

Everyone Who Loves You Wants to See You Shine - full moon at 16° of Aries (Fall 2022)