Willow's October 2008 Astro Perspective

Man, I'm a rockstar. Here's the monthly update...on time! And after a hellish five days of packing, moving, cleaning, unpacking, painting, more cleaning and still the astrology is flowing like water. heh heh

This month, we will be striving with all our ability to find our equilibrium, attempting to find a neutral point between the wild events of September and those yet to come in November. This is always the case with Libra energy (where the Sun will be for most of the month and the currently retrograding Mercury will be until November 4), but Libra's refined airiness and awareness of beauty are needed more than ever at this point to give us a moment to breathe, to give us something lovely to inspire us through some bumpy channels.

Libra is the sign where we attempt to achieve balance, equilibrium, and peace - sweet, sweet, peace - if only for a moment. As fleeting as they seem to be, peace is Libra’s goal, its directive. It is the sign of partnership and relationship, where we are constantly existing in relation to and acting accordingly.

As I said in the September Astro Perspective, Libra energy has its work cut out for it at the moment. We’ve got a lot to balance, a lot piled on the scales and only more to come, it seems. The scales are working hard, correcting where necessary, swinging wildly up and down at times. We just think we’ve gotten it together, a moment to relax (which Libra, ruled by Venus, loves to do most of all), when something else gets added to the pile and we’re forced to take yet another angle into consideration, to rebalance.

Libra is driven for justice, and it just wouldn’t do to leave something or someone out who should be taken into the fold. That wouldn’t be fair. True harmony, true peace (and the peace of mind that comes with it) can only come when we have left nothing out, when every piece gets its say and its consideration. Bringing many disparate elements together into one beautiful, harmonious tone.

But of course, this is not as easy as it looks. Getting a ragtag group of human beings who all sing in different languages, who all have different levels of experience, all singing in harmony, seeing the beauty in each other and enjoying being together. Libra is one harried choir director at times.

Which brings us to the other parts of Libra and Venus, the parts that are sometimes glossed over and that is the strife and battle and discord that exist on our way to finding that harmony.

This month, the Sun in Libra and retrograding Mercury in Libra are ruled by Venus in Scorpio, making it a very strong influence. Venus isn’t ever-so happy in Scorpio, but nonetheless, she will do her job here. She would rather keep things lovely, smiley and beautiful, but in Scorpio, we're faced with both sides of the coin. We understand that our relations with other people contain ugly things as well as beautiful, and that we have to see the dark parts of our relations with others in order to bring them to light.

Scorpio knows that superficial, surface-level peace will never last. Whatever we leave hidden and neglected will eventually come out in nasty, indirect ways to undermine the peace and harmony in our relationships. It drives us to the root, to the very centre, to see what’s REALLY going on underneath it all, so that we can break underlying dynamics that are holding us in a places where we don’t want to be. Also so we can intuitively recognize and merge with those who will strengthen our ability to reach our soul’s directives - both personal and collective - without dragging a bunch of detritus along with us that will smother the alchemical flame guiding us through.

Scorpio shows us the dark parts to bring about awareness of them, so that we can choose wisely when it comes to merging our precious energies with another. So that we don’t walk blindly into situations and relationships designed to give us karmic bites in the ass.

As the balance shifts from Libra energy to Scorpio throughout the month, things take on a depth and an intensity. A “do or die” quality. We are driven to tunnel, tunnel, tunnel right to the core of what is going on in our relations with others and root out what we know in our guts is rotten. Scorpio, ruled by Pluto and Mars, is about bottom-line reality. Whatever can’t morph into something better and stronger, more adapted to what is going on right now, will die, plain and simple. This means in our relationships, our lives, our selves. Any part of the cocoon that threatens to catch and contain our butterfly wings has to go, with little to no sentimentality. Why attach ourselves to something that will hold us back, smother us, kill us? This is what Scorpio energy teaches. To cut ourselves out of that which will eventually collapse us, to trust our intuition to nip it in the bud and to move directly to a new force field that will hold us in a mutually beneficial orbit as we continue to unfold.

Scorpio understands intuitively what needs to be done and sets a goal, directed by the soul - often a complicated, multi-layered, emotionally and/or energetically dangerous goal. And it does not give up until that goal is reached or until it is “told” that to continue would bring it closer to destruction than abandoning the goal.

Scorpio energy can see things no one else can. It sees what no one else will. Will. That’s the word. Scorpio is the place where the will of nature/of the universe and personal will join forces, merging into one direction. To ignore the directives of the soul is to die, either literally or figuratively. To refuse to root out what is rotten is to choose to infect everything. Nothing can be right until this is right. That’s what Scorpio knows. It knows it would rather die than leave things as they are. It knows it is already dead if things are left as they are.

So much talk about death. But this is a Scorpionic subject. To die a million deaths before the physical death. To say goodbye to multitudes of versions of self, relationship, life. To shed a million cocoons, all that is done, to get to the fresh, raw strength of the emerging soul-driven path. And to have the otherworldly Plutonic drive to continue, against all odds, to face deeper and deeper, at times darker and darker, realities. Intricate and intimate. Complex. To burn through an amount of energetic detritus that would be unimaginable to someone without the guidance of that alchemical flame, ridding us of the garbage that threatens to clog up the works and screw us over.

It is to this end that Scorpio energy does its work, so that it can lay the very purest of matter on Libra’s scales. So that the shifts in balance that are made are only the necessary ones. The upsets of the scales are as minimal as possible. Nothing laden in the energetic tar of the past.

This is why Plutonic people sometimes creep other people out. They are driven by something unseen, something not understood by people looking from the outside. Plutonic people must follow the directives of the soul, from the gut, bringing things to light that most people would avoid looking at. Severing unhealthy dynamics as they go, freeing the energy up for new growth, and going deeper than most people care to go. It can be seen as an obsession by other people. But when one understands that it is a case of: do it or perish. there is nothing else to be done.

What Scorpio energy does can also be seen as not very nice (which is why Libra takes issue with it at times). It often doesn’t feel too great to have a Scorpionic surgeon dicing energetic dynamics up around you or within you. But it's necessary. Scorpio energy triggers in us an awareness of what needs to come out and what needs to be purged completely. It triggers an alchemical process where we have to look into the depths of ourselves and our lives to see what is not in integrity and to see old energetic patterns that we fall into and continue unaware. Places where we’ve been fooling ourselves, where we haven’t gone deep enough, where we haven't truly looked reality in the face. In Scorpionic interactions (which will be coming up with Venus in Scorpio), the relationship dynamics make each person aware of certain dynamics that are past their usefulness.

We can be repulsed by what we see during this process, blaming the person who did the triggering. (This is a dynamic that goes on all the time - as Scorpionic/Plutonic people know all too well.) Not so comfortable.

Too much Plutonic energy is poison. Best to take only as much as you need, nothing more.

This is a hard lesson that most Plutonic people have to learn - that some people find being around them a medicine taken best in small, maybe even tiny, maybe even microscopic, doses - or not at all. But once one understands that it's the process being triggered that people find distasteful, it’s possible not to take it personally - sort of.

Scorpio and Pluto go beyond the personal ego. The process trumps social niceties. But it still smarts at times.

Note: “Plutonic” people are what I would call anyone who has these similar drives for getting to the core of the matter, bringing hidden or neglected parts of reality to awareness - planets/placements in Scorpio, aspects to natal Pluto, bodies in the 8th house, and such.

As I said, our Mercury in Libra retrograde this month is ruled by Venus in Scorpio until Venus enters Sagittarius on October 18th.

The Sun in Libra is also ruled by Venus in Scorpio until it enters Scorpio itself on October 22.

Mars enters Scorpio October 3 and is there into November. (Note a pile-up of consequences for any passive-aggressive tendencies/Libra avoidance techniques as Mars passes through the last degrees of Libra before entering Scorpio. October 1 - 3)

So these Libra - Scorpio themes are prevalent.

What we’re leading up to this month is a big month in November. We’re getting our bearings, doing the prep work, so that we can navigate these energies.

There are two big things going on in November (which I will, of course, write about in November’s Astro Perspective):

First, Saturn in Virgo opposes Uranus in Pisces for the first time since the 60s. Saturn rules our concrete material structures (how things are set up) and Uranus rules revolution. Hmm…sounds about right. The current structures of our material world are about to get a shake up.

Saturn will be opposing Uranus’ freewheeling, future-oriented, slightly erratic, nothing-to-hold-onto-but-the-vision-of-where-we're-going, revolutionary, maverick spirit. And Uranus will be opposing Saturn’s traditional, tried-and-true, conservative, for-our-own-good limitations, restrictions and concrete structures.

Material structural readjustment related to a new understanding and vision of things to come. But also making sure that our revolutionary vision is grounded, that it has legs. That it is practically applied and will really take root within the material and build there - not just stay on the fringes as fluffy, pie-in-the-sky ideas from a bunch of drug-addled burn-outs. (No offense to drug-addled burn-outs, but this is a time when we really have to stay in reality” to bring it to the people - especially those people in suits and SUVs.)

A leap of faith into the future, but one concrete and common sense enough to appeal to more conservative minds.

The last time Saturn and Uranus opposed each other was in the 1960s, so you can see where this is heading. Think of the upheaval of those times that brought strides for humanity - civil rights, women’s rights, anti-war, etc.

But at the same time, the wave of revolutionary spirit didn’t go far enough. The mainstream Baby Boomers got caught up in material trappings and the ego glorification of being the person with the biggest and best.

So now is a chance to continue what began then, to go farther, hopefully to go as far as we need to go. To make the revolution structural, to come in from the fringes and really affect the mainstream flow.

The second big event in November is Pluto moving through the final degree of Sagittarius and heading into Capricorn November 27. Here is the transformation of allllllll our material structures and our understanding of success, prestige and importance on a public level. This is why it is crucial that we take this step-by-step, to really give it lasting impact.

Anyway, that’s next month. But as nothing exists in a vacuum, we have to see October as leading up to that. This is why the Scorpio energy is insisting that everything be put on the table. We have to be real now. It’s imperative to our survival as human beings on Planet Earth. We have to see through the shellaced smiles of those attempting to lead us somewhere our gut tells us we don’t want to go - not only in politics but in our personal lives. The personal is political.

We have to look for motivation - a big thing for Scorpio. What is the root motivation? If it’s something you can get behind, good stuff. If you get a little sick feeling in your stomach, no matter how slight, listen to it and take action, even if it seems like drastic action - action that no one but a Plutonic person would understand. The Mars influence on Scorpio means we often don’t know why we don’t like something or someone. We just don’t. We can sense we don’t agree with the root motivation or that we are being somehow manipulated. We just might not know the particulars in the moment because they’re somehow hidden to us. Here, we have to act on instinct, taking action based on intuition and gut-feeling…and figure out the logistics later, at a safe distance from whatever dynamic/situation/person we didn’t want to participate with.

From October 9 to October 14, Venus in Scorpio is squaring the North Node, Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius. This is a bottom-line, reality checking-type of aspect…again, related to not getting too far ahead of ourselves on this future vision thing. Especially with Neptune here, there is a tendency to get a little starry-eyed and lose sight of where we actually are. To get caught up in the rhetoric (Pluto in the last degrees of Sagittarius) of what’s possible and to act as if we’re already there. Scorpio keeps us right in the thick of what is going on right now. It doesn’t allow us to move forward until things are dealt with, until all the crap is brought out into the open for resolution. Until the subjugation-domination dynamics are truly destroyed and we’re truly equals. We’ve still got a lot of work to do here. The vision may be there, but are we really willing to do what it takes to get there? Are we willing to go to the mat on this one? To fight for that vision with everything we have? To leave no one behind? These are the kinds of questions brought up with these squares.

Mars in Scorpio will repeat the squares to the North Node, Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius during the last week of October. Here, we’re challenged to put our personal energy behind it. To make it personal, a personal goal, to deal with everything Scorpio brings up, especially the ouchy, ugly parts. To look at the inequality, the injustice that still exists, the fallacies we’re being told, the manipulation of the people - and to really deal with it.

Mercury Retrograde is also working away, bringing up all the things we might have missed since September 4. A whole lot happened last month, so this is a good thing. Any decisions made or actions taken will come up for a review. We’ll get information that we didn’t have at the time. and, again, with Venus in Scorpio ruling, it could be stuff that was hidden at the time.

All giving us a chance to orient ourselves with as much information and understanding as possible.

Mercury goes direct October 15 and leaves its shadow (heads into new territory) October 30.

Just in time for my favourite time of year: Hallowe’en! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-haaa! (also known as Samhain or pagan New Year) A time when the barrier between life and death is oh-so-thin.

So nothing really “new” until then, but lots of necessary information coming up and interactions playing out, especially those interactions that have a sort of fated, soul-mate quality to them. Déjà vu.

Our Full Moon this month is in Aries on October 14. (On the same day as the federal election here in Canada.) The new directions we’ve taken related to our new sense of personal identity are bearing fruit now. The Sabian Symbol for the degree of Aries where this Full Moon takes place is: The Gate Opens to the Garden of all Fulfilled Desires. Let’s hope that’s not just hype. ;-) My Scorpionic “show me the money” side is acting up on this one, but let’s give the universe the benefit of the doubt on this one, shall we? Heh heh

The New Moon in Scorpio on October 28 starts a new cycle of growth - a shedding of past dynamics, as was talked about earlier. The New Moon kicks off a month that will probably feel very unstable as the past structures and dynamics of our lives turn to rubble. As I said before, November is going to be a heck of a month, and this New Moon is an indicator. It really does feel as if we’re going through a gateway, and we have to be 100% real, stripped down, doing only what feels right to us to make it through. It’s a tight squeeze! Getting caught up in what others want us to do, getting caught up in THEIR stuff, allowing any kind of abuse of your energy (no matter how subtle) - all this is detrimental now in a big way.

I have this image lately of always having to stay a step ahead of what is crumbling under our feet, to keep moving on, moving on as a matter of survival. If we aren’t staying true to our own path here, we’re asking for trouble. If we’re clinging to old structures, relationships, ego constructs, personality traits, we just might go down with the ship.

So as always, to thine own self be true. It’s more important now than ever as the waters get a little choppy.