A curious and driven hero wanders around a rising tide, thinking he can befriend it. The water seems to invite him in, but right now he’s just looking, unsure if it’s dangerous, unsure what it wants. He climbs up on the rock pile so he can have the best view of the ocean. Suddenly, a pang of longing enters the hero: he yearns to go forward on the journey so that he can return to what makes him human again, so that he can return to his home and hearth.
But he doesn’t know the boundaries of the ocean well enough. He waits, alert, on the rocks near the shore. And like this hero, as Mars sextiles Sol and Neptune, we find ourselves burning the fuel of what inspires and magnetizes us. We might be drawn to go into some deep, dreamy waters, and feeling as though self-interested judgment is suspended, we’re not sure how much of the sea is friendly and how much is monstrous. All we know is the strong pull of the lover at home.
Does this strike you as wrenching grief, as with Odysseus? Or as with Orpheus, do you find yourself driven to play music on your seashore rock, feeling that there’s a creative act to be done that requires courage and that redeems what you thought was lost? In either case, the need to speak with the flotsam emotions and invite the radioactive realization into your home presents itself.
This week brings a view of possible navigational directions, taking stock, weighing the consequences of directions taken from a distance only to be surprised by what presents itself at the current stop-gap base. With Luna on her waxing cycle toward fullness, there’s a rhythm and ethic of growth, of preparing for peak and release, and of the necessity to confront how the blooming of what’s been planted meets the emotional environments of power, authority and justice. The dangers of these charged ghouls are alluring and unknown. There’s a notion of moving into uncharted oceans or paths, resulting in situations that are easy to dream about but hard to see clearly. The scope of the sea, its surfaces, wombs and death-traps through which we voyage and that give boundaries to our journeys are endless in their depths even with the best view. No route is free of storms, ambushes and secret undertows.
The word “navigation” comes from “ag”—to drive, draw out or draw forth, move. To go or to stay? And what is doing the drawing of the drawing out—from the perspective of the force that’s drawing us out, are they therefore drawing us in? Just as a heroic quest to move out there prevails, so too does an irresistible magnetism toward ‘we-know-not-what. ‘
But we sure want to know: as Mercury the trickster continues in his retrograde motion, he regresses into Aquarius, in which we grow impatient at the massa confusa of the tempting forces pushing, pulling and trying to communicate with us, converting the desire into a focus on clear ideas. Messy feeling, scattered all over the place, turns into dissociated thinking. The cacophony of emotive experience turns into intellected, truncated fusion for our sense of individuality not being able to bear the lack of focus. Swimming against the current of psychedelic moods and poisons infecting our concentration, the mercurial force lusts after the whirlwind of airy focus that it hopes will result from intellectualizing all the wet confusion.
A grounding question through this mental-emotional maze might be, “How do your ideas about the journey you’re on help each person express who they are as individuals while still participating in a collective?”
Mid-week, with sensual Venus squaring task-master Saturn, there’s friction between the part of us that’s seduced by the possibility of forging ahead into the erotic mysteries, and the grindstone in front of us that needs attention. Old, cold and dry figures threaten to stomp out the fire, compressing and contracting heated ambitions. But when Venus ingresses into her home, Taurus, on Thursday, she nears a conjunction to wild card Uranus. It’s as if electricity suddenly courses through the limiting grindstone Saturn had only moments before forced upon our sensual drives as an object of toil and labor.
This jolt could lead to unwelcome surprise, or conversely, an over-confidence in our sensuality, an over-trust in the endurance and feel-goodness of material resources to see us through the tasks at hand. On one level, we may feel that we’ve moved ahead when in fact we have stayed put. On another level, we might have thought nothing had progressed and that we’re stuck, only to find out there’s something growing and ready to surge in the very place that seems most familiar.
It’s as if the week rhymes: just as Mercury’s retrograde motion into Aquarius tries to gather the moody debris into a windy cylinder of concentration, the dynamics of Venus, Saturn and Uranus sideswipe love’s restless drive to move ahead into more creative paths with a sudden jolt and realization that we have yet to complete our reflective journey toward epiphany in the place where our sensuality currently treads.
It is these concentrated swirls and jolts that enable us to glimpse the rest of the journey—its dangers, joys, and demands for completion, the deception of unexplored territory, and the ability of our immediate surroundings to ceaselessly surprise us with everything we need.
mythopoeticastrology.com 