Venus into Scorpio | September 23rd - the seduction

beauty is by do not attempt aka madelaine

Today, Venus dives from Libra, the sign she rules, into the deep, murky waters of Scorpio.

Venus is considered in her 'detriment' in Scorpio. It's dark. It's ruled by Pluto. It's not her favorite place to hang out. She is also moving out of her opposition to Uranus. If we have felt someone separating a bit from us and taking some space or if we have done this ourselves to someone else, this can shift now. We will notice how we use other people's energy and how they use ours. Vampires do not really only come out in the night.

Venus in Scorpio doesn't look like the more traditional beauty of Venus in Libra. Her beauty is dark and forbidding now. She doesn't flirt. She seduces. She doesn't want peace at any cost so much as she wants to feel what's really underneath all the phony smiles and superficial niceties.

Scorpio rules death and destruction and now this comes through our relationships.

Here Venus pushes herself to the edge of life with compulsions, intimacy, jealousy, obsession and a struggle for real power. She goes into the dark corners that hold all our secrets and she coaxes them out into the open. There can be brutal and deep honesty here.  

Relationships get intense. 

If you are working through the unraveling of a relationship or financial quagmire - this energy will be your best friend. 

Venus will be in Scorpio until October 18th.

Scorpio Suns and Ascendants get more attractive (more beautiful and more able to attract what they want). Your Scorpio house (where is Scorpio hanging out in your natal chart?) gets more magnetic, too.

(and speaking of magnetic WARNING SHAMELESS PLUG AHEAD - have you seen my magnetic aromatherapy lockets - handmade by my two hands from a recycled steel car part - you can check them out at aromatherapylocket.com)

Venus rules love, money and women. Getting what we want with any of them becomes an act of seduction. We need to entice. We need to risk our flaws and shadows being visible.  

Venus in Scorpio knows our need for acceptance will make us invisible, so she risks rejection to be seen.

She doesn't want to be friends - she wants to be soul-mates. We will feel more "all or nothing" with our passions now. Things can crash and burn here. And for better or worse she isn't afraid to manipulate things to get what she wants (and yes, this, and her obsession with secrets and power will be her downfall).

People will be drawn to what is hidden; to what we don't show them. Keep this in mind if you sell things for a living. Buyers will want to discover things for themselves.

There will be no place for our secrets (especially women's secrets and love and money secrets and the secrets buried in our natal Scorpio houses) to hide. We draw to us during Scorpio cycles what we have not allowed ourselves to acknowledge in ourselves. We'll pay attention to what we attract and see what the person/situation is showing us. There will be lessons about power, playing the victim, jealousy, obsession, compulsion, manipulation, intimacy, truth, other people's money (taxes, loans, spouse's earnings, inheritance, etc), sex, reproduction, life, death and passion.

The Scorpio house in our natal chart is where we need to get real and go deep to have what we want now.

The world is not black or white. It has a whole lot of gray. If we can’t decide between "this or that", it's likely due to the infinite distance and variances between "this and that" that we haven’t even thought about.

Empowerment includes wading through the gray to find our own answers. Even though Scorpio energy is very much 'all or nothing', it is especially good at finding ways to be empowered. It is decisive. It is fixed and stubborn. We will want what we want here (and so will other people).

Pluto rules Scorpio and the house of Pluto in our natal chart carries quite a bit of karma and is the space we experience things "outside our control", so it's fitting how much Scorpio likes to be in control.

With Venus in Scorpio, the women will be calling the shots. We'll need to bring our 'A' game.

Pluto's 5 month retrograde ends in a few days - are we ready? xo all

the Fall Equinox, Sun into Libra and Mercury moves direct | where do we want to go from here

floating by sollena fotografie

Mercury retrograde - over the past three weeks (and the area came to our attention a bit before that when Mercury when into his shadow period- the degrees he was going to nit-pick over) some space in each of our lives (Virgo) had Mercury backpedaling and doing what Virgo (and Mercury since Mercury rules Virgo) does best - picking at something, checking for problems, re-thinking a situation, hitting a time out - you get the idea.

Maybe some miss-shaped pattern in our thinking, doing or relating was brought to our attention. Maybe something came to standstill. Maybe something/someone from the past re-emerged (it could disappear again). Things can start to move forward now. We will learn where we stand here.

Mercury rules Virgo and Gemini and is an important player in the inner skies (our day to day life) ruling communication (and the things we communicate with ie computers), our thinking, our early experiences and things nearby, ie siblings (even when they are no longer close by) and neighbors, education, transportation (re its link with speed, communication and commerce) and sales/commerce (re its link with communication and intellect).

He/she is the closest planet to the Sun - we will all feel better when he is back up to speed (give him a couple/few days to un-wonk himself and iron out the kinks). There could be rewards for our thorough re-work and patience. If you know where 14 degrees Virgo is in your natal chart this is the space he is moving forward from .... so here we go!

Also today, the Fall Equinox arrives as the Sun moves into Libra. Darkness and light are equally balanced today. Burning Libra fuel we can come into balance. In my part of the world we move from Summer into Fall (and heading toward Winter) - the time between life and death.

We take stock of our harvest - what do we have, what do we need, what do we need to do to get it, what do we need to do differently. We prepare for the winter ahead. We move into an air sign (and could reap a head cold - do whatever it is you do to head that off) and could feel a bit off-kilter and ungrounded for a couple days.

Libra is the sign of beauty and partnership and balance. We give and we get. With all of us burning Libra fuel for the next few weeks any ways this is out of balance in our lives could show up for us - an inability to make a decision could cause us a problem, bending too much to other people could cause us a problem, pouring pink paint on problems and pretending they don't exist could cause the problem to bleed through our crappy paint job in bigger and messier ways.

The good news and there is plenty of it - we are heading toward what astrologer Susan Miller calls "the luckiest day of the year" on Monday - the day the Sun conjuncts (joins) Jupiter.

This happening in Libra this year (love and money) makes it even more magical. We are in that energy now as they move toward their meeting

(and if you have a birthday between now and September 30th - my brother does, the lucky devil! - this energy will be part of your whole, entire next year and because it's part of the Fall Equinox we all have access to it for the next 6 months!).

We'll talk about this in the next weekly, but it's all good with this one!

For today - we can be like that Libran scale symbol and weigh our options (don't run full steam ahead just yet, let things fall into place a bit around you first).

This has been a challenging six months. The mutable trials have been immense. Mutable energy is rather boundless and stretchy. This can be a good thing.

But it can also have its drawbacks. We can end up right back where we started very easily. Too much space sounds like a good thing until we get it. Less options always equals more focus. More focus with less options is exactly what we get with Saturn in Sagittarius (through the end of 2017).

As we move into the second half of the astrological year we will have learned that sometimes we need to know this is as far as we can go. Or this is where we must concentrate our energy in order to succeed. People who do not see things this way at all may feel their goals and dreams are stifled now or get kicked in the ass at some point. For dreamers that can embrace this way of thinking (we can't have everything all at once and this means even in little things like we can't sleep in all the time and waste time and still get our work done on time or we can't eat fast food and have a fast moving, fast thinking body, etc), Saturn will help us build the kind of stability that supports BIG THINGS.

While we have the Sun in Libra - two heads will be better than one, air signs in particular (Aquarius, Gemini and Libra) will be very quick thinking and easier to work with, yes, even stubborn Aquarius (ack!). It's a time to negotiate. Brings legal matters to a close if possible. It's a time to partner. We will refuel the way Libra Suns do - through beauty and peace - get to a museum, get outdoors. 

What feels out of balance? Hint - it's probably that thing we dread doing or the relationship with that person we dread dealing with. On the other side of that same coin it can also be whatever we feel we can't live (breathe) without - they only thing we can't breathe without is oxygen! If something feels like a do or die situation or there is some person we simply must be in balance with to be able to sleep at night - this is a good time of year to make changes here.

We can evaluate the past 6 months and see what we can do in the next 6 months to bring ourselves into a better balance with ourselves and with other people. Our beliefs, past decisions and past actions have brought us to exactly the space we now occupy - our current beliefs, today's decisions and today's actions will bring us to the next space - where do we want to go next?

xo all

after the eclipses | the baseball cap

final hour by sebastien tabuteaud

So, if you are reading this you have survived the Eclipse season - ha! (although maybe it's not officially over until the New Moon at the end of the month). It feels closed to me though.

The Fall Equinox in two days represents the mid-point of the astrological year. Someone in a store yesterday said to me, "this year is flying" and I said, "yes, we are half-way through already!" and she looked at me like I was nuts and needed to repeat my second grade math class or maybe buy a calendar. 

You might have felt a big adjustment in your life, maybe it was more subtle, maybe it's still to play out in the visible realm. Pisces rules the 12th (and final) house of "everything hidden" and "what we put away" and "what we do last" so it could be the shift was more "behind the scenes".

Usually with Eclipses we start to feel the energy about 6 months prior, so probably six months ago there was some change in our thinking/beliefs and we started to move in a different direction without us consciously moving in a different direction. Then the Eclipse season acts like a portal to connect that thinking/belief realm to our 3D physical reality and over the 6 months following the eclipse the changes manifest ... and life is different.

It's like when we set intentions or make goals, except the intentions and goals that set the changes into motion are outside our conscious control. They line us up with fate/destiny - what we came here to do.

(I always imagine us all lined up in the heavens like children on their first day of school - shiny new shoes and notebooks with smiles on our faces and ready for everything ... before schoolyard bullies (or maybe we are the schoolyard bully), burned out teachers, overloaded backpacks and helicopter parents have their way with us - ack!)

Sometimes we just need a little tweak to get back on track and sometimes we need a more major overhaul. Life can turn on a dime. And when enough people's individual lives turn on a dime - the world turns on a dime, too. This particular eclipse (in Pisces) maybe had a lot of us looking within because there were no answers outside of us.

The eclipse was t-squaring Mars and Saturn (the two planets considered malefic by astrologers) and with a t-square (picture the letter T) the energy gets funneled in the direction of the t-square. That is a lot of energy to change outdated belief systems; stuff that we often don't even realize is constraining us.

my cap circa 1999

Most mornings I get up early and walk at my local reservoir. I throw my hair into a baseball cap and when I first put on the cap it feels tight and annoying, but after a few minutes I don't even notice I am wearing it. Some days when I get home and check my email and get off track with whatever comes up I can find myself still wearing it hours later because I have adjusted to the tight/annoying feeling and don't remember to take it off. I always feel better when I finally do though.

We could think of an eclipse (and this happens with other transits, too, especially those involving Uranus and Pluto) as one way life has to get us to notice and (hopefully) remove that baseball cap; to move past what is constricting us.

I had a memorable eclipse season this month with Olive's accident and in March 2015 with a financial tax matter - to outside eyes these might seem like very different things, but I can see the connections.

They were both about "values, what's most important - what money can't buy" and "other people's money" and my own habit of negative thinking where I immediately take what is happening to the worst possible conclusion in my head and don't trust things to unfold properly without my manipulation.

I took Olive's situation, in my head, to an expensive surgery she would not survive (I have experience with pets having expensive surgeries they did not survive) and the tax situation, in my head, had me going to jail, missing months of Sully's life and losing tens of thousands of dollars. Both these things were extreme and very, very unlikely to ever happen, but I did not see them that way. In my head, they were right in front of me. Both situations were outside my control, resulted in me having to "let go and let God" and offered up lessons about what my negative thinking does to my physical body and lessons in what is most important to me (ie Olive and Sully) and the way I react emotionally to issues around money and security. They have a 'before' and 'after' feeling to them and are situations/times I will remember.

(And now I feel the need to explain the tax situation a bit - hubs business, truck repair, has some customers who do not pay sales tax on their repairs/maintenance because of their gross vehicle weight or the type of work their vehicle is used for, etc - now, some of these rules changed a few years ago, but we were unaware of the changes so exempted sales tax where we shouldn't have and I say we, but I really mean 'me' here. A mistake I made brought this to light and I was told by a tax attorney that although we wouldn't have to pay the missing taxes, since we had tax waivers signed by customers claiming exemptions, we could have to pay the penalties and interest which totaled about $18,000 and I could even go to jail since I had signed the inaccurate returns. Of course, it's probably in his best interest to tell me the worst case scenario so I would hire him, but I was in the circus of eclipse season and this seemed to me like exactly what was going to happen. I also had a long transit in my chart that spring that looked like 'legal' stuff to me. In the end the state waived the penalties and we paid about $1500 interest and obviously I didn't go to jail - although I did watch a couple seasons of Orange is the New Black and cut my hair to get myself ready just in case and I did get on the jury of a very long heroin trafficking trial ...)

Anyhoo, with Mars (action) in Sagittarius (freedom) part of the t-square, life is asking us what we are going to do as we release whatever limiting belief (ie baseball cap) we have taken off. Do we really want our freedom or are we more comfortable staying constrained and playing small, because of course with our freedom comes our responsibility (Saturn in Sagittarius). It's easier to stay constrained and blame something outside our control for the limitations in our life or stay asleep and wait for someone to come along and fix everything - the complaining/blaming thing that Saturn in Sagittarius (through the end of 2017) is bringing to our attention.

This eclipse is releasing a constriction (maybe right away or maybe more slowly over the next 6 months). The wind has blown off that baseball cap and we can either have a really bad hair day or look the world straight in the eye, hat hair and all, set our sights on our target (the hair in our eyes won't stop us, it's only hair after all!) and move forward with this new passion that has awakened now that our head isn't being constrained by 10 ounces of canvas.

(for me, the thinking that keeps me stuck and playing small and thinking "this isn't going to work" so not doing the first step - even though I know the step by step thing changes the outcome and it's not possible to see the outcome anyway - and feeling that I have to manipulate the situation for it to work out and a lack of trust with money and other people that has me making emotional decisions focused on security rather than freedom or happiness)

We might have been so dependent on that baseball cap that we are kind of freaking out now and thinking "where the hell is my cap?!" and, of course, we have free will and so if we keep looking for that baseball cap we will re-manifest/re-create it 

(there is a Target in almost every town after all) 

and this is how we move from one relationship to a new relationship that turns into the same relationship and a new job that turns into the same old job. And then we'll be stuck in it again and get used to it again and it will be comfortable. But maybe a comfort zone is not what the world needs us to be looking for right now and maybe it's not what we came here to find ...

This is how the vibrations that we have in our physical body that are determined by the belief systems we have in our psyche create the world we experience. So we can experience a world with a baseball cap where we are all neat and tidy and our problems are all tucked away underneath and people cannot really see us or get close to us or touch our hair.

Or we can experience a world where our hair is unrestrained even if it gets in our eyes sometimes and maybe even gets caught in the steering wheel of our car (yes, I did this recently - don't judge me) and needs to be brushed and given our attention and also gets to touch and sometimes, yes, be judged, loved, hated and ignored, by others.

And I hope this metaphor is making sense to someone - I think I've lost the thread here - ack!

This is how we all live on the same planet but inhabit very different worlds and how most people, and maybe most of us in some space in our life, just move from baseball cap to baseball cap and never take the damn thing off (whatever is restricting freedom but is providing safety).

xo all