On March 28th, our moon will be full in Libra. It’s important to understand what a full moon in Libra can offer us, but it’s also valuable to think about the path the moon has taken toward fullness. This Libra full moon carries the lessons and themes of the March 13th new moon in Pisces to a kind of completion. I write “a kind of” to remind myself and you that the lessons these moon cycles offer us are never done, they just keep changing shape.
If the most recent new moon in Pisces encouraged us toward play and flirtation, if it joined hands with Venus and pushed us to define our values so that we might recognise those who uphold the same ones, then the full moon offers us a night of Venusian appreciation for all the beauty that revealed itself on the other side of those efforts.
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we spend much of our days living from moon to moon, from big emotion to big emotion, from life to death and back again. There are traditional associations with these cycles and their waves, but the way each moon affects us has a lot to do with our own perception — not just of the moon, but also of our lives.
This time, the moon opposes the Sun, and the focus on self-actualisation widens. We can see that we are in company, that we have never been alone. Which is not to say that we have not suffered — not lost faith, not lost loved ones to systemic violence and intolerance. Under a Libra full moon, we can recognise what injustice has cost us, both collectively and individually. Our understanding of beauty is narrowed in a world that doesn’t recognise the sacredness of all people. Our sacredness, our ability to love each other fully, is bound up in our complicity with imperialism. Under a Libra full moon, we can unburden our grief on the big silver scale and then look to the other side and ask: What balances this? How have I balanced this? What has anchored me to the land of the living? What can I praise?
Can we appreciate what’s beautiful without making demands of it? “Beauty is not enough,” wrote Edna (Ethereal Bisexual) St. Vincent Millay in her poem “Spring.” I think about her poem every year as April approaches, but I rarely think about when it was written, just following the first World War; just following the 1918 pandemic. “The spikes of the crocus./ The smell of the earth is good./ It is apparent that there is no death./ But what does that signify?” The poem heralds the lively colour of Aries and April — but, it won’t rush to leave the grief of Pisces and March.
Above us, the Aries Sun looks toward Aries Venus over Chiron, which has transited the constellation of Aries since the end of February 2019. When we keep our sights narrowed, we see that between the self (Sun) and the life that self admires (Venus) are the wounds (Chiron) that have fractured our efforts, our sense of our own beauty. Under the full moon in Libra, we’re encouraged to widen our periphery, to open up fully and let others help us see ourselves. Collectively, change takes a long time and power is never simply abdicated. But, Libra looks across the sky at Aries and says, when we come together with reverence, we strengthen each other as individuals. These two signs return to us every equinox and welcome us to their — to our — negotiation. They are the signs of the self and the other, of passion and strategy, fire and air.
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