The Christmas Truce

Mars is a fighter. However Mars in Most cancers, and particularly trine Neptune (Might 15, 2023, 6:44 am PDT), would favor to keep away from bloodshed. Two weeks from Memorial Day, this story appears acceptable.

On Christmas Eve 1914, within the throes of World Warfare I, German and British troops spontaneously started singing Christmas carols to one another throughout enemy strains. At daybreak on Christmas morning, German troopers got here up from the trenches and referred to as out “Merry Christmas!” in English. The British troopers initially thought it was a lure; however once they noticed the Germans had been unarmed, they too emerged. The enemies shook arms, exchanged items of cigarettes and sweets, and sang carols collectively. Some Germans lit Christmas bushes across the trenches, and there have been even experiences of an impromptu soccer match.

Think about you’re removed from house (Mars in Most cancers) at Christmas, chilly and damp and depressing, afraid on your life – when a Neptune wave of surprising heat, kindness, and humanity unexpectedly washes over you. Hold your eyes and ears open as Mars trines Neptune this week; somebody you’ve been defending your self from may truly welcome an opportunity to clink glasses and share a music with you.

Urge for food

On Might 16 at 10:20 am PDT, Jupiter enters Taurus for a one-year journey (via Might 25, 2024). It most just lately visited this signal between 2011-12, 1999, 1988, and 1976.

Jupiter is the planet of extra, and Taurus loves ease, leisure, security and safety, and the finer issues in life, together with superb meals and wine, superb objects, and actual property. When Jupiter travels via Taurus, it awakens our urge for food for this stuff – with predictable penalties for our financial institution accounts and waistlines.

Jupiter, the planet that transfer us ahead, expands our horizons, and prods us to step outdoors our consolation zone is an odd match with Taurus – which, all issues being equal, would favor to simply preserve its very snug established order. Much like Uranus, which has been in Taurus since 2018, Jupiter will problem that established order.

It wastes no time in doing so. Inside eight hours of getting into Taurus, Jupiter squares Pluto in Aquarius (Might 17, 2023, 6:10 pm PDT), wheeling in a backhoe to dig up the bottom for a brand new basis. Jupiter’s different massive facet in Taurus is subsequent 12 months’s spectacular conjunction with Uranus (April twentieth, 2024, at 21°49’ Taurus); anticipate an thrilling and unpredictable shake-up wherever your life has turn out to be stagnant.

Cobbling

This week’s Taurus New Moon (Might 19, 2023, 8:53 am PDT, 28°25’ Taurus) is on the Sabian image, 29 Taurus, Two cobblers working at a desk. On the New Moon we formulate a imaginative and prescient of what we’d love to do subsequent in a selected space of life – particularly, at this New Moon, the home of our start chart that incorporates the New Moon diploma (28°25’ Taurus) reveals the place we needs to be planting new seeds.

However wherever it falls in your chart, Taurus symbolizes wealth and price, stabilization and safety. And, after two Aries New Moons in a row and a few eclipses, it actually does really feel like time to quiet down, discover our footing, and let ourselves take it simple for a short time.

The New Moon’s Sabian image is a picture of working comfortably alongside somebody, performing the identical job. You will have totally different approaches, however collectively you may share satisfying store speak and change concepts about learn how to do the identical work.

The message of this New Moon could also be so simple as that: We every have our personal work to do, left over from these entrepreneurial Aries New Moons. However we could come to appreciate that it may be far more satisfying (and presumably profitable) to ask one other cobbler into your workshop now and again.

Combat Like Kings

Leo’s nice present is its potential to point out us ourselves in a noble mild. When Mars, the warrior planet, enters this regal signal (Might 20, 2023, 8:31 am PDT, via July 20, 2023), it rallies help for a trigger not simply because it’s worthwhile, however as a result of the struggle itself elevates those that help it. Mars is the planet of battles and those that struggle them, and in every signal of the zodiac it symbolizes a unique fashion of warrior. As Mars leaves quiet, defensive Most cancers this week and enters Leo, it’s time to struggle like kings.

The basic instance is Henry V’s magnificent speech to his troops, badly outnumbered by the French at Agincourt. His important message? “It’s truly an excellent factor that we’re outnumbered, as a result of meaning a larger share of glory for every of us once we win. It is a very unique membership we’ve bought right here. We’re going to kick some severe ass, and as we inform this story for the remainder of our lives different males shall be envious that they weren’t right here. We few, we blissful few, we band of brothers,” and so forth.

Henry bought fortunate that day, and his military gained. However from a rhetorical viewpoint, it didn’t a lot matter. The concept was that merely combating alongside your brothers made you higher than the subsequent man, shinier and extra resplendent.

Within the curiosity of full disclosure, Mars in Leo can have an unpleasant, self-serving, bombastic facet. The preening, useless, and vacuous playboy that was Prince Hal of Henry IV, earlier than he renounced his outdated boozing pal Falstaff and have become King Henry V, is the failed, shadowy facet of Leo. That Prince Hal may by no means have rallied the troops at Agincourt. First, he needed to turn out to be the exemplar of males’s highest imaginative and prescient for themselves.

That’s the type of transcendent work that Mars faces because it opposes Pluto (Might 20, 2023, 8:12 pm PDT). Pluto won’t stand for lower than our greatest and most trustworthy work, and something much less will nearly definitely backfire.

Whereas Mars is in Leo, put forth a imaginative and prescient of your self that you would be able to be happy with, and apply each ounce of it to every vital job at hand. And be an instance that evokes others to do the identical.

Passengers

Annually, when the Solar enters Gemini (Might 21, 2023, 00:09 am), I discover myself itching to take a highway journey. It’s a household custom; we spent a number of late-60s summers touring to go to household in Los Angeles in an Oldsmobile station wagon.

I liked these journeys, jostling alongside the open highway for days at a time; it was like being on a cruise. What luxurious, to spend days in that cosy, automotive womb with nothing to do however learn comedian books, struggle together with your siblings, and watch the panorama change throughout the miles. Whenever you’re younger, you instinctively really feel secure with another person behind the wheel. All it’s important to do is sit again and entertain your self whereas the world drifts by, filling you with a way of journey and countless potentialities as large as the large desert sky.

4 years after my first journey to California, we moved to Los Angeles completely. Simply earlier than Memorial Day, nearly precisely one 12 months after my father died in a automobile accident, my mom, my sister, and I set out in a brand new station wagon to go away the place the place all of us had been born and raised. This time, Mother needed to deal with the driving chores alone, and infrequently grew drained; I keep in mind one witheringly scorching afternoon nap beneath a freeway overpass in the midst of nowhere, once we miraculously awoke simply as a creepy trying stranger was approaching our automobile. The sense of journey and wide-open areas had given approach to an unsettling consciousness of our vulnerability.

This week, simply after it enters Gemini, the Solar trines Pluto (Might 21, 2023, 6:58 am PDT) and brushes up towards the shadow facet of the open highway. It’s not simply menacing strangers within the shadows; it’s additionally the uneasiness we will really feel, as adults, with giving over management to a different driver. As this Solar in Gemini season dawns, Pluto is behind the wheel. We could also be wanting to hit the highway, but it surely’s not essentially all that snug being a passenger as an alternative of a driver.

Writing and pictures © 2017-23 by April Elliott Kent

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