I’m a Leo. Most astrologers will let you know that being ignored just isn’t an issue most Leos need to deal with, adept as we’re at calling consideration to ourselves. However that’s not my story. I used to be born with Leo’s ruler, the Solar, in exhausting side to Neptune, the planet of obfuscation. Removed from being a flamboyant Leo queen, I spent a lot of my childhood in a fog, afraid of every part and all people, hiding below furnishings when surprising guests dropped by. I had solely essentially the most tenuous Neptunian boundaries to safeguard my sense of self. It has taken aware work for a few years for me to realize confidence, and more often than not I stroll round pondering I’ve performed a reasonably good job. However there are nonetheless days that my vulnerability bubbles as much as the floor and I understand that that I haven’t come so far as I’d thought.

You needn’t be a sun-sign Leo, or have a tough side between the Solar and Neptune, to narrate to feeling a insecurity. You want solely be human, with a human’s fundamental want to be ok with your self and a human life that always locations that out of attain. We consider the Solar—and Leo, the signal it guidelines— as symbols of self-expression and confidence. However maybe what they symbolize is the striving for these items.

The image for the Solar – a tiny speck surrounded by a circle – has at all times jogged my memory of the bulls-eye of a goal, with the astrological Solar describing each the purpose that we’re aiming for, and the way we have to develop as a person with a purpose to attain that focus on. We start as a tiny, almost invisible speck, encompass ourselves with empty, insulating area, after which construct a strong circle round all of it, a boundary to soundly comprise our fearful smallness. There may be goodness in us too, and it’s not so fearful or small. But when we draw our boundaries too tightly, we change into a closed system, and the goodness has a tough time getting out.

For a few of us, constructing a robust sufficient circle may be the work of a lifetime. Others appear to have sturdy boundaries proper from the beginning. Individuals with wholesome egos are in a position to dance between self and not-self, often navigating liminal area the place boundaries don’t exist, then safely returning to the middle of the circle. They know play, and re-create themselves; they’ll shape-shift effortlessly, both completely or as a mini-vacation from actuality, seeing all of it as one gratifying and unfolding journey.

However Leo, being a set signal, tends to seek out this type of flexibility elusive, even threatening. Leo prefers to be himself, thanks; if Leo have been an actor he could be John Wayne, who was at all times just about John Wayne, it doesn’t matter what position he was taking part in onscreen. And so through the annual Leo season we’re usually involved with fortifying the traits and inventive impulses that make up the boundary between us and different, and outline our identities.

However at this New Moon in Leo – sq. thrilling Uranus—the impulse to interrupt with the previous and hurdle towards a brand new journey is at the very least as sturdy as Leo’s need to bloom the place we’re planted. Breaking with the previous may be very liberating, and generally the one strategy to provoke change is to behave boldly and irrevocably. At this New Moon, now we have a greater than common likelihood to make modifications that basically imply one thing.

We reside in reckless, harmful instances. However seen one other manner, the world is within the strategy of recreating itself, and we’re weaving change and upheaval into the material of our new future as we go alongside. Sanity tells us to be afraid, however religion whispers that there aren’t any false strikes now; nonetheless random, even capricious these modifications look like, they’re embedding themselves into our new basis like stray river rocks and sea glass.

Maybe this Leo New Moon season requires a brand new glyph for the Solar – not a closed circle with a dot within the center, however quite a labyrinth. A labyrinth has a single, unambiguous route we are able to comply with to the middle and again. We set forth in life on a stroll by means of this labyrinth, and irrespective of which course we take, or how misplaced we generally really feel, we’ll inevitably find yourself exactly the place we’re meant to be.

The New Moon is a darkish time. It’s midnight now in our gardens, and it’s tempting to suspect that chaos lurks in each shadow and to obey the constraints of worry with out query. However whereas the New Moon in Leo is invisible to us simply now, slightly below the horizon within the night time sky, it’s nonetheless there, and we really feel it even when we are able to’t see it. It reminds us that we’re works in progress, and we’re creating, day by day, the selves we wish to be and the world we wish to reside in. Even when there’s a lot on this planet, and in us, that may very well be higher, Leo reassures us that it will likely be—as a result of we’re free to be no matter we wish to be, and since there’s a lot good in us.

Writing and pictures © 2010-23 by April Elliott Kent

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