A Meditative Last Quarter Moon

This Last Quarter Moon, traditionally a time of reassessment and reevaluation, is accompanied as well this month by Mercury stationing to direct motion on the previous day. This brings us to a much more internal place than usual, where we can take the opportunity of thinking over where we are heading and where we have been. Mercury's change of direction is welcome, and implies that we are definitely more focused and externally oriented, but there are still strong symptoms present of the somewhat difficult Mercury Retrograde period, gradually lessoning, that will continue hanging around for the next two weeks.

As Mercury stations, and for the next few days, Mercury strongly aspects Neptune, symbolizing an increase in the level of both confusion and also incipient spirituality present in our lives right now. Neptune, strongly placed near the beginning of its own sign of Pisces, represents numinous other-dimensional realms that are essentially beyond logical understanding, better expressed by music and poetry. We all partake of a dual nature that includes, as Jung documented, the deep and vast unconscious process below and beyond the level of consciousness that taps into myth and long-lost ancestry, and that underlies, even though we might not be fully aware of it, everything that we think and do.

This powerful Neptune factor makes this a particularly good time to meditate, or to relax by taking in nature, or by simply being. As we indwell on our relationship to the cosmos, we could find that some of the answers we are feverishly seeking in our busy lives might appear to us, welling up from our interior depths as if by magic.

Interestingly, Venus is now in Cancer, sign of nurturing, and is in trine with Neptune. Venus also opposes Pluto, an intense condition that could bring up all kinds of relationship issues. This gets stronger over the next week leading up to the mid-month New Moon. As we mull over the well-springs of our behavior and where our lives are actually heading, we are therefore in the midst of a thoughtful episode of relationship activity that while it has its overly idealized and even confusing moments, is nonetheless a life-changing ongoing study and reevaluation of how we do relationship with significant partners, and indeed with ourselves.