First Quarter Moon in Sagittarius
Friday, September 22, 3:32 pm EDT
Sun Enters Libra (Equinox)
Saturday, September 23, 2:50 am EDT
We’ve entered the First Quarter of this waxing lunar cycle with a mutable square between Sun and Moon.
At the First Quarter, energy is increasing. We reach for goals by taking action. Yet today the Sun in the last minutes of Virgo and the Moon in the final minutes of Sagittarius are not interested in action.
The Sun is deeply aware of mortality. Everything that lives will fade. All that begins will end.
The Moon is exhausted. Sagittarius is adventure and exploration. Now we wonder what we’ve accomplished. What was it all for?
In not-quite twelve hours, the Sun steps into Libra, the moment of the Autumn Equinox in the northern hemisphere.
We shift from mutable Earth and its pervasive sense of loss into the cardinal Air of new ideas.
For me, this feels energizing. I was born at this equinox. I’m also an endless reader and perpetual student, who welcomed the beginning of each school year with its promise of new things to learn.
Yet we haven’t left the sense of endings behind. A paradox inherent in the shift from Virgo to Libra is the balance between justice and peace.
At the end of something, we want to feel justice has been done, in all senses of that word, and we’re ready for some peace. Yet these two values can be antithetical.
Sometimes individuals and the world at large seem to purchase peace at the cost of justice. We know in our bones such a peace is neither true nor lasting, yet it is a choice made again and again.
We can also focus so fiercely on justice we leave ourselves no peace. This leads to exhaustion and sometimes a sense of futility.
The answer–or at least, one answer–lies in remembering that although there is a stillness at each equinox and solstice, we are always, always moving.
Perhaps you’ve seen an animation of how our solar system moves through space.
My 4th grade science book offered a drawing of a stationery Sun in the center of concentric circles on which the planets rested. Sometimes an enterprising teacher would create a 3D solar system on the ceiling, which, if made anything close to scale, put Pluto somewhere outside the room and down the hall.
Today animations show the planets circling the Sun at their relative speeds. My favorites, though, are the animations that spiral through a dark field of stars. A radiant Sun blazes the trail as planets circle as if doing their damndest to keep up.
While it’s natural, and can be useful, to think about endings and beginnings, it’s also good to remember how relative those concepts are.
Everything is movement. Everything is in flux. We are dancers constantly shifting position relative to each other and everything else.
These moments of transition are good for taking our bearings as long as we remember nothing has stopped.
“Since when,” he asked,
“Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?”
― Seamus Heaney
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
– Yogi Berra