With the Sun in late Capricorn, the enthronement of one’s psyche and earthly poise over personal ‘kingdoms’ is emphasized in rooted footsteps.  Yet with our star conjunct Pluto, we see ever more the collective shaking of a stolen kingdom.  Tectonic shifts, erupting anger at each injustice, every unforgettable sorrow — and blood still seeping around the ephemeral foundations of political fortresses and the real masked faces adorning them.

From our earthly vantage the Sun conjoins Pluto once a year, and today’s Full Moon in Cancer carries not only the power of coinciding with and opposing said volcanic conjunction — it is the first full moon of 2022 — but the gravity of kicking off this gregorian year that holds the United States’ first Pluto Return.  The length of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun is 248 years, about the average age of an empire in 250.  The wealth of astrologers who’ve written on the oppressive and illuminating dimensions of this are like jewels compressed from lethean rivers, integrated riches looking back over the particularities of history and the heavenly movements mirroring them.

Mercury is three days into its airy retrograde, close with Saturn in Aquarius and reigniting 2021’s final and slowly fading Saturn-Uranus square, whose reverberations may prove quite enduring — a topic I made mention of on the January 10th episode of Carolyn Elliott and Laila Bernhardt’s ‘Sleep Over Podcast.’  This aspect is more immediately pronounced in its connection to the aforementioned ‘tectonic shifts’ in power distribution, from physical structures to property in the Meta-verse, unprecedented economic injections to the few who swallow them up.

Mercury Rx in the first decan of Aquarius and near to Saturn, is like a fluent conversation on heavy matters had while staring into space and appearing lost in one’s thoughts, a look at once stony and glazed over.  Words roll off your tongue with facility, yet your gaze seems unreachable.  The world is a puzzle you are not the sole architect of, and imagining one’s way out — revising or re-visioning its contour with your own contributions — is among the primary needs of the particular person.  Writer and astrologer Stephanie Warner described Mercury’s reigniting moments for Saturn and Uranus as volatile in nature, and they seem to burn on and off depending on time of day and starkness of one’s setting.

This Full Moon’s opposition to the Sun and Pluto briefly activates the cardinal yin axis.  Cancer and Capricorn both conjure ancestral memory, continuity of our lineages, and the sustainability of an endeavor over time.  These signs ask us what is true, what is enduring, summoning both strength and sensitivity, worldly ascent and sensitized walls of the heart.

A few years back during a rather successful special, the comedian Whitney Cummings shared a joke about walking with a man she was seeing who unexpectedly tripped and fell, prompting her to instantly fall out of love with him.  While this does seem like a ball-buster move befitting to a Virgo Sun, it pokes at the some of the most invulnerable parts of our psyches.  It reminds me of the jovian and especially saturnian shades perhaps, that want a person to be arrived in their totality, full representations of our inner ideals, rather than flawed, vulnerable people we can grow with in their mis-steps both literal and overarching.

In the collective world just as one’s individual life, no matter how well one hits the target, we must grow with incomplete entities and realize that we are mutual reflections, interconnected in being-ness.  This kind of enmeshment is the stuff of the Cancer Moon, opposite the Sun and Pluto all the more — sticky, syrupy, and in the wounds with all our mercurial uncertainties.

Whether one looks at ‘the earthly powers that be’ as having our backs or hedging control — governments doublespeak-ing and pulling trucks off the roads, the withering of young minds unable to see each other’s faces in their most formative years… or reasonable measures in protecting people from the ever-looming ‘next enemy’, these are the stories we tell ourselves, growing in imperfection together with each part acting out something we all contain in potentia.  May the friction and jovian grace of these moments treat you kindly and help you find a steadiness in the flux, rather than any perfectly arrived or un-flickering completion.

‍