The New Moon in Taurus arrived today at 3:31pm EST, reaffirming the fertility and salience of Spring in the temperate Northern Hemisphere — yet engaging Mars and Pluto, eye-locked across an axis of light-bearing between seen and unseen forces.

This implicit coming together of the Moon with the Sun as the lunar cycle is renewed, continues to engage yet move our lights away from the ‘Fixed Grand Cross’ of late, involving Lilith in Scorpio, but particularly Mars in Leo opposite Pluto in Aquarius.  Dynamic tensions and staring contests of four planetary bodies across the fixed signs.

The red planet, recently emerging from several months spent largely retrograde in its ‘fall’ of Cancer, entered Leo just nine days ago on April 18th.  ‘Emergence’ is a keyword for the first face of Leo, one which beckons stepping into a role or stepping into the light, coming from shells and crevices of protection perhaps — where Mars in Cancer spent what felt like ages merging nurture and aggression, scraping the lacquer, revisiting old wounds and places where one might have felt unseen or untended in one’s suffering, where lack of a care or charged attention to care alike may have been prevailing narratives.

It is our own choice to step into this light.

Opposite Pluto in Aquarius, the chthonic pressure-cooker planet perched on the periphery, Mars in Leo asks us not just where we have felt exiled, or held ‘beyond the city gates’ — but what parts of ourselves and our character arcs have we been ignoring?  What else has kept us from stepping into the centrality of our innermost narratives, those visions of ourselves we most dearly hold tight?

In even the strongest families blessed with the most consistent parenting, there will be moments when the child walks fumbling with some misshapen creation in their hands, as if to say, “Look, I made this for you!”

And the parent might be reading the paper, or doomscrolling… and no matter how solid they may typically be, no matter how dear they are at bearing witness, in this moment they brush it off, they fail to witness, fail to see the child, and this plants some seed of future therapy, which begs to integrate the moment.

‘I was not seen properly.  I did not feel witnessed.’

Whether this, or whether ongoing in our lives… times we didn’t feel tended to, in this relationship or that — ‘was it really then, when I needed it most, that those I love ceased to be there?’

Mars in Cancer has struggled and worked through such wounds — “raging against the insufficiency of care” as I’m ever quoting Diana Rose Harper.  Perhaps we revisited such pains or similar ones over the several months that Mars transited Cancer, from September 4th to April 18th, save for glimmers of Leo from early November to early January.  Perhaps these inner wells, stirring at scars nourished into the joy of character built and strength renewed — perhaps from them Mars in Leo now mirrors our courage to move forward.

There is something to be said for the three water signs, symbolized by the Crab, the Scorpion and the Fish… two of them have protective crustacean armor, whether sidestepping with pincers or striking from a place of self-protection.

Mars in Leo, emerging from several months spent in its traditional fall, begs now that we step into “the Spotlight” as Austin Coppock called the sign’s first decan — as if to say ‘I am ready to make choices of greater creative agency’ working with what I’ve learned from these places, these spinning eddies of water, the guarded Mars in Cancer lapping where wounds have alternately burned and cooled in umbral healing.

As Mars in Leo stares down Pluto in Aquarius, we’re asked not just the seesaw of creative agency and iconoclastic exile, that leonine ‘stepping into the role’ or that aquarian ‘I am an the antihero, perched beyond’…

What is it in myself that -I- have exiled, what parts of myself do I banish or hold as less sacred?  What is it that I am equipped with now?

Where in the fecundity of Spring will we take these bold steps into the light, forward with us, further into the vernal promise…

—A.B.