Exploring Limits: The Dark before the New Moon

deep waters

Today's energies are introspective, emotional, and transformational.

The New Moon arrives overnight, 3:14 am in my Eastern US time zone; we're in the Dark Moon now.

I don't typically write essays on days like this, but I'm home when I planned to be traveling: Unexpected car trouble has me waiting for body shops to open in the morning.

Not what I hoped to be doing, but fitting the edgy energy of the day.

The Moon and Sun are widely conjunct at 7 and 15 Cancer, and they're activating the Pluto–Uranus square, creating a T-square of ... of what, exactly? The Sun and Moon are our lights, the bodies closest to who we are. The Pluto–Uranus square is the signature of our time, the emblem of the polarizing challenges we face around the world in political upheaval, economic breakdown, and environmental degradation.

Cancer is the sign of home, family, tribe and the body. This T-square brings the political right home to the personal. Its energy might be reflected in the videos and stories circulating the web now showing how ordinary people have been threatened, and in some cases killed, by police acting far outside their mandates: Where we think ourselves to be safe, we are not safe.

Or the terrible story about the train filled with crude oil that derailed and exploded in the middle of the night, engulfing a small town in flames. Where we most think to be secure, at home in our beds, we are not.

AND (an important 'and'), this T-square appears where people cross boundaries and think outside the box to do good. Michelle Obama and Laura Bush met with first ladies of Africa to discuss and support the empowerment of women, as President Obama thanked former President Bush for his efforts in AIDs relief, credited with saving millions of lives.

Another story circulating now tells of a brother giving a surprise $500 tip to a waitress to honor his late brother ... which went viral, leading to an outpouring of donations that has the brother traveling to all 50 states to surprise waitstaff with generosity, in remembrance of a loved family member.

the beauty of chaos

The connection between personal and political shows up in myriad ways.

The myriad today is likely to be creatively passionate as well as transformative. Venus in Leo is trining revolutionary Uranus, and both are in Fire.

Venus also sits as the apex of a yod, a Finger of Fate, with Pluto and Chiron the wounded healer at its base. We are more likely to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems when we bring our hearts courageously into the arena.

We're not meant to find solutions alone. Venus sits opposite Juno, each representing partnerships that are balanced, fair, and bring out the creative best in all involved. These two champions of relationship square the Nodes of the Moon, the karmic pathway. Squares to the Nodes represent a missed step on the path: Maybe it's time to let go of the idea we can do it all alone.

So where does the limits thing come into it? We look to Saturn for limits, and he's very powerful right now. He's slowed down to turn direct, which he'll do just two hours before the New Moon.

Saturn is, as he has been, sitting in Scorpio, sign of the Shadow. He's trining Neptune in dream- and vision-filled Pisces, and also trining a Jupiter–Lilith conjunction. This Grand Water Trine is strong enough to pull us into some deep water, where it's essential to read currents well.

I think we can all agree that our lives and chaos theory are a pretty good fit. We live within systems that change dynamically over time, in which the inputs (and outputs) are many, complicated, and not well understood.

As Nate Silver describes, we have a hard enough time predicting the weather, let alone understanding human behavior. At the same time, chaos theory offers key ideas that can help. One is the 'butterfly effect,' more officially known as 'sensitivity to initial states.'

This sensitivity means where we started affects where we can go. By extension, where we are now, right now, has a huge effect on where we can go next. Which means understanding very clearly where it is we actually are, becomes really important.

This might sound like a 'duh' moment, except there are many voices out there today telling us we can be, do and have whatever we can envision, if we can visualize it clearly enough, believe in it, and let go of any stories from our past that limit us. This is a wonderfully seductive idea that fits modern (especially American) beliefs about self-determination, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, and having it all. The thing is, it's not that simple, and today's energies help us see why.

Saturn anchors the Grand Water Trine to say, look where you are. Look at your patterns, beliefs, emotions, past, fears, and subconscious. Look at your Shadow. Do these things control our destiny? They need not. They do, however, create initial states with tremendous influence.

small things, big effects

This leads into tricky territory. Old-style predictions set hard and fast limits: "You will be this and not that," "This event will befall you in this year," and so on. That kind of determinism is not welcome, and does not work, in modern lives. We do have options, we can remake our lives, sometimes dramatically.

And yet promises of limitless change with no regard for current and past conditions are empty. Such promises lead to disenchantment, and sometimes despair.

Rick Jarow, author of the The Ultimate Anti Career Guide and Creating the Work You Love, argues strongly that our best futures are built on a thorough grounding in our past––our family history and the history of the land we live on, as well as personal history. A strong advocate for personal transformation, he sees an understanding of history as essential, and ignoring our history as a barrier to moving ahead.

Today's energies invite us to dive deeply into exploration and understanding. Where have we come from? What is our history? How has our past, in all its forms, influenced where we are today?

Within the crucible of that understanding, what can we let go of? Are there fresh understandings, new points of view, that frame the past in a more inclusive, more compassionate, more insightful way? Embracing new insights today offers smoother sailing through the coming New Moon.

Take time to reflect, looking back, perhaps, to something that still troubles you. Writing, meditating, drawing, moving ... any approach that works for you ... can help shift that something in a new direction. In this powerfully fluid place, we can shift our current state in a direction that opens new possibilities for us.

May it be so!