Waxing Moon in Libra

The Moon glides through harmonious Libra, her only aspect a conjunction with Mars at 9:21am EDT that brings feelings and action into alignment in balanced and beautiful ways.

Libra is creative and artistic, words we associate with the "fine arts" that belong to the great, not to us ordinary humans. Yet the Latin libra simply meant a weight, or a scale. Our word balance also meant a device for weighing, coming to us from Old French from the Latin bilanx, which was a libra with two (bi) plates (lanx) to compare weights. Even talent, that prerequisite for great art, meant in classical Latin a balance weight or a sum of money, beginning to take on its modern meaning of an aptitude or skill we can "spend" in the 14th century.

So, Libra has her decidedly practical side, attuned to harmony in ordinary life, where beauty emerges everywhere. Today Mars helps us take action to bring our lives into equilibrium, aequus (equality) of libra (balance), even as the Libran Moon helps us find emotional balance.

My thanks to the Online Etymology Dictionary for information on word origins, and to WikiMedia Commons for the image of the balances.