First Quarter Moon: The Personal is Political

First Quarter Moon: June 26, 2012

In about twelve hours, the Moon will reach her waxing square with the Sun, the First Quarter Moon. This is the monthly challenge between the two luminaries, the core energies of our individual selves.

We started something with the New Moon––are we ready to see it clearly, accept it, work for it? This is a personal decision, based on our own feelings, understandings, commitment.

This First Quarter Moon bumps the personal up against the global, the universal, and the cosmic. This Moon–Sun square joins the Uranus–Pluto square to create a Grand Cross in which the game-changing pattern of our time intersects with individual motivation and action.

In 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote the essay, The Personal is Political, to challenge the idea that women's consciousness raising groups were "just therapy" and "just personal." The "just" label came from people wanting to dismiss the emerging feminist movement as nothing more than gals with not enough to do, sitting around––and from politically active feminists who saw the groups as a sideline and waste of time.

Hanisch says "One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems." In other words, the things we experience in our lives as obstacles, as threats, as issues all have systemic causes. In today's terms, foreclosures are not caused solely, or even primarily, by individual spending habits.

Her very next sentences are "There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution." Full stop. Really? Wow.

Today's First Quarter Moon brings us face to face with this issue, in the form of a Grand Cross. In our lives right now, where are we looking to personal solutions when collective ones are needed? Where collective action is called for, are we participating or waiting for some group somewhere else to fix it?

Today we're placed squarely in front of ideas from an earlier time: No man is an island, everybody look what's goin' down, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Where is the line we won't cross, the place we take a stand? Where are we ready to say, we shall not be moved? Think about it.