The Moon's Light is Personal: Today's First Quarter in Scorpio

Moon illuminations

First Quarter Moon in Scorpio
August 14, 2013 6:56 am EDT
(and 11:56 am GMD)

The Moon is always close. When not blotted out by manufactured light, we track her changes naturally. She's personal, human in a way, the focus of the earliest calendars we now know go back to the Neolithic––or earlier.

Since the Moon moves fastest, being closest to us, she's often described as a "trigger" astrologically, a word I don't like in this context. Triggers set off devices, often destructive or at least explosive devices, and are themselves incidental. The Moon, the light of our night, is anything but incidental.

The Moon is more like a spotlight, drawing our attention. She's an emotional genius, focusing our feelings, and therefore our attention, before consciousness and rationality know where they are.

Today (just before noon where I am in Ireland now), we reach the First Quarter Moon in Scorpio.

Yesterday, as my jet-lagged self rode in a comfy bus through green countryside to Cork City, the Scorpio Moon shone her light on the Grand Trine in Water we've been swimming with this summer. As I rode, I wrote about my hopes for this adventure.

Part of what the Moon's spotlight shows us now is how everything focuses in on the flow of feeling these days. Look at the First Quarter chart, how so many planets around the circle are in and around 12 degrees of their signs. Everyone is at the table; everyone has something to say.

So do we leave it at "It's All One" and get on with our day?

It's an option, certainly, and there are times when the details of our lives seem so hopelessly tangled (or, if we're lucky, seamlessly integrated) that nothing more needs be said.

But then the Moon ... spotlights focus our attention, drawing the eye inexorably to a particular place. On this Scorpio Moon day, notice where your attention goes. Without trying to control it, just see what you see, feel what you feel.

In meditation, journalling, drawing, dreaming, living, allow a part of yourself to have a bit of Scorpionically detached incisiveness, the ability to see around corners and through fog. What does the deeper self want us to see today?

That's all––and that's enough. Allowing the Moon to set the focus, draw us into seeing something we might have missed. It might seem small. It may well prove larger than we realize at first.

What did I write in my journal on the bus? Stuff about handling the practicalities of life on the road, about listening to ancestral voices, about working and traveling, about the ways landscapes speak to and affect us.

I wasn't thinking about the Scorpio Moon then, just writing. But in my birth chart, Saturn, Venus, Juno and the doorway into my Fourth House are in Scorpio. What I wrote was personal, meaningful, and gently illuminated by the transiting Moon, even though I couldn't see her at the time.