Do not try to save the whole
world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue." Martha Postlewaite
The Aquarius Full Moon on August 3, 2020 invites radical vision and innovation, encouraging a progressive and open-minded sensibility that opens pathways for how to serve the wider community from the unique gifts, talents and wisdom we possess.
The Aquarius Full Moon on August 3 has us asking: how can I best serve the great need of humanity and the world around while not compromising my personal evolutionary impulse for healing, wholeness, and authentic self-expression?
Aquarians march to the beat of their own drummer. They stand out as different, perhaps eccentric. They are the inventors, the one’s thinking outside the box, with a vision for humanity.
The House where Aquarius, and its ruler Uranus, reside in our birthchart marks where we have progressive, open-minded, and an offbeat streak where we are willing to experiment and color outside the lines. Their placement indicates where the status quo has limited, even hurt us, and where we have adopted an unconventional approach so we can be authentic and true to ourselves.
The Leo/Aquarius Polarity - Two Sides of Freedom and Giving Freely
To appreciate the Aquarian temperament, we must look to its opposing sign: Leo (where the Sun resides at the Full Moon). The Leo/Aquarius polarity produces a tension that begs resolution.
The childlike spontaneity and creativity of Leo is heart-centered and subjective. Feeling-oriented, the Leo in each of us follows an inner impulse to actualize our potential. The experience of joy affirms we are centered in our heart, aligned with our true nature and destiny. Most of us can relate to the desire to sustain a level of spontaneity where self-consciousness falls away and we are in a creative flow. From a Leonine perspective, the best gift we can give the world is to be fully, and unabashedly, ourselves.
Be who God
meant you to
be and you
will set the
world on
fire
St. Catherine of Sienna
Both Leo and Aquarius experience themselves as unique and are looking for the freedom to be authentic and original. Leo seeks personal fulfillment, and Aquarius is looking for collective fulfillment that encompasses the personal fulfillment of all. Where Leo thrives at the center of activity, Aquarius prefers to sit at the edge observing. This detachment provides Aquarians an objective to see the big picture. Leo follows their heart with less need to understand their motivations. Aquarians orient to an intellectual framework that provides the lay of the land and a vision for how to navigate from where we are to where we want to be. At all times, Aquarius is thinking of the collective and how his/her actions, gifts and service will contribute to the forward movement of society.
We look around and evaluate how our unique gifts and expression (Leo) can find a good fit with what the world offers. We want our talents to serve the larger community (Aquarius) but can become discouraged when the community at large responds with stipulations, rules or demands on how to shape what we have to offer. Invariably, we compromise and conform in some way to contribute to society.
Conformity irks both Leo and Aquarius and both desire another way. Aquarians may opt to be loners or to live on the fringe of society rather than engage conform. Leos can become self-absorbed and simply ignore the cues for how to fit in. The dilemma and opportunity is: how to contribute and serve the societal need without sacrificing or abandoning the heart of us.
Aquarius is called the humanitarian because the Aquarian mind creates a vision where the individual is not restrained by the culture and where the culture values, supports and is uplifted by individual fulfillment. Democracy is founded on this premise. Like with any vision, the implementation of it requires challenges, adjustments and, dare I say, compromise.
A hero is someone
Who has given his or her life
To something bigger than oneself.
Joseph Campbell
The story of the Ugly Duckling is a universal story that illustrates the Aquarian nature. As our minds develop through childhood, we have the unique ability to detach ourself from the subjective experience and see a bigger picture where we can observe ourselves as if from a distance. Invariably we each discover that we are an oddity.
In the process of being socialized in school and at home, we did our best to walk like a duck and talk like a duck. Then came the earth-shattering realization for many of us that we are not a duck at all and yet are surrounded by ducks. This realization came in response to meeting a swan, and we recognized ourself as swan, not duck. We then sought out other swans, kindred spirits. We may have rejected the duck world and insulated ourself n a swan collective. We may have become loners, feeling we are not duck or swan but perhaps a hybrid duck/swan or even a rare-exotic-near-extinct bird. Feeling our uniqueness, we wondered if we could fit in anywhere. This is the Aquarian experience. Aquarians can become disillusioned with all groups seeing them as inherently cultish, each with a given set of customs to which one must conform. And yet, they feel compelled to see their life within the context of the group.
There is a paradox within the Aquarian temperament. Aquarians love humanity but dislike people. With a detached view of humanity, the Aquarian sees no reason to be immersed in messy relationship, to enter into the fray of confusion and dysfunction that typically accompanies human activity. Aquarians love the idea of love, expound on its qualities, write beautiful poetry, but avoid the experience of it.
Aquarian long to be part of a group but are suspicious of being subjected to the groupthink that groups engender that would have them lose their objectivity, originality and clarity. This longing will lead them headlong into service, into finding kindred spirits that share their vision, because when it comes done to it, Aquarians love humanity. It is this love of humanity that is stirring in us, and this willingness to overcome the messiness of engaging, so our Leo heart and Aquarian vision can nurture humanity in some meaningful way.
Now, more than ever, the Aquarian spirit is surging within all humanity, offering a vision for the world where ducks and swans, hybrid duck/swans and rare exotic unnamed birds can coexist, each empowered to fully express the gift of who they are and what they have to offer the collective.
Everybody is a genius
But if you judge a fish
By its ability to climb a tree
It will live its whole life
Believing that it is stupid.
Albert Einstein
The Fire of Summer and the Sun and Mars in Fire Signs
The sun makes its annual journey through Leo mid-July to mid-August. Summer is the season for vacations, breaking away from routine, having extended playtime with our children and rekindling the childlike spirit that lives within us. It is a cyclical and essential time to reconnect with our heart and our joy.
At the Aquarian Full Moon each summer, we begin to imagine how to integrate into our life the experience we had on vacation or away from mundane responsibilities. While rekindling the fire within, we recommit to dreams for realizing our creative potential (Leo heart) and look additional steps we can take to bring the gift of who we are to the greater world (Aquarian vision).
Both Aquarius and Leo value freedom – Leo the freedom to follow one’s bliss and Aquarius the freedom to fulfill the vision one’s sees for the collective. The Aquarian Moon brings a self-consciousness to the Leo Sun in that following our heart is suddenly infused with a desire to be seen and contribute to what we have to the greater community. The value for spontaneity is now infused with a detached objectivity look where we can define how our life fits into greater and greater wholes.
The dynamic tension of the Aquarian Full Moon oppose the Leo Sun creates breakthrough and a way through to resolving the polarities between the individual vs the collective, subjectivity vs objectivity, heart versus intellect.
We can ask ourselves: How can my expression, gifts, and joy serve the needs of the collective and what humanity is needing at this time?
Some people are waiting for a final, apocalyptic war.
But the final war is fought not on battlefields, nor at sea, nor in the skies above.
Neither is it a war between leaders or nations.
The final war is fought in the heart of each human being, with the armies of his or her deeds in this world ~ with the miracle of light.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Energy is Freed Up with the Full Moon’s Square to Uranus
Aquarians can spend an endless amount of timing discussing and shaping a vision and have less motivation for implementing it. Current planetary alignments propel us to get out of our heads and give our ideas, our creativity, our vision legs. Its time for the rubber to hit the road. Mars and the Sun both in fire signs assist with this, but it is the Full Moon’s square to Uranus that truly gets things moving.
Uranus rules Aquarius and its titles include: The Rebel, The Genius, and the Visionary. Uranus is the nonconformist. Saturn is the last planet in our solar system we can see with the naked eye. Just beyond is Uranus which can only be viewed through a telescope. We can all look into the sky and see Saturn and say, 'there is nothing to see beyond that,' because we cannot see it. Uranus is the planet that denotes where we can see beyond what others can see, where we have our unique genius, where we hear the music no one else hears.
Uranus interrupts the collective agreement of the status quo and at this Full Moon, it promises to do just that. .
We can say to ourselves: 'I have gotten rather used to the unexpected here in 2020'. But Uranus is likely to deliver something else from left field. Its influence disrupts our automatic way of thinking and operating. Uranus is attuned to the tensions hidden beneath the surface and catalyzes events to release what is hidden so there is greater freedom of movement and vitality available.
The deep truth of this Full Moon is that perhaps it is not the world that needs to change, but that everything around is conspiring for the change that needs to happen within each of us. The disruptions of 2020 are breaking up the stagnant patterns that bind us. The restraints of society trap and isolate us much less than our own limited thinking and beliefs. And when we change from within, the whole world changes as a result.
When we become inwardly free we discover we were never separate. We discover that we are intrinsically unique and yet woven beautifully into the family of humanity And from this we can freely give, recognizing the profound reciprocal nature of all creation.
Our Minds are Under Siege – Mercury opposing Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin
Mercury’s opposition to Saturn can have us feeling we are not being heard or understood. Our ideas meet resistance. We may feel pessimistic or critical. In truth, we are encountering the rigidity of our thinking and being asked to reconstruct the way our mind works.
If we allow our mind to contemplate the meaning of Freedom during this Full Moon and to define what freedom is for ourselves and within the community and culture in which we belong, we may have a profound insight into ourselves.
Freedom to do what I please without the Aquarian value for how my actions serve or don’t serve the community is a selfish freedom. It is childish. As adults, we want to be childlike (not childish) where we reclaim our spontaneity, creativity and presence to the moment. Without this connection to our heart, to our love, we are empty with nothing to vital to give. Disconnected from the heart of us, our knowledge of greater and greater wholes and what humanity needs and how we plan to serve it, ultimately leads to futility, burnout and disillusionment.
Aquarius is the rising sign of the United States. The U.S. was the first country worldwide founded on the revolutionary belief that all people are created equal and that each has an inherent human right to pursue ‘life, liberty and happiness.” The difficulty is when a culture holds onto living in a ‘childish' way these words are interpreted in a selfish, narcissistic way. With maturity comes an awareness that all life is interconnected and when one suffers, all suffer. To uplift, empower and care for others nurtures liberty for all, and not a grasping for freedom as though it is a commodity in short supply.
Let us each look to dissolving limiting beliefs and patterns that keep us distant from our own hearts so that we can discover the freedom to no longer hide from ourselves or from a world that is waiting for what we have to give.
