Tomorrow’s Full Moon – Day 896

Colors of Tonight’s Sunset – Photo: L. Weikel

Tomorrow’s Full Moon

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like it’s been an especially long two weeks. I’m talking about the two weeks it’s been since the new moon in Aries when we planted all the seeds we wanted to manifest in the weeks and months to come. With tomorrow’s full moon, we’re going to want to check on our sprouts to see how they’re coming along – and make a concerted effort not to yank them out of the ground if they’re not growing as quickly as we’d hoped.

As I do every now and again, here’s a link to Chani’s assessment of the main attitudes we’ll be feeling and confronting with this full moon in Scorpio. Make sure you read both your sun sign and your ‘rising’ sign (known as your ascendant). Pay attention to which one seems to more accurately describe you and your feelings or approach to life. It just may be that your ascendant holds a more accurate key to understanding yourself and your position in life than any reading of your sun sign will ever yield.

Ascendant and Moon

Just in case you’ve forgotten what sign your ascendant is or where to go to find out, I want to remind you that it’s important to know your time of birth. Once you know that, it’s pretty easy: just go to astro.com and create a free account. (You can always look up everything as a guest – but if you create an account, you can save all the different charts you create when inserting birth information about yourself, your family, and people you’re interested in understanding better.) Once you start piecing things together for yourself, trust me: you’ll become ‘curiouser and curiouser’ about all the other people in your life.

Once you’re into the website, click on “Free Horoscopes.” On the far right side, you’ll see a link under “Drawing and Calculations.” The top link is “Natal Chart, Ascendant.” Plug in your birth information there and you’ll be well on your way to understanding yourself better. Plus, you’ll know precisely what two signs to read first whenever you run across a website or article like Chani’s.

Another important placement for you to discover in your natal chart (the position of the luminaries – sun and moon – and the planets at the time of your birth) is the sign the moon was in when you were born. This information, too, will be found on the chart you create on astro.com.

A Rehash

I realize much of this information is a rehash of stuff I’ve written about in other posts. But this basic information is important for all of us to know about ourselves. It’s extremely helpful to know your ‘rising sign’ (ascendant) and moon sign as well as your sun sign (which almost everyone seems to know). Tracking this information and the accuracy of its application in your own life only serves to help you know your own self better.

Intention

It wasn’t my conscious intention to focus upon the fundamentals of astrology tonight. But here we are.

I’m guessing at least some of you will benefit from this refresher and a little nudge to remember who you are, what the cosmos looked like at the moment of your birth, and what that means for you today.

It’s as if the cosmos are reaching out to put their arms around you in a big, loving hug.

Cloud Being Swooping In With Arms Extended – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-215)

New Moon/New Beginnings – Day Twenty Five

New Moon/New Beginnings

Of necessity, I am not going to be able to write as much as I usually do this evening. But at the same time, I don’t want to leave you hanging on this whole ‘new moon’ thing that I started yesterday.

And I realize I may very well be talking about stuff you already know. If that’s the case, I hope you’ll forgive me.

Just from my dead giveaway ‘title’ to this post, yes, Virginia, when the moon is ‘new,’ which is also referred to as the ‘dark’ phase of the moon, it is generally thought to be a particularly auspicious time to embark upon new endeavors. New adventures, new jobs, new ideas, etc. It’s not that starting at other phases of the moon is ‘bad’ – it’s just generally thought to be most advantageous or giving the opportunity the greatest chance of success to begin it at a new moon.

And remember when I said last night that astrology is surprisingly complex? Well, just to give you a taste of that, beyond paying attention to the actual fact that the new moon is taking place today (be it December 6th or 7th, depending upon what time zone you live in), true astrologers also look to the sign in which the moon is hanging out, as well as the house of your particular natal chart. Yeah. I do not even pretend to have a rudimentary grasp of this. Yet. But it is intriguing to me and, after decades of relying on someone else to let me in on what all of this means, I’m actually starting to try to get a grip on it myself.

We’ll see. Who knows? By “talking about it out loud” here on my blog, maybe I’ll log the information into the appropriate folds of my brain and one day this stuff will start clicking.

I can tell you that the new moon tonight/tomorrow morning is occurring in Sagittarius, because that’s where the sun is right now – and a new moon is when the moon is lined up with (or ‘conjunct’) the sun and therefore not reflecting any of its light (hence it also being known as the ‘dark’ moon). While the sun moves through the 12 signs of the zodiac every 30 days (or so), the moon moves through each sign every 2.5 days (or so).

And yaaaaaaawn. That’s enough of that.

Some Favorite Astrology Links

So, here I’d like to give you links to two astrologers I enjoy following.

Kaypacha (Tom Lescher) publishes a weekly video called the Pele Report. He gives the technical aspects at the beginning (which still makes my eyes roll into the back of my head – but also makes me want to understand them better), and then he gives an entertaining and insightful explication on how the aspects occurring that week may play out or influence us in our daily lives (and on a global level, when and where appropriate). I find his personality endearing, and I relate to his goofiness all too easily. He knows his stuff, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Chani used to give reports on a weekly basis, but is now giving them on a monthly basis. In order to get the most of Chani’s interpretations of the celestial aspects, it is extremely helpful to not only know your sun sign, but also your ascendant. That’s why I suggested you might want to discover yours in yesterday’s post. I find these interpretations extremely insightful and uncanny at times.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these links. It’s really kind of neat to start paying attention to this information and noticing how it may or may not play out in what you see and feel unfolding in your life.

(T-1086)

 

Astrology and the New Moon – Day Twenty Four

 

Esoteric Means of Understanding Ourselves Better

As you’re all discovering day-by-day and post by post (thank you for hanging with me), I’m fascinated by a wide range of esoteric means we humans have developed to help us understand our place in the Universe. I’ve been on the quest to understand myself better since my earliest memories. And of course, the admonition 28 years ago by the Taos Pueblo elder to “know” myself, as I describe in my book Owl Medicine , only clinched that early urge to soul search and gave me permission to translate it into a life-long passion.

Numerology

There’s numerology, which, as I’ve only tangentially touched upon, uses numbers based on a Pythagorean system of 9 to set forth a roadmap of our lives and the various gifts and challenges that our souls have come into this particular lifetime to experience and hopefully learn from and use to evolve.

Astrology

Another system is astrology. I’ve been fascinated for decades by this means of cultivating self-awareness, which is incredibly complicated and is far and away so much more in-depth and rich than the trite paragraph we used to read in the newspaper about our ‘sun sign’ when I was a kid.

At its most basic, astrology takes into account your ‘natal’ chart, which is the exact position of a wide range of heavenly bodies at the minute of your birth, from the perspective of where your mother was at the moment you were born. From this snapshot of the solar system, you do indeed know your ‘sun sign’ – which is the sign of the zodiac in which the sun was located at the minute of your birth.

Discovering Your Rising Sign or “Ascendant”

What many people don’t realize is that, while one’s sun sign can be a somewhat prominent indicator of traits that you carry in this lifetime, an actually more intimate and accurate indicator of who you are is what’s called your ‘rising’ sign – or the sign that was ‘on the ascendant’ at the minute of your birth. So, if you have a chance, I strongly urge you to research and discover your ascendant or rising sign.

One way to do this is to access the free website Astrodienst. (There are many others. I just happen to use this one.) You can either set up an account (again, for free) or just log on as a guest. Either way (under the ‘Free horoscopes’ tab, go to the far right and click on ‘natal chart, ascendant’ under the heading ‘Drawings and Calculations’) you can input your birth information. You’ll need the date of your birth (obviously), as well as the time (and this is important, as some important shifts can take place within minutes), but you can always input a default time until you can secure your specific birth time from your mom (wink) or on the ‘long form’ of your birth certificate. You’ll also need to know your birthplace (city, state, country). All of this information will add up to giving you a much richer, deeper picture of the heavens at the moment you arrived.

The three easiest and most basic aspects for you to discover are (a) your sun sign, which you probably know already unless you live under a rock; (b) your ascendant or ‘rising’ sign; and (c) your moon sign. Just knowing and delving into those three aspects of your personal astrological makeup can bring you an incredible amount of insight into yourself and how you ‘tick.’

What I find fascinating is how every form of roadmap that our souls have created for us to discover and work with, if we choose, matches up. In other words, when Alison Baughman gave me a comprehensive numerological reading years ago, it dovetailed in truly eerie and profound ways with every astrological reading I’ve received. (All told, I think I’ve had three or four separate astrologers read my natal chart for me, cultivating decades-long relationships with two of them, which means I would go back to them periodically to have them read my ‘transits.’)

I’ll talk about transits another day.

Roadmaps of Our Souls

My point, though, is that no matter what roadmap you look at, they all pretty obviously chart the same unique challenges and gifts. So it is as if we (as souls) leave cosmic magical breadcrumbs for our ego-selves to discover, in order to help us understand our strengths, weaknesses, and potential destinies, should we have the desire to discover them.

I started this post intending to discuss the fact that we will be experiencing a ‘new moon’ tomorrow and what that might mean for each of us. And then I got sidetracked into writing what I wrote.

But! The good news (for me) is that I just now realized that the new moon actually won’t ‘arrive’ until 2:20 a.m. EST on Friday, December 7th.

So maybe I’ll save what I was going to say tonight until tomorrow!

(T-1087)