Who we are at midnight when there is no one around to see, the lowest part of the chart and the most internal. It’s a restart. A rebirth from the inside out. There is some energy to it and some pride. It’s a creative vulnerability moon.

Pressure? Yes.

Confusion? Less and less.

There are only so many things that feel right to do, and by July 12, you will be doing some of them.

It’s a good time to say YES to reality. No need to argue with what is, but you may need to do something else with it, to play with reality, to connect to it, to move ahead, make a choice, or go beyond.

The thing of it is, you can now.

It’s a moment of potency and creative fertilization. There is nothing to prove, that part is over. What comes next is a very clear expression of potency. We are extraordinarily capable at the moment. You do need courage, but by now you have it. YES YOU DO HAVE IT.

To open big doors, you need big levers and these are big levers: Talent: we have, Power: we have, Ingenuity, we have, straight back, face forward, looking proudly ahead. With Venus and Mars coming together in Crab’s solar 2nd, our talents & desires match our actions and abilities. Leo is GOLD.

Use the beautiful darkness of the New Moon to show you to yourself. Uncovered. Naked, Lovely.

Let you show yourself what is important now, then use the light of Venus and Mars to show how you will enact it, to show you what comes next.

So that all sounds pretty easy, what’s the trick of it? The trick is this:

Our values are changing and it’s uncomfortable, for everyone.

I don’t mean in a liberal/conservative way, but rather our personal values, the ones we never see and rarely describe, the lights with which we look at our decisions, the unexamined yardsticks we take out when we are about to change.

What I mean is, the values that rule our individual day to day choices are being reexamined individually by us. What is it worth to you, right now, type of values.

What is it worth, your independence, your interdependence, your trustworthiness, your artistic freedom, your accomplishment, your financial freedom, your family, your heart’s desires. What will you give up to have it? Which mountains will you move? What can be discarded, and what must not be let go?

What is it worth?

Your values are changing, and most likely they have not finished changing, what they are now, is half fully formed butterfly, half absolute caterpillar goo.

Our New Moon initiates a lesson on growing while doing. You will find out what you care about by putting yourself in new situations. The measurements will be made in real time… you are coming very close.

We are ⅔ thru our Summer Situation, and we move out of the theoretical trials and into the applied experiments. There is no other way.

James Baldwin writes:

– Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.-

If you have to follow certain rules, rewrite certain rules, realize you may not understand certain rules, then you will also have to take that as it comes and respond to your challenges in real time.

You have had time to think, and you have had frustration, deliberation, and revision, perhaps now you can arrive at something in the vein of self abundance, a feeling of your own validity.

Leo is a potent creator and what comes of our extended Venus/Mars conjunction is more than pleasure or satisfaction, it is play, creation, creativity, vitality, and birth. Something can be born, and made, and bent, and shaped, a creation: brand new.

As I say that, I’m aware that some things will be abandoned now, not all (or who) that has been valuable to us will make it into the future.

That’s as it should be. Something new is born in us, and we can’t hang on and let go with both hands, and what we do now, trapeze style, we do completely, with both hands.

We welcome what arrives. Confidant. A test is passed, and if we don’t have everything, perhaps we don’t need everything.

This is a newborn Moses in a basket, who magically grows in the course of a single summer to lead us into our promised land. Moses who parts the sea, drowns our enemies and takes us to the place we have been so longing to go… or something like that.

To be fair it’s more of a complicated dance this year and even those rejections made now, may feature some revisioning in the future, when our outer planets move ahead, and in our venus retrograde to come, but in this moment and for this time, and with what we understand now, this is clarity. Move with it. You need it.

The key to the energetic is to stay with yourself, your glorious self, your golden and shining Leonic self.

And what if you only have the ordinary self? The pockmarked and pitted, the wounded and damaged self, the stubborn and idiosyncratic self, the shy and private self, that self, that same old workaday self?

Cheryl Strayed says:

– A foundational truth I return to in the course of giving advice is that there will always be a price to pay if you fake the core. If you do not allow the truest things you know about yourself to guide your life, you will be miserable. You’ll be sad and numb and confused and resentful and endlessly paddling your canoe down the wrong river, all because you took a left upstream when you knew you wanted to take a right and here you are, almost sunk, because you didn’t—or couldn’t—trust your clarity.-

You have to bring the self you have, that damaged self IS the golden one, none other.

There is a great piece by Stephen R. Schwartz called The Prayer Of The Body II published in an issue of Sun magazine. It’s much too long for this podcast, but, I’ll put a good bit of the excerpts here:

— Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here.

We often misunderstand our feelings. We think that some of them are weak and some strong, some are good and some bad, some right and some wrong. Such a relationship to our feelings represents an overlay of arrhythmic thought onto the intimate rhythms of our bodily experience.

When we allow ourselves to turn toward our feelings at the bodily level, we can discover a core of warm nourishment there. Even in our anger, our guilt, our confusion, our loneliness, even in the depths of despair, we can find something that we truly want — a sustaining force which we can receive and then give in return.

Feelings can be recognized as a movement of energy on a subtle level. Like breathing, the beating of the heart, and the movement of blood in the veins, feelings are not owned by us. They are part of the stream which sustains and uplifts this mysterious human form.

… They are like tones that resonate from subtle regions of the human form. These feeling tones have become disrupted by the ways we have been taught to fight against them, deny them, dishonor them, and obstruct them…

… We return our consciousness to the rhythms of the body and allow ourselves to breathe. When we turn our attention to the heart and locate our conscious identity there, we begin to understand and feel gratitude for the very interdependence that we so often try to reject. Everything is given to us. Our purpose is to receive, transform, and give back…

Every human body has unique qualities. Each of us takes in, transforms, and gives back energy in a distinct way. Each of us is a particular individualized pulsation of life current, a resonating tone, and not merely a series of memories, beliefs, and ideas. We each bear a unique way of expressing the energies we receive.—

Cancer rules the breasts that nourish the baby, the impulse to give, to foster new life, Leo rules the heart and the back, the center of our body that holds us straight.

When we are very sincere in our words or our creations, we say “It came from the heart.” Mercury is still in Gemini ruling the lungs and the hands, and giving us all we need to understand what we experience now.

Let’s breathe together, and now let’s do it again. There is no separation between the air that enters your body, and your body itself. We are infinitely entwined, inseparable from each other, indivisible from the limitless power of creation. I’m so glad you are alive, I’m so glad you are alive and breathing, here with us.

Love YOU!!!

XoX

p.s.