Spring Equinox
20th March 2017 10:30
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” Dylan Thomas
The global experience of Spring Equinox is the balance of the forces of Day and Night in all places across the Earth. Our whole planet is similarly affected, and all its denizens. Light and warmth are the forces of growth, emergence and awakening. In the northern hemisphere now, the Sun is on the horizon, its rays illuminating and warming the land. We see plantlife responding to the waxing Sun in a greening of our lands. New life is everywhere manifesting, and this renewal and burgeoning of growth is happening at every level of our experience, seen and unseen.
We can think of the annual cycle of the Sun as a Greater Day: the Winter Solstice was midnight, the seeding moment; the Summer Solstice is the noon of the year, time of culmination. Here and now, in Aries, we are at the daybreak of the whole year. Light is the signal to “WAKE UP!” Time to get up and get going. Aries brings a dynamic directional energy, a huge drive towards activity, self-actualisation and manifestation. That energy is moving through us now whether we know what we are about or not. If we are living without a sense of purpose and direction the awakening energy of Aries might feel disruptive or exhausting, as it pulls us out of passivity and torpor into activity and wakefulness.
We need acute mindfulness at this time of such questions as:-
What is my purpose?
What serves my purpose?
What am I doing now?
What are my next steps?
That is to say: what am I all about, where am I heading and how can I channel this new energy of awakening in a constructive way?
Failure to address these questions can mean that we have dynamic force moving through our lives without it being channelled and directed, which is, at best, wasteful, and, at worst, random, chaotic and pointless. We can observe how this outflow of force manifests in the natural world: in the swell and break of sprouting seeds, in budburst and regrowth of ground cover, in nest building, warming of air, land and sea, and in new birth. Humans are, of course, integrally a part of nature; but paradoxically we are set apart: we have free will. We choose how and when and what we do. We are subject to doubt, anxiety, loss of faith and willpower. We are prone to waiting for a sign from the external world in order to be galvanised into activity. We are undermined by the fracture lines in our attention, our difficulty in holding intent: we are dealing with chronic levels of distraction, which holds us in its grip like a kind of cultural dementia.
The powerful directional force of Aries manifests in humans as the will to be and to do: it is about our effectiveness. Our world sorely needs free and effective agents to challenge injustices, to resist the mire of conformity and to fight for values that sustain the wellbeing of life forces on our planet. To find our effectiveness is to find out our unique purpose and gather the forces of the will to serve it. Just as the brilliant renewal of spring has its beginnings in the inauspicious chill and gloom of winter, so must we gather the forces of our will in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. We cannot afford to wait or to retreat the truth and purpose of our souls even if we feel overwhelmed or undervalued or whatever our personal line of least resistance is. The time is now!
Our dilemma is how to empower intent, how to renew commitment when it fails, as inevitably it will, and how to raise our sights above and beyond the seductions and distractions of a culture that is steadily reducing us to passivity and disconnection. We have to remember who we are: timeless spiritual beings having incredibly precious, hard-won, Earthwalk lives. Our opportunity is invaluable, but we can only take hold of it through deep and continued deployment of the will. It is for us, step by step, to steer towards purposeful living, better use of time and attention, our own higher goals, reconnection with wider communities of being.
The planetary principle of the Earth is manifestation. It is here on Earth that the refined energies of spirit, thought and emotion are cloaked in form and take on physical characteristics – our bodies and the events and circumstances of our lives; reality, if you like. How things get embodied in our lives is a reflection, an index, of all that is arising at unseen levels. Impulses, ideas, thoughts and feelings come eventually (if held on to) in to physical manifestation in our lives. Our thoughts and feelings are very powerful then: we become them, we give them birth in the manifest world. This power is ours, all the time, in every moment; we can foster a sense of our great capacity as free human beings (at another level, as multidimensional, timeless beings) or we can become avatars in some useless game that we give ourselves to through lack of awareness and lack of willpower.
The challenge of Aries and of this time is to develop and guide the will: to gather forces. To root ourselves in the manifest reality of physical life is crucial to Aries’ project, because the will is about our being and doing in the world. We gather force in order to act effectively. This Spring Equinox is striking the note of grounded and embodied action strongly, for Mars, ruler of the Equinox dawn, is in Taurus. Taurus pertains to physical sensation and the experience of the body. Mars here is urging a venting of physical force. The more we are grounded and living in our bodies, engaging with present realities, the more effective and useful our actions and the less likely we are to encounter aggression and hostility in ourselves or around us.
Our experience more widely is of a shift in the paradigm of authority and governance; we are seeing radical change in our political conventions and structures. A new model of authority and responsibility is sought in the unpleasant, toxic remains of traditional forms. Many people are taking autonomous action outside of the usual realm of political discourse and change: all kinds of new constituencies are arising as people make new associations with each other, deciding just to get on with what needs doing in their locality. This is in keeping with the spirit of the times, heralded somewhat, I hate to mention it, by David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ theme.
We currently have Pluto in Capricorn (going through our establishment with a wrecking ball), disposited by Saturn in Sagittarius (the structure/status quo negotiating foreign relations), disposited by Jupiter in Libra, seeking the wisdom of the middle way, the way between extremes. Jupiter is calling us to explore compromise, working through the principle of balance and groundedness. Find the meaning in this situation, it urges, see the underlying principles at work here; transform the energy of crisis into the energy of opportunity. Our response to the drastic work of Pluto is that the whole thing is coming down on our heads, as Pluto continues to root out traces of sepsis in our political body, indifferent to how widespread, ugly or painful its activity may prove to be. We are likely to be emotionally triggered, hence the importance again of finding the ground.
At the same time, Uranus, in the sign of Aries, is liberating personhood, urging us towards autonomy and entirely new notions of human subjectivity; the digital human or the spiritually conscious human, both avatars of sorts. War, tumult and technological revolution are just one level of Uranus’ potential outworking. We can also see its energy as liberating qualities of soul and intuition that serve to transform notions of human presence and effectiveness in very different ways. It is for us to choose the level to which we respond.
The particular gift of this Spring Equinox is that it is pushing us into an awareness of the physical world that needs us, our rootedness in the energies of the Earth are crucial to all evolutions.
I feel that all the stars shine in me.
The world breaks into my life like a flood.
The flowers blossom in my body.
All the youthfulness of land and
water smokes like an incense in my
heart; and the breath of all things plays
on my thoughts as on a flute.
~ Tagore
Kate Hubert
Awen Astrology
kate@spiral7.co.uk
