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Stored deep in the antiquarian depths of my memory banks is an old giggle about the dance that heterosexual people do: “She ran away from him until she caught him.” Are the times gone when people believed that script? Is it extinct? I guess that is an essay question nowadays as the old gender assumptions pass through the wringer of cultural change.
In any case, the saying came to mind as I watched Venus chase Mars around the Zodiac this month. At the beginning of January, Venus is speeding through the last degrees of Capricorn while Mars lies safely ahead, deep in Aquarius. Venus joins “him” there on the 3rd, but “he” quickly escapes into Pisces on January 12th. Venus tracks Mars down and enters Pisces “herself” at the end of the month, on the 28th. Mars nearly makes his getaway yet again—he just manages to cross the line into Aries in mid-February, but Venus finally catches up with him there on February 22nd.
September opens straightforwardly with Venus in Libra and Mercury in Virgo. Each planet is in the sign it naturally rules, in other words. And that symmetry can be a bit bland, like a beige rug in a beige room. But then things get a lot more interesting. On the 9th, Mercury crosses into Libra where it resides for the bulk of the month, until finally entering Scorpio on the 29th. Two days after Mercury slips into Libra, Venus leaves it, crossing the border into the classic sign of its “detriment,” Scorpio, where it remains until the end of the first week of October.
It is this period from September 11th onward, with Venus in Scorpio and Mercury in Libra, that I'm interested in. Harnessed in an evolutionary way, this planetary combination can trigger conscious deepening, support both truth-telling and truth-hearing, and foster the resolution of tough, longstanding intimate conflicts. Experienced unconsciously, it can read like the script of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. People can tear each other apart in the name of love, in other words.
Venus enters Cancer on the 7th of August and remains there until September 6th. In a way, that is no big deal. Venus moves fast and has already passed through every sign of the zodiac many times in your life. But to a great extent our journeys are actually composed of a lot of “no big deal” events all strung together. Let’s put this one under the evolutionary microscope and see what potentials it affords us for opening our hearts.
