The Current Quality of Time

We're in what could be described as a pivotal moment and while I am taking a break from posting regular weekly updates, I do want to try and put some words around it for anyone who finds themselves on my page in the next few weeks.

I am writing this as Mercury, our God of words and communication, is opposite Uranus, God of awakenings and surprises. Mercury is walking backwards and tomorrow They will be entering the heart of The Sun as the New Moon rises. This is a rare and striking signature that will flavour the Moon's next cycle and our experiences as we head towards Christmas and into the winter solstice. It's a momentous time, and one we can embrace given the right perspective.

One of the most helpful things about astrology, in my humble opinion, is the gift of distance that it allows us when we have an understanding of what's going on in the skies above and how that mirrors what we're experiencing here on Earth. It assures us that there's meaning and purpose in what we're experiencing and reminds us, through the idea that all that is happening is planned or fated in some way, that on some level we have chosen these experiences because we want to learn and grow through them. Life is happening for us, rather than to us.

And perhaps more than this: there's a part of you that knows you chose to be here, now, in this particular story. As within, so without. As above, so below. We are walking through experiences we've called in because they lead us somewhere we need to go. Towards some version of ourselves we're meant to become.

I hold the fundamental belief that we live in a benevolent universe. That we're moving, always, towards a self that can feel joy in all moments and be in love with all moments, regardless of whether those moments wear the traditional costume of 'good' or 'bad'. The Stoics knew this. Christ taught it. Buddha sat beneath a tree until he understood it. Every spiritual teacher who has been, and will come, points towards this same truth: that we need the whole rainbow of life. The rain and the sunshine. The breaking and the mending. You cannot know one without the other, and all of it is necessary.

So let's look at what the sky is asking of us now. Let's see what story is being written in the stars, so we might recognise it when it appears in our lives.

This New Moon rises in Scorpio, the sign where we descend into what cannot be seen. Scorpio has a reputation for darkness, and rightly so, but we need the dark to know the light. We need the forge to become the blade. Think of the phoenix, burnt to ash, rising transformed. Challenge isn't punishment; it's the fire that makes us.

And this Moon falls in the final degrees of the sign, which tells us something is ending even as something begins. The final degrees are a threshold, a last breath before the new. With Uranus opposite, that ending, or beginning, may arrive suddenly. Uranus doesn't knock politely. He kicks the door open and floods the room with light you didn't know you needed.

Mercury is in the mix too, walking backwards, soon to enter the heart of The Sun. This is the signature of a mind being changed. Permanently. Not through argument or persuasion, but through knowing. In my encounters with Uranus, there's always a quality of authenticity. Of freedom. Of liberation that feels like coming home to yourself. A truth may come to light in this moment, something that unlocks a part of you that has, until now, been hidden. And that truth may liberate you. It may allow you to step more broadly, more honestly, into who you are and why you're here.

And perhaps we're not walking through this alone. Neptune in Pisces forms a trine to this Moon and a sextile to Uranus, a gentle, flowing connection that whispers of something larger holding us. Neptune is where we dissolve into the all, where the boundaries between self and universe blur and we remember we were never separate to begin with.

In Pisces, Neptune asks: what if there's a divine hand here, guiding us towards this liberation?  What if the truth that arrives - sudden, Uranian, undeniable - is being offered to us with love? What if we're being elevated, not broken? Refined, not punished?

The trine from Neptune softens Scorpio's intensity. It reminds us that even in the dark, even in the ending, we are held. The sextile to Uranus suggests that the awakening, the shock of new sight, comes wrapped in grace. That we can trust what's being revealed because it serves our becoming.

This is the gift of this moment. That we might see clearly. That we might be freed. And that we might know, deeply, that we are loved through it all.