The Full Moon In Libra Will Offer A Guiding Light This Week

A few days ago, an Aquarian friend of mine wrote something along these lines on Twitter: "Thinking that we are all looking at the same moon as a billionaire right now makes me want to cry." It's an Aquarian feeling, not so much possessiveness of beauty but the inability to comprehend how two lived realities can be so diverse yet somehow still lay claim to the same planetary body. While quarantine and self-isolation might be giving us some multi-pronged lessons in how to be more Aquarian (are you supporting collective revolt? are you disassociating from the human experience?), it's our cardinal air sign, Libra, that offers Earthlings a guiding light this week. On Tuesday night, the April 2020 full moon in Libra reminds us that, whether we are drowning under the waves of capitalist hegemony or riding them in the safe raft of our privilege, it is the same moon with the same light. Justice, apparently, is not the same as parity. Justice reveals itself in its own time.

A sign ruled by Venus, Libra loves beauty and harmony in all things. But, beauty is not a simple idea. More than the old Twilight Zone-reified adage, the one about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, beauty beckons us to witness something for pleasure's sake. Beauty is best exemplified in our natural world, where we can all stand in reverence of spring's returning butterflies and bees. How they adorn the budding rose bushes, how they co-exist with hummingbirds, how they pollinate our parks and wilderness. In the morning, there is the beauty of dove song, and in the evening, the spread of a heron's wings flying over a darkening pond. A time for everything, a complex and self-regulating system, the beauty of the natural world is found in its reliance on ecological balance, interdependence, and resilience. There is a very clear sense of natural law, the understanding that every choice births a range of new possibilities and, likewise, closes a range of doors.

It is harder to understand natural law in our own lives, lives that have been compelled, in one way or another, to forgo what we know of harmony for the sake of human-measured success. Wealth, we know, is not generated in a vacuum. Someone's work is devalued so that someone's work is prized. One life for another. One country for another. While we grapple with our own values, values that Venus is interested in interrogating and assessing, our newsfeeds and timelines fill up with stories of underfunded hospitals and the nurses who are dying. There's word that ventilators headed for Barbados are diverted toward the U.S. Millions out of work with no health insurance and no rent forgiveness. Individual value systems radiate out into national value systems. Everything is untethered from its false narrative. Words like "hero," words like "essential," words like "mercy" begin to shift meaning. Once, a man convinced the lot of us that in the natural world, only the strong survive. In reality, trees form networks of mutual aid, large growths protecting younger ones, a whole web of fungi weaving through the roots and nourishing the soil.

If you're reading this wondering, What does this have to do with me? ask yourself, What about this doesn't have to do with me? Libra, famous for indecisiveness when it comes to a dinner menu, knows that every choice matters. That's why she takes so long to make one. Libra, ruled by Venus and represented by the Tarot card of Justice, knows that, in order to expect integrity from others, we must first interrogate our own integrity. We must sit with the way we are dishonest with ourselves and others, about our intentions, about our own fears. What is sacred to you, dear reader? How do you protect what is sacred to you? How do you nourish it? What is your understanding of justice? In what ways do you gear your energy toward that understanding of justice? In what ways do you betray it? This full moon in Libra, while our lunar influence pulls us toward examining the ways we act in relation to others and our solar influence remains in Aries — the sign of individual action — we are tasked with holding ourselves accountable. Not for the sake of authorities, or clout, not to be loved or admired by others, but to nourish beauty in ourselves.