A Kick-Ass Aries New Moon
Show of hands: Who’s ready for a fresh start? Yeah, I thought so.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re thinking new job or career, new romance or new energy in the same-old relationship, new home, new hairdo or even just an engrossing new Netflix series to sink your teeth into…
Most of us are ready to move on to something as long as it feels fresh, exciting and motivational. Which is why Sunday night’s new moon in Aries dangles so much promise.
I actually wrote this on the eve before the new moon, after a big storm gathered dark clouds, dimmed the skies and churned up the surf in my “backyard,” the Gulf of Mexico. It felt ominous and exhilarating at the same time—definitely like something was up.
Which it was! Beyond the tornado that made landfall less than half a mile from my home (!), Sunday night’s dark moon, at 10:31pm ET, was kind of a “triple-play” of this incipient energy.
New moons, which occur every 29.531 days, are about release, dissolution and beginning anew. As the first sign of the zodiac, Aries is about breaking ground, blazing trails, taking risks and venturing into often uncharted territory.
And so on April 11, we got the first new moon of this zodiac cycle, in the first sign of the Ram—and it fell smack in the middle of a hockey team of Aries planets: the Sun of course, and also Venus, Eris, Mercury and Chiron.
The Sun and moon met at 22º Aries 25’, which puts them in a close sextile to intrepid Mars (which rules Aries) at 23º Gemini, while Venus was in a tight and tense square to transformational Pluto.
This is definitely a time to be careful what you wish for.
The manifestors among you have been building up energy for a while now—perhaps even the whole last crazy pandemic year. “Potential energy” is one way to describe the dynamism that's been getting conserved and stored up. And eventually, it’s gotta come out, in one form or another.
For some of us, the past 13 months have felt like one endless test of patience while we wait for things to “open up” in the outer world. There’s been anger, sadness and heaps of frustration. Yet for plenty of others, this global gap year has yielded unprecedented results.
People have left dead-end (or soul-crushing) jobs, started businesses, learned languages, mastered instruments, read volumes, written volumes, fallen in love, had babies, consciously uncoupled, produced major works of art, contributed to start-ups, pulled up stakes—or planted them—and got into the best shape of their lives.
What they did wasn’t caused by a virus or even Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto tearing it up in Capricorn. It was the blooming of a seed within them.
Was it their karma? Shrug. But I can tell you this: After reading thousands of charts and listening to the stories that go along with them, I sometimes find karma to be a convenience excuse for not showing up fully.
These are things I hear all the time: “I can’t do x, y or z now because I’m repaying some karmic debt.” Or as an explanation of someone else’s enviable success: “Oh, she’s just reaping good karma.”
Bottom line: We don’t really know what’s our karma, what’s our dharma and what’s our free will born out of desires that come from living in the now. It’s heady stuff, and yet…not really Aries' jam.
As the first fire sign and the first goal-oriented cardinal sign, Aries is about action. Not talking about taking action, not thinking about it or rattling off a list of plausible-sounding reasons not to act but feeling something so deeply in the bones that it simply must happen.
Aries energy is passionate, direct, driven, fearless, competitive and headstrong. When it wants to do something that hasn’t been done before, which is often, it just takes the first step and trusts that the rest will fall into place. (And if it doesn’t, it dusts itself off and tries another tack.)
This potent, piercing Aries new moon—supercharged by those other planets in Aries plus the angle to Mars and Venus’ to Pluto—could start a revolution all by itself. But this is self-directed energy, so rather than try to galvanize your friend or community, how why not set one big intention for yourself?
Aries likes to provoke and challenge, so how about this: Challenge yourself to not only “wish” for something new in your life but to actually accomplish it in… two weeks is a good time frame for smallish goals. A month (until the Taurus new moon on May 11) for middling projects, and for those “holy cow, am I really gonna do this?!” ambitions, give yourself until the corresponding Aries full moon on October 20, which happens to be my birthday.
And here's a birthday present I'd love to receive—from you. Don’t just read this and delete it and go back to Life As It’s Been for the past 13 months. Take this seriously, even if you don’t tell anyone what you're up to. Of course, if you do tell someone, ask them to take this seriously too, and commit to calling in or releasing something major. Then hold each other accountable.
And when it’s done, email me so we can virtually high-five each other across the miles.
