The extra dose of struggle

Mercury's still retrograde. Venus is not (haircuts for everyone!). Mars is not, and it's just about the only planetary body that's moving normally right now, aside from the sun and moon. I do love the thought of the moon going retrograde, because that would created a heretofore unseen level of bonkers in the world if the thing that rules our emotions and subconscious experiences went haywire. That's a fun thought experiment for some of you who are more well-versed in astrology lingo: what if the moon went retrograde? What would that look like? Chaos, obviously, but what kind?

Anyway, the sky is not terribly interesting (still), so unless something is stationing near important stuff in your chart, there's not much to report.

A friend of mine said to me yesterday that it seems like a lot of people seem to have an "extra dose of struggle" recently, and this is such a good way of thinking about it that I wanted to share with you. For most of us, there really isn't much happening, sky-wise, but if you're one of the people with something major in line with a stationing planet, which I already talked about, you may have an extra dose of struggle. There was one extra dose that I could not believe, because the stationing planet setting things off was Venus and the aspect was a trine. Trines are easy, friendly aspects, as though your neighbor is having a barbecue and invites you over, so dinner's suddenly accounted for and you have social plans with someone you like. Venus tends to bring about nice, albeit brief, social occasions. However, if what Venus is trining is in poor condition natally, all that energy does is exacerbate what's already there.

For example: my moon is in piss-poor condition. It gets aspects from Neptune, Pluto, Saturn, the south node, and the midheaven (and it's in Capricorn). A warm and fuzzy moon, it is not. Like, if we were trading at the elementary school lunch table, no one would want mine, because it's a moldy bologna sandwich vs. everyone else's lunchable. Every time I see Jupiter headed for a major aspect with my moon I start rubbing my hands together, getting all excited, because every transit definition of Jupiter to moon is all about the nice things that will happen to you, and every time Jupiter actually makes that aspect, someone has an epic crisis or dumps some responsibility on me or something similarly unpleasant happens. All Jupiter did was make the bad energy bigger, temporarily. We all have a not-great situation somewhere in our chart, which you can liken to a pile of rocks rather than a fabulous mansion, so even good energy just adds more rocks to the pile, rather than Glenda the Good Witch appearing and taking the pile away. I always naively hope something else will happen, and then am reminded that oh, right: my moon sucks.

So, the aforementioned Venusian crisis: Venus is in exact trine to the 12th house ruler in that situation, and the 12th house portends situations outside your conscious control. Trines are fast, so something happened very quickly and it's out of conscious control, and probably also seemingly out of nowhere. So, rather than your neighbor inviting you over for dinner, some random person throws a chunk of brick at your head for no reason. But, Venus, really? I would have read this transit as beneficial (if I was looking at it in isolation, which is a reminder to never consider one transit by itself), and I would have been dead wrong. Also, this person has a bunch out major outer planet transits, so Venus was just the fuse on a time bomb, unfortunately.

Mars went over my descendant the other day, which is one of the 4 angles we care about in charts, and the descendant is the angle the opposes the ascendant, or "you." In this case, I mean "me," actually. When this happens, you can expect to be opposed by Mars things, which usually means men, but also means aggression in various forms. I was driving home from work, and in front of me was a Toyota SUV going comically below the speed limit (they were probably lost), and behind it was a minivan being a total asshole, both tailgating and swerving back and forth behind the SUV like a Formula 1 car before a race. Seriously: an aggressively swerving minivan. Then I remembered what Mars was doing relative to my chart and decided I wanted no part in any of that, so I drove comically slowly behind that duo. Also, yesterday I got yelled at (by a man, of course, because Mars) for something that was a cable company's fault (guess which one! your first guess is probably correct!) and I was sorely tempted to tell him off, but I remembered once again that Mars was in play, so harshness would have earned me more yelling, and found a way to end the conversation as quickly and professionally as possible. While Saturn transits and Mars transits will both bring you assholes (expeditiously!), Saturnian assholes (sometimes) actually make good points, while Mars assholes do no such thing. So if you were asking yourself why I was being yelled at for things I had nothing to do with (which I wonder to myself a lot, honestly), that's the answer. Mars doesn't need a good reason. Mars tends to be an idiot.