Cycles and beginnings
At this time of year, new cycles seem to come one after another. A new calendar year, a new solar cycle, a new personal solar cycle for me as an Aquarius Sun. Last week was Imbolc, the festival of new beginnings and the returning light.
But almost all creations begin in the dark. In the womb. In all the creation myths, something comes into being in the darkness of chaos, a seed of order, of life taking the first steps towards organising itself into existence. Do we mark a beginning at Samhain, when the old year ends and we retreat into the darkness? Do we mark it at Winter Solstice when the Sun is reborn? Or at Imbolc, when the first flowers are stirring and the greening of the land is beginning? For me, all of those are new year festivals. Because however we mark our new beginnings, they are not literal, or clear cut, or simple. They are tangled up in our endings, hovering at the tipping point in the spiral where one turn ends and the next begins to twist away from us, full of potential.
In astrology, the Ascendant shows beginnings. It can be our literal beginnings - my Cancer rising daughter was born in a birthing pool of gloriously warm water and my Sagittarius rising son arrived so quickly, the midwives almost didn’t make it. And that literal beginning can set the pattern for all of our beginnings - do we hesitate at the threshold, do we leap in like the Fool in the tarot? With Aquarius on the Ascendant, I am ruled by both cautious Saturn and lightning quick Uranus. I resist and I also leap, occasionally at the same time.
This year, this new solar cycle, feels a little different. There’s a sense of a deeper shift at work, as we gear up for some big astrological shifts in the next few years. Saturn into Pisces and Pluto into Aquarius carry such potential…. clients tell me they feel it too, this sense of being on the cusp of something, something we can’t see yet but are preparing for anyway. Most of the readings I’ve done so far this calendar year have been for folk asking about new enterprises, new phases in their lives. Not just the annual round but an urge to go deeper, to honour their true self, to do what is most meaningful to them. A sense that now’s the time. Or perhaps that it doesn’t matter whether now’s the time or not, just get on with it. No more procrastinating. There’s an urgency in the air, a deepening awareness of just how much needs to change, and how deeply.