This is a transitional week in a transitional year. Against a backdrop of slower-moving changes, as this week draws to a close, the Moon (now in earthy Virgo since late yesterday) and Mercury (now in earthy Taurus since April 14) will transition from earth to air signs.

The Moon will leave its air sign, Libra, after only a little more than two days. Mercury, however, will enter Gemini for about two months just three short seconds before 10pm EDT Thursday (01:59:57 UTC Friday).

Two months? After just more than two weeks in Taurus? Yup, must be getting close to Mercury retrograde time again, but time enough for all that later. It would not be advisable to get all hung up on Mercury retrograde details now. It would keep you from getting off the mental ground you are on now.

Planet Waves will be here in a timely manner to guide you through Mercury’s retrograde with the Spring Report readings and other services. For this week, let transition be your focus.

To gracefully begin Mercury’s transition (initially in concert with the Moon) from a short run in Taurus to a long winding flight through Gemini, it would be appropriate to use your imagination. That’s because one of the ways versatile Mercury manifests in your life is through mental activities in general, and your own thinking specifically. The Moon’s own association with dreams makes an imaginative touch appropriate, at least enough to get you off the ground and into the weekend.

In this case, a useful mental construct would be to tell yourself that Mercury’s transition from Taurus to Gemini will be “just like flying a bicycle.” That way you combine a familiar and reassuring old saying (“just like riding a bicycle”) with what is still a relatively new activity for human beings, one that requires conscious awareness: flying.

Gemini is one of the two signs Mercury rules, along with Virgo. In other words, for Mercury, entering Gemini is like going home. Hence, you can safely anticipate Mercury’s ingress to Gemini on Thursday will be the mental equivalent of getting back on a bicycle after a long period of not having pedaled on two wheels. Your mind will likely adjust quickly and comfortably to the change. 

Yet, it’s inevitable that you will not be able to take this particular traversal of Gemini by Mercury unconsciously. Depending on how sensitive you are, you may have to shift from intuitive bicycle rider mode to being an attentive and intentional mental pilot as early as the first week of May.

That’s because Mercury’s apparent motion will begin to slow down rapidly once it enters Gemini, which is not a natural state for what appears to us as the fastest planet. Much like an airplane, greater speed provides what you could call greater lift for Mercury’s metaphorical wings. By the same token, slower speed implicitly brings up the possibility of stalling, even crashing.

In an actual airplane, a consciously aware pilot can often employ a counter-intuitive strategy to prevent a crash in the event an unexpected stall — by going into a dive to increase air speed and restore lift under the wings. Sometime before Mercury emerges from Gemini to enter Cancer, you might have to be something akin to a skilled pilot as regards to mental activities in general — and your own thinking, specifically.

For this week, however, it will be enough to know what you are getting into while accomplishing a smooth transition. It will mean relaxing and allowing your natural, unconscious mental reflexes to come back. It will also mean being prepared to calmly and confidently employ less intuitive and more intentional strategies if and when they are called for.

One other possible strategy to investigate now is getting yourself a co-pilot for the next couple of months. It’s an idea that fits with Gemini’s iconic representation as a set of twins. It’s also a practical concept that suits any ongoing endeavor that involves transitioning from one lifestyle or state of being to another.

So, relax and trust your instincts while also being aware and (ideally) arranging for a buddy this week. If you can do that, just that, you will be able to more easily transition into a near future timeframe — one astrology indicates will be just like flying a bicycle.

Offered In Service

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

By Sarah Taylor

So, here you are, standing on top of a derelict, bombed-out building: the Five of Swords; Defeat. You — looking at a distant star on the horizon. Or maybe you are that distant star on the horizon, a soft glow of light surrounding you. You have survived. You are very much alive. You are following a light. Your own inner light.

Nine of Cups, Five of Swords, Knight of Disks from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Can you hold that light to you when it looks like everything around you has been torn down, the girders exposed, bent, the walls of your experience bearing the cracks and holes of an attack that has passed, leaving you seemingly alone? But there is that light. There, are you.

Where have you come from? Ah, that’s such a different scene. Somewhere, in your past, or in the recesses of your heart, is a vision that lies so much in contrast with where you are that it may be hard to reconcile them.

The Nine of Cups is also known as “the wish card.” Take a look at it; it might be easier to grasp it, not through your mind, but through how your body and heart respond to it. There are beauty, softness, sensuality and flow. There is inspiration; there is delicacy. In it, there is a kind of heart-sung grace. The words on the card reflect this:

“Happiness,” “Deep Joy,” “Overflowing Love,” “Blessing,” “Rapture.”

The Nine of Cups is a prayer answered and reflected back. It is the light in the Five of Swords — that kernel of truth that you carry with you over the wasteland. It offers a gentle vortex into which you have the choice to let go in order to move you through your immediate circumstances and out into ones that are different.

The Nine of Cups, being of the heart as it is, has a quality to it that is not always easy to grasp and to hold to yourself. It is there; but if you try too hard to ‘make it behave’ or bend to your will, it is apt to slip through your fingers like a rainbow. How do you hold on to a rainbow?

The answer lies in the destruction under your feet. It feels paradoxical. A construct — no, a fortification devoid of that Cups energy — needed to be brought down so that you could be reunited with that grace in the Nine of Cups. A dose of reality brings it in closer. There is another way to hold that rainbow. You can’t trap it in steel and concrete — which has been your mind’s way of negotiating with the heart. You hold it by becoming it.

You are the Nine of Cups. You are Happiness.

“Everything you were looking for was right with you all along.”

Maybe you, too, had to travel to some distant, inner land to find your heart and your courage — to find the right use of mind — in order to face down what told you that you were anything but, and to come back to yourself.

What emerges from your travels is the card that you are now able to move towards: the Knight of Disks (the King of Pentacles). As the individuated adult in the suit of Earth, the Knight has made the journey through the Five of Swords in order to reunite himself with what once felt ethereal and dreamlike, which slipped through his fingers.

The Knight has grounded the Nine of Cups, and now lives it out in physical reality. Look at the Nine and the Knight as if they were side-by-side. Do you notice the correspondences? The upward-and-outward movement of the heart-and-cups infused panel at the top of the Nine and the key, coins, notes and stamps that sit over the gold circlet on the Knight’s forehead. The feathered striations that radiate down on the Nine, and the Knight’s own beard. And finally, the spiral just above centre on the Nine where the Knight’s face now appears — and that same spiral — now tangible — that seems to emanate from him.

The Knight is holding the paradox by embodying what was unable to be embodied — the supposed fantasy of the Nine. From fantasy to reality. From Oz to Kansas. He has returned from the fray a different person. He is more than he was before, because he now knows.

“I know,” he seems to say to you. “I know what it is to search for what reveals itself in the rainbow — the promise of what I knew I felt, but which eluded me and nearly abandoned me at the time where everything seemed to crumble beneath me. It, and I, are one.”

Time to tap your heels together and come home. That thing you were searching for? You are it.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Nine of Cups (Jupiter in Pisces), Five of Swords (Venus in Aquarius), Knight of Disks (the Fiery aspect of Earth)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Amanda Moreno

I’ve had a fascination with the idea of ‘soul mates’ for a very long time. The idea of that one, fated, true love who would finally complete me was implanted early on, most likely first through 80’s bubble gum pop, and then solidified through my encounters with the musicals The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

To say that our culture romanticizes the idea of soul mates is an understatement. I suppose there is nothing wrong, at least at some levels, with searching for The One — to each their own.

But the ways in which it has been romanticized in that you-complete-me-I-will-die-without-you kind of way is insidious and destructive, especially because it is one model of relating being put forth as the ideal for everyone. It also encourages us to locate self worth in external sources rather than from within. The level of codependency that results from obtaining self-worth from without is problematic.

But it sounds so good, right?! The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and co-suicide; or the image of an old couple who die one right after the other, of a broken heart, or because they’re so linked that one could not exist without the other.

I remember reading Wuthering Heights when I was 17. I only read the first half and declared it my favorite book of all time. How could I not, with passages such as this: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” And:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

My teenage self (and my 4th house Scorpio Moon and 8th house Venus in Pisces) didn’t stand a chance — I knew that I wanted that kind of fated connection. I wanted to find my other half. I wanted to lose myself in someone and to have some torrid, long-term, angsty, passionate love affair with my soul mate. There is such incredible poetry in that kind of connection, and maybe even sometimes longevity and stability. Unfortunately, the stories I was drawn to also often carried the theme of unrequited love and triangulation, with which I identified in the role of the mistress/other.

Somewhere in my twenties, it all began to shift — very, very slowly. Cultural conditioning, particularly around relationship norms, runs so deep. I started to recognize the face of my soul mate in more than one person, and increasingly in myself. I started to open to the notion that perhaps we have more than one ‘soul mate,’ and that we’ve been traveling with many souls over many lifetimes, working out all kinds of different things.

I realized that nurturing those connections and remaining open to them was a higher priority for me than choosing one person to be with for life before I’ve even met the rest. Learning through relationship is part of my spiritual path, and I began to shun what I’d been told they’re supposed to look like. I started to realize I could really only decide on the qualities of relationship that are important to me rather than the concrete ways the relationships might look.

This all blended nicely with my introduction to non-monogamy, which I saw as a way to honor connections that came into my life in whatever way they need to show up. When I feel that zap of erotic recognition with someone, which happens fairly rarely, I want to be able to explore what’s there.

I’ve also come to recognize that that zap doesn’t necessarily indicate long-term, passionate intimacy. It jolts me in order to help me recognize someone with whom I have some kind of contract; I have to remain open to the fact that I don’t know what that contract is or how long it will take for that contract to be fulfilled or worked out — a week, months, years. Nor do I know if we’ll both be in a place in our lives to commit to the work, therefore leaving it to another time. Remaining open to these mysteries while being authentically in touch with my needs has proven to be a very tricky endeavor.

In his Pluto books, Jeff Green talks about different kinds of bonds: Karma Mates, Soul Mates, Same Soul, and Twin Souls. Lo and behold, I recognized a whole lot of karma-matey relationships, which Green characterizes as “two people who have had past-life connections and experiences that are not finished or resolved.” With this category, it’s important to remember that karma is not necessarily a negative thing.

Contrast that with Soul Mates, which in Green’s framework are “two people who have independently acted on their desires to embrace a spiritual or transcendent reality, and the real purpose of the union with one another is to continue their individual spiritual development because of and through the relationship.” Now that sounds lovely. And requires a high level of discernment.

As my understanding of soul mates and relationship evolves, I’m coming to understand just how deeply my conditioning runs. It can be so difficult not to romanticize tumultuous, passionate encounters. It is also pretty horrendously difficult to confront the ways that I believe ownership and possession are part of a healthy bond — more facets of relationships that have been romanticized as natural and healthy.

Something I’ve also realized, however, is that sometimes passion in that carnal, I-want-to-throw-you-up-against-a-wall, can’t-stop-fucking kind of way is actually a way of avoiding intimacy. Sometimes passion comes from developing a container with another person over time, creating space for vulnerability to unfold. Erotic energy is not simply a sexual energy, it is the energy of community-building and friendship as well. It is the container that occurs between therapist and client or teacher and student that allows transformation to happen.

Someone once told me that my genius lies in understanding the complexities of the human heart. It seemed like a nice slogan to refer back to, even as I flounder and blunder my way through figuring out how to relate to others within a paradigm that tells me there are only one or two ‘true’ ways. I come back to a belief in soul mates again and again, even if it looks different from how it did before. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is rationalization and self-delusion and what are honest goals being sought after with integrity.

As always, the temptation to look at it dualistically in terms of right and wrong looms, and holding the tension of all the paradox, contradiction and not knowing can be difficult — although usually pretty inspiring, at least when it’s going well. My hope is that as more people start engaging alternative notions of soul mate and relationships, we will start to develop models based on quality and morality, no matter how relative, which are based in a quest for authentic truth and reverence for the different forms of connection. Even if it takes a very, very long time.