By Amanda Painter

This morning is the Aries New Moon at 7:24 am EDT (11:24 UTC). As the first New Moon after last month’s eclipses, it marks a threshold into a new phase or beginning. But a beginning of what?

Wheat-paste mural of children painting a building in downtown Dewey, Isla de Culebra, Puerto Rico. Photo by Amanda Painter.

On a personal level, only you can say what kind of initiative you’re feeling called to enact — perhaps an exploration, reinvention or expression of identity; maybe a tangible project (artistic, domestic, political, work-related or other).

It could be some other kind of step you feel compelled to take in your life. Chances are it won’t take much thought for you to identify something, and you might already be making it happen. Whatever it is, it’s likely something only you can get going, at least in the way that you imagine or desire it.

Yet our current astrology is also emphasizing global-scale, collective or generational activity — despite the fact that Aries, the sign of ‘I am’, is the locus of the heat we’re feeling. You see, this morning as the Sun and Moon conjoin in Aries (the New Moon), they’re square Pluto in Capricorn (the push to change). At the same time, the Sun and Moon are nearly conjunct Uranus and Eris in Aries (two revolutionary, unpredictable planets).

That is, the Sun and Moon — which represent your consciousness/ego and unconscious/emotions, respectively — are drawing the larger-scale, social vibrations of Pluto, Uranus and Eris into your personal awareness. The process will continue through early next week, as the Sun exactly conjoins Uranus Saturday (5:27 pm EDT / 21:27 UTC) and Eris Tuesday (6:41 am EDT / 10:41 UTC).

The separating-but-still-effective Uranus-Pluto square defines this era of institutional upheaval and social evolution that we’ve been engaged with since around 2010 or so. (Think Occupy movement, Arab Spring revolutions, activist organizing around global warming, and so on.)

The conjunction between Uranus and Eris, exact in June, is something the world has not seen since the mid-1920s. We can take clues from that period, but a lot has changed since; most notably, the complete reconfiguration of communication and entertainment technology, and the ways that our lives (and very sense of self) have become enmeshed with it. Uranus seems to represent that process. Eric has described Eris in Aries as our collective post-modern identity crisis and ways of individuating.

The Sun and Moon today are bridging the gap between Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Eris. One way to get a handle on that is to stop and look at what is going on in the world. These aspects are ‘signs of the times’ in astrology; as such, global news events can clue us in to what is shaking loose, what is coalescing, and where each of us stands in relation to it all.

A quick survey of recent news includes:

— Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz staging upsets in the Wisconsin primary, in a race that has brought into glaring relief the polarization of the American public, and the desperate desire to belong to some movement for radical change;

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— The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously standing behind the one person / one vote principle in a recent ruling that rebuffed redistricting efforts that would have discounted unregistered or ineligible voters;

— The leak of the Panama Papers revealed at least 200 U.S. citizens who used the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca to hide assets and evade taxes; Iceland’s Prime Minister just resigned due to his own hidden offshore investments being exposed by the leak;

— California and New York passing $15 minimum wage laws;

— San Francisco passing a paid six-week parental leave policy that also applies to same-sex and adoptive parents;

— Thousands protesting in Poland to defend female reproductive rights in the face of a proposed outright abortion ban;

— Mississippi and North Carolina passing laws that enable discrimination of LGBT citizens;

— The EU’s controversial plan to deport all newly arriving refugees back to Turkey, already being enacted in Greece.

— Puerto Rico’s Senate and House of Representatives authorize the governor to suspend payments on $72 billion in public debt to hedge funds; University of Puerto Rico students lead anti-austerity protests.

There’s plenty more news out there for you to consider as context, both productive and destructive, polarizing and unifying. See if you can watch for trends, and look for how you fit into the story. What can you do?

Hint: you are neither as central to the universe as your Facebook feed might seem to imply, nor as insignificant as your feelings of helplessness in the face of world events might suggest. Somewhere between those two poles is a space where you can do that thing you feel compelled to do. Be it small or large, the Aries planets have your back — so get started.