By Amanda Painter
We’re one week and one day away from the Capricorn solstice. Here in my corner of the Northern Hemisphere, the urge to hunker down and cozy up is strong, despite all the holiday insistence. As my college photography teacher said recently, “This time of year, it’s 3:00 pm all day” — referring to the quality of the light, as the Sun never gets very high in the sky here, and only shines for a short time. It makes the day feel late, not long after it begins.
Mill Pond, Casco, Maine; photo by Amanda Painter.
This year, the fact of finally being on the other side of a year of inner-planet retrogrades seems to be adding to the paradoxical urgency brought by the holidays in this time of slowing down and moving inward. As in, suddenly there are opportunities for forward movement and outward development that seemed to be in hiding much of the year (speaking for myself personally, at least).
Yet, true to the season, many of those opportunities are still in potential. Looking ahead to the months when they might actually culminate — aiming toward the vision, the goal, the horizon — resonates with the tone of Sagittarius, where the Sun is. But so much of that is mental: the Gemini side of that zodiac axis. And there’s only so much one can do in one’s mind before setting events into physical motion must follow, before intention and action must be integrated.
Reflecting a fairly quiet week astrologically, the central aspect heading into the weekend is the first quarter Moon. This is the Sun in late Sagittarius receiving a square from the Moon in late Pisces, exact at 6:49 am EST (11:49:08 UTC) on Saturday.
Squares tend to reflect tension and a need to integrate two sides of something by taking action of some kind. Perhaps fittingly, this particular first quarter Moon involves two of the signs most related to formulating a broad vision of something, and related to the concept of ‘spirituality’.
