nature's zodiac

This Aries season has brought to me a new awareness of the powers of refreshment. If Aries represents the freshness of spring, its opposite, Libra, the one who relates, keeps this freshness coming back in the form of refreshment.

We all know freshness, we just need a reminder. We are fresh alongside the freshness of an instant, we just tend to forget this. So we need a return or a revamp, a rev and a redo of freshness.

Freshness is observed and embodied. Embodied, it is that kundalini current, the secret life, the animism of nature, the phenomenon of regeneration that we observe each spring. Embodied, it is the symphonic swirl of roots beneath the earth. Observed, it is the yellow of a daffodil that reminds someone of the sun, or their grandma, or love and lightness.

Did you hear the re? Reminds? Even in this simple example, the yellowness of a flower has its animism, its rev, re-purposed in poetry and nuance. A different kind of tendril reaches back to the past and forth to the future as well as deep into the bounty of the present.

To ‘re’ something, to bring it back, this is part of Venus in Libra’s power. As the seventh sign she stands right at the edge of a topology of process. She is the culmination of it right before it begins anew (in Scorpio). And in this culmination, she reflects, like a mirror does, not in accuracy but in far fuller, wider, deeper ‘truth’. You could call it accuracy but it wouldn’t be true. Because in its truth it reveals more not equal to what stands before it; more truth, more nuance, more beauty. It is a magic mirror. It reflects the whole world as a drop of rain seems to do when looked at so closely.

Venus has been retrograde, going back, re-ifying it’s re-ness, its rev. And now it will go direct, back in Aries in a few days for a second spring to our psyches. Maybe the cold snap will finally recede and more flowers will rise like rehearsed and ready ballerinas.

It’s almost like spring started this year with a decided anthem of ‘let’s move ahead’ only to be followed by Neptune joining in (with its big ingress into Aries) and saying, ‘let’s try that again, everyone go home and dream for a bit and meet back here in a couple weeks’.

Nothing gives spring a better step than refreshment. that natural ahhh feeling. Refreshment is the opposite of exhaustion. Art aims to refresh. So does the person who engages with intention. The artist who paints is not just aiming for a final product that refreshes, ideally the artist is also refreshed in the process of painting. And this refreshment goes into it, easily seen with paintings like those of Van Gogh.

There will have to be more words for refreshment. Why not just call it life? Why not call it more life? Why not call it an appetite for more life and keep the ‘re’ in circuit? Carry back out and in. Each time the fire can grow, like a welcoming hearth to more and more hearts on this large earth.

It is a Libra Full Moon today, with Venus moving direct in Pisces. Where have you been finding refreshment lately? How can you cultivate this farther and blow gently on those poetic embers that live deep within you?