Yesterday’s annular solar eclipse, layering upon the total lunar eclipse of late May, has sent ripples and stirring winds through the inhalation of Spring.

Mars entered Leo this morning, and with it one might feel the red planet’s emergence from cancerian protection, pulling back the curtain for more comfortable outward flickers across the celestial stage.  Hints of a fiery domain better suited.  There is certainly a touch of robustness and clarity emerging from the post-eclipse haze.

With the Moon visiting her domicile Cancer this morning and enclosed by the benefics, Venus and Jupiter, we have a day well poised for pleasure even amidst the ambiguity of Mercury retrograde, the quicksilver planet largely square to Neptune in Pisces for most of its backwards jaunt.

The astrologer Elodie St. Onge-Aubut reminded in recent weeks that “Mercury and Neptune [engaged in aspect] together is the perfect cocktail for illusory states like when you are dreaming that you are waking up but you are only waking up in your dream.”  Couple this dynamic with ‘eclipse dreams’, and the newfound fiery footing of Mars brings a welcome pierce.

The final Saturn-Uranus square on June 14th will be one more ‘resolving’ of the frictions brought by their earlier 90° dances, perhaps less pronounced in weight.  I recall seeing a surrealist meme captioned by an insight about Uranus in Taurus — that this seven-year transit is about experiencing life as the process, not the product.  The Breaker’s square from Saturn in Aquarius has, among other things, highlighted the dichotomy between material valuation and informational identity in an increasingly digital age.

In ways, these Saturn-Uranus squares further tease the overarching transition from an Age of Earth to the Age of Air commenced by the Great Conjunction of December 2020, from hard materiality and industrialism to digital identity and airborne dissemination — be it of poetry or plague.

Once in 2011, while sleeping next to a partner, I had a dream in which I was flying amidst the clouds, lucidly aware that the fluttering of my wings and dips in my flight path followed the cadence of my sleeping body’s breath.  I awoke and the word ‘prana’ spilled from my lips involuntarily.  Before I ever embraced yoga as a conscious practice, I was delivered this beautiful reminder of the breaths that carry through our great arteries and the arcs of each year.

All cycles share a likeness.  With the rise and fall of a breath, the weight and liberation of decades might be felt.

The inhalation of Spring, commenced by the cardinality of Aries wherein the Sun is exalted, draws fecundity to Earth — marriage of light and soil — with Taurus’ central intake in this vernal segment of the breath.  Here, Taurus’ rulership of the throat does not seem so obscure.  As a single breath cycles, we see in its movements throughout the body an entire cosmic metaphor, a limbic reflection of the macrocosm.

As we reach Gemini and The Twins, the third sign of Spring in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, we experience the end of the inhalation, before Cancer begins the held breath with life in its breast, Leo extending with its chest puffed out.  Gemini is filled up with the final bits of air, all the potentialities, pollens and pollutants from that which surrounds us.

As many an astrologer will illuminate, and as I’ve described in recent weeks, each decan of Gemini builds on the exploration and reconciliation of (dis)harmonic identities within.  As the aforementioned transits decorate Gemini III, the final decan of Spring, we settle the chatter of inner symphonies.  Their tuning is now a preamble to Cancer season’s unfolding in openness, framed by good dignity even as Jupiter will begin his trek back in this aquarian year.

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