New Moon or Solar Ingress–which matters more?

New Moon or Solar Ingress? It’s a silly question: because why should you have to choose. But it’s an important one. Here at Mooncircles, New Moons tend to get our attention. But it’s the Sun’s transits that actually inspire the changing qualities of every month. As the “hour hand” on the clock of the year, the Sun sets the seasons. It also guides us into auspicious activity, if we listen. Two days after the Aries New Moon this year, the Sun enters Taurus.

What new initiatives did you launch last month while the Sun was in Aries?

Taurus is the time to develop, stabilize, or complete
whatever you began in the last solar month.

It was the opening hour of my natural time workshop. Terri, sitting in the front row, frowned. Like many eager to learn about natural cycles, she took lots of notes and asked urgent questions. She wanted to get it right. But when I asked her to apply the solar cycle to her own life, her enthusiasm evaporated. After a few minutes, she raised her hand.

“What if you didn’t start anything in Aries? What should your project be for Taurus? Have you ruined things if you slept through the initiating month?” I understood. I’ve had those years when I didn’t feel particularly daring or heroic in Aries. Yet there was always something that made the Aries month different from the Pisces one before it and the Taurus one that followed. It was this “different thing” that represented each year’s new seed.

I asked Terri a few questions. Eventually it came out that she’d quit smoking during the weeks the Sun was in Aries. “Wow!” The room broke into applause. Terri blushed, though she was still frowning. “Isn’t that pretty pathetic? I mean where’s the heroism in that?”

Quitting cigarettes or eating less sugar or taking a taxi cab for the first time may not seem like heroic acts. Yet the truth is few of us actually march off to war, climb mountains, or rescue cats from burning buildings during the Aries weeks. We don’t launch life-changing initiatives every year. Yet something in us will leap forward. And that’s what we need to honor:  the hero’s archetype—however it is expressing itself through us.

Often, like Terri, we just don’t see it. That day, she needed convincing. A workshop participant raised her hand, “I’ve heard that quitting cigarettes can be as tough as quitting heroin. Sounds heroic to me!” Another offered, “I still remember the day when I quit. That was twenty years ago.  Isn’t something you remember that long an important initiative?”

Terri brightened at the group’s validation. Still, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do now in Taurus. “Am I just supposed to keep quitting cigarettes during Taurus? That sounds dumb.” Stabilizing our heroic efforts is important and something the Taurus energy can help us to achieve. But rarely do we plan the Sun’s work. We need to enter each of its twelve months with awareness, willing to see what wants to evolve. That way we can keep ourselves moving in the right direction.

Sometimes when the Sun changes signs all you need to do is ask that very question: “What am I supposed to do now?” It’s like a Zen koan, a question that succeeds not so much by answering it, as by having it in mind. The work of one zodiac season always leads naturally to the work of the next. How that happens is each month’s mystery.” Terri looked dubious, but promised to give me a report.

A month later Terri called. She’d been reading in a spiritual book about the destructive power of negative mind states. She recognized herself in that, in particular, her habit of anger. In fact, after she’d quit smoking, her anger seemed even more pronounced. She watched with horror as she snapped at her children and said cruel words to her mate. She urgently wanted to change, but how? “Then it hit me,” she said. “I had successfully quit smoking. If I could give up that habit, couldn’t I do the same with my angry outbursts?” She went to work with determination and had a profound Taurus season. Several months later, she called me again. “I’m so much happier. Things that would have made me angry just slip by me now. I’ve wanted this for years… and I owe it all to that productive Taurus season. Amazing!”

May the awareness of your Taurus season be just as profound and your activity just as productive!

If you’d like to explore the archetypes in even greater depth, if you like to journal and/or muse on the positions of the Sun and Moon, you may enjoy my enrolling in my Moon workshop (by snail-mail or email). It’s designed to deepen your relationship with the guardians of natural time, the Sun, the Moon, the zodiac… and you!