Your April Horoscope

This Lunar Month we see the New Moon in Aries completing its journey around the zodiac and giving birth to a new set of experiences for the year ahead. Aries represents new beginnings, the energy of spring, sprouts, projects and pioneering impulse that will open the door to new innovative ideas. The Moon is the symbol of our subconscious emotional life, of what makes us feel nourished, protected and safe. This aspect of us is our way of giving and receiving to others and ourselves.

The New Moon sees the Sun and the Moon together, which symbolizes the conscious meeting the subconscious. Therefore it is a time when we can make a point of connecting with ourselves and plant a seed of awareness that will shed light on our emotions and reactions to life’s challenges in the weeks ahead.

In the astrological chart of this month, the Moon and Sun are conjunct to Uranus and Mercury, creating a configuration colored by an extremely idealistic quality. Uranus, which will be in Aries for the next six years, will lift the tone and the level of pressure in all active initiatives. Ground breaking research and innovation are more likely to take place during this time.

The main difference between the Aries Lunation of last year and this year is that a year ago, Jupiter and Venus were in Aries adding their fire together with the Sun Moon, Mercury and Uranus. This year Jupiter and Venus are in Taurus, giving more stability in the pursuit of concrete achievements based on lasting values.

Growing things from seeds requires strength, patience and a determination to succeed, but also an understanding of frailty and vulnerability. In the chart of this spring, Mars is retrograde in Virgo, implying that all action, initiative and impulse will need to be well considered, analyzed and filtered in order to be effective and successful. Try not to underestimate strong conflicts that do not find a suitable outcome.

Mercury retrograde in Aries, conjunct to the New Moon represents the mindset that will be most useful for us in the next weeks: slow down, listen to our inner voice, tune in to ourselves. The need for a structural change in our society is now evident to us all, and it requires a myriad of little careful adjustments if they are to be successful. These adjustments have to take place in our personal lives, with small things on a small scale, which will permeate through everything else.

Saturn in the last degrees of Libra is also moving retrograde and will turn direct only in late June and will not enter in Scorpio before October. Therefore we have time to find a constructive dialogue with what we consider our opposite, with what we fear and see as our outer enemy. Most of these obstacles are within ourselves, barriers we put up to protect our feelings or to avoid confrontation with what we conceive to be our limits.

Aries’ Moon cycle is the ideal period to find the strength and courage to face these fears and discover how by going through it, we will find new sources of strength. Aries represents individual will and choice. We should learn not to relinquish this power by expecting someone else to fight for us. Awareness of the importance to make individual, informed choices in one’s social and political life will help us move in a direction that will give us hope for the future.

We are now facing a very delicate period of transition in our lives and in society as a whole. The origin of the current crisis seems to lie in a way of life that has lost all connection with reality. The financial bubble and the subsequent economic breakdown we currently are experiencing is the result of an inflation of false values, values that are primarily psychological and emotional before they are financial.

We can see this crisis from the point of view of the slow planetary cycle. Neptune, representing the dreams and visions of collective salvation, is now back in its sign Pisces, after a 160-year-long journey around the zodiac. The cosmic clock indicates a time of renewal, a different future for humanity as a whole. The 13 year period that the planet will reside in Pisces is a time we all can use to reconnect with collective values based on more inclusive models of society.

The slow cycle of Pluto is revealing all that is rotten and how we are scraping the bottom of the barrel of our political and economical system, exposing all the dirty games we play with each other’s lives. Pluto is about digging deeply to the very bottom and using the compost to fertilize the soil.

We need to see the interconnection of all human beings. We need to end poverty, famine, wars and discrimination of all kinds. This seems to be a perennial aim—unattainable and an unrealistic hope perhaps—but by aiming for this goal, we give ourselves the opportunity to change and to shed old mistakes. Even if we do not want to get our hands dirty by getting personally involved, we should try to do it and see how we feel then . . . maybe better than what we expected. . .