Astrology for Sunday, 13 October 2019:

Today is the Full Moon in Aries, and this is not a simple lunation. Early in the day, the Moon moves through a square to Saturn in Capricorn. Fear, pressure, or scarcity may intrude into the final degrees of the Moon’s gibbous phase. Something is coming to fruition and visibility, but we may have to push through a rigid sense of limitation and regulation in order to experience the fullness of what is coming. Jupiter casts a sextile ray back to the Sun in Libra, a blessing of abundance for this Full Moon. In fairly rapid succession, the Moon receives a superior trine from Jupiter and moves into opposition to the Sun, just as both the Sun and the Moon move into squares to Pluto in Capricorn. Detailed geometry aside, this is a Full Moon in supportive aspects to Jupiter and challenging aspects to Pluto.
 
Aries is the cardinal fire sign. It is combustible, initiatory, impulsive and brave. Aries puts us in touch with our passions and drives, and pushes us to take action. With the Moon in Aries, our systems may feel amped up with the need to do something, anything. Receiving a supportive trine from Jupiter in Sagittarius, this could be the conditions for grand gestures, making moves in pursuit of big ideas, blazing beyond familiar territory in courageous pursuit of adventure and freedom. However, with the Sun and Moon in a T-square to Pluto in Capricorn, do not be surprised if the under-worldly challenges your way. Pluto demands transformation, particularly of those parts of our lives that we repress, the destructive and traumatic experiences that we push into the shadows and beneath the ground. The Moon, Sun, and Pluto are all in cardinal signs, and Jupiter is in its domicile in mutable Sagittarius. This is the time for something new, but it requires addressing our own darkness. The fires of Aries and Sagittarius stoke our longing for freedom, but Pluto would seem to remind us what Angela Davis has written: “Freedom is a constant struggle”—a teaching from a freedom song that was “repeatedly sung in the southern United States during the twentieth-century freedom movement.” I take from these teachings that struggle—against systems of oppression, repression, domination, and exploitation, struggle against systems that afford us privilege at the cost of others’ suffering, struggle against violence, struggle against shame—struggle itself is perhaps the experience of freedom. Freedom is not the unhindered, uninhibited autonomy to do whatever we please; if we are not in struggle, it is very likely that we are intentionally or unintentionally complicit within systems of oppression that require our compliance, and in feeling no resistance as we live our lives in line with such systems, we imagine this absence of struggle to be freedom. But as Fannie Lou Hamer said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” and any look around our world with open eyes will see the we are not all free.
 
So today, as this fiery Aries Full Moon reaches its climax, as Jupiter gives us immense support to charge after expansive adventures, let these squares from Pluto remind us that freedom is a constant struggle—with the systems outside and inside ourselves that are built on suffering. What must you struggle against in order to be free? If you feel free, in what ways are your freedoms dependent on the oppressions of others? These are questions we must ask, because this Full Moon reminds us that in order to be free, we must face and transform those buried shadows that we would rather repress and ignore.

If you would like a critical resource for this Full Moon, I offer this meditation from the archives of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black Feminist Breathing Chorus: https://blackfeministbreathing.tumblr.com/post/130611578365/blackfeministbreathing-today-october-6th-is