Full Moon in Libra; holding the tension of opposites
Relationship is a charged word. A word imbued with implications that we don’t often consider. We most often use it in terms of romance or a significant other, but the truth is we are in a relationship with everything, including ourselves.
Tomorrow, Saturday, April 12, a Full Moon in Libra reaches its peak and 40 minutes later, Venus, Goddess of Love and Relationships, who rules the sign Libra, stations and moves into direct motion. `
Libra is a sign concerned with how we relate. It is the sign of I and thou. Libra is often spoken of in terms of balance (it is represented by the scales, after all), but at its core, it is about relationship, about the opposition, about the exchange of energy between opposites that creates the world.
Yet, everything springs forth from us, represented by Libra’s polarity Aries (where the Sun is during this lunation), the sign whose keyword is I am. Like Aries, the starting point of the zodiac, we cannot help but view everything subjectively through our own eyes. All of our relationships begin in our interior world, springing from the place we stand as we gaze at the world outside of us.
We are the starting point of our relationship to everything. Which, if you have done any spiritual study isn’t ground-breaking news. Yet, in our day-to-day life, we most often make it about someone or something outside of us.
As David Whyte so wisely puts it: “Relationship is the guardian figure standing by the doorway of the temple of what we actually want.”
We are all so intrigued by thresholds, seemingly doorways into another world. But perhaps the most powerful portal of all is our own consciousness. Our perception of “reality” determines our relationship to everything.
As I am writing the image that keeps springing into my mind is Dorothy in The Wizard of OZ at the end of her journey with her companions, each seeking what they most desire. The Scarecrow receives a brain, the Tinman a heart, the Lion a badge of courage, and Dorothy is left standing there, the Wizard can’t help her. It is at this point Glinda appears.
Dorothy: Oh will you help me? Can you help me?
Glinda: You don't need to be helped any longer. You've always had the power to go
back to Kansas.
Dorothy: I have?
The Scarecrow: Then why didn't you tell her before?
Glinda: Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.
The Tin Man: What have you learned, Dorothy?
Dorothy: Well, I, I think that it, that it wasn't enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and
Auntie Em. And it's that if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any
further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin
with. Is that right?
Glinda: That's all it is.
This tension of opposites, the world within us and the world as it appears outside of us, is heightened during this Full Moon. Which also happens to be conjunct (aligned with) Chiron, the wounded healer. Chiron was wounded in his thigh when he was accidentally stuck by an arrow covered in Hydra blood. Because he was half divine, the poison didn’t kill him, and so he suffered with the wound. But the wound that could not heal was caused by a poison of his own making. A poison he had given Hercules to help him in his labors.
Isn’t that where we most often get stuck in our relationship to life? Metaphorically, we are wounded by a poison (what we believe to be true about ourselves and the world) of our own making. This is not to make light of any wounds that we are carrying. All of us have been through things, yet resilience and freedom lie in shifting the relationship we have with those events.
This Full Moon offers an invitation to explore this within ourselves and to set it free.
“You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.”
― David Whyte
