Mars Stations Direct

a tall gray pine adorned by blue sky and a flying V of sandhill cranes (zoom in to find …)

Learning from Mars Retrograde (December 6th — February 23rd)

Mars stationed retrograde in Leo back on December 6th, 2024.  At the time of his station, Mars was in Leo, the sign of unabashed Self-expression and participation in Life.  The place of radiant and generous sharing.  Of heart and the center of creation.  Of being on stage, resplendent.

But as a sign related to being on stage and performance, Leo is also a place where you can get used to being moved by what is being mirrored (and not mirrored) back to you by the audience.  A warm smile encourages further movement this way.  A bored face, raised eyebrow, grimace, stoic or worried look prompts movement that way.  We can dance moment-by-moment responding to the subtle cues of our mirrors — what we’re perceiving that our audience needs and wants from us, what they like and dislike about us, what’s catching their attention and connection.  Restoring a felt-experience of our own inherent lovability and shining from that place, involves recognizing when we’ve lost our center and don’t see our true selves reflected in our various mirrors due to the position we’ve unconsciously assumed, shape we’re re-membering or pain we’re clamping down around. 

Setting aside time and space to just be with ourselves is so important for being able to turn our attention inward, bringing presence to deeper (older, wider, beyond our small selves) attractor patterning and breath patterning, and discernment around where plaque tends to build around our ability to improvise and dance with life.  Where we keep turning in order to feel safe, held, made real and solid amidst all the flux and constant change.  What familiar role or archetypal energy we tend to run — or, what familiar “anti-role” we take on, defining ourselves as definitely not that, shaping ourselves in defense against a particular archetypal energy and the voices, perspectives, stories and memories it brings in.

While this process of identification is not inherently bad or good (there is a place for it), there are risks that come with prolonging these identifications past their time and season.  Such risk is reflected by the story of Hercules, a myth that’s associated with the constellation of Leo. As the first of his 12 labors, Hercules was tasked to kill the lion that terrorized the city of Nemea.  Finding his weapons useless against the animal’s hide, Hercules takes the lion down with his bare hands and then places the lion’s skin on himself. He goes forth, wearing it across his back as both a symbol of his strength and using its impenetrability for his own protection. After this labor, we don’t have images of Hercules without this lion skin; Hercules becomes one with his role as a superhero.  Invulnerable, and now encapsulated, the mortal human beneath the lion’s pelt becomes protected from death — but also protected from Life. 

While we might not readily relate to the image of a lion-killing hero, the ways in which this tale plays out in each of our lives are multiple.  There are many, many, many variations of the “superhero” we can step into.  Loosening the image from its connotations with someone strong and able to take down a lion, the word “hero” can just mean part-divine.  In ancient Greek, a hero was a person with some kind of super-human capacities, carrying divine blood and a kind of glow or ideal form promised, as the descendant of an immortal god and a mortal.  

As we strength our capacity for story-hearing and story-tracking as the storytelling creatures we already are, and as stewards of the mythic field we aim to be — it can be relevant and helpful to consider yourself as having a kind of a “heroic” moment when you are adorned (patterned, ordered, organized) by a particular god/dess who is bringing forward their luminosity forward in you, who is giving you the juice of their particular charisma. This may mean being filled up by the compelling energy of the Judge, the Scientist, the Lover, the Mother, the Wild Woman, the Antagonist, the Healer, the Wise One, the Responsible One, the Queen, the Child …

There is a particular kind of “lion’s pelt” that comes with each of these roles that we may struggle with taking off.  This pelt is something we can continue to wear in order to keep invoking that archetypal energy, empowering our believe-ability and impact in that role and also communicating something to others about how they can and cannot relate to us.  How they can or cannot touch us.  This “lion’s pelt” can become like a second-skin.  Forgetting that we’re wearing it, we can then forget to take it off.  We can forget that there is this immediate, nonverbal layer of our communication with an other (be it with a lover, a parent, a child, a friend, an animal, a dream job, a god/dess we pray to), which influences how they are showing up to and being experienced by us. This isn’t the sole influence on them, and this isn’t to deny them of their own agency or responsibility for themselves. But it does point to ways we can shift what’s patterning the relational field and the space-between-us, by shifting something inside ourselves.

But, before we do tug the pelt off ourselves in the name of breaking free of old patterns, it’s essential to remember why it’s there.  It’s important to acknowledge the radical vulnerability that we feel without this second-skin. It may feel so deeply vulnerable and dangerous without this old layer of protection that of course it hasn’t arrived in our imagination as a possibility to take it off and be able to survive. 

And that’s something to respect. 

Hopefully over the last couple months we’ve begun or continued to give ourselves that respect, creating space, offering gentle witnessing and pendulation around the tenderness we each carry.  Because, after a month retrograding in Leo, on January 6th Mars returned to Cancer.  Since this time, we’ve been invited into an intensive living-and-learning-and-remembering about what leads us to keep our lion’s pelt(s) on. (Although in Cancer, the metaphor might slip from lion’s pelt to crab shell — these stories are slippery!) 

What does our inner child want to avoid ever feeling or encountering again, which has led us to keep returning to a familiar role, shape, god? 

What part of ourselves prefers to stay hidden in darkness because any light shed upon them is dangerous in a world made up of untrustworthy, unpredictable others? 

This question around what is worth coming out of our shell for is like a baton being passed from Mars in Cancer to Venus in Aries.  Aries is the spring-time sounds of baby birds chirping out their will to live, crying out to their parents for food, vocalizing their needs and desires despite the risk of alerting their presence to animals who would eat them in a heartbeat. And, while Venus in Aries may begin with this overwhelming sense that bringing her true Self to the table is going to just break and ruin everything! and make her visible to all sorts of risks and critics, this retrograde from Aries back into Pisces is an initiation into knowing that there are not just predators but allies out there that are worth making your voice audible to; that deep beauty emerges from darkness; and that your authenticity won’t ruin everything but yes, you will disrupt the ways we’ve grown culturally accustomed to ~* arranging things *~ and that’s not necessarily a bad thing right? You can forgive yourself for making a mess out of things that weren’t put together in a way that should stay together if we’re going to make space for more life force energy to come into the system.

Venus in Aries trusts her Self and her authentic voice to magnetize the attention of her allies and repel the rest, while accepting this magnetism will be imperfect.  She expects there will still be conflict and pain and, in those inevitable moments, Venus in Aries can remind us of her full nature. 

She is not just the watered down version of the Goddess of Love that we’ve been given, she is the Goddess of War. 

She has the courage to claim her space and let the relational field re-organize around her — because that reorganization creates space for what has been oppressed and marginalized, too.  

That is one of the gifts of planets in their detriment. Venus in Aries is opposite her home sign of Libra. As such, in this place she can subjectively experience exile, resource scarcity and challenge — but also she can help us learn to embody what might not be upheld as culturally appropriate or pleasing, what might not appear balanced to the rational mind, what might not be living “up to” some beauty standard — but what is truly our inner beauty, bravely expressed. She helps us stand up for what’s been marginalized or left out of our conditioned definitions of “being good at” making peace, making love, making money, making ourselves presentable, etc.

Venus in Aries knows that being in a real relationship with an other (again, this may be a romantic partner as much as it could be our bank account, a creative project, a furred or pawed or winged or scaled person, or a god we pray to) is a Risk.  Love will eventually carry us out of the magical season of falling in love and peak ripeness.  Love will eventually take away the external mirror and ask us to re-source our desirability, lovability and worth another way. Love with an other will eventually be subject to aging and the seasons of fall and winter where there will be mis-attunements, mis-communications, great fears and disappointments, regressions, boundary breaks and navigations, experiences of rejection, coldness, scarcity of love … and the possibility and maybe necessity of physical separation.  

Questions like “should we break up?” and “should I keep carrying this heavy thing — or should I put it down?” typically surface during Venus Retrogrades AND in the place of Aries.  It’s the feeling of — if I can’t authentically show up in this relationship, it is high time to leave.  And we are approaching the time of both.  Venus Retrograde will occur in Aries, as we enter Aries season, as Neptune enters Aries, and as Mercury also retrogrades through Aries.  So these questions and feelings around staying or leaving; boundaries and separation; what do we truly want and what fears stand in the way of that; what is worth our boldest, bravest, fullest, all-in efforts and where will these efforts make the biggest impact, are now extra loud and foregrounded.  So if that’s where you’re at now … it makes sense.

That’s where we’re at.

But, as we enter this season of shedding lion’s pelts, crab shells and Venusian adornments, as we descend into the underworld naked with a fatal vocation to witness, I want to acknowledge that this time for you may be happening within a container of soul commitment where “breaking up” is not really on the table and it’s not what you, in your heart of hearts, truly want … even if, yes, there does still exist this impulse to cut the tie and leave.  

But also, it might be exactly what’s necessary and what you want.

So what’s right for you?

Do you stay, or do you leave?

Honestly I think it’s generally the hubris of the astrologer to predict whether or not it is indeed time for you to break up with an external other (again … be it with a career goal or a creative project or a lover). Rather, what I think astrologers can offer, is helping you to keep your eye trained on breaking up with the pattern as you consider breaking up with a person.

Aligning with that intention and returning to the contemplation that we began this newsletter with Mars in Leo:

What space do you need from the archetypal energy that you tend to adorn (pattern) yourself with?

What space do you need from the god/dess who has taken most interest in you … so that you can surrender into being the beautiful, ever-changing, messy, imperfect but whole human that you are and let go of striving to stay a hero, half-divine?

What action (it could be quite small but potent) supports a conscious separation, increases air flow within your system and allows more of your spiritual allies to be known and come through for you? What dimension does this action, this shift, this adjustment, this boundary-setting take place?

What action (again, can be subtle but significant!) supports a conscious separation that enables us to, in Sophie Strand’s words, “risk new shapes”?  What dimension does this action, this shift, this adjustment, this boundary-setting take place?

This is a form of martial art — in that it is the art of Mars. Experiential astrology is the art of Mars, the guardian of Night and psychic multiplicity — and, more specifically, it is the subtle art of Mars in Cancer.  Again, it’s these planets in detriment and fall that can bring us unique perspectives outside the ways of dominant culture.

Through embodied storytelling and creative prompts, experiential astrology can help tease apart knots in ways that allow energetic shifts to be felt-sensed into, recognized and made on the inner domains, subtle and imaginal levels, which then can simplify, clarify and put more of your authority behind your next step (though maybe not the entire road ahead — which, for now, just has to be enough because so much is collectively shifting).

~ * ~

If the nature of these contemplations call to you in this moment and you want to go deeper, you can book a 1:1 reading with me to feel for the golden thread winding through your Mars’ retrograde in Cancer and into Venus’ upcoming retrograde in Aries.