A Poignant and Transformative Full Moon

With Friday's Full Moon we reach an important stage in this pivotal end-of-year period. This is an especially significant moment in time, one week after the 2012 Day and just a few days before the New Year, Monday the 31st at midnight, and featuring the perfection of the Saturn-Pluto sextile that has come along in this Winter 2012 time frame to add its weight to the on-going cycle of Uranus and Pluto. Massive transformation is the theme, as current events continue to call to our attention, and as our own instincts also reveal when we take the opportunity to tune in – as Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter puts it, to "close our eyes to see." And the individual and societal mandate for change that we so poignantly feel actually represents our own best interest. We must, in the final analysis, allow to drop away whichever of our dysfunctional behaviors that we can identify as no longer serving our real needs.

There is in fact an enormous focus on Pluto in Friday's chart, and as the year turns over. At the moment of the Full Moon, the Sun conjuncts Pluto within a mere two degrees, while the Moon opposes; Jupiter in Gemini makes an exact quincunx to the midpoint of Sun and Pluto. Saturn in Scorpio remains in mutual reception to Pluto and also in extremely close sextile, exact within a few minutes of a degree, thus greatly emphasizing both of these powerful planetary energies for change. Pluto in the social sign of Capricorn presages the radical transformation of cultural structures. Saturn brings hardship and lessons to whatever sign it occupies. In Scorpio, the lessons are all about emotional connection with others around us, and within ourselves as well. Being in closer touch with ourselves at the deepest possible level is one way of conceptualizing the cultural shift that we are in the midst of now, and through to the end of the decade. When we witness the tragedy of schoolhouse assassins failing to get the emotional help that they need it speaks to all of us. And when we see social services potentially curtailed, placing the most vulnerable among us at greater risk, in order to keep the wealthiest in better financial health, it forces us to pause and consider priorities.

The Full Moon opposition from the nurturing sign of Cancer versus the Capricorn Sun brings issues of private and public, self and other, directly to our inner dialog. Jupiter, planetary archetype of spiritual faith and fundamental optimism in our choices, is also a particularly dominant factor right now. We as a society are looking ahead to the future, and attempting to discern where we are headed. And yet the social organism is nothing more than the sum of individuals. Each one of us has the emblematic power to make the choices that as a society we will live with for years and perhaps for decades to come, and the sustaining power of Spirit is working along with us to guide us through.

At the time of this Full Moon, the Moon in Cancer makes a Grand Trine in Water with Saturn in Scorpio and with Chiron in Pisces so that our emotions are easily aroused and deeply motivated. Also, the Sabian Symbol for Pluto's degree in Capricorn speaks of unfamiliar energies that we need to explore: "An albatross feeding from the hand of a sailor." Indeed, through this Full Moon, we are getting in closer touch with our orphaned animal nature, our instinctual side. We are probing for answers to our collective dilemma where we must: on the inside. As we come though the transformationally oriented end of a potent year, we do well to remember that we have within us, by a simple shift in attitude, the ability to change and improve our world.