A Cosmically Oriented Month of June

The Astrology of June features Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Neptune. Mercury resides in the sign of Cancer for the entire month of June — and also throughout July — because of its upcoming retrograde on June 26th, a week after the Summer Solstice of June 20th when the Sun itself enters Cancer. Thus, in the last week of June and for the first two thirds of July, and potentially into August, we will likely suffer the usual Mercury Retrograde symptoms of mechanical breakdowns and mismatched communications, while our interior dialogue looms large and feels more profound.

This is the second such period in 2013. You might reflect back on whatever happened for you in late February. All three Mercury Retrograde periods this year, including the one coming up next October, are in fact in Water. Since Mercury symbolizes a mental energy, and the astrological element of Water represents the emotions, these times are edgy, as Mercury is not entirely at home there. You could look at this in two ways. On the one hand, everyone's thoughts are confused and "at sea" so to speak; and on the other our emotional detectors are on alert and are more directly stimulated, improving the connections within ourselves between mind and heart.

Venus, too, is emphasized in June's configurations. At the time of the June 8th New Moon and slightly before, Venus aligns into a very close grand trine with Saturn and Neptune. All through the first week of the month, in fact, either Mercury or Venus participates in combination with these outer planet energies, which are in and of themselves antithetical to one another. Saturn and Neptune's close trine, lasting through to mid-August, does allow them to have a constructive dialogue with each other, and with these two inner planets that represent factors of mentality, communication, and relationship connection.

Each of us is therefore pulled in two very different directions all through the month, and especially in the early going. Saturn has the symbolism of restriction and limitation, serious purpose. Relationships partake of that energy, meaning that you could encounter obstacles, forcing you to evaluate the degree of serious purpose that you bring to each partnership encounter. Can you go the distance, make things work out in spite of everything?

Meanwhile, with Neptune in the mix, fantasy and idealization have their full sway, a feeling that no obstacles, or boundAries, even exist. We can dream, and perhaps deceptively imagine, all kinds of ideal circumstances that fly in the face of reality, or perhaps — by taking the other side into account of what we can visualize and plan for — we can come to ground our vision more concretely. I like Richard Wilbur's poem, called Mind, which has the opening lines

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

We might think of this as the corrective influence of Saturn upon mental function. There are limits to thought, such as the paradigms of science, that constrain it: not everything is possible. On the other hand, just as the paradigm of Newtonian physics had to yield to the more complex vision of Einstein, and just as the current materialistic world view must eventually yield to a more spiritually inclusive one, there are those moments which could be characterized as Neptunian — escaping the boundAries of time and space.

His poem concludes

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.