Finishing Off What Was Started Last Week

5.11.07


Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… another weekend dominated by a friggin' Pluto aspect.

Last week, we had Venus opposing Pluto. This week, it's Mars square Pluto. And in case there were any question about it, Mars is far more, um, active and overtly disruptive.

If the events that built up to last weekend's exact peak of the Venus-Pluto opposition (Sun May 6) left any unmade decisions, unanswered responses or unresolved 'ick' in their wake… well, Mars is here to finish it off.

To fully understand the dynamics here, we must first recognize that Venus and Mars have themselves been at odds since mid-April, when they first arrived within orb of squaring each other. (The exact square was on Sun Apr 22.) Venus was in Gemini, while Mars tenanted Pisces. I described these pairings in some detail last month, when they first entered those respective signs.

This Venus-Mars tension can best be summed up first by examining Venus-in-Gemini's desire to delight in multiple different options for self-satisfaction… which may keep her flipping back and forth, changing her mind, constantly comparing the possibilities by weighing pros and cons in her head, and refusing to commit fully to any one, due to not wanting to close doors to the others.

Where Mars-in-Pisces is concerned, however, there little use for such mental machinations. For him, it isn't about 'deciding' at all. He simply follows his compassionate heart, along a path without clearly labeled landmarks. He knows he's going the right way because it feels right (at least in this moment). Or is it the right way?

Is he fooling himself? Mars-in-Pisces may actually appear to sabotage himself… or, by 'not deciding', default to a highly impressionable passivity. (And that, in the end, is also a sort of decision.) Time will reveal whether he's following some invisible cosmic beacon to a pot of spiritual gold, or if he's hopelessly lost and blinding himself to rational logic.

The rub between these two should be obvious. Venus-in-Gemini gravitates toward a diversity of light pleasures, but resists the committal judgment-call by maintaining a gabby emotional distance. Mars-in-Pisces also resists formal decision-making… but at the same time he 'decides' by putting his existential all toward whatever his sympathies glom onto, either achieving total emotional union (perhaps the epitome of 'commitment'?) or self-sacrificial 'doormat' status. Both Gemini and Pisces are mutable signs—hard to pin down, chameleonic and lacking firm consistency.

When Pluto enters the puzzle, though, neither of these planets can get away with this back-door slipperiness, not scot-free anyway. As I already wrote last week, Pluto put the pressure on Venus through its opposition to pick sides… pushing up past pains and/or pulsating passions that cannot be 'reasoned away' by the Gemini drive to keep things relative (and thus safe). And if we (playing the part of Venus-in-Gemini) still wouldn't judge based on the deeper right-or-wrong, then we were probably on the receiving end of such judgments—lobbed from those folks who were damn sick and tired of our fickle flip-flopping.

Now, with the Mars-Pluto square, we have an opportunity to finish the job, in a highly emotionally charged (maybe even hysterical) continuance of the Venus-Pluto opposition.

We (now in the role of Mars-in-Pisces) may indeed fight the judgment already laid down (or kinda-sorta 'laid down', as the case may be)… whether it's a battle against ourselves and our mixed feelings, or against the person who's insisted that things go one certain way or another. We may ignore what's been said ('decided') and act with undiscerning impulsivity, hungry to feel that forsaken bliss one more time, and to hell with what's legitimately 'right' or 'good for us'. We might throw ourselves under the bus, to save our beloved (though that same beloved wouldn't necessarily return the favor). Or perhaps we desperately want to escape the whole damn issue, and consequently take shot after shot of whiskey (or our preferred intoxicating equivalent)… only to get drunk enough to call his ass up and tell him what we really think (a 'truth' that we may regret when the booze wears off and the dry heaves start).

And in standard astrological fashion, if we don't feel those types of urges I just outlined ourselves, then it's quite possible the other person will play out that experience for us… and fight against us.

Of course, there are no guarantees this last shove will finish the job off for good. But Mars does enter his favorite sign, the fresh-start/new-beginning land of Aries, on Tue (May 15)… while Venus has already left Gemini for more tender pastures in Cancer.

Change keeps on coming. Whatever we don't resolve, we must lug with us as baggage—and there's only so much any one person can carry, if we want to continue the journey.