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"All our relationships are person-to-person. They involve people seeing, hearing, touching, and speaking to each other; they involve sharing goods; and they involve moral values like generosity and compassion."
Brendan Myers

The New Moon happens on February 18 at 6:47 pm EST, right on the knife’s edge between Aquarius and Pisces, and brings attention and awareness to ideas about the collective and how we treat each other. The importance of technology — everything from breakdowns to privacy issues to technology saving the day — is another topic likely to be front and center. In this upcoming month you may want to focus on considering how you can work with others and create effective change within a group. What can you do together that you can’t do alone? Who is your tribe, and how do you support each other? Who are your spiritual kin, your “fellow travelers”, and how do you connect with them?

The term “tribal mentality” is tossed around a lot these days as though it were something to be avoided — and in the implied meaning of restricted, fearful, insular thinking, no doubt it is. But human brains are wired to live and work in small groups, so we also can find a number of people who are exploring a tribal template as a basic unit for a healthy economic and social system.  As the cracks in the industrial civilization we have built become more and more apparent, some are looking at tribal society as a promising, egalitarian model for a fossil-fuel-restricted, environmentally-challenged future. (See this and especially this) Others feel that “New Tribalism” is destructive of the values of a democratic society. (More about that here). We’ll be seeing ideas like these up for discussion in the coming month, and they will be well worth considering on a personal level as well. What communities do you belong to? How do you support them? How do they support you?

It should be a very interesting month ahead. This month’s New Moon falls on January 20th at 8:14 am, just inside of the sign of Aquarius, the sign of freedom and equality. Just hours later, Mercury turns retrograde. In the chart cast for Washington, DC (and so predictive for the country), the conjunction of Sun and Moon falls in the twelfth house of hidden things. The sensitive Ascendant, plus two other planets, Venus and Mercury, are also in Aquarius. That’s a lot of focus on freedom (or its lack) and on the vagaries of equality in these transformative times.

There is also a major emphasis on the first house in this chart — the house of the people of a nation. Venus and Mercury in Aquarius are joined by Neptune, Mars and Chiron in Pisces all in the first. The combination could promise well-thought-out, heart-centered plans for improving the lives of ordinary citizens — and we all could benefit from that kind of planning in our own lives, in our own communities. But — particularly given some of the aspects — it could also promise attempts to deceive and control that are actively opposed by some -- and studiously ignored by others. There are opportunities for spiritual awakening — and religious oppression. For expressing empathy, and for cold-hearted manipulation. You’ll be watching these decisions made on the world stage, but you are also likely to see them in your personal life. Nourish your spiritual life, and be honest with yourself — and others.