We don’t need to be your daughters.
Mothers.
Wives.
Sisters.
Cousins.
Aunties.
We don’t need to be connected to you.
In any way.
Shape.
Or form.
To matter.
To be worthy of protection.
We should not need to be your kin in order for you to be insulted by the abuse that befalls us.
Women don’t have to be loved by or adjacent to a man to count. To be counted. To be telling the truth. We count because we are here. We count because we exist. We count apart from your accounting system.
We are counting ourselves.
Because we can’t trust this system to account for us. We have been taught to mistrust women. Taught to mistrust ourselves. Taught to mistrust the feminine within ourselves no matter our gender orientation. Taught to mistrust anyone who wants to side with the force that is Femme.
Women are seen as extra. Adjacent to men. Extraneous. A bother. A situation to deal with. Whether or not we identify as female, when the world sees us as such, it sees a target. An object to demean. Some thing to be put in its place. Something that should be oriented towards maleness. To be subservient to it.
Femmes of all gender orientations have historically be disrespected, dejected, disavowed and left for dead the moment we step out of line. Out of the lines that white-supremacist, capitalist, colonialist patriarchy has boxed us into. Femme-ness is a dangerous field to find oneself in. Because we are taught that power can do what ever it wants to us. To our hearts. To our minds. To our souls. Playthings for the powerful. And until a moment comes along that articulates, in no uncertain terms, what it means to allow this system to continue as is, we are caught in it.
Swallowed in its code of silence. Frozen in the fear that has been carried over from our grandmother’s grandmothers.
It might take many more lifetimes than this one for us to see each person as an individual. Individuals with rights, feelings, a heart, a mind, all deserving the right to live out our own paths as we must. It might take many more lifetimes than this one for all of us to develop the sense of self required to buck the systems that separate us into the deserving and the undeserving. It might take many more moments of awakening than this one to get there. But it is our duty to take each moment as a precious invitation to advance.
Today’s full moon in Aries (at 9:23 PM PT) begs us to do so.
Aries is the sign of the individual. It is the sign of courage, independence and unending energy. Aries is a cardinal sign, whose main job is to take action, to initiate change, to strike out and take a chance on a new direction. Aries asks us to develop a sense of self because without one we are open to believing that a thief is a saint and a liar is a leader. Without a sense of self, we cannot develop the agency required to fight for the rights we deserve.
We must know ourselves to fight for ourselves.
Aries is a fire sign. Fires are pretty hard to put out once they get going. They act on their own inspiration. They act, period.
This full moon is sitting next to the planet Uranus and the asteroid Eris. Uranus is the Awakener. The shaker-upper. The revolution. The rebellion. The break from tradition. The unexpected. The breakdown. The breakthrough.
Eris is a mythological figure from the Greco-Romain pantheon. A female goddess whose Latin name is Discordia. As in discord. As in no fucks left to give. A dark goddess who helps to balance out the universe by calling out self-importance. In her mythology, Eris wasn’t invited to the party. She doesn’t take too kindly to this and so she takes a golden apple, writes “to the fairest” on it, and rolls it into the center of the party, counting on the vanity of the party’s participants to fight for the prize. This they willingly do, and so began the Trojan War.
Our vanity will take us down. Every time.
On the other end of the full moon’s astrological spectrum, lies the sun in Libra, sitting with Jupiter and Mercury. This trio wants accord, wants peace, wants things to be lovely, sweet, beauty-filled and harmonious. But this full moon in Aries reflects a relentless gaze that will not play nice, sweet or demure in the face of disregard.
Mars, the ruler of this full moon, sits in Capricorn with Pluto, squaring both the sun and moon. This square teases out the action needed. This square points to the urgency of the situation. The square points to the fact that when things come to a boiling point we must be willing to be disruptive in order to bring justice.
The full moon conjunct Uranus and Eris brings unexpected apples rolling into the middle of the party.
If we have used our individuality or sense of self to stand for justice, we have risked the possibility of peace in order to manifest it. Because we know that they cannot live apart. We know that no justice equals no peace but when we know justice, we will know peace.
Full moon blessings,
xc