Looking into the sky this solstice week there’s a lovely celestial set up going on that can support a mood of inner stillness, one that mimics the apparent stillness of the sun when it comes to its solstice moment in the early hours on Saturday the 21st.
The set up involves the red planet Mars, which just started its once-every-two-years retrograde and can be seen rising in the east each night between 8 and 9 pm. The other player is the Moon, which was Full on Sunday, and will pass by Mars as a waning gibbous mid-week, on Wednesday, about an hour before sunrise.
Right now Mars is moving retrograde through the heart of Cancer, where the beehive cluster is located. The beehive cluster is also referred to as Praesepe, which is Latin for manger or cradle. And even though the Moon will drown out visibility of Praesepe when it comes to encounter with Mars, it definitely stirs up the imagination about what might be going on up there!
It will be dawn on Wednesday when they meet, just a few days ahead of the great still point of the year. The Moon is waning, sweeping past Mars in retrograde where it prepares a place in the cradle of the heart for all who are tuned in. To imagine such a thing it helps to have a poem like this from Rilke, and to whisper it softly in the heart:
Much has happened
That we could not see
And the future will be nothing less
Than the flowering
Of our inwardness.
These are the deep words of the heart, passed from Mars to Moon in the early hours of solstice week, helping us know that what we love abides above…
