Love always involves a dance between closeness and putting up walls. We love each other, hurt, annoy and frustrate each other. Lately I’ve been doing the latter, tainting the precious time we have together with emotional jujitsu. I feel irrational when he talks too long and laughs too hard with the wait staff on date night, so I pick a fight goes something like “I’m not enough for you?” though as I am saying this I know I’m being dishonest. Those aren’t my true feelings, but an excuse for a clingy-ness I don’t yet understand.

Then one day I remember to look at my transits (just as “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”, I often forget). A-ha! Saturn is trine my Venus. Our pair-bond is maturing. I think about how slowly the kids have left for college – our youngest will go this fall, we don’t have a full house anymore and it seems, almost imperceptibly, we’ve each started to fill that empty space. I’m nestling into my domestic haven, pets, spiritual work; he’s surfing and socialising. He is visiting Inca ruins in Peru; I’d rather be meditating. I can see this bothers us both. We each want the other to be doing what it is we’re doing. We both want closeness and our freedom.

Saturn is the crystallized structure of habits and patterns we’ve developed, a garden container, Venus, the intertwined roots of our partnership. “We” are ready for more space. We’ve outgrown our Saturn pot. The truth is, I don’t want certain things to change.  As having kids around will do, we’d cultivated our relationship patterns and pleasures around domestic life, making family meals together, and stealing non-kid time for the joys of togetherness. I didn’t like having to steal time but I enjoy domestic life: cooking family meals, our weekend plans revolving around the house. I have Venus in Cancer. I also want freedom for everyone (me, too) to do whatever the heck they please (Venus square Uranus in Libra). It’s a conundrum and as Saturn shifts the biological timeline of life, our connection, our shared pleasures must mature, too.

Even during robust Taurus Sun springtime season, we must face the reality of change. This Scorpio Full Moon wants us to face the things we don’t want to face, connect with our strong emotions, and to honestly communicate what we feel. The terrain is our most intimate relationships, the people we most care about…hence the difficult emotions. Scorpio Moon’s shadow is moody self-absorption and self-isolation, i.e., what you feel when your emotions are so intensely charged with old wounds, insecurities, perceived threats and abandonment fears that you lash out or hole up. And then: what if the honesty required is too painful to admit, even to ourselves? With Venus in Aries now square Pluto, the distancing strategies we’ve been using to avoid addressing real topics have grown stale. We need to reveal more of our humanness, our vulnerable, naked feelings to partners, to our self. We need to stop hiding the truth of our humanness, our pain, our raw hurt and fear, behind drama and avoidance.

Saturn is joined with the Moon at this Full Moon.  Maybe, like me, you have outgrown a stable “the way things have always been” pot in your life. Maybe you can, with awareness, transplant what’s alive and salvageable into a new container and avert bigger, darker issues down the road…or maybe the pot will not so delicately splinter and breaks wide open so Spirit can grow. Liberating Uranus is joined Venus: the bonds of connections and pleasure need to be refreshed, renewed and revitalized. People need to be valued, relationships need to be restored, pleasures redefined. To Uranus, it really doesn’t matter how this happens, but that it does.

The gift of this Scorpio Full Moon is an ability to honestly see the truth of our reality and act on that insight. When we feel and communicate the personal and interpersonal fears that have been holding us back, we’re freed up to more fully live, and enjoy each other. Brooding gives way to the awe-ful, sometimes tragic, always deeply moving dance of life, death, change.  Dark moodiness releases into the deep gratitude we have for life, and those we love. As we restore emotional integrity to our vital bonds, we’re free to enjoy the beauty in life.