Sagittarius New Moon:
Think Big
By April Elliott Kent

Astrologer Dana Gerhardt, born with the Sun in Sagittarius, once wrote "Feeling envious of someone else means you're not thinking big enough for yourself." What a liberating thought! Leave it to a Sagittarian to remind us of our own limitless potential.

Realizing that potential, however, relies on cultivating your imagination. Envisioning something that hasn't existed before is not unique to people born under the sign of the archer, but you can bet that most true innovators have that sign or its ruling planet, Jupiter, prominent in their birth charts. Sagittarian Walt Disney, for example, envisioned a playground that could be enjoyed by people of all ages, and realized it on a scale previously unimagined. Steven Spielberg gave the movie-going public an entirely different vision of what films could be. Jimi Hendrix took the electric guitar to places it had never been before.

Scorpio teaches us to burn away the hubris of ego, to better perceive the truth. Following Scorpio on the zodiacal wheel, Sagittarius builds on this honesty with independence and innovation. To be an innovator begins with trust in yourself and in your truth. The Sagittarian road requires the faith to ignore nay-sayers and to resist the urge to emulate the successes of others.

Years ago I read something in Jan Spiller's book Astrology for the Soul that changed the way I practice astrology. Writing about the North Node in Sagittarius and the 9th house (my own Node placement), she said, "[These people] are learning to trust the accuracy of their first inner feeling and not second-guess themselves later on." It occurred to me that the reason I'd always had such a hard time giving readings for people is that my intuition about the chart was too easily swayed by my clients' real-time feedback. I often left a session feeling that I'd yielded too much to the listening tendencies of my 7th house Gemini Moon, without giving my client much in the way of Sagittarian insight.

I decided to discontinue telephone consultations and to focus instead on recorded readings. Aside from some notes a client provides on a pre-reading questionnaire, I now rely completely on my gut reactions to the chart. I can't say my readings have always hit the mark or been well received by my clients, but that comes with the territory, regardless of how you conduct readings. And there are advantages to this approach. Some things are easier for an astrologer to say into a recorder, and easier still for a client to listen to in the privacy of her home. And often, clients have reported that while they might initially have resisted something in the reading, they later found that it resonated for them. If we had been talking in real time, perhaps they would have convinced me there was nothing to the idea, and I might have dropped it before it had been fully explored.

To move in the direction of Sagittarius truth always requires a leap of faith and confidence in what we know. In pursuing this path, there's the danger of becoming insular and overzealous, of refusing to listen at all to other points of view. The utter conviction that serves Sagittarius so well in many situations can sometimes cause problems if we assume our own truth is universal. Navigating the Sagittarius experience requires that we keep feeding our brains with other ideas and perspectives, to keep ourselves flexible and lively. But for the sake of innovation, it's equally important to know when to escape to our own imaginations and retrieve what we find there.

Consider the time of year when the Sun is in Sagittarius, and the importance of Sagittarian faith becomes clear. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is the beginning of the coldest time of the year, when days are short and dark, when in pre-industrial times survival was by no means assured. It's no wonder that a tradition of celebrating light, birth, and redemption emerged during this season. When life is hard, we need something we can believe in - whether it's religion or simply the beauty and logic of nature.

Author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, though a Cancerian, was born with a powerful stellium of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune in Sagittarius. He is best known for his book Walden, a celebration of living simply and in harmony with nature. Interestingly, Thoreau was a leading figure in the American transcendentalist movement, which emphasized intuition over formal religion as a path to spiritual enlightenment.

This can be a hectic time of year. All that shopping, entertaining, and party-going can be a lot of fun, but when we discuss the holidays with our friends, it's interesting to note how often we describe feeling exhausted and stressed. If left to our own natural tendencies, we might - like Thoreau - simply retreat and sit quietly by the fire and dream big dreams. Gazing out your window at the dazzling winter sunlight and frenzied bursts of inclement weather, you might find it possible to imagine a world that's different than the one you inherited, and the individual contribution you might bring to such a world.

Pluto's long transit of Sagittarius (1995 - 2008) left behind a world that was perhaps a little too entrenched in beliefs and personal opinions, and Saturn's recent transit of Virgo reintroduced the importance of critical checks and balances to these ideologies. But at this Sagittarius New Moon, with the Sun and Moon in a close and energizing square to radical Uranus, the world has never been in greater need of passionate convictions. And it's never been in greater need of idealists with belief in themselves, and the ability to envision solutions. Uranus in Pisces urges us to transcend the intractability of opposing beliefs and to work together to - think big, and to dream bigger dreams for ourselves and for our world.

© 2009 April Elliott Kent
All rights reserved

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