This calendar month begins a day before the start of the lunar cycle. Here comes March, ready or not.

If you use the lunar cycle to navigate the unfolding of time, as the ancients did, you’ll appreciate the shape of March. One New Moon (March 2nd) launches the month, and another closes it (March 31st).

In between them, just before the Equinox, the Moon is Full (March 18th): two New Moons serving as bookends to support a big popping climax imid-month.

Consider what you’re doing as March begins. Whatever it is, it will start a two-week climb into manifestation. To steer this in a positive direction, offer up an intention when the moment is ripest. Create a prayer, a sankalpa, an affirming quotation —  whatever works for you. The point is to formulate a life-fueling goal: to gather all the stray wisps of your heartfelt desires into a single coherent thought, and commit to it with your whole being.

Whatever you come up with, it will be buzzing with Pluto power. Mars (ego) and Venus (creativity) are conjunct Pluto as the month begins, which will intensify your intention considerably: all the more reason to handle this ritual with full awareness.

You are tucking it into the fertile soil of the New Moon, where it immediately start to geminate.

Fertile soil

Two weeks later your declaration will blossom, at the Full Moon — which, this month, is fueled by the power of the Vernal Equinox. When the 18th rolls around, think back to when you framed your declaration. Notice the way you feel, now, compared to when your prayer was merely abstract potential.

You will learn something about what you intended, back when you devised your prayer. It will be something you did not know. The Full Moon shows us something that, two weeks earlier, was not yet visible.

And then, a nanosecond after the Moon reaches fullness, the cycle begins to wane. Now comes the assimilation period. Your intention has changed its character. It started as a mere twinkle in your eye, and it is now here-and-now reality. It has become the story of the month.

Over the next two weeks (3/18 – 3/31) you will be busy absorbing its full meaning into your life. Your blossomed prayer is now fertilizing the cycle to come.

Lions and lambs

By this time, the Sun will have crossed the threshold into the astrological new year (March 20th, 8:35 am PDT). This ingress, from the last sign of the zodiac to the first, marks the Sun’s most extreme shift in character. Of any pair of signs in the cycle of twelve, Pisces and Aries are the most distinct from one another. In any series of symbols, this logic pertains. When the last segues into the first, the spiral of life reasserts itself. The world begins anew.

Pisces is a unifying sign: chaotic, unfocused, potentially attuned to the ultimate truth that We Are All One. By contrast, Aries is a separating sign: bold and active, it charges ahead in order to distinguish the self from others. The fact that March begins with the former and ends with the latter is what gives the month its extraordinary character.

The folk saying “In like a lion, out like a lamb” expresses this dichotomy, except backwards. The saying refers to weather: in the Northern hemisphere, early March can be stormy and fierce, turning mild and warm in its later weeks.

But in terms of collective mood, it is the first three weeks of March, when the Sun is in the mild and diffuse sign of Pisces, that are awash with the vague lassitude of the oceanic mind. Everything is dissolving together in one sloshing, universal pool — especially true this March, when the Sun and Mercury meet up with Jupiter and Neptune (3/4-13; 3/20-23).

Then, on the first day of Spring, the last is replaced by the first. There is an explosive shift as mutable water is replaced by cardinal fire. The Sun’s ingress into Aries gets the solar year going in a blaze of high-spirited individualism. This month, Mercury’s ingress follows a week later.

There is one way, however, that the old adage does fit the logic of the tropical zodiac. The lamb, attributed to late March in the saying, is the diminutive version of the Aries ram.

Images:

Seedling germinating: Ricardo Morales

Harpy: Hans Thoma: 1892-95

Time lapse photo by Matt Malloy