Dress for heat but keep an umbrella handy. In April we’ll be navigating fire while dodging the sprinklers.
Mid-month, Mercury’s entry into Aries and Mars’s into Leo (4/15 and 4/17) impassions whatever we’re doing. Will you use it to fuel your creativity, or waste it on crude displays of ego? Depends on you.
On the 12th, the Full Moon in Aries may provoke heated confrontations. You might find yourself in a face-off with an opponent, or in a contest between your inner impulses and outward expectations. One way or another, it will require a balancing act, like that of children on a seesaw. Position yourself on the fulcrum.
As the month comes to a close, Venus enters Aries, and the heat moves into personal relationships. It may not show up as sexual so much as self-expressive, and more active than usual. Aries-style socializing is partial to high jinx, not sitting around holding hands.
Neptune, meanwhile, is forging ahead in the first degrees of Aries, an almost oxymoronic combination of planet and sign.
Questions abound
Does your chart have any planets in this degree range? If so, that part of you is probably used to diving into experience headfirst, and asking questions later, if at all. But with
Neptune hovering around, questions will abound.
Whatever natal planet is affected, Neptune will confuse it. Aries tends to think of not-knowing as an unfortunate, temporary state, to be combatted with sheer willpower. At worst, it interprets Neptunian ambiguity as weakness. But if you have this conjunction, you’d be better off digging a little deeper.
A once-in-a-lifetime transit, this Neptune lesson will be with you for quite a while, using doubt and uncertainty as a teaching device. The only respectful response is to plead ignorance and wait. Let the truth come to you.
Neptune in Aries is like a koan. Imagine a ball of fire made up of not flame, but mist.
Water chaser
There are other seeming contradictions to contend with this month as well, given the presence of several planets still afloat in the tail end of water.
Against the backdrop of the fiery Aries Sun, Mercury and Venus remain in Pisces in early in April, making nice with Mars in Cancer. These two signs are trine each other, strengthening the teachings of water: that vague and winsome knowing that we all have deep inside of us, the sense that everything swims in the same cosmic sea. This understanding, by nature somewhat unconscious, is as eternal and universal as water itself. Right now it’s easier to get in touch with.
If you are someone with a lot of water in your chart natally, you are only too aware of being linked to everything around you. Whether you want to or not, you feel the currents 
and eddies of the collective vibration. In the disconnected cultures of the industrialized West, you’ve probably been told that you’re “too sensitive.” Don’t buy into that malarky. Your sensitivity is a gift.
This doesn’t mean it’s easy to use. But what else is new, where important spiritual lessons are concerned? Your lifetime is a study in how to use your sensitivity appropriately, effectively, without doing violence to its subtlety.
It’s all alive
For those whose charts lack a strong water presence, this month’s trines can trigger unexpected realizations of an emotional and spiritual nature. Pay particular attention when Mercury stations, on April 7th, a chance to empathize with people you usually find hard to relate to.
And don’t stop at people. Let yourself feel a kinship with other living things. Allow yourself to feel the sentience of animals, plants, even minerals. As the Bioneers say: It’s all alive, it’s all intelligent, it’s all connected.
