A Place in the Sun

It’s the Aries Full Moon!

I love this time of year. The light is so beautiful, and it feels like golden hour all day. After the hard work of the harvest, we have a moment to enjoy ourselves before the nights get longer and colder. We may even be lucky enough to have a friend or two to share the fruits of our labor with, look back on what we accomplished over a glass of fresh-pressed cider, and dream about what’s to come as we sit around the fire pit and watch the sun set. I feel a cozy satisfaction just thinking about it. 

We welcomed fall here in the Northern Hemisphere on Tuesday, September 22nd, at 5:05 PM PT, when the Sun entered the diplomatic social sign of Libra, and this season will bring us some of the year's most personally impactful astrology. 

Both Venus and Mercury will station retrograde in October, but before that, the Sun activates the Fire-Air transpersonal planets by standing in one of the positions in the kaleidoscope, as I call it, on Friday the 25th, followed by the Full Moon the following day. 

I published a collaborative piece about this outer-planet kaleidoscope, penned by yours truly and some of the participants in the 2026 DA&T cohort, earlier this week on Substack; if you missed it, you can catch up here. 

Primordial dreams point the way through

Overall, this lunation feels more dream-like than a textbook Aries experience, which I would describe as fast, passionate, sometimes cutting, and always direct. Brave Mars, the ruler of this lunation, retains some of his focus, yet slows a bit as he swims through Cancer's nourishing waters and takes more time to discern the borders between things. With the planet of imagination, Neptune, potently present, we’re also connected to something liminal and otherworldly. 

Water, an element associated with the Moon, the sign of Cancer, and also Neptune, holds memory. And because our first embodied experience was within the womb of our mothers, before we had language to describe it, these memories of our earliest dreams may feel more like sensations- colors, textures, temperatures- within the body, or protectively ensconced within the heart. This feeling is one of home and belonging.

Dreamlike and sensorial, these primordial experiences are from a time when all we knew was the warm, dark safety within our mother herself. Our first memories here are of physical closeness, connection, and the quiet, cozy stillness of being, and becoming. 

As I write this, I feel a softness and taste a sweetness, like an experience of love beyond language, where the connectivity between all that exists is love itself. This lunation reveals where we have created, or desire to create, this sensation in the material world. Where we find our place in the Sun. 

Full Moon in Aries 2026

So yeah, this lunation is illuminating something in a rather unusual and deeply sensorial way for us. When a Full Moon occurs, it shows us something about our internal experience and/or manifests in reality. 

Occurring at 3°37’ of Aries, this is typically where we use our Mars to carve out a place for ourselves in the world. Yet we have action-oriented Mars- how we direct and impose our will in the world- in the sign of its fall in watery, intimate Cancer, and the Sun's ruler, Venus, is in detriment in Scorpio, attending to the compost heap of our emotional entanglements. So, we are deep in the emotional experience of what is happening. 

Emotions are not wrong; they are not always accurate. And they change. A lot. Emotions are wonderful at showing us where we have concretized beliefs that may have outlasted their usefulness, initiating us into a season of change. Being afraid as a small child without agency is understandable, but reclaiming your energetic, emotional, and physical sovereignty is a big part of becoming a wise, fully embodied adult. 

While there is some resonance between intense Mars and the caretaker Moon, what astrologers call mutual reception given their sign placements, it still points to a deviation from Aries standard operating procedure. Whereas warriors are typically focused and driven, this one is more emotional than usual, and how Mars is feeling its way along plays an important part. Mars’ motives are less straightforward or visible to us, as crabs move sideways. 

This lunation takes us back to the events of spring earlier this year, when the New Moon in Aries occurred alongside a lineup of planetary witnesses, including Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune, along with the Sun and Moon. Together, they created a sense of urgency, and we felt inspired and compelled to start something. Likely it wasn’t rational at all, but it was right.

Look back at what you began around April 17th this year. What ignited your passions then? What did you bravely begin? Or did you make a big, bold departure?

This weekend, we’ll get a first look at the results, see how close you got to your intended target, and whether it resonates with your original desire.

What to expect

This is the architecture of what’s unfolding. Notice how the sky confirms the hunger you’re already feeling in your bones.

Before the mother of manifestation and inner illumination, our Moon enters the sign of our passionate warrior Aries, it will confab with proactive Mars via a harmonious trine as it leaves sweetly sensitive Pisces. So in the small hours on Saturday, September 26th, they have a moment of soft conspiration before the main event.

Next, Our Lady of the Night Skies will conjoin dreamy and imaginative retrograde Neptune, with an alchemical assist from retrograde Pluto in Aquarius, all within the hour of opposing the Sun in Libra as she gives us the Full Moon at 9:48 AM PT. Here, the prayer in our hearts, even if we don’t know the words to describe it, is revealed and received by the Divine, transforming both our inner and outer experience of self.

Later that afternoon, the Moon gifts these same insights to retrograde Uranus in Gemini, so we can integrate this new information into our plans and interact with the world around us, making it real and bringing it further to life.

Just after midnight Pacific Time on Sunday, the 27th, the Moon then conjoins retrograde Saturn in Aries, as Mars in Cancer squares retrograde Chiron. Here we must consider limitations, but Aries learns best through experience by running into them head first. Notice any hesitation. Are old wounds, now healed, running the show?

Is a boundary really a boundary if you don’t challenge it?

BTW, I think Mean Girls and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby are two of the most Aries-coded films of the early 2000s. The difference being that one is Aries with an Aries Mars, and the other is Aries with Mars in Cancer. I’ll let you infer which is which.

Whatever bruises or head bumps show up heal quickly as the Moon receives a blessed ray from growth-oriented Jupiter in Leo, declaring victory over our experience.

Then, Sunday evening at 7:48 PM PT, Mars leaves watery Cancer and warms himself in the fires of Leo, taking charge of any situation and courageously leading the way once more. Mars will traverse Leo’s domain through November 25th.

The Moon in Aries opposes Mercury in Libra, giving us a different perspective on how this is playing out across space and time, and then the Moon conjoins Chiron at the heart of his apothecary to make a dose of medicine before entering the sign of her exaltation, Taurus, at 7:39 AM PT on Monday, September 28th. Any scrapes and scratches are healing, even if a bit tender, and we’re on our way.

How to work with this energy

What’s interesting here is that we are still working with our opportunities and resources from the August and September eclipses and lunations. Either we didn’t invest, didn’t participate, or the opportunity came and went, and we weren’t ready. Hesitation, a question, or doubt. That’s OK; sometimes we need more information, or we didn’t see it clearly the first time. 

If you lost a bit of momentum and are feeling some type of way about it (Mars likes to win and is often a sore loser), think of that as a practice run, a rehearsal of sorts. This lunation, this Full Moon, will illuminate the missing piece. 

What matters here isn't specific information, the message's content, or the signal itself, but how you feel about it. Emotions and their transmutation are key elements in magick. So take extra care to check in with yourself. Notice moments of excitement or activation. 

It feels instinctual, but it will feel good. Satiating. Like the moment right before having your favorite meal. The pleasure in knowing you’re about to consume something that will satisfy or scratch an itch. This is what you’re attuning to, and given the elements of this lunation, you might not have words for it because it's beyond them. 

Next, follow through. Ground the energy and watch your investment take on a life of its own, and create your place in the sun.

We are moving from the dream-state into the material world, and sometimes, the bridge between the two is simply another person who can see what you are currently feeling your way through.

If you’ve been circling your own threshold—feeling the pull of your next chapter but unsure of the specific shape it wants to take—let’s look at your chart. We’ll parse out what’s true and turn that unnamed desire into the right next steps. Book a Sacred Cycles & Seasons consult here.