Reaction+Response

Aries is cardinal fire. Initiatory flames that consume completely without thought. Aries is action born of pure instinct: fierce, protective, vital.

Pure Aries scorches earth. Its fire is contagious. There are times when instinctive reactions save our lives. Storm and passion arise within. Injustice must be fought with flame. We stand up and fight, tapping into the courage needed to take the risk.

Aries lifts up authentic self-expression; the wearing of the heart on the sleeve. The freedom to exist as we are. When it slips into extremes, attachment to authenticity becomes a weapon wielded as a tool for violence and domination.

The raw, vital power of Aries can consume and destroy. Reaction becomes chronic inflammation. Anticipating attack, offense and defense become barriers to new information and all encounters become mechanisms for venting pain stored from every hurt that has ever been suffered.

Libra is cardinal air. Tasked with initiating connection, Libra seeks to balance the outward fire of Aries and the subjective focus of the first five signs of the zodiac. Libra values thoughtful response and the respite of harmonious interaction.

Libra craves learning through relationship, mirroring, compare and contrast. Libra understands that relational connection defines our existence and therefore must be held dearly.

Libra is not inherently in balance, but rather constantly seeking it. It attunes to the spaces between things, and to seeing all sides. Libra’s scales carry the weight of societal expectations around appearance, “civility” and masking.

The efficacy of Libran diplomacy evaporates when conflict is avoided and the ability to see all sides becomes a hall of mirrors, perpetuating the injustice it sought to remedy. When fundamental needs are surrendered or denied for the sake of compromise, politeness or political constructs.

Through the consequences of ambivalence, Libran air refuses to see that denying essential needs alongside a lack of maskless spaces creates further fragmentation and the imbalance it sought to avoid.

When Aries and Libra polarize, extremity reigns. It becomes difficult to hold on to our humanity.

Libran striving for peace is supported by recognition that the heart is an organ of fire and that justice in action — rebalancing the scales — often requires discomfort. The Aries impulse towards freedom is strengthened when it interfaces with Libran understanding that freedom cannot exist without fairness and inherent recognition of interconnectedness.

Sometimes the flame must be weilded, not thrown.

Although astrological polarities are often discussed as opposites, with the Aries-Libra polarity providing the baseline for polarization itself and its associated black and white, binary thinking, the truth is that opposites form a continuum. They are dynamic tension. A spectrum of experience that reinforces and feeds itself through an infinity loop of relationship which, if we can hold that tension without polarizing, serves as a combustion engine for a third option.

Although Aries instinct and Libran thoughtfulness can save on their own, embracing astrology as a way of knowing is an invitation to more explicit participation in the nuance of the cosmos.

The Aries-Libra continuum stimulates the dance of compassion and insight, reaction and response. Compassion harnesses the immediate protective flames of the heart, which are best tempered by the insights of empathy. Empathy brings about the cooling powers of insight and the ability to respond with compassionate action.

(this post was written on the edge of the solar eclipse new moon in Libra, exact at 10:55am PDT October 14)

Amanda is a queer astrologer who is very into relational, evolutionary and psychological astrologies. Sometimes she also writes about the world and her place in it. You can support her work — and get rad incentives like monthly AstroCircles, New Moon ritual guidance and community hangouts with QA through Patreon.

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