September: the end of summer, the beginning of the school year. After two years of living with his lesbian aunts, the Teenager has just moved into his dorm room in the nearby university. He’s setting up his own space, where he can drink beer, try out all the dating tips we gave him, and inhale a great quantity of higher learning.

The Teenager’s father is visiting us from Venezuela. After helping the Teenager hang his bulletin boards, he’s been giving our apartment a face-lift. He’s installing lights, putting together Ikea furniture, rewiring lamps, and re-grouting the shower. Everything will be new and shiny for the fall equinox.

The sun is in Virgo now, and this is always a good sign for puttering, clearing, organizing and fixing. Virgo is all about the end-of-summer cleaning that prepares us for a new season. We sweep out the old, and then pass through the arched doorway of the fall equinox, into the lovely symmetry of Libra.

On September 4, we come to the Pisces full moon, a time when everyone is more vulnerable and more emotionally present. The full moon gives us pause in all the daily practical activity of Virgo, and we tune into our feelings. This is when we really let go of what we need to let go of. Only then can we move on with our lives.

Mars is now in Cancer, a great sign for building or improving a home, for finding the perfect nook, for nesting. Cancer is about emotional memory, which is what connects us to home and family. We bond with the tastes, smells, colors and shapes of our environments, feeling welcomed or not, feeling safe or not. Forever, these sensual cues will take us back to the old places and the old feelings.

Decades years later, people harbor strong visceral memories of the Second World War. They remember the smell of explosives, of deprivation, and of fear. In Poland, as I write this, the 70th anniversary of the German invasion is being marked. Poland is reminding Russia of the role that it played at the beginning of the war, when Stalin imprisoned and murdered some twenty thousand Polish military officers.

With Mars in Cancer, the past is not forgotten. Mars in Cancer is like a dog sniffing out the old bones and presenting them to the ones who buried them. “Look, see what you did!” Russia, which wants to see itself as a war hero, is forced to acknowledge the genocidal maniac that is also rustling around in the shadows of its past.

Mars is the Warrior planet, even in the mellow sign Cancer. And so as September begins, there’s an urge to fight for home and family, and to defend your own version of the past. Mars is also squaring Mercury as the month begins. Mercury in Libra is all about forms, theories, and abstract notions, and it gives an awareness that there are two ways to look at everything. But for Mars in Cancer, there’s only one way, because the gut is unequivocal. Its instincts, gleaned from real-life experience, refused to be explained, justified or reformed.

But then, a week into September, Mercury goes retrograde. It backtracks in the face of Mars in Cancer’s emotional belligerence. Basically it says, “Well, if you won’t be reasonable about these things, I’m out of here.” For most of the month, Mercury stays retrograde, calmly reorganizing the past.

A retrograde Mercury is all about unfinished business. On both sides, the war in Afghanistan is seen as a debt owed to the past, but the Taliban are favored by Mars in Cancer. The one who defends his home will always have the sharper instincts and the stronger need. The US is like Mercury in Libra, not at all sure that this is the right place to be. The US has laws, forms, protocol, but no real drive, after all these years of basically fruitless war.

All wars are a combination of belly-deep fears and set rituals. The fears activate the war, but the rituals keep it going. And the Mercury/Mars square is about the tension between these two elements. An overly formalistic approach blunts the emotions that burst out and seek resolution. Mercury in Libra retrograde is like a dance, an endlessly repeated set of steps, but this dance is performed on the bodies of other human beings.

The snafus of Mercury retrograde may actually be a good thing on the field of war. Communication problems, transportation hassles, all the things that get in the way of business as usual, are hallmarks of Mercury retrograde. And maybe a little inefficiency is a good thing when the business is killing. Even better would be for both sides to look backwards, and to own and admit our mistakes. Until then, long memories and established rituals will feed each other.

On September 18, a new lunar cycle begins, with the sun and moon together with Saturn in Virgo. This is not an ordinary new moon, as Saturn and Uranus are closely opposed. The Saturn/Uranus opposition is the aspect under which President Obama was elected, and it can be enormously liberating, but it also indicates strong resistance.

This is all about the struggle between the old and the new. But Mercury is still retrograde at this new moon, so the past definitely has the upper hand.

What happens to the new energy of September? There is some remedial work to be done before we can all begin a new chapter. There are things to remember, things to claim. There are broken things that need to be fixed. We have to keep puttering, gluing the torn pieces of our past together.

Sometimes new beginnings start slow. Meanwhile we look at them and ask: do we want to go there? Do we want to go anywhere?

We will take the path, though. When day and night are in balance, at the fall equinox, a new commitment is demanded of us. By then, Mercury will be slowing down to start its direct motion again, and, after more hesitation, it will go forward again on September 29.

This month puts us all on the threshold of the future, and then reels us back to the past. In September, my partner and I may see more of the Teenager than we thought we would. He might be back here to do his laundry. He might even come back and ask for more feminist dating tips. Meanwhile, his dad will go back to Venezuela, leaving us with a well-lit, well-functioning apartment.

It’s not easy to venture forward, especially when the past is unstable, always changing shape, rocked by tearful memories and passionate avowals. We all may have to stand here for a while, poised but still. The longer we stare into the past, the more we know about who we are. And then we’ll all start moving again. There is lots of road ahead.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com