HD Transits 26 July to 2 August 2023

The Quality of Light

As Venus, in her Evening Star robes, moves into retrograde, we get to explore the very nature of light.

This week, the Goddess of Love draws forth a new quality of light. It is beautiful and subtle. We have to withdraw a bit from the world to feel it. As we do, it will restore our integrity.

Romancing Life

For most of the week the Sun is in the Gate of Influence (31). This is bringing your attention to the quality of what influences you. It’s the difference between the seduction of lust as power-over, and the sweet power of true love. The energy of this gate is not just about romance. This is about life as romance, romancing life! Your own unique desire nature that propels you onto your true path.

What truly moves you and how can you make yourself more open and available to it?

The key in this gate is in the difference between true influence and false manipulation. Can you tell the difference? Veritas, Goddess of Truth (veracity, in Gate 7) lines up with the Sun to help us make the distinction. Pay attention to what feels sweet and good. Notice the heavier energy of what seeks to manipulate and seduce through fear. This is bridge between old and new ways of being.

It’s Okay To Hang Out In The Void

The Earth is down in the Root Centre, in the Gate of Decrease (41) sending us out to have new adventures. Or, more likely just now, into the void, where we experience a lack of them! That void is a good place to hang out for while this week. This is a place for processing the past, for waiting to fill up again on desire. For not forcing things.

Mercury joins Venus in the Gate of the Abyss (29) this week. They meet up in line 4 where we find ourselves down in the depths of things, where pretence no longer has any value. We crave authenticity, simplicity, real connection. We crave momentum, but can feel stuck. Don’t try to fix things, just find your next small step, the tiny crack of light that leads you to a new doorway into the unknown.

Read: Weird Barbie and Venus Retrograde

A New Kind Of Life

The Experiential Circuitry is lit up right now, with the Earth (remember, it’s in Gate 41) bringing a Root Centre impulse for something more real. It meets up with Eros in the Gate of Clarity and Illumination (30), flows into Neptune in the Gate of Wounded Brightness (36) and on to Vesta (heart-flame) in the Gate of Progress (35).

There’s a lot of light in that process. The Gate of Clarity (30) carries a doubled energy of light – consciousness at its most illuminated, as well as the power to capture insights and make them visible to others. Eros is, at it’s highest expression, the passionate desire that drew the world out of Chaos. It turns unconscious drives into spiritual illumination and universal creation.

Mistaking Eros

Eros is retrograde in Gate 30.3. Retrograde energies turn us inward, make us more contemplative. Eros represents desire and in this Gate of Illumination, we desire to experience our own brilliance and discover ways to share it with others.

But Eros wants us to take a bit of down time – this is the end of one phase of your life and the beginning of another, it is time to take in all that has happened. Don’t pretend things are as they have always been. What’s past is gone and won’t come back. Don’t bind yourself to old desires. Eros calls you into a new and different future. It’s going to take some time to connect to the new energy Eros is bringing, allow it to gradually fill your void. When the time is right, Eros will be there with you, filling you with the romance of life!

Neptune in the Gate of Wounded Brightness (36) has been teaching us when to share our brilliance and when it’s best to just kept it to yourself. This gate meets up at the Throat Centre with Vesta in the Gate of Progress (35), which is Light over Earth – a new dawn.

Like Eros, Vesta wants you to hasten slowly. She is bringing you a powerful gift, of confidence in your timing and direction. You begin to see yourself in a new light, and realise opportunities previously hidden. The Gate of Progress comes filled with blessings. To receive them you have to seize those opportunities, to make the most of them, even if only in the smallest ways.

More: The Gates in Human Design (and why quick keywords don’t do them justice)

Capturing the Light

In the past, your brilliance has been captured, bound up in a way of seeing the world that perhaps had you turning yourself inside out trying to see what went wrong. Hidden in your experiences are keys that unlock the truth of who you are. We have a Full Moon on 1 August with the Sun in the Gate of Retreat (33) and the Earth and Moon in the Gate of Approach (19).

View: Taraka Full Moon chart

So, while the experiential circuitry is telling you to pay attention to who you share your brilliance with, the Full Moon adds another piece of advice. You don’t have to keep going ‘out there’ into situations that don’t support your integrity or greater sense of purpose. You can safely walk away from anything draining your creative potential.

The whole of August is set up for internal experience rather than external activity. This is a major readjustment, as we learn to hold to our big picture, align with a new level of creative reality, and still take the small steps each day to bring the potential of our most cherished desires and goals to fruition.

What is forward and what is backward?

In the Gate of Approach (Earth and Moon in Gate 19), we feel the new potential approaching us. We create the space to feel into how it wants to grow – not according to any old rules, but from our own heart. We can now responsibility for partnering with it’s development from seed to gift.

Holding tight to how you think things should be, can create the illusion that you are making progress, when you might simply be repeating the same old dance steps that will take you around the same old dance floor with the same old partners.

Between now and the end of August, retreating does not mean you are going backwards. Instead, it means you are moving away from old negative patterns of behaviour and going to meet the incoming creative potential. This is the hermit, withdrawing into the mountains to get a longer view and larger perspective.

Let’s finish our story with Vesta, who represents the hearth flame at the centre of your home. Vesta can be so concerned with keeping alive the flame of others that her own splutters and dies.

Vesta is the spark of fertility, the sexual and fertilizing power of the goddess brought to earth.. She marks out the boundaries of our own home, the place which sustains us, and from which we draw the clarity of our purpose. This is a personal quality rather than a physical place.

This week, we find a new quality of light, and give ourselves, and perhaps some special others, the gift of that brilliance.