Full moon in Aries and an archive: what has changed from 1986 to this week

It was October 1986. Halley's Comet had returned, and people climbed onto balconies to watch. Newspapers had been writing about it for weeks, children were sweeping the night sky with binoculars. That October, too, there was a full moon in Aries, opposite the Scorpio Sun — just like this Sunday night. People were looking at the same stars, breathing the same season.

Today the moon in Aries is completely full. The Sun in Scorpio, Venus moving backward in Libra, and Saturn — not in Capricorn this time but in Aries — also in retrograde. In other words, the sky is calling things back — but from a place very different from that sky forty years ago.

Then: people stayed awake so as not to miss a comet. Now: we cannot sleep because of the notification screen on our phone. Both are sleeplessness, but one looks up and the other looks down. The first question of the week might be this: have you raised your head lately?

Then: you would write a letter and wait three weeks for a reply. Now: even as Venus moves backward, we cannot bear ten minutes of a message showing as read. This week — Monday through Thursday — an old name, an old sentence, an old argument may return. The difference is this: now we feel we must answer the returning thing immediately. You don't. Venus's retrograde motion is precisely a rehearsal of this: to let the answer wait, to steep a cup of tea, to look out the window.

Then: when Mercury moved backward, the typewriter ribbon would break, it would be human error. Now: the cloud doesn't synchronize, the calendar collides, a voice message goes to the wrong person. Mid-week — around Wednesday — if there's a small glitch, don't take it as the end of the world. Mercury in Scorpio is moving backward to deepen things anyway; a little chaos on the surface, clarity underneath.

Mars and Jupiter in Leo toward the weekend will suggest a kind of courage. The person of 1986 would use that courage in the street, in the square, in a long phone queue. Ours struggles to step away from the screen and knock on someone's door. Thursday-Friday, a small but physical move: to meet someone face to face, to rearrange a room, to take a walk you've been putting off for a long time.

The reader of forty years ago could not have imagined that the phone they carried would wear them out this much. We don't know right now what we're not seeing — perhaps the very thing we're not seeing is how much silence is worth.