Test!

Attempting a post from my phone, I haven't done much with the blogger app so far and wanted to give it a whirl.
I'm pretty much recovered at this point (yay!), and am just trying to stay warm from the Arctic weather that has taken over Maine.
Also wanted to share that a big goal of mine for 2013 is blogging very regularly (like, daily), and maybe even making this my job... which I would love. So much. :)
Many thanks to those of you who read this, it means very much to me and I'm so grateful!
The moon's in Virgo today, which I'm seeing as a good transition type day, getting us back into the swing of daily life after the holidays. Good day to get back to business, tidied up, and getting a sense of accomplishment out of it... working to propel you forward in this new year! Plus this trines the sun in Capricorn with the Earth energy, which can be both grounding AND expansive. That which arises from steady work, steady practice. Are you feeling it? How do you want to ground and expand in the new year?
Xo everyone, hope you're all having a fabulous day and making creative solutions to whatever pops up...

love-trees.

aspect overview/cut and dry

Aspects are the ways the planets interact with one another.

There are four basic aspects:

Trine: planets three signs away from each other, aka signs in the same element (water, fire, air, earth). This represents an easy flow of energy in that part of the chart. For example, Aries and Leo, fire signs, trine.

Planets four signs away from each other, with the same quality (cardinal, fixed, mutable), square. An example of square are the fixed signs of Taurus and Leo. This is more of a challenging aspect.

Signs opposite each other are in opposition, duh, for example Aries and Libra are in opposition. This signifies an area of life where balance is an issue.

 Conjunct is two planets in the same sign. This intensifies the sign and planets in the chart.

Astro makes it pretty easy to find out your aspects. When you get your free chart, you'll see a chart like this on the bottom left-hand side:

This is where it gets kind of confusing- you have to decipher the symbols! You can see each planet running diagonally down the top of the chart; sun, moon, mercury, etc. The symbols inside the chart show the aspects. At first, I'd recommend just look at the four major aspects- square (represented by a square :P), a trine (triangle), opposition (two circles joined by a line), and conjunct (a circle with a line going out of the top right).  You can see that this person's Venus and Mars trine, while their Moon and Mars are in opposition.

Or you could just look at this, from wizzards, which is an awesome site btw. If you want to get more specific, this shows the actual degrees between the aspects- the closer in degree they are, the tighter the aspect, and more intense it is:

This adds another dimension to Astrology and your chart. :) You can start to put more pieces together and get a clearer picture of your chart and yourself! After you've done this it's easy to Google "jupiter trine pluto," or whatever, to see what sort of info pops up.

This is confusing stuff, so please feel free to ask away in the comments if you have any questions about your aspects! I'm not sure if this is super clear so please ask if anything's unclear. Sorry that this is such dry material, but I wanted to bring it up...

Also, I have a new plan of action for blogging... an experiment, of sorts, to try to keep me more on track. Let's just say that today is "aspect day." :P