Crossing into Universal Compassion
How today's Lion's Gate and tonight's full moon in Aquarius empowers our empathy. Also how a romantic car crash has widened my heart.
Hi, doll.
This week, I’m nursing reopened wounds so piercing that I considered skipping today’s Ruby Report. Only when I remembered that everyone and their cousin was nursing a variation of a broken heart did I get over myself.
Welcome to the lessons of tonight’s full moon in community-minded Aquarius.
Before getting into that, allow me to say that, as I’d suspected, this Mercury retrograde in Leo has turned out to be an awful lot like a Venus Retrograde. In addition to the usual transportation and technology kerfuffles—all my Apple devices have soured in some way—we’re experiencing such Venus retrograde bugaboos as creative blocks, family and financial dramas, and aesthetic malfunctions. Pets also are suffering, as familiars so often do when their humans experience upheaval.
The real headline, though, is the heartbreak.
Retrogrades don’t manufacture anything from thin air, but they accent existing deficits, dissociations, dysfunctions, despair. (All hail alliteration!) With Mercury still mired in Leo—arguably the largest-hearted sign of the zodiac—and Venus in hyper-sensitive, family-oriented Cancer, we are confronting the pain buried in our timelines, including our ancestral lines. We also are confronting the pain we have inflicted upon others.
Old lovers, relatives, and friends are coming out of the woodwork to revisit old injuries and patterns. Given the profound racial injustice at this country’s roots (and that the USA is a Cancer), these injuries are flaring on a national scale.
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Happily, tonight’s full moon in Aquarius is joining the sun in Leo to connect our broken hearts with others in the name of utopian change. After all, what is heartbreak but a heart that has been broken open? Is there a better time to let others in?
Both Leo and Aquarius are about self-expression, but Leo platforms the individual human while Aquarius platforms the human condition. Together, they remind us that others’ psychic realities are as valid as our own—a precious, if humbling, download that distinguishes between what we’re projecting on each other and what we’re perceiving.
The Lion’s Gate
Today we also are graced with the Lion’s Gate, a portal that materializes every year when the sun is in Leo, and Sirius, Orion's Belt, and the Earth align. Because Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and heart-forward Leo is especially empowered by solar energy, the Gate infuses our wishes with extra energy, closing the gap between expression and execution, and more easily manifesting our desires.
As it is open July 28-August 12, we have been basking in the portal’s glow already. On August 8–yes, mama, today—it reaches peak power.
This is a lovely culmination of the magic released by last Thursday’s Cazimi, in which Mercury in Leo was deputized by the sun to transform our words into love spells. (Last week’s post for paid subscribers contains Leo manifestation rituals that also would apply today.)
Titrated by the full moon in Aquarius, this portal is not just making our personal goals possible. It is restoring public compassion by boosting our love, care, and good wishes for the collective. It does this by flooding us with the universal truths we try not to acknowledge and the feelings for each other that we normally suppress.
The Gate is whispering: Nothing is just about you, which is a good thing because together our broken hearts can build somewhere better.
Metaphysician, Heal Thyself
Even in the years I forget about Lion’s Gate, I register its effect—a big gust of warmth not unlike the Santa Ana winds. Love on steroids, essentially.
This year it’s brought me back into the heart of my community and path.
On last Thursday’s cazimi, at the river park where I pray every day, my last important love—the one whom I mourned so deeply that Hilma af Klimt had to stage an intervention— arrived like an apparition bearing an Americano and a kiss. It was the first time we’d seen each other in more than two years and neither of us could stop smiling.
Only minutes before I’d wished ardently for his presence, and knew the cazimi had granted my wish. But as absolutely no one ever says: Be careful what you wish for. It might give you what you need.
The story of what happened next is not quite right for this newsletter. Suffice it to say this retrograde in Leo has finally, if brutally, liberated me from the prison of unrequited romantic love. It has taught my every cell that, no matter how resonant someone may seem, if they do not prioritize clarity and kindness, they are not worthy of my heart.
To quote the great sage John Lennon: The dream is over.
In the aftermath of my emotional car crash, people I haven’t seen in years—some never in IRL— have come out of the woodwork to offer hugs or a gorgeous meal, and my closest friends have held me extra close. I also have been fostered by my Leo grandmother, deceased since 1989, and a Lisa Ruby of the slight future—a 58-year-old woman who’s already completed her second Saturn Return.
In their current incarnations, these two women are more joyful, fulfilled, and accomplished than I’d be able to envision if they hadn’t shown me in this week’s dreams, meditations, and automatic writing. Both have been revealing the steps to their presents.
And therein lies the latent magic of these 2025 dog days. They bring us to our knees so as a collective we can jump higher than before.
On Monday, August 11, this tricky, time-bending Mercury Retrograde finally comes to a close, though its shadow extends through the first week of September.
Until then, notice what ideas, emotions, and imagery most ignite your body, particularly your lower chakras (ahem). Convert these passions into wishes.
Next, write to an ideal future you or future collective about what you wish to see in your path and the greater zeitgeist. Ask this future entity for more details about their reality and how they achieved it, and stay alert to whatever guidance they offer through the channels of their choice.
Tonight especially, pay close attention and unplug as much as possible.
In my practice, I am happy to help you hear. Book a reading for yourself or a loved one, or try out a Whether Report to answer specific questions about how this astrology is intersecting with your personal path.
If you find this newsletter or my readings to be of use, please share, like, subscribe. More than ever, I crave the expansion of communities of care.
We are very far from an ideal reality, but not from each others’ hearts. May we cross into love.
With waggling eyebrows and slow feline blinks,
Sending love, clarity and comfort💖