Experiences with permanent relocation

[Mike V]

About 14 months ago, I finally moved to Southern California to move my natal Venus from the immediate background of my natal chart into the immediate foreground - from 3*35' into the 5th House, to 2*03' above Descendant. Though Venus foreground was the main reason I moved, I also get Mercury on Westpoint 0*29', and Eris on MC 0*32.

I have been to places along this west coast Venus line many times before - LA, SF and the Bay Area, Seattle - for a combined total of at least 2 months spent with Venus foreground, which is quite a lot when you consider I didn't live nor work here. Nearly all of those times, I was struck heavily by the totally different feeling I had here. I felt full, complete, like there was something missing inside me everywhere else. It wasn't specifically about any particular city or even state; it was just where Venus was foreground.

When I moved here, I felt Mercury's activity very quickly. Higher degree of nervousness, and generally just much more mentally engaged in things all the time, lots of projects I'm juggling and working on (most of them with pronounced Mercury components), and things like that. I have been working on my theories about Eris.

But Venus was much harder to spot, which was surprising to me. It took about a year, maybe a bit longer, before I was finally confident that Venus was naturally expressive for me - on par with my natal Mars, and sometimes overpowering it, which has never happened before. So why did this follow the track that it did?

I have a theory. First of all, Mercury and Eris are closer to their angles here, and they are firmly middleground in my natal chart, so there was no resistance to overcome. They are just suddenly active when they were never exactly "inactive" before. Secondly, they haven't had to fight their "complementary planets" for expression - my Venus side has had to contend with my deeply-ingrained Mars nature for expression for my whole life. Finally, and most concretely, every other time I've been here, I was visiting, and had very little of "my stuff" with me. I was staying at hotels or other friends' houses, I was taking Ubers or getting rides... my whole context contained very little patterning from my life up to that point. I was fully immersed in a very separate context from "home." But when I moved here, I moved all of my stuff, physically and metaphysically, with me. I think it's taken a year for all of those resistances, habits, and inertia to be overtaken by what's true about me out here. That's 33 years of easy Mars expression and frustrated Venus expression to rebalance. All things considered, I think a year is a pretty reasonable block of time to anchor a shift like that.

I realized that Venus is finally appreciably active recently, when I instinctually expressed Venus traits in Mars-friendly situations, unthinkingly. I do expect it will continue to ripen over time.

[Jim Eshelman]

Thanks for this, Mike - it will be valuable to a lot of people.

I think your analysis is great. You hit all the main "thinking points," I think. I might only add that your (already in Virgo) Moon also picked up a mundane square to Mercury, so Mercury is hitting on three very strong cylinders here. (You surrendered your birthplace 0°08' Moon-Eris mundane opposition for Eris partile on MC. That might be an area to explore, the difference between Moon-Eris and angular Eris.)

[Mike V]

(You surrendered your birthplace 0°08' Moon-Eris mundane opposition for Eris partile on MC. That might be an area to explore, the difference between Moon-Eris and angular Eris.)

Wow, thanks for calling that out - I haven't looked at the mundoscope for my NJ natal in a long time, and definitely not since I started paying attention to Eris. That is very interesting...