Today is the infamous Ides of March (March 15). Ides merely is a calendar designation that means the middle of the month. On this day in March some odd thousand years ago, Roman emperor Julius Caesar was assassinated.

Two days from now, as you have marked on your calendar, is St. Patrick’s Day (March 17). It is no surprise to astrologers that St. Patrick’s Day, falling in the water sign Pisces, is celebrated with drinking.

The good news, my friends, is that as Neptune transits Pisces for the next decade, St. Patrick’s Day celebrations will get better and better. The culmination is March 2023 when Neptune will be conjunct the sun on St. Patrick’s Day. You mark it on your calendar and if it isn’t the blowout promised here, you will get a full refund of the time you spent reading this blog.

In 2024, Neptune will also be conjunct the sun on St. Patrick’s Day but the old stick-in-the-mud Saturn will also be in Pisces saying, “Don’t do what you did last year or I’m calling the cops.”

So March 15 is infamous and March 17 is famous, what about March 16?

Is March 16 the “middle sibling” of a clearly remarkable week of unusual and intoxicating energy?

Pat Nixon

Pat Nixon, the late First Lady to President Richard Nixon, was born on March 16, 1912. Nixon had both sun and moon in Pisces.

[Photo from Biography.com]

Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac, the mutable water sign. It is essentially receptive to all input from life from mental, spiritual and emotional planes. Pisces is a sponge. As such, it is considered emotional.

Pisces and its opposite Virgo tend to be the caretakers and servants of the zodiac. Why?

Ego and service don’t work well together and both Pisces and Virgo often take to the spiritual side of life due to a lack of ego carried by the other ten signs. In the negative sense, these two signs struggle with self-esteem and often see others as having qualities they lack.

Yet which signs of the zodiac are more talented than Pisces and Virgo?

The role of First Lady is quite Piscean. If the President is the center of attention, the First Lady is the shadow, behind the scenes, staring at her husband with awe and admiration as the cameras pan to her every so often to show that she stands by her man.

Yes, we’ve had a couple First Ladies (or maybe just one) who dared do more than stand and stare. And she was duly punished.

Reading Nixon’s biography, she appears to have nursed both her dying mother and later dying father before reaching adulthood. That’s a double Pisces load and extremely emotionally taxing.

Later Nixon married a man who became President and later resigned in disgrace. My guess is she nursed him as well as they remained together for the rest of their lives, which was more common in those times than today.

During her tenure as First Lady, she focused on education and volunteerism. Volunteerism is the energy of Pisces-Virgo which gives and doesn’t expect anything in return.

Because Pisces-Virgo will do much for others in the way of service, those of lower energy often send abuse in return. Sometimes Pisces-Virgo has trouble distinguishing between helping and rescuing, nurturing and enabling.

Pisces-Virgo takes on the color of the surrounding environment which may be why they both are prone to illness, need time alone and seek spiritual refuge.

While Nixon had a lot of Pisces, she also had a Pluto in Gemini square sun. Mars was also in Gemini but not forming a tight square with the sun or moon.

The Pluto square for me is the mark of a politician so it’s interesting that Pat Nixon was drawn to the cantankerous and edgy Richard Nixon.

Nixon may have accepted her Piscean energy to some extent, but Pluto suggests she was also looking for more than a bit of power herself and carried a lot of inner drive.

Nixon’s bio says she drove across the US, worked her way through college, and graduated cum laude. All that is simple for a woman in the US to do today (except for the fact that college has become much more expensive), but imagine doing this in 1932.

What a woman! I’d like to transplant her to this century to see what she would do with that energy. As her photos suggest, she was also a beauty. Pisces and Neptune bring an alluring, other-worldly beauty.

Yet for all this power and beauty, Pat Nixon’s bio is short, her legacy attached to a grouchy Capricorn.

March 16, 2014

March 16 this year brings us sun in Pisces and moon in opposite Virgo. When the sun and moon are opposite we have a full moon.

In between death and drunkenness, we have a day of extraordinary sensitivity to the environment. It will be an interesting day to simply feel what’s occurring around us – feel without a media portal (television, computer, phone) telling us what others feel, without a media portal defining the story for us.

You’re in the middle of Pisces – go ahead and feel what’s out there.