The Aries New Moon occurs on Saturday, April 18, 2015, at 2:57 PM EDT and 11:57 AM PDT.

I’ve been thinking, and temporarily concluding, that there is very little real individualism (Aries) in life. We are each a composite of our relationships (Libra), and the forces that shape us are our social structures. Even the past decisions that we make have consequences independent of us, that shape us beyond our new decisions. To add more to metaphor: If Aries is the stimulus, then Libra is the response. Something new and awkward is happening to me. Finals are over. We bought a house. My brain is balancing.

The Sabian symbol for this Aries New Moon is “Music of the Spheres.”

Recently I picked up a book called, “A Symphony in the Brain,” by Jim Robbins. It’s about the field of neurofeedback and reads, at least to me, a little bit like an Oliver Sachs book yet from the perspective of a deep-diving journalist. Regarding the symphony aspect of the brain, Jim Robbins writes,

“The four parts of the brain, as well as myriad areas across the surface of the cortex, must ‘talk’ to one another constantly, and the brain accomplishes that by means of a vast assembly of tiny electrical devices, the neurons or brain cells. Neurons are like microscopic batteries. Their membrane builds up a charge electromagnetically and then releases it, over and over again, in the form of what is called an “’action potential.’”

What is powering this symphony is undifferentiated energy – metabolism that gets specialized along the lines of the axons and received and networked by as many as a hundred trillion connections. But even that is an over-simplication of what makes an individual look and behave like an individual, considering all the undifferentiated parts that actually make him or her up.

A Symphony in the Brain, the Aries New Moon, and the Sabian symbol for the new moon have got me making my own connections. Aries, here, represents the undifferentiated aspect of energy. It is the spark of a neuron, but it needs the support and direction/pathways of the network to bring a spark into an idea, its synthesis; that is, it needs to be defined through relationship (Libra). Let’s label the glial cells as Libran, again for the sake of metaphor.

I’m looking at this New Moon in Aries as the birth of new neuron. Perhaps its signal will travel from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area (in the brain), to vocalization, to WordPress. Will this neuron survive? It’s only one tiny neuron in the midst of many, many.

“At birth, a baby’s brain contains 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way, and almost all the neurons the brain will ever have. The brain starts forming prenatally, about three weeks after conception.”  http://umaine.edu/publications/4356e/

But let us consider that unitary neuron. According to Robbins, “Each one may make from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of connections with other cells, which means a total of perhaps ten to a hundred trillion connections.” That’s a lot of action potential!  By the way, you’re likely to find new neurons in the hippocampus only, not anywhere else. See the quote above. We are born with most of our neurons already present!

So….What’s happening in your life that has a lot of ‘action potential’ right now?