In astrology, the second house is often thought of narrowly as relating to money: whether or not you have any and how you should go about getting it or spending it. This is certainly not entirely wrong and it’s one way that life will get your attention during this progression, but money is only one part of a much deeper reality. We can start getting closer to that reality when we replace the word money with resources. Obviously money is a resource, but there are also other resources, and not all of them are even material resources; they can also be skills or experiences. The second house deals with anything you’ve got going for yourself, including the lack thereof.
The deepest root of the second-house progression concerns lessons with survival. During this second-house progression, issues that get you to pay attention to your ability to survive are going to come up. Now, of course you are not likely to find yourself in the wilderness facing a wild bear with only a ballpoint pen to defend yourself with! The second-house sense of survival can feel just as primal as the situation with the bear, but is more focused on our ability to take care of ourselves, and our families and households. As astrologer Steven Forrest has so eloquently put it, you are being asked to prove yourself to yourself. This will simultaneously develop on the material plane and the emotional plane. The material plane will have you taking actions toward maintaining your existing resources or securing new resources. The emotional plane will have you questioning whether or not you’ll be able to make it on your own, and hopefully developing confidence in your ability to handle even unexpected things.
Are you enough? If not, what do you need to do to be enough? Activities and situations that you must deal with now will have you sure of the answer to that question by the end of this progression. In the first house you could fake it because you were just sort of thrown into a new way of life. In the second house, you need to apply yourself if you’re going to make those developments stick and really turn into something sustainable.
Read more in Astrology of the Moon by Amy Herring