On Monday, June 29th, at 4:57pm PT, the moon peaks in fullness at 8° of Capricorn, the holy sea goat and sign of Great Works. Capricorn is our cardinal earth sign, the Architect of the Zodiac. It takes our grand Sagittarian ideals and visions and distills them into practical detailed blueprints and plans, then executes those plans. It guides us through the peak of our creative maturity and adulthood. Ruled by Saturn, the great mother of Limit and Form, its essential nature is wise, containing, steady, patient, and disciplined. It knows that’s what it takes to bring something into being on the earthly plane, to stabilize it long enough for it to grow strong, to ensure that it thrives. It doesn’t expect things to come easy. Capricorn knows that the obstacle is the path, that the intelligence we gain by grappling with hardship and complexity is how we get where we’re trying to go. Once it knows its mission, Capricorn practically invites challenge. It comes fully alive only on higher difficulty levels. It loves what will take a lifetime—possibly many lifetimes—to build. It’s the first of the three final signs of the Zodiac, which focus on the completion of the individual life and the return to the collective, so what starts as a personal legacy with Capricorn doesn’t stay that way. Its ultimate purpose is to generate, sustain, and protect abundance for future generations.

As you might be able to feel just reading all that, a full moon in Capricorn is not a relaxed time. The Moon rules Cancer, Capricorn’s opposite sign. The Moon is most herself in Cancer’s warm waters, gentle rhythms, steady nurturance. It needs to be allowed to be sensitive and needy. It wants to trust and be in the Kairos flow, following tides and instincts, not responsible to the demanding, unforgiving calendars and clocks of Chronos. Capricorn, however, favors Chronos. It understands that Chronos time is necessary, especially for working together with others, and that while we need to be clocking our own instincts, preferences, and bodily needs, sometimes we have to override all of that to meet the greater needs of others and the work. There is a selflessness to Capricorn that can easily turn sacrificial; a dutifulness, determination, and integrity that can get a little grim. The Moon can really struggle here, especially if Capricorn unbalanced and overburdened—if, for example, we’re in our full adulthood, raising children, caring for elders and animals and the sick, managing a household, tending to our professional obligations, guarding collective systems, fighting a fascist regime. The Moon and the body have real limits, our needs must be included and honored or we will eventually breakdown and fall apart. And, Capricorn would remind us, there are things worth falling apart for. There are things worth giving everything we have to, and more. At its highest frequencies, Capricorn teaches us that we can unlock great amounts of energy through joy, joy in the work, joy in acts of service, joy in being a source of love. This joy actually lightens our burdens; it makes them easier to carry.

A Capricorn full moon is a good time to tune into whatever that is for you—your commitments and devotions, your work and responsibilities, what burdens you are carrying, what ties you to the greater collective and the greater good. Notice what’s culminating there, and where a new phase of that work might be beginning. Take stock of how well those parts of your life are being balanced and supported by your emotional life, your bodily health, your personal systems of nurturance and care. Like, how are your inner children doing? What or who needs steadying? With its ruler Saturn in Aries, this particular full moon in Capricorn is drawing our attention back to what began on the Saturn Neptune conjunction in Aries, and whatever that big project of manifestation is for each of us. And then it wants us to get ready, whatever that means, because the energies are about to change dramatically. On the same day as this full moon, we have three other major astrological shifts. Mars is leaving the slow and steady creative grind of Taurus and entering the highly energetic, ADHD-amplifying Gemini, heading directly towards a conjunction with revolutionary planet Uranus on July 4th. Jupiter is exiting the warm, nurturing, familial waters of Cancer and entering the bold, expressive fires of Leo, accelerating the fieriness of this year significantly. And Mercury stations retrograde in Cancer. Each one of those is big change—all three at once, under the eye of the full moon, it’s like a horn section warming up. Whatever’s about to happen, it’s not subtle.

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What’s drawing my attention the most is what’s happening in Cancer, partly because it’s opposite the Moon. But what timing, for Mercury to be stationing retrograde on the exact last moments of Jupiter’s time in this sign of its exaltation. It’s as if, even though Jupiter is moving on, we are also being drawn immediately into a six-week period of reflection on what happened during its transit of Cancer over this last year. That’s where our thoughts will be, even as we feel Jupiter expansive energies start to light up our creative drive in Leo, and our Mars energy goes on wild explorer mode in Gemini. It feels like an opportunity to secure and integrate the healing and growth and medicine we received there and do some artifact making. We are going to want to remember how to access our inner water as the heat and difficulty level rises this year. We are going to want to stay connected to Cancer’s perspectives and medicines, its insistence on care as the guiding heartbeat of life. We are going to need the faith Jupiter brought us for the years ahead.

Whether you can feel it or not in this moment, remember we are in a revolutionary tide, we are in a fight for this planet’s future. This is, in many ways, Capricorn territory—the abundant future. The healthy, thriving Capricorn is well integrated and in full cooperation with Cancer, I would even argue it is led by Cancer. We must do nothing less collectively than rebuild our human systems with collective care, reciprocity with natural systems, and the well-being of mothers at the center. That’s the path of true abundance. That’s what every Capricorn lunation is moving us towards. A week or so go, the Quaker elder Parker Palmer wrote a beautiful essay for his newsletter, Living the Questions, and I think he says it exactly, so I’m just going to land us right here.

Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community not only creates abundance—community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world would be transformed.

However this full moon finds you, thank you for being a part of my community. May we sustain each other through whatever comes.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now some extras for paid subscribers! First a collection of links to the archive of writings on Capricorn lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now (these archival lists are getting more and more exciting as time goes by, they reveal their own larger stories). Then some reflection and ritualling prompts to support you in working with this new moon, or just understanding how its landing in your own life. And finally, a creative writing prompt for those of us who practice writing magic.

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Happy Solstice friends! Solstices are the holiest of holy days, for those of us who find holiness in the spirals of time and turning of the Earth—days that hold the extreme poles of the dance of dark and light. For me, and I imagine for most of you reading this, this is a Summer Solstice. The main moves of the four season cycle are down, in, up, out. In Fall we go down, we descend, the natural world completes its latest life cycle and dies. In Winter we go in, we are drawn inward, to the hidden, inner world of that death or dissolution; we hibernate and dream and gestate and re-form. In Spring we come up, we ascend, we are called into the crisis of rebirth, we rise up and get up and stay “up for it.” In Summer, we go out, we unravel and unfurl, we expand. The hermetic vessel is broken open, and the new form is kicked out into the world to discover itself.

In this year of the Saturn Neptune conjunction in Aries, this year of the Grand Air Trine, with Jupiter and the south node about to enter, together, into Leo, sign of self expression, and the north node entering Aquarius, sign of collective consciousness, this summer expansion season will be a doozy. It’s promising some special magic for all those willing to come out of the fantasy of doing what they are here to do, and dive into the experiment of making it for real. It could be a summer of inspired artistic effort and inspired community organizing.

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Hello friends and fellow students of the forces!

This email contains a link to come hang out with me on Zoom today, Sunday, June 14th, from 3:00pm-5pm PT. It is officially the final week of spring, and we will be just hours from the new moon in Gemini exact.

The loose plan is this: I will start with a brief astrological weather report, tuning us all into the new moon and more specifically, the fresh electricity of Uranus in Gemini. This will lead us straight into some of the weird, beautiful, prophet-mode aspects of language, how poetry can serve as a liberation technology, how spells work, and how we might want to work with this new moon to open up properly to our own best present and future.

Bring a notebook and pen - or anything you prefer to write with - this will definitely involve some writing. And have your own birth chart handy, or just refresh your memory of where Gemini shapes your chart and life. Otherwise just come exactly as you are. Sharing will be optional! This will not be recorded, to ensure maximum looseness, spontaneity, and confidentiality.

This gathering is for paid subscribers to this moon channel, all the Zoom details are below the paywall:

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Live Gathering This Sunday/Tomorrow

A reminder! You’re invited to join me tomorrow for the last live gathering of spring. Sunday, June 14th from 3pm-5pm PT I’ll be hosting a hangout on Zoom for paid subscribers, just hours before the new moon in Gemini is exact. We will be tuning in live to the new energies of Uranus in Gemini, talking about poetry as a liberation technology and spell craft, and then we will do a little writing together and a little talking about it all. Think of it as a pregame ritual for your own private new moon practice, where you can enter the electric field of the new moon in a state of connecting and writing and talking and radically listening, as Gemini would have it. All paid subscribers will receive a link to join tomorrow. Come if you want to and can!

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This new moon in Gemini

At 7:54pm PT on the of evening of Sunday, June 14th, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 24° of Gemini, Zodiac sign of the Twins, or Lovers. Gemini is our mutable air sign. It’s a part of us that is adaptable, flexible, changeable, in ongoing forever process. Its ruler is our mercurial mental magician planet Mercury, who else? And as an air sign ruled by Mercury, Gemini activates through our conscious attention, our breath and speech, our constantly shifting awareness. If Gemini is not changing its mind, just give it a minute; it will. It’s not built for conclusion and certainty. It enters the world through it curiousness, its wonder. It considers all information potentially interesting and all knowledge provisional. It needs to learn and discover. It needs to stay fascinated, and be allowed and free to follow the current of what’s fascinating. It fundamentally can’t get stuck. I would go so far as to say that Gemini is how we learn; it is how we change our mind; it’s how we rearrange the memory and story furniture, in the inner rooms of understanding. It’s also how we avoid the risk of over-prioritizing stability. We need stability and groundedness, of course, but the world we live in is alive and constantly changing, so we also really need to be able to destabilize intelligently, to adapt and respond. We need to want to expand out of our comfort zones. That’s the only way we will survive, collectively. That’s how we heal and grow and individuate. That’s how the great epic of journey of life unfolds—through the dance of change.

In the northern hemisphere, Gemini is the final sign of spring, and it rules the transition from spring into summer. In the natural world, it’s a very fertile, flowery time. The work of pollination is underway, the serious play of mating and sex is happening, the buzzing and birdsong is everywhere. Life is thriving through the undeniable dynamics of attraction and seeking. Without this stage, the next cohort of life can’t happen, the fruits and seeds and baby birds to eat the fruits and seeds can’t be born. In the psychological or alchemical dimension, this is the stage when fresh consciousness is created, life-changing epiphanies are minted. It’s the crowning achievement of the citrinitas to finally see something you did not see before, that you were not ready to see before, and then for that seeing or insight to come with a clear call for change—and, hopefully, a willingness to pursue that change. Insight at this stage is not purely reflective or intellectual; it’s visceral, embodied knowing. The ascension energies of spring are building up to this, and once we’ve arrived at our moment of enlightenment, our transformation is basically complete. The hermetic vessel breaks open, we are kicked out of the chrysalis for good, for now, and we’re sent out into the world of summer to live in our new form and grow into it properly. Gemini holds both ends of this process inside of it—the height of spring and the beginning of summer; the magic of arriving to a peak experience or fresh insight and being exhilarated by it, and the need to almost immediately move on from it, to not get stuck in it, to go live and explore and seek more.

All of this tells us about what the new moon in Gemini needs. Definitely some fresh scenery, some freedom to change it up, some permission to get a little strange and fractal. Depending on where we are at, we might need a reset of our mind and attention, a break from taking in any more information or stimulation. We might really need to get out of our heads a bit, shake off any stuck or looping stories or thought patterns. We might need to physically get loose and untrapped in the body, and watch how that works to get us looser and more untrapped in the mind. If the mind actually feels pretty rested—amazing—then the reset we might need is more like time meandering around our life and immediate environment in beginner’s mind. We might want to play with not knowing anything for a moment, and just re-entering that sweet space of agenda-free discovery. Like, if you didn’t have to do anything, what would you do? And then do that, and then the next thing you feel like doing, and then the next thing. See what unfolds. We just had a very powerful full moon in Sagittarius two weeks ago, where we were all called into a conference with our big picture, our soul purpose, our individuation destination, and we may have received a little more insight into that then we’ve had before. We don’t need to let that insight go—we should definitely keep our larger intentions and sense of direction and purpose in mind—but Gemini wisdom wants us hold that knowing very lightly. It wants us to know it, remember it, then return to the present moment, to begin again from there.

This particular new moon is getting extra charged by exciting, brand new conditions. This is the first new moon in Gemini with Uranus on deck, and so there’s some birthday party/inauguration/kick-off vibes, for Uranus’ 7 year transit here. It might feel sparky and sparkly for some of us. And some of us might be in a beginning that feels more like a crisis, and that’s real: all beginnings are in some way a crisis. Uranus is known as The Great Awakener. It’s the first planet beyond Saturn, and so it’s stationed beyond the limits of this world. Its energies are “out there,” and it connects us with parts of us, parts of the universe, that we might not know yet. Its job is to breakup old ground and deliver new worlds. Its transmissions tend to be sudden, shocking, sometimes bewildering, they reveal and dash our expectations. I believe it was Miyazaki who said, “In order to grow you must betray your expectations.” We can get more comfortable working with Uranus, in ways that make its energies less of a shock to the system, by developing our own intuitive function, but even then, it will still stay a little wild to work with. Uranus operating in Gemini, I think you can feel it, is extra wild. Partly it’s that this combination of Gemini’s communication genius with Uranus intuition lightning is undeniably a little ecstatic and oracular. It’s also that we just made it through 7 years of Uranus moving through Taurus, which slowed it down significantly, but also amplified its destabilizing effect. Gemini will not be slowing Uranus down. If you’ve been noticing things moving faster, momentum building for big changes, that’s connected to this. Strangely, this faster speed of developments might, for now, feel more stabilizing than the slower speed fall-apart of Uranus in Taurus.

Uranus is still only at 2° of Gemini, and it is in a close-and-getting-closer supportive trine with Pluto, currently at 5° of Aquarius. They are still at the beginning of their respective transits, and they have a long way to go, and their collaboration might not be noticeable in the day-to-day. But over time, they are working on a massive transformation in the air territories of consciousness. If we could see the world to come, we would not recognize it, that’s all we can know right now. So that’s adding so much tangible potency and significance to this new moon. I can also a feel a specific challenge coming through them, to be open to greater freedom than we are used to experiencing or using or believing we have. To trust some wilder currents and storylines. To sense the new forms that want to come through that are, in themselves, liberating. The Pluto Uranus exact trine will be on November 29th of this year, at 3° of Gemini, just 5 days after the full moon at 2° of Gemini, when the current of manifestation now beginning will culminate. So what we start now is connected to that moment, it will be pulled forward by an especially strong Fate magnet.

Gemini’s ruler Mercury is currently at 17° Cancer, where it’s been hanging out with both Venus and Jupiter, who’ve been making out in Cancer’s final degrees since we entered the month of June. So technically, the new moon’s ruler can’t see the Moon—in astrology, we say that events in neighboring signs or houses have a hard time seeing each other, like it would be hard for you to see something happening directly next to you, as opposed to in front of you. But of all the planets, Mercury is less troubled by those kinds of limitations and boundaries. It’s a shapeshifter and a translator and a mover-between-worlds. It doesn’t need a direct line of sight to the Moon to be in contact with the Moon. It feels like Mercury in Cancer is in the future—it’s in the sign where the Sun is about to go, a week from now on the Summer Solstice. It’s also going to spend a lot of the summer in Cancer, it’s going to retrograde there, and is already in the shadow zone of that retrograde. So the future it’s in is also a particularly reflective future. Mercury in watery, nurturing, feelings-steeped Cancer is already very intuitive. A Mercury retrograde in Cancer is likely going to be extremely nostalgic. So it’s giving this new moon some of that mix—enhanced intuition, communications arriving on feelings, future-sensing but also nostalgic and past-sensing. The perfect support for this activation of a new mode here in Gemini, the one connected the Uranus transit. The next 7 years will radically transform how we “think,” making that rational function far more irrational and sensing and intuitive. And that process begins now, on this new moon.

Over all, as this new moon has gotten closer, I’ve just been feeling it radiate this kind of like freebee slot machine energy. Like the new moon wants us to come put a few gold coins in the cosmic time machine, just for funsies. It wants us to pull the lever on the future. There are big winnings ahead. Not material winnings; these winnings are decidedly spiritual. But they will benefit us here on the material plane. I strongly suggest you take some time to play with this energy this weekend and especially at the start of the week. Talk. Write. Draw. Meditate. Clear the line of any static. Retune until you find a clear enough signal. Then listen in. Listen out. Listen to the future. Listen to the present. Reflect back what you think you’re hearing. Notice what resonates. The future is already here, it’s a little bit already here, and your own voice can sense it if you let it. What would surprise and delight you most if it happened? What’s the weirdest, best plot twists you can imagine for your personal life, for our collective? How free would you have to get to enjoy those twists and turns? How supported would you have to be to live the life of your ancestors wildest dreams? What if life were conspiring to communicate its most delicious and desirable secrets to you? Secrets you are uniquely designed to hear and understand and pass on? What if we all nailed it in this life, and the next, and the next? What fresh heavens can be created?

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now the regular extras for paid subscribers: shortcut links to the archive of Gemini writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some journal prompts and specific suggestions for ritually working with the last new moon of spring and this brand new Uranus energy, and a creative writing prompt brought to you by Gemini’s conversational gifts.

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This Sunday, May 31st, just over the bridge of midnight at 1:45am PT, the moon peaks in fullness at 9° of Sagittarius. Sagittarius is our mutable, transformational fire sign. It’s the final sign of the fall season here in the north and it’s a sign of mastery. Not emotional mastery, that’s Scorpio’s territory; and not mastery over the physical, manifest world, that’s Capricorn’s territory. Sagittarian mastery is the kind that grows out of Scorpion emotional mastery, and makes Capricorn material mastery possible: it’s spiritual, philosophical mastery; it’s wisdom. We likely won’t truly grasp Sagittarius and its teachings until we are further into our adulthood, at least at midlife. When its energies activate, we start to reevaluate the meaning of life, and feel a pull towards deeper understanding of who we are and what our purpose is. We experience an expansion of consciousness, a need to seek, a need to connect with our own inner teacher. Its natural affinity is with the 9th house, the house of wandering far and wide, but it’s wandering and expansion is not directionless. Its teachings are connected with the Jungian concept telos, a fated destination, an unfolding that is meant to happen. Sagittarius can instill in us the spiritual sight to know the blueprint we came here with—at least the piece of it we are ready now to know. Appropriately, it’s represented by the half-human half-horse form of the centaur, holding the bow and arrow of the search for Truth. That Truth—whatever it is for each of us—we have to aim for it, hunt for it, quest for it. Sagittarius is teaching us no less than how to create our own philosopher’s stone and then use it to discover our true nature and embody it and enact it.

How does Sagittarius do it? First, as I said, it has to have some serious life experience and real suffering to work with. When Sagittarius takes over in our development process, we’ve already gone through the first six signs that guide foundational self-development. We have come through the lessons of entering the world of relationships, and we’ve been challenged and changed by those relationships (Libra). We’ve also been humbled by the realities of trauma and illness and death, we’ve encountered at least some of the serious adult trials of life, and we’ve been introduced to our prima materia (Scorpio). The transmutation has already begun, and the solutio is underway. Ideally, any part of us not up for all that has done some growing up; any relationship not secure enough to withstand the storms has fallen away; the parts of us most in need of healing and love are receiving healing and love. Now, all of that difficult life experience and struggle, all our dark nights of the soul, they become kindling for the inner fire. We begin to process what we have been through, to learn from it, and to make meaning from it. If the meaning is not readily available, we set off on a quest to find it, to make it. It’s this meaning intuiting and making that is the bright core of Sagittarian’s teachings. It forces us to combine the rational intellectual, the imaginative intuitive, and the sensory emotional. It asks us to use our whole selves to sense what’s true, and to act from that truth. It promises big, life-defining epiphanies if we stay the long and epic course.

On a new moon in Sagittarius here in the north, we are within weeks or days the Winter Solstice. Last December, it came just two days before the Solstice. It’s a time when the darkness is peaking, and our spiritual quest is in its seed state—we know just enough to set off from the known world, in hope of transformation and growth. Our intentions are vague but feel potent. They are pregnant with possibility. We definitely don’t know what we will find—it’s still emerging from the unconscious and unknown. By the full moon in Sagittarius, it’s the height of spring. We are within reach of the Summer Solstice, and the results of that quest for transformation and meaning are in full bloom. It’s the big moment in the citrinitas phase of alchemical transformation. We have maximum light to see by. The ascension energies are as high as they’re going to get. We are on the metaphorical mountaintop, with the largest possible view. We can see what we could not see before, or rather, we are finally ready to see it. This opening of consciousness or dawning of awareness and understanding, and the transformation of the psyche it reveals, is a state of enlightenment. Enlightenment can feel very good, and, it can be painful—it’s often both. For those who seek the true spiritual food of meaning, who want to know their own nature, who want to be on the path that’s meant for them, it’s necessary to endure both the joy of it and the pain of it, to feel it all. That’s what a Sagittarius full moon wants for us—to help us feel connected to our higher purpose, focus our energy on that purpose, and see what we need to see right now in order to stay enthusiastically on the path.

This year, it feels like we need this Sagittarius energy more than ever. With Pluto in Aquarius, surfacing humanity’s deepest wounds, asking us to heal from all this disconnection and isolation and soul loss, trying to wake us up to our true collective spiritual nature and bring us together to face the existential crisis we’re in; with everything that’s been activated by the Neptune/Saturn conjunction in Aries, asking us to stop fantasizing our lives away and giving away all of our power, and instead get to work building our dreams in the real world; and now with Uranus in Gemini, trining Pluto, bringing its fast, wild, revolutionizing energies to our communication and the way we process information? If you are not plugged in to a larger sense of purpose, if you don’t know who you are, and what you’re here to be and do, if you don’t have the protective shield of that, these energies could spin you way way out. And that’s really almost all of us. Many of us are still on the long healing journey of discovering what parts of us are trauma responses and social conditioning, and what parts of us are authentically us; until we are further along with that, it can be difficult to hear our inner voice clearly. Some of us are in the middle of that midlife re-imagining of what we want to be doing, what might fulfill our soul, after a few decades of prioritizing others or our stability and security. Some of us know our purpose, but are still finding our footing around taking the risks we need to take to live it out. Wherever you are at on your path, it’s possible to receive timely support and encouragement from Sagittarius/your higher Self/future you — a dose of big-picture meaning that will help you keep going and reinvigorate your quest.

I want to pause here and acknowledge that not everyone resonates with the word “purpose,” or the idea that you need to have one. That’s fair. I would gently argue that what they are not resonating with is someone else’s definition of purpose, not with purpose itself. I think when purpose is defined as a kind of productive doing and never a way of being, it chafes. Every life is inherently valuable, no matter how “productive” in the capitalist sense. If it exists, it has purpose; its existence is a gift. One’s purpose is united with one’s singular form—it’s the design and destiny of that form. It’s both the process of that form’s becoming and development, and it’s the destination of that process, its final form. I am talking about individuation here, and to use the classic analogy, about how the acorn has the instructions inside of it to become an oak tree. The acorn’s purpose is to grow into an oak tree. Not all acorns may have the chance to grow, they may not find the right conditions, but once they do, that’s what will happen; a rose bush will not happen.

That’s us. We’re all acorns, on our way to being the oak version of ourselves. It’s tough, because we don’t really get to know what that is—we don’t get to see the future, not for certain. We don’t get to see where we are going, where our own story will end up, not until we’re there, at the end. Marion Woodman would always say something like, you have to learn to love the acorn, before you’ve ever heard of an oak tree. That’s one secret, loving the acorn, loving your mysterious self, exactly where it’s at, even knowing there’s so much becoming still ahead, and so much you don’t know. The other secret is: if you do know a little about your nature and purpose, dare to know it. Dare to own your intuition. It is ideal to be process-oriented most of the time, and that’s Gemini’s path of joy—not caring where you’re going, not needing a clear purpose, being a life-long learner, never getting stuck on any one truth, staying open. When someone says that to get comfortable not knowing, to stay with the mystery, it sounds wise because it is wise. But on a Sagittarius full moon, we are being invited to balance that, to go beyond it, to risk grasping the point of it all, to risk solving the mystery a little, to risk having a sense of our soul purpose; to let our process be in a sacred marriage with our endgame.

The conditions around this full moon feel very supportive, but also very new—new energies we haven’t felt before are being constellated. Uranus entered Gemini back on April 25th, the opposite complement sign to Sagittarius, and it will be there for another 7 years, until 2033. That’s the biggest, brightest, loudest aspect to this Moon: an opposition from Uranus at 2° of Gemini. Uranus just had its cazimi a week ago, its renewal in the heart of the Sun, so it’s sparking and ready to go. This will be our first lunation where we get a taste for what it’s going to be like to have a Uranus opposition to every transit in Sagittarius. It’s a lot of wild and liberating energy. I suspect it’s going to “cook the process” significantly. Like any transformations we are meant to go through, we’re about to realize they are very big, very much already underway, and likely to progress quickly. Over the next 7 years of Uranus’ transits of Gemini, we will be going through many exciting and daunting changes, changes that will stretch us and stress us, and Sagittarius will simultaneously be activated to grow in ways that can balance and support that load and that revolution in process. Mercury is also here opposing the Moon at 28°in Gemini. Mercury is Gemini’s ruler, so it’s amping the Sun and Uranus’ power here.

The Moon, on the other hand, is hanging solo in Sagittarius for its big moment. It has a lot of space to feel itself fully, to glow bright. A Sagittarius moon wants to feel hope, and radiate hope. It wants us to have faith in something larger than us. It also wants us to be taking time to process and recover, physically and emotionally, from what we’ve been through. While there’s a lot of energy opposing it in Gemini, and that’s been building tension, it’s receiving a significant support from a blazing fire trine in Aries. The heaviest support is coming in from Neptune at 4° and Saturn at 12°. They are offering this Moon an ability to dissolve all obstacles to greater vision and spiritual understanding (Neptune) while grounding all all incoming insights in the practical realities of where we are at, and what we are here to try and create (Saturn). There are also three asteroids currently in Aries: Vesta at 7°, adding a kind of spiritual fuel for self-actualization; Pallas at 10°, with the gift of strategy and right-action; and of course, Chiron at 29°, reminding us that our era of unconscious self-wounding can be over if we want it to, we can love and accept ourselves exactly as we are, and move and act from that love. Sagittarius’ ruler Jupiter is at 23° of Cancer, where it can’t directly aspect the Moon, but is feeling very good, very resourced and resourcing. It’s entering its final month in the sign of its exaltation, in whole sign conjunction with Venus at 14°, heading towards a Venus Jupiter conjunction. These are excellent ingredients for a celebration of how far we’ve come, of all we’ve risked and lived, of all we now know that we didn’t know before. And they also want to help us use this full moon to kick off the next phase of releasing, getting freer, and pouring all of our insights out onto our life.

If there were any last thing Sagittarius had to offer us, it might be something like this: it’s actually a rare thing to be alive, here in the world of form. For all its inherent struggle and hardship, life is a gift, and time is a gift. To know what your gifts are, and how they want to be cared for and directed and given away, you have to first look at yourself and your life through this frame. Open the gift of this one specific life. Consider that you are here on purpose, to receive this gift, and be this gift. Look back on all that’s happened, and remember your life, and see every part of it as a gift, even the suffering. I’m not saying that suffering is inherently good and meaningful and noble, or that anyone deserves it or should have to suffer, but I am saying that everyone is given a share of suffering. I’m saying—or Sagittarius is saying—that something important happens when we consider the dark, dense matter of life, the mysterious suffering of life, through this lens of the gift, through the lens of spiritual meaning. All of the trauma that happened to you, all of things that “went wrong,” all the limitations and difficulties, all of that has given your life a shape, and granted you embodied empathy for certain kinds of suffering and life experience. It’s taught your heart. It’s uniquely suited you, or situated you, to have a specific story to tell, and to be the carrier of a specific medicine, medicine the rest of us might need and not have. You’ve been granted some very special shit that is yours to turn into gold. On this full moon, see what you can see right now about this giftedness. Open the piece of it you can open now. Call in the courage and fuck it and grace and wisdom it’s going to take to share it.

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Upcoming Live Gatherings

The next live gathering will be Sunday, June14th, 3pm-5pm PT on Zoom on the day of the new moon in Gemini. This will be a free offering for paid subscribers to In the River of What’s Happening Now. I will give a talk on Uranus in Gemini, poetry as a liberation technology, and writing poems as spell craft. Then we will be doing some writing together, in the near approach to the new moon exact. Save the date if you want to join and can!

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now, some extras for paid subscribers: shortcut links to the archive of writings on Sagittarius lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some facts about this moon; and some reflection questions and ritual prompts for working with this full moon; and an accompanying creative writing prompt brought to you by Sagittarius and the greatest mysteries of life.

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Upcoming Live Gatherings

This coming Sunday, May 17th, the day after this new moon in Taurus and two days before my solar return (!), you’re invited to join me and Trinity Capili for How On Earth, a group ritual somatic practice for calling in joy, robust resources, and community resilience to get through these times. The in-person version is sold out, but it is not too late to join us for the online version from 10am-noon PST. A fully sliding scale donation to join, with all proceeds going to support my new nonprofit school for artists and embodied mystics, Inner Doors.

You can put Sunday, June14th, 3pm-5pm PT on your calendar. Just hours before the new moon in Gemini, I’ll be hosting a free live gathering on Zoom for paid subscribers. We will be tuning into the new energies of Uranus in Gemini, and exploring poetry as liberation technology and spell craft. Join if you can and want to!

And now for this new new moon

Saturday, May 16th at 1:01pm PT, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 25° of Taurus, the cosmic bull of earthly power. Taurus is our fixed earth sign, an archetype of rootedness, stability, and generativity in the material world. It’s the steadiest force in the Zodiac, the one closest to the ground. All the earth signs know how to create something out of nothing, how to bring an idea into reality, and they all orient us towards the practical practices of hard work, seriousness, and patient dedication over time. But Taurus is the only earth sign ruled by Venus, goddess of love and beauty, so it is also orienting us towards ways to make all that hard work actually pleasurable. Taurus wants us, first, to slow way down, get close to the earth and our own sensing bodies, and enter the creative, generative process through the channels of pleasure, desire, and needs getting satisfied. What pleases us, and how can we tell? What pleases what we are trying to grow, and how can we tell? What resources would meet our current needs and desires, and how can we create or attract them? How can we more deeply sense the enoughness of the resources we already have? These are questions we need to be asking if we want to not just make something, but make something sustainable, long-lasting, and happy to exist. These are the questions Taurus can answer.

We are arriving at this new moon in the final week of Taurus season, deep into the medicine of springtime. I don’t know about you and where you are, but outside my window right now, the Hawthorn is blooming and snowing its delicate white petals whenever a breeze moves through. There are fresh green mosses and grasses and yarrow fronds everywhere. The lettuces and mustard greens are bolting, sending up little yellow flowers. The tomato plants are still just getting started, putting down roots, invisibly steadying and readying. The air is sweet and cool. The earth is scented and damp from rain. When the sun shines, it’s angelic still, warming everything, encouraging everything, not too hot, not too drying. It’s a brief lesson in how Taurus would have it all the time, and how the Moon would have it too—everything in just the right amount, everything in its right time, everything chill and harmonious, rooted and fed. Gentle incremental change. Change at the speed of happy ferns. It’s hard not to believe right now in the inevitability of rebirth and the persistence of goodness and life and light; it’s all around me; everything is infused with it.

I’ve written before about what I call the Gospel of Neuroplasticity, the central idea that death and disconnection are never the end of the story; that life always finds a way. It’s spring wisdom, citrinitas phase wisdom, so in the Zodiac, Aries is the first chapter of that gospel and Taurus is the second. Aries tells us that no matter what has happened in the past, we can have a new experience now. As long as we are alive, we can change, we can rise and begin again. Taurus teaches us that ones we have received the gift of a new beginning or new pathway, we have to protect it, stabilize it, and nourish it. New forms and efforts are fleeting without the right support. We have to build solid, sturdy foundations, and be solid, sturdy foundations. We have to be rooted and anchored first, to tend that growth before the more visible above-ground growth. We have to be steady and reliable in our attention and care and tending—we have to be ready to be in it for the long game. So a new moon in Taurus is a time to tune into the new beginnings already happening in you, and those you want to encourage to happen. What do those new beginnings or new patterns or new relationships need to have the best possible chance at surviving their vulnerable beginnings? What kind of support is needed to stabilize and “fix” these new forms into a more secure state of being? What kind of time and love and dedication? Are there ways we are expecting things to change and grow without this foundational support, and how is that going for us? Are we at all rushing the process, and is it having the opposite effect? Are we being called to slow it down, bring patience, bring steadiness, reintroduce joy?

Those of you who’ve been reading this for a long time know that I have a pretty hefty stellium in Taurus — I am a Taurus Sun, and a Taurus Venus, Mars, Juno, Chiron, Mercury and Part of Fortune — and I am grateful for the creative capacity and for the grounded steadiness all this Taurus energy affords me. I’ve also had to develop some other muscles to balance it out, to become less afraid of destabilization, more flexible, more spontaneous, and just generally embrace the fact the not all change can be gentle and incremental, nor should it. Take for example the change we need now. If the current authoritarian takeover in the U.S. has done us any favors, it’s in the realm of demonstrating that nothing is as stable or fixed as we thought it was; big change can happen, and it can happen rapidly. While all of the changes they have introduced are bad for democracy, bad for social justice, bad for life on Earth and toxic for the soul, they have broken ground for a re-invention of U.S. society and its structures. It coincided with the closing years of Pluto’s transit of Capricorn, and all of Uranus’ transit of Taurus. Pluto and Uranus have now both moved on to the air signs of Aquarius and Gemini. That heralds a time of revolution and rapid change, and that’s both dangerous and so hopeful. Conditions are good for evolution in the collective consciousness and real, radical re-invention. Those of us on the side of the Earth and sanity and compassion—and there’s way way more of us—can enact changes just as big and just as fast. Maybe even bigger. Maybe even faster. Now that we know, so clearly, that the fundamental unchangeability of our systems was an illusion, we can take actions we once feared were too destabilizing or just not possible to pull off.

Which is also to say: this is our first Taurus new moon without Uranus in Taurus in 8 years (!!!!!!!!) This is our first new moon without the planet of disruptive, electric change in activating conjunction, opposition, and square to the fixed signs. We get to begin again here, without that activation present, but also having been changed by it. Our efforts to put our roots securely into the ground, find our center in the storm, and build new, more interconnected, more intelligent foundations will finally work, and work in a way that stays working. Knowing that rapid change is the energy of these times, that fire and air are going to be working some dramatic transformations, we will benefit greatly from joining forces with this new moon and intentionally resourcing and restabilizing ourselves. A Taurus new moon can also give us clarity about the positive desires we have for new forms we want to grow and what they need. This one in particular can also help us integrate what we learned from Uranus’s transit here over the last 8 years here—how to be both steadfast and intuitively responsive to necessary change; how to be resourced in ways that plan for and allow for adaptation and movement.

The conditions surrounding this new moon want to support all of that. The only major planetary players in Taurus at the moment are the Sun and Moon and Mercury. Mercury is very close to the new moon at 25° of Taurus. Mercury in Taurus grounds the mind and makes our magic slows but reliable. If you’re going to do some creative or healing rituals with this new moon, really take your time articulating your intention. Results are likely to be come in their own time, but be tangible and real when they arrive. Taurus’ ruler Venus is at 27° of Gemini. While that makes it technically harder to contact (neighboring signs cannot “see” or aspect each other), it also puts Venus and Mercury in mutual reception—they are both in the other’s domicile or home sign. So even if the Moon can’t see her, all the psychic lines are open to Venus. She will be able to bless all of our new beginnings here, while also helping us to integrate that Gemini flexibility and Uranian gift for change into our Taurus reset. Jupiter is at 21° of Cancer, in a close sextile to this new moon, offering a big dose of hope, faith, and generosity. Jupiter wants us to ensure that whatever resources we are calling in for ourselves, we are also calling in for everyone else. It wants us growing, intentionally, new forms of collective care. Jupiter is in the final stretch of its year-long transit of Cancer, sign of its exaltation—it leaves for Leo at the very end of June—so its help is very potent right now.

The final condition to note: on the same day is this new moon in Taurus, Mars reaches Chiron for a conjunction at 28° of Aries. Our planet of energy and action is meeting the point of wounding and pain in the sign of self, instincts, and identity formation. It’s a meaningful synchronicity, even if it’s not directly aspecting the new moon. Like a wound is opening or activating right at the time that a new medicine is being made; perfect conditions for receiving a timely dose of healing. If there is any way in which you have over-identified with your pain or wounding or trauma, and if that has led to you re-experiencing and re-enacting it, or staying in a guarded, protected pose in your life, afraid to be truly seen, afraid of fully stepping into your power and being the author of your own life, now is the time to allow a reparative experience in. If you have been unsure of what actions to take in this wounded world, or how much space your allowed to take up, pay attention to the impulses and invitations arriving at this time. Go towards the ones that feel like an affirmation of the creative, loving direction you want to be going in. Go towards the ones that empower you to be a full creative citizen of this holy estate, this sacred Cosmos.

Taurus not only imparts the power to concentrate your attention and love on that which is most valued and desired, it also encodes one of the secrets to lasting success—the development of your consciousness of beauty. Walk that Beauty Way. Tune your attention, moment by moment, to a state of reverence. Notice the beauty in everything. Create beauty by noticing it. If you want something to thrive, appreciate it, revere it, bless it. Give it what it needs by first giving it this kind of loving reverent attention. which will help you sense what else it might need. Beauty can open in the future when we have cleared the way by making the present beautiful. Let beauty fill your heart. Let the gentle rains of spring soak your tender new roots. Let all that you have lived through, learned from, and atoned for from the past be the food for this new stage of growth. Let it anchor you. This is the right time to meet your body’s needs, come back to your center, come back to your ground of being, and when possible, come back to the literal ground. Re-source yourself, resource your garden, resource those you love. The giving and receiving are simultaneous right now. Our roots are interconnected. To paraphrase John Muir, every time you plant a tree, you plant yourself. Every root is an anchor. Let’s get so rooted together. Let’s imagine a world where we all have everything we need to thrive. Then let’s watch that world grow.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now for paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of writings on Taurus in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some facts about this Moon and some specific suggestions and inspiration for ritually working with it, and a creative writing prompt brought to you by the Earth.

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Hey friends — I’m pulling one out of the archives as we are getting pulled into the vortex of another Mother’s Day. If this day is complicated for you by grief, or illness, or all the many other forms of loss, I am especially sending it out to you. I wrote it a year-and-a-half ago, just five weeks after my mom died. It’s a little bit about that, and it’…

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Friday, May 1st, at 10:23am PT, the full moon peaks at 11° of Scorpio, our Dark Queen, our Mother of The Deep Waters. Always arriving in the heart of spring and Taurus season, when fresh life is blooming and rooting, the Scorpio full moon casts its otherworldly light in the shadows. It interrupts our lighthearted spring programming with the timely reminder: death is not a rumor. All that blooms and grows and lives will die. Enjoy your life, live your life, before it’s too late. If that sounds intense to you, you don’t know Scorpio well—that’s Scorpio on its most gentle setting. Scorpio is not here to makes things smooth and beautiful (Libra.) It’s not here to tend and protect our inner children sweetly and steadily (Cancer). It’s here to support us as we go through our initiations into the deep mysteries of adult life—how to meet and be with pain and suffering, how to survive trauma, how to heal and grow stronger from the trials that threaten to break us, how to face illness and death and loss. These are the real “shared possessions” of the 8th house, the parts of life we can only tend together. And indeed it’s a sign that tests the strength, integrity and realness of our relationships with each other. Every attachment feels secure when all is well, but what happens when the shit does down, and we go down with it? How do our intimate partners show up for that? How do we show up for ourselves in that, or for others when they are in it? Who sticks around, deepens their commitment, and rides the big waves? Who helps us get to safe harbor? People who’ve done their work in Scorpio, that’s who. Those who’ve done some rounds in the Abyss, learned how to climbed out, and are currently between abysses. Those who have learned to allow life and love all the way into their hearts, even when it hurts.

Scorpio is the deepest, fiercest, most radical heart medicine there is. It’s the fixed water sign of the Zodiac, but it’s also ruled by the fiery warrior planet Mars, so it might help to think of it as both fire and water, as fiery water. One of my greatest teachers of Scorpion and Taurus energies is the Hawthorn tree. I have two clusters in my backyard. The Hawthorn is like the older, more powerful aunt of the Rose. They come from the same family, they both produce protective thorns, but Hawthorn’s thorns are very long and very sharp; rose thorns look so sweet next to them. In the spring, the thorns create a protective habitat for nesting birds. After flowering in May (Taurus), they grow dark red berries to feed those same birds in the fall (Scorpio). Hawthorn berries are a traditional heart tonic, known to strengthen the heart, lower blood pressure, and improve circulation. They are so powerful, they are one of the few herbal remedies that come with a strong caution to those already on heart medications. Spiritually, Hawthorn supports us in the depths of our grief and sorrow. It can increase our capacity for grief—in body, heart, mind, and spirit—but it also increases our capacity for joy.

All of that is so Scorpio. Scorpio is all of our defenses, all our thorns. It especially wants to protect our hearts, our innocent core self, our youngest or most vulnerable parts—and it wants us to protect that same innocence and vulnerability in others and the world. It arms us with sophisticated psychological and physiological defenses, including the spectrum of fight, flight, freeze, appease responses. Those defenses, if needed and used repeatedly or in an ongoing way to survive traumatic environments, can harden and get stuck; once-effective defensive states become personality traits, family traits, cultural traits. We might be unable to relax them, even when we are safe. They might have done their job too well, disconnecting us from relationships entirely—or feelings, or body sensations—to make sure we never feel pain. At that point, what was once protecting us is now hurting us, preventing us from living fully. That’s when Scorpio’s deeper teachings are activated. They also involve our defenses, but our wholeness-promoting defenses that call us to our deep inner work, our heart-and-soul-healing work—Hawthorn berry work. Scorpio guides us to seek safe-enough spaces with others so we can let our guard down, soften our armor, and call in the healing water of our deepest, most intense feelings—our sorrow, our rage, our fear, our shame, our longing, our powerlessness. Scorpio teaches us that it’s the feelings themselves, along with our discovery that our body can contain them and feel them, with the help of trustworthy others, that does the work of restoring us.

It needs to be said, Scorpio can be a hard place for the Moon to be. The Moon is in its “fall” here, since it’s in its exaltation in Scorpio’s opposite/sister sign Taurus. The Moon is all about gentle, incremental change, steady nourishment and care. A Scorpio full moon is not delivering that. It’s delivering intensity, the intensity required to cut through ignorance and delusion. It makes big, fast waves. It calls things up from the depths that need witnessing and catharsis. It’s trying to galvanize us. Things get really “thick” emotionally—like we are “in the thick of it.” It can be hard on the physical body, demanding on the heart and spirit. The soul loves it though. Loves it! The soul thrives in the Scorpion depths. Soul growth requires that we be called down into the deeper realities and complexities of life, chief of which is that there is no life or rebirth without death, no growth and maturity without facing conflict and struggle. I am not special, you are not special, we all have to go through it. Scorpio often uses the eruption of feelings and conflict to empower us/force us to overcome inner and outer obstacles and discover our strength and ferocity.

Not all lunations affect us personally or strongly, but if you are getting hit hard with this one, I see you. If you were already emotionally saturated, the additional emotion or weight or intensity of this full moon is likely creating a crisis. Trust that if it’s happening now, it’s a healing crisis. Something long-neglected, ignored, unseen might have surfaced to force you to attend to it, to change and grow. Some part of you that has not known love might be up, or some part of you that needs attention and development. Ancestral parts, or ancestors themselves might be here. You might need some additional support, a session with your favorite therapist or body worker or float tank or body of water, or some extra time with your animals and trees and friends. Go towards what grounds and resources you, what builds capacity. You can always lean into Andrea Gibson’s advice—whatever you are feeling, however hard it is, name it love. If we know the feeling or experience as an aspect of love, it becomes something we can accept and be with and do. Love will always illuminate the harbor when we are at sea.

It’s also possible that this full Scorpio moon is casting its light on all the healing work you have done for the last six months. It’s tenderizing you, making you feel full and emo, even activating some crisis, but only so you can properly see, feel, and celebrate how far you have come, all that you have bravely faced, all the healing you’ve given your power and time to make real. It wants you to recognize that everything that’s growing aboveground right now, everything that will grow over the next six months, and all the expansion in capacity you might be noticing and appreciating—it’s been made possible by the hard emotional work you did and are doing now to heal and tend your roots. Take a good long look around your life in this light. See if there is a final layer of this healing you can attend to now simply by witnessing yourself, loving yourself, and committing to being yourself authentically and fully. Integrate it. Update your self-stories. If there are shadow parts not in the shadows anymore, give them high fives, give them new names, welcome them to the team.

The conditions surrounding this full moon are gorgeous, supportive, and a little intense and activating—which in Scorpio is support. Scorpio’s ruler Mars is in its other domicile, Aries, halfway through its transit there at 16°. This feels very fiery. You could read this whole moon just as a report on the healing of your Mars, and how it’s changed and grown in the last six months. Now that it’s back in Aries, what have you been noticing? What’s changed in terms of your relationship with your own power? What upgrades have you received? How’s your sympathetic nervous system doing? How have you grown in your capacity to feel your anger and channel it effectively? How have you grown in your ability to hold anger and compassion at the same time? To hold and enforce strong boundaries and feel mercy and loving-kindness at the same time? What’s still a work-in-progress? Significantly, Mercury and Chiron are in exact conjunction on this full moon at 27° of Aries. So what’s coming for you on this full moon is also, in some way, a direct a continuation of what was activated on the new moon in Aries. Maybe something wants to and is able to communicated at this time with the wounds Chiron has been constellating and healing in Aries, or maybe there is some that needs to be spoken aloud—a boundary, an affirmation, a new story—that deepens your connection with yourself and your power, and enacts more of the changed-state you’ve been longing for. Just to clock it, there will be one more significant activation of Chiron this season—Mars conjunct Chiron on May 16th, the day after the Taurus new moon. So this is all a part of the bigger healing work being amplified this fiery year, around how we each connect to our personal power, how we choose to use it, and how we come together from a more empowered place.

Pluto is at 5° of Aquarius in a whole-sign square the full moon, making sure our collective healing, and its entanglement with our personal healing, is fully a part of that conversation. When is it not? But it might feel extra obvious right now, how so much of our personal struggles are created by the collective structures and dominant cultural beliefs we live inside of. And Jupiter is at 19° of Cancer, making a very welcome and supportive trine to the Moon. If there is any part of what’s going on for you that has to do with healing your relationships with your parents or early caregivers or reparenting yourself (Jupiter in Cancer), it’s fully in conversation with the ancestral parts that pattern (Moon in Scorpio). I’ll share more about my own personal experience with this in the ritual and creative prompts below. But I just want all of us to be tracking that piece of what’s happening. As we grow in our understanding that our trauma didn’t start with us, and that it didn’t start with our parents either, or our grandparents, we grow in our capacity for empathy, and empathy grows our capacity for transformation. Even our oldest, toughest, most inflexible scars can be thanked in a way that softens them; our most rigid defenses can be seen for their incredible work keeping us safe, which makes them receptive to loosening; the rustiest heart valves can be loved in, and oiled, and readied to receive water again.

The last condition I want to acknowledge is that this full moon is arriving on Beltane, on May Day. Beltane is a fire festival marking the midway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. It’s a holy day for celebrating the fertility of this time in the cycle, when the days are longer, the land is warming up, and all the flowers are blooming. This feels like some encouragement for us to lean into the fiery part of Scorpio’s fiery water. If there’s anything you need to call in protection around, consider using both fire and water to do it. Burn away and release any part of the past that is oppressing you, and keeping you from moving into this time of new growth and experimentation. Honor it and thank it—then burn it, and let it go. Then go take a bath or shower or a swim, and wash it away. And! Celebrate all that is growing and blossoming in your life now, because you have done the hard and painful work of healing and changing, even as you recognize there is so much more to do—in your own self, in your family, in the collective. Make offerings to all the ancestors and guardians that have helped you, and are with you now. And, make an offering to the guardian that you are, and to the ancestor that you are becoming.

One day, we will all be ancestors. We will have left a legacy of actions that the world will still be living with. Whether we are remembered consciously or not, the karmic imprint from our lives will remain. Did we lead with love? Were we brave? Did we move through our deepest fears? Did we live freely as our true selves? What part of the work did we take up? What pain and suffering did we face, love, and transmute while we were here? How much hidden light did we find and free? What wisdom did we cultivate and pass on? What beauty did we make and share? How did we help keep the road open for those that would come after us? As this full moon light peaks, get a glimpse of this large weave, this greater cycle. Know that we were once stars, and we will be stars again. And that right now, here on Earth, we are growing the bright love that will one day light the way for others.

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Upcoming Live Gatherings—On/Just After New Moons Because It’s Spring and We Are New

• Sunday, May 17th, two days after the new moon in Taurus, join me for How On Earth—a group ritual somatic practice for calling in joy, robust resources, and community resilience to get through these times. There will be an online version from 10am-noon PST and an in-person version from 2pm-5pm PST held at The Ground Floor, a new baby somatic studio now open in Portland, Oregon. A fully sliding scale donation to join either one, and all proceeds go to provide my new baby nonprofit school for artists and embodied mystics, Inner Doors. More details at those links!

• Sunday, June14th, 3pm-5pm PT, on the day of the new moon in Gemini. This will be a free offering for paid subscribers to In the River of What’s Happening Now. I will give a short talk on Uranus in Gemini, poetry as a liberation technology, and writing poems as spell craft. Then we will be doing some new moon writing together. Save the date if you want to join—more details to come.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now, some extras for paid subscribers: some shortcut links to the archive of writings on Scorpio lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some facts about this moon; and some reflection questions and ritual prompts for working with this new moon; a recording of my poetry set at the recent Miz Kitty’s show in Portland, and the text from one of those poems, brand new this spring; and an accompanying creative writing prompt brought to you by Scorpio, ancestral healing queen.

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Very early on Friday, April 17th, at 4:52am PT, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 27° of Aries, the cosmic ram, our holy shit starter. Aries is cardinal, initiatory fire, primal fire. It’s the first sign of the Zodiac sequence, and in the north, the first sign of Spring. It calls for a lot of physical lifeforce to be unleashed. It calls all of us old-life-forms to shake off the contraction and inner-ness and deep-rest/depression of winter, and all the new life-forms to come out and announce themselves and take up space. It’s the sudden, impatient spark that restarts the whole cycle and takes us all the way out of death into birth. It’s the exclamation point of the Zodiac, only it’s like three exclamation points!!! It’s a lot!!! A lot a lot. A lot of power. A lot of energy. A lot of joy and zing and wow and what just happened. Wherever Aries leads in your chart, it might be where you have the most courage, the most foolishness, the most fuck it. It’s definitely where you have been assigned to learn the great Aries art of being utterly present, completely yourself, and showing up to every moment of every day as if it were brand new.

This new moon is coming at the end of Aries season, which feels like a good, helpful thing—the late degrees of each sign have a more mature energy. There is a massive, impressive stellium of planets lined up for this new moon, a once in a lifetime stellium, and to work with this moment well, we need to draw upon our most mature, most healed, most have-created-this-fire-and-walked-through-it-before Aries selves. It might be a surprise for some of you—based on the Aries you’ve met or the Aries you are—to hear an astrologer suggest that mature Aries energy is possible. As the first sign of the Zodiac, Aries is, in this sense, the youngest sign. It’s associated with both the wild energies of rebirth and the early stages of life that follow. It’s very physical and experiences very little distance between instincts and actions. So it is essentially childlike, and when it’s undeveloped, it can definitely be childish; it can be impulsive and unreliable. But it’s also the sign that connects us most with our spontaneity and joy and playfulness; it’s where we feel most alive, and most the way we want to feel.

In its mature expression, Aries is still in direct contact with its instincts, but those instincts are also informed; they have been schooled and honed by experience. A middle way has been forged between instant catharsis/expression of those feelings and instincts and the need to repress them or hold back—the way of containment. The instinct and energy comes up—no need to repress it, even if it’s big—and then it is felt fully, experienced fully, learned-from fully. From there, in a state of full embodied agency, we choose to channel it how we wish. What could be more powerful than mature Aries energy? Not much. Once we get to have and be both—our innocent core child self and our healed adult self—and once all our energy is unblocked, it’s on. A new moon here can be like the shot of a starting gun. It can get us unstuck, quickly—anything Pisces wasn’t able to unstick, Aries is empowered to move. It can give us exactly what we’ve needed to actually begin a brand new way of living and being.

This new moon is all that but with some very new planetary energies in Aries, and some powerful qualifying conditions. We’ve been feeling that new and different power kindling in Aries for awhile now, since the Saturn Neptune conjunction at 0° of Aries in February. Then the Sun entered Aries on the equinox, March 20th, making conjunctions with both, activating their new energies further and blessing the new era they’re here to make. And if anything was subtle about that for you, it likely stopped being subtle last week, when Aries’ ruler Mars came home and joined the party. Then this week, late on Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, Mercury and the Moon entered Aries. By the exact time of the new moon, the stellium looks like this: in the opening degrees of Aries, we have Neptune at 2°, Mercury at 3°, Mars (in its dignity) at 5°, and Saturn (in its fall) at 7°. In the final, mature degrees of Aries we have Chiron at 26°, and the Sun (in its exaltation) and Moon at 27°. Aries is already, on its own, a lot. Now, well.

I want to unpack all this thoroughly. In the bigger picture, we have entered a time period ruled by Mars to a large degree—a lot of the next two years is going to feel like an extended fire ceremony. That’s because the farther out, slower moving planet of dreams, spirit, and the unmanifest imaginal realm (Neptune) and the planet of limits, form, and manifest reality (Saturn) entered Aries together, initiating a new cycle, and shaping the new era. And to get anything done in Aries, they have to go through Aries’ ruler Mars. Mars is our inner drive. It’s our passion, our courage, our physical energy, our motivation, our need to take action. It gives Aries all its kapow. It’s also the planet of war, and it’s closely tied to our anger and rage, to our fight responses. When Neptune and Mars combine, in the best case scenario, our drive is in direct conversation with our highest artistic and spiritual aspirations. In the worst case scenario, it channels our energy and drive through our delusions, or it produces a kind of wild fire, a boundaryless, unfocused, unmediated rage. Their exact conjunction was on Sunday/Monday, so you may have been feeling or encountering either side of this collaboration, or both. It is truly a blessing, then, that Saturn is also here, guarding and guiding the first two years of the Neptune in Aries transit. Saturn is the planet of limitations, the planet of wise boundaries, the planet of sober strategy and dedicated discipline. It’s the only planet capable of focusing all that fire.

This is the attitude I want all of us to take towards the Mars/Saturn of it all, on this new moon, on the coming Mars Saturn conjunction on April 19th, and for the length of Mars’ transit of Aries (it leaves on May 18th). The attitude of “thank you Saturn.” If you read a lot of astrologers, you already know that anytime there’s a Mars Saturn interaction, a square or opposition or conjunction, it gets flagged as a danger zone, and rightly so. When Mars’ intense energy and urgency to act meets Saturn’s real-world boundaries, it can produce very hard lessons. But many astrologers were also taught to interpret Saturn as a kind of tough masculine authority figure, a cosmic disciplinarian or sky-daddy we can project all our daddy issues on to. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I contradict this whenever possible. (If you want to read me going on about it at length, you will enjoy my essay The Conditions that Give Birth to Luck. Rob Brezsny is also out there fighting this particular good fight!) The short of it is that in the Western mystic tradition, Saturn is not connected to masculine authority, but with the divine feminine. On the Kabbalistic tree of life, Saturn is associated with Binah, the Gateway of Form, the archetypal womb. Saturn/Binah is the maternal, limiting, contracting power that receives, gestates, nurtures through to readiness, then gives birth to new forms.

I want to let that sink for a moment, in case anyone’s hearing it for the first time. Saturn is the creator of form. The receiver. The gestator. The nurturer. The womb. She’s here to teach us how to embrace limitations; how to love our own forms, our highly specific, limited bodies with their highly specific needs and gifts, with limited time down here on this plane. If Saturn’s transits and aspects seems to be harshing us, it’s only because she’s trying to lovingly get us to stop being who and what we are not, and start devoting ourselves to being who and what we truly are. Saturn also wants to teach us what she knows, to pass on the secrets of creative manifestation. One of those secrets is that if we have no limitations, no containment, just total freedom, we can imagine and dream all we want, we can have idea after idea after idea, but either nothing will actually get made, or what we make will not be the thing that satisfies our soul. But if we accept and choose and create right limits; if we build loving, limiting containers and structures; if we devote ourselves to the slow, long game, then we can really get somewhere. We have the conditions in which a real thing can grow.

Put that together with Mars—with our energy and drive—it’s actually the most potent collaboration possible. Saturn is technically in its “fall” in Aries, but that’s just a reflection of their differing natures: Saturn’s slow, discerning, measured energy and her love of structure versus Aries and Mars’ impulsive, fast-moving energy. But these two different energies create ideal conditions for generating something new. They will struggle a bit at first to integrate, (that’s an understatement, I know, we are in it right now), but when they do, they will create the kind of focus, drive, and steadiness we’ve always wanted to cultivate—the kind that creative dream lives are made from. Even more important: they are also creating the conditions in which we can get some real momentum going on our collective embodiment and enactment of the “holy no”—millions of us rising up and refusing, demanding an end to the reign of this lawless death cult—and the “holy yes”—millions of us steadily, joyfully building a new world, whose structures center care, respect, sharing of the wealth, and wise reciprocity.

On a personal level, it may or may not not have been entirely clear before now what the Saturn/Neptune collaboration in Aries was activating for you. Back in mid-February, at the time of the Saturn Neptune conjunction at 0° of Aries, Mars was in Aquarius, in deep conversation with Pluto, planet of soul work and power and all that is hidden, ruler of the mysterious, transformative territory between death and rebirth. Mars’ physical energy was chambered, pointed inward, confined to consciousness. It then had to travel through Pisces, a sign that dissolves self and selfishness, drive and aggression, where Mars has to bathe in the sacred waters of sorrow and compassion and become a warrior for Love. So Mars has essentially been in the underworld, in the afterlife/beforelife. It’s been receiving spiritual lessons, getting trained, getting prepared. Starting last week, that preparation and waiting was officially over. Mars entered Aries, the warrior planet returned home, and while the Sun is still here, in its exaltation, lighting the place all the way up. All of Mar’s fire and energy is now being unleashed. It’s humbling.

With Mercury the magician also here now, this new moon and the current of manifestation its kicking off has a truly wild amount of charge and power and potential. The final condition shaping this new moon’s energies is Chiron. Chiron is our wounded healer archetype. When it gets activated, our wounds get activated; it’s like acupuncture on our pain points. It tenderizes us, and when needed, brings on a healing crisis. The day before this new moon, Chiron is cazimi — conjunct the Sun. And at the time of the new moon, it’s just one degree away. So Chiron is very activated and active on this new moon. That means we might be very activated. And it also means we can’t just use this new moon energy for anything. It wants to used, at leats in part, to bless the completion and actualization of Chiron’s healing work here (Chiron’s transit of Aries began back in 2018, and it completes in 2027). In Aries, Chiron’s been healing our self-connection. It’s been bringing up all the ways we have given away our power, not defended ourselves well enough or at all, and allowed others to define us. It’s been surfacing the false and harmful stories we’ve internalized and turned into beliefs. By the end of its time here, Chiron wants us to know, accept, and embrace our true selves, all the good and the not so good parts, and to proceed from authentic self-connection, self-respect, self-trust, self-care, and real deal self-love. We are sacred beings. We deserve to be treated like sacred beings. And that begins inside each of us, with how each of us sees ourselves and treats ourselves. The deeper we go with this, the more we are able to shine in ways that give others permission to shine; the more we can show up to our relationships and to the world in a good and loving way.

There is a lot at stake right now, and I know you all know it. This is one of those times that historians write about. The world is radically, rapidly changing. To influence the direction of that change, to help write the story we want to be living and move us toward the holy yes of it all, we will need to stand in our power in big, bold, audacious, beautiful ways. The “savior” that’s come to save us is us, is the community; but that collective community is made up of individuals who’ve learned to embody their power and lend it to the work of love. It’s made up of you, knowing your gifts and knowing their worth, caring for them and developing them, and freely giving them. We will succeed because each of us is listening to and trusting ourselves, loving ourselves in ways that allow us to love each other, cultivating joy wherever possible, acting with integrity, and engaging in generative conflict whenever needed. We will succeed, in part, because of you. On this new moon in Aries, locate yourself as the spinner of the web, the teller of the tale—the author of your life. Pull a Mary Oliver, and forgive the dark past for everything. Then ask—what new healing story do I want to tell? What story do I need to live, to know I’ve really lived this life to the bone? What can I do now, to commit to that new story; to promise it that I’ll see it through to the end?

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Upcoming Live Events

• Saturday, April 25th I’ll be reading poetry live in Portland this month at Miz Kitty’s at The Mission Theatre — iykyk. There’s nothing I love more than bringing poetry to not-a-poetry-show and not-a-poetry-audience. It’s a poet’s version of a high wire act. If you are in the area and want to see some music and poetry and have a good time, come out come out!

• Sunday, May 17th, 2pm-5pm, my sweet teaching partner Trinity Capili and I will be hosting the first gathering of a new in-person offering - a 3 hour somatic workshop called How On Earth. If you live in or around Portland, and you’ve been wondering how you will make it through this year, how you will ever protect your sanity and sincerity, how you will stay grounded and loving and joyful in the midst of all this harrowing fucking shit, save that date and time on your calendar. I’ll be sending a separate email out next week with registration information.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now, the extras—1) a gathering of shortcut links to the archive of writings on Aries in In the River of What’s Happening Now, 2) some moon facts and a new moon Mad Lib to help with your reflecting and ritualing, and 3) a generative creative writing prompt brought to you by my mind in collaboration with the current astrology (always!!!! writing is a magical practice!)

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It’s been a minute since I was able to put out any extra content between new and full moons! I spent the winter months focusing on writing a new book of poems, developing a school, doing some personal inner work, and battling the occasional virus like we all have to do in winter — all while running my somatic trauma therapy practice, organizing locally, and keeping my promises to the Moon. And all that was fine, it was plenty—I knew you were all out there too, with so much on your plates and in your inboxes. But as this stellium has grown in Aries, which is in my third house, I’ve been feeling the pressure to do more and write more and say more and be less precious about it. So in honor of this stellium—Neptune, Mars, Saturn, the Sun and Chiron, and so soon, Mercury and the Moon—I want you to have this poem, which I think is in its mood or key. I’ll have more to say on Thursday in the new moon in Aries post, but please let this stellium’s power light you up all the way. Let the safe return of the Artemis crew into your heart. Let the victory over authoritarianism in Hungary last night give you a taste of what’s coming. Mars and Aries is not just wildfire and war and aggression—it’s spontaneous unbridled joy, it’s getting free together, it’s everyone dancing the dance they came here for.

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Wednesday, April 1st, at 7:12pm PT, the moon peaks in fullness at 12° of Libra, cosmic ruler of balanced, harmonious relationship. Libra is our cardinal air sign, teaching us how to initiate life through breath, speech, connection, thoughtfulness, consideration, and cooperative creative expression. It’s a playful, social sign, highly sensitive to vibration and resonance. It’s tasked with drawing us willingly(!) into the second half of the Zodiac development sequence—the half that’s less about discovering, resourcing, and developing the individual self, and more about developing rich relationships with others and being an active, contributing part of the world; the half that leads to the eventual dissolution of the Self into selflessness. Relationships can be a tough sell, depending on our experiences of them. They can be irritating and uncomfortable. They can ask us to sacrifice our own preferences to meet the wants and needs of others. They can lead to painful experiences of rejection. We can be hurt deeply by those who simply don’t know how to hold another’s heart exquisitely. But Libra is ruled by Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, the great heart opener, so she is not daunted. She has endless sweet, pleasurable ways of enticing us out of our reluctance and fear and defensiveness, getting us to consider repair and reconnection, attracting new connections that can actually meet our needs. She is the part of us that knows that our differences are not a problem, but a gift, one we can only discover and appreciate by coming together and setting our hearts and minds to figuring out how to work it out—how to see and hear each other, how to understand where we are all coming from, how to play well to together, how to fight and forgive, how to create win-win situations and share the goddamn wealth, how to enact utopia one meal, one class, one party at a time.

A full moon in Libra is high tide for relationships, in all their beauty and glory and struggle. It arrives in the middle of Aries season, when the Sun is shining its light on our individuality and personal fire and need to be as free as possible to be ourselves completely. The Moon in Libra is like, yes, I love that for all of you, and while you’re doing that, how can we spread that freedom around? How can we be the intrinsically social beings that we are and create beautiful environments where everyone gets to be free, where everyone gets their needs met? How can we use our sensitivity and creativity and appreciation to improve the vibes around here? Libra starts by making us keenly, painfully tuned into places where resources are not distributed fairly, where some people are getting to experience power and freedom at the expense of others, and by using and disempowering and oppressing others. She shows us where systems are only working “efficiently” because they don’t count the real costs, or they devalue and invisibilize some contributions. She wants the fundamental unfairness and injustice of it to make us sick, so that we are moved, forced, to do something about it, to make it right. She wants us striving towards greater harmony and justice and peace. And, in order to do that well, the Libra full moon knows we need continuous support and healing from all the ways we have been hurt in relationship. We need help, over and over again, softening our cynicism and judgement, softening our hardened hearts. We need to be tinctured with the spirit of openness, curiosity, and playfulness, and visited by the angels of trust and compassion and understanding. We need divine intervention to make us want reparation and redemption more than we want to be mad. As the old Libra question goes—do you want to be right? Or do you want to be in relationship?

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On this particular full moon in Libra, conditions are highly pressurized, like music that’s building. One of the biggest, most impactful pieces of astrology this year is the move of Neptune and Saturn into Aries. On the equinox, the Sun entered Aries and—as everything will that enters Aries for the next few years—it had to pass through this new gateway of guardians, making a conjunction first with Neptune, then with Saturn. Now on the full moon, Neptune is at 2° of Aries and Saturn is at 5°, and both are freshly energized and sanctified by those cazimis. Their job for the next two years (Saturn’s transit here will last until April 2028) is to galvanize us into leading the charge for a new world. Neptune wants that world to be highly spiritualized, born from our deepest values and ideals, singing the songs of the Cosmos’ most beautiful dreams. Saturn wants us to commit to building the structures that world will need to actually exist for real—not just in our dreams, but here on the ground. They both have to work with Mars to get it done, the ruler of Aries, so this will be a long, two-year fire ceremony where our anger and its energy will be continuously activated, refined, and channeled into action—into the good fight.

All of that is opposing this full moon in Libra, alongside Chiron, our wounded healer, in the final weeks of its penultimate year in Aries, and Lilith, our fiercest, most unapologetic, most fuck-you-I’m-not-asking-permission part of us—they are at 25° and 24° degrees of Aries respectively. It’s further constellating and clarifying the powerful paradox we are living into right now: that we must become fierce warriors for peace and love. What we are fighting for, and going to war over, is very much Libra’s territory: for justice, for fairness, for beauty; for a sturdy peace, not one built on inequality and the oppression of dissent; for our very right to collective existence; for our right to party, and give and receive that good love from our mother earth, and be free from loneliness and from greed and its illusions and addictions. And the energy we need to fight that fight, that’s Aries and Mars. Mars is still back in Pisces, Neptune’s home territory, being healed and loved on in the spirit world, getting prepared to lead us forward. The world we want, the one we know is possible, we are going to have to fight for it, joyfully, angrily, lovingly, relentlessly. We are going to need our Mars to be healthy, balanced, supported, guided by wise and loving forces. In two more weeks, there will be a new moon in Aries, and Mercury and Mars will both be there—that new moon is going to be some seriously big, potent commencement energy. So consider that this full moon is getting us ready for that. It’s pulling back on the bow in the Sun’s hands, creating all this tension and culmination magic, making clear our desired direction, readying all our potential energy to release and fire the arrow of liberation.

Adding to the potency of this tension, Libra’s ruler Venus, our love goddess, is currently at 2° of Taurus. That is technically out of sight of this full moon, but she just finished her transit of Aries on Monday, so her energy signature there still lingers. Aries fires up a lot of passion in Venus, she burns very hot there, in ecstasy and pain, and now it’s time for her to rest and recover in Taurus, sign of her exaltation. It may not quite feel that way just yet, though, because Pluto is at 5° of Aquarius, so Venus is in a square with the deepest, most intense healing energy there is. That square will perfect on Friday. So before Venus can fully relax into her radiance, lounging in abundant support, being fed fruit—the Venus-in-Taurus-special—she will likely first need to work with whatever Plutonian depth charge has come her way.

It might be bringing up something extremely deep and old and painful and tricky in terms of your personal relationship wounding, something ancestral. Trust that if it’s coming up right now, it’s of vital importance to your future well-being and efficacy. Like your ability to show up fully for the big collective work ahead, and your personal creative contribution, is directly connected to your willingness to heal this ancestral wounding, and be open to restoration and repair. If we want our revolution and our manifesting-a-new-utopia magic to succeed and bear fruit, we have to be up for the inner revolution; we have to be willing to build the healed utopia inside. We don’t do that by cutting off or cutting out the parts of us—personal, ancestral—that have not known love, and become difficult, unloving, and “unlovable” in turn. We do that by including those difficult, unloved, unloving parts. We do it by offering them respect and understanding; by cleaning out the gunk of old dried up grief and anger; by applying ourselves and our love to getting that rusted heart valve open and flowing again.

It always bears repeating: by healing, I don’t mean fixing. What’s happened in the past, it cannot be undone, and it cannot be fixed. Our core relationship wounds don’t ever fully heal, not if we imagine healing as a kind of closing up. They instead create these tender, sacred cracks in us; these holy imperfections; these permanent openings where compassion, sorrow, empathy, and understanding can flow through us, out in to the world where it’s needed. It’s that compassion and sorrow and empathy and understanding that will lead us to the new way of being together—to taking that leap, and enacting the beloved community we so desperately need. If you were out there last weekend joining in the No King’s demonstrations, thank you thank you thank you. If you were otherwise tending well to your people, and staying loving and inspired, and fanning the flame of hope and wisdom, thank you thank you thank you. I wish the cost of our collective mistakes were not so painfully, unacceptably high. I wish that the hatred of women were not so deeply and disgustingly at the root of it all. But I am genuinely lit up by the solar powered, punk rock, mother-loving world we are birthing into being. I am so here for an end to this war against the future.

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P.S. I’ve brought this up on previous Libra full moons, but the Jack Hirschman poem Path distills this moon’s medicine perfectly: “Broken-heartedness is the beginning / of all real reception. / The ear of humility hears beyond the gates.” The secret name of the Libra full moon will always be the Jack Hirschman moon for me. Here’s that poem again, just in case you need it:

Path by Jack Hirschman

Go to your broken heart. 
If you think you don’t have one, get one.
To get one, be sincere.
Learn sincerity of intent by letting
life enter because you’re helpless, really,
to do otherwise.
Even as you try escaping, let it take you
and tear you open
like a letter sent
like a sentence inside
you’ve waited for all your life
though you’ve committed nothing.
Let it send you up.
Let it break you, heart.
Broken-heartedness is the beginning
of all real reception.
The ear of humility hears beyond the gates.
See the gates opening.
Feel your hands going akimbo on your hips,
your mouth opening like a womb
giving birth to your voice for the first time.
Go singing whirling into the glory
of being ecstatically simple.
Write the poem.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now, some regular extras for paid subscribers! First, some appreciation: I truly feel the gift of every paid subscription. Your resources are precious, and means so much to me have your support. Thank you for loving the moon as much as I do, and thank you for your reciprocity. As a little extra thanks, below is the list of shortcut links to the archive of writings on Libra lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some facts about this moon; some reflection questions and ritual prompts for working with this full moon, one of them directly from my mom Lynne; and finally a creative prompt brought to you by this full moon in Libra and our artist inspiration Tomory Dodge.

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Wednesday, March 18th at 6:23pm PT, the Moon goes dark and renews herself at 28° of Pisces. Pisces is our mutable water sign. It’s symbolized by the twin fish of duality and nonduality, forever swimming in and out of existence in the great cosmic ocean of Being. Pisces is the final sign of the winter season and the final sign of the Zodiac cycle. It represents, in many ways, a state of death and transcendence—the loss of material form and achievement of pure formless spirit, or unity with the Whole; total freedom. It also represents what naturally happens next in that spiritualized state—a longing to become something again, the dreaming of new form, and the mysterious and invisible process of inception and gestation, by which that new chosen (given?) form readies to be born. This new moon renewal is happening at the final degrees of the final sign of the Zodiac, and here in the north, in the final days of winter actual; the end of the end. The Spring Equinox is arriving in just two days. So we can likely feel that we are in the more mature phase of Pisces, the readying to be born phase—whatever that means in this most nonlinear of signs. A new moon contraction now, it’s making a point. It wants us to slow down and sync up with the coming Equinox. It wants us to prepare ourselves for rebirth. Some great karmic cycle has finally exhausted its lifespan and its power over us; it’s been over, but now, it’s really over. And, some great karmic cycle is just beginning; it’s been beginning actually, for awhile, but now, it’s really beginning. Something new is finally ready to emerge from the collective unconscious.

This is what Pisces sounds like—prophetic, strange, dancing around something true but not directly sayable, pointing to a kind of knowing that is beyond what can be known. It’s generally only intelligible to those with “the eyes to see and the ears to hear,” as they say, those receptive to signals from the metaphysical realms, the nonmaterial, spiritual dimensions of reality. Pisces speaks in poetry, in parables, in koans and paradoxes and symbols. It uses language in the literal, metaphorical, and oracular modes, all at once. When the Sun is in Pisces, things tend to get very emotional and very visionary, very waking dream. They can also get chaotic and swirly. Definitions and rules and patterns tend to dissolve. Synchronicities abound. Personal consciousness is blipping in and out of awareness of its unification with the collective unconscious. We might feel very lost in the sauce one minute, and the next, feel struck with aliveness and inspiration and understanding. We might feel generally moved, like the world is trying to move us, profoundly, like our bodies want to move, and come out of the stasis and deep rest of winter.

When the Moon joins the Sun here, it’s like all of that but more. Like maybe right now you can feel your own soul, the part of you that is eternally specifically you, lifetime after lifetime; and you can also feel your own spirit, the part of you that not you, but is the whole, the divine spark immanent in you; and you can also feel this bodily form you are now, this sacred animal, with these exact-to-you limitations and gifts, shaped in part by your DNA, and you life experiences, and your ancestors. You might be able to feel the whole of yourself, in other words, in relationship with the whole of the universe, all of it in a state of change and evolution, and you might experience that as both infinitely complex and utterly simple. Then this invitation arrives, the Pisces new moon invitation, to begin again; to start over with living this life, but from greater awareness of that wholeness and its potential.

This particular new moon in Pisces is arriving in the midst of some dramatic, era-birthing astrology, and some seriously apocalyptic and Tower-like conditions here on Earth. The ground is shifting, the future is being rearranged. We entered Pisces season this year in between two eclipses—a solar eclipse at 28° Aquarius, which arrived in tandem with the perfecting Saturn Neptune conjunction at 0° of Aries, the Zodiac point of reincarnation; and a lunar eclipse at 12° of Virgo, coming just after its ruler Mercury stationed retrograde in Pisces. In the collective, here in the U.S., this eclipse season was very big. I’m still energetically in it, or hungover from it, and you might be too; it definitely doesn’t feel tied up or complete. I want to just name some of what has happened. Before the eclipse season activated, we were working with what erupted in the battle for Minneapolis. We were mid-crisis, whatever that means in this poly-crisis, and answering the need to rapidly grow the pro-love, pro-decency, anti-ICE, anti-fascist movement to contain and counter the damage being done at the highest levels of our federal government. We were then flooded, intentionally, on January 30th, with the release of 3 million more pages of the Epstein files, and their overwhelming and heartbreaking evidence of this long ongoing conspiracy to traffic and abuse children and protect those involved, including the current president. The consequences of that were still playing out when four weeks later, on February 28th, days before the lunar eclipse, the U.S. initiated open war with Iran, which included the nightmare bombing of a girl’s school, killing more than 170. It’s accelerated the collapse of the old order, heightened the danger we are all in this year, and deepened our alienation from world allies. It also deepened the gaping wound of this administration—this profound moral injury of being complicit in all this unjustifiable, irredeemable violence, in the genocide in Palestine, all for the sake of this power and land and money grab, by billionaires, under the guise of securing order and peace.

I’m naming all of this for myself, to keep it in my awareness, to not turn away from it, and to ground discussion of the astrology in our earthly lived experiences. It’s one thing to say, “this is an astrology of revolution and war and massive change,” and be imagining the explosive nature of that, the stakes of that. It’s another thing to be living it, in your body. If you have been IN it, in some big chaotic feelings, in the high tide of grief and rage and fear and compassion, that makes sense. And if you have been coming in and out of feeling, in and out of dissociation and numbness, that makes sense too, and is likely just what you should be doing for your survival. Nobody knows how to metabolize atrocity and evil at this pace and scale. Thankfully, the destruction is not the only thing happening. We are also—Pisces especially would want to remind us—seeing the rapid proliferation of courageous experiments in community building and mutual aid and healing. We are seeing people reject the old rules and assumptions outright, and build radical new structures of care we’ve been told our whole lives were not possible.

One of the struggles we are in right now—and that we’ve been in since round two of this administration began—is the need to stay connected and present and paying attention and feeling things, while at the same time, needing to practice a bit of emotional sobriety, or psychological self-defense, because of the psychological warfare aspect of what’s happening. There are people intentionally trying to harm us and put us in a state of overwhelm and disorganization and freeze with a flood of information. We need to protect ourselves against that, and guard the precious resources of our attention and energy and love. We want to have what we need in that department, not just to mobilize resistance and respond effectively to danger, but to put towards creativity and generativity. If we all spend all our time reacting to the latest news, we won’t be doing the thing we really need to be doing—the courageous experimenting, and building models and microcosms of the world as we want it to be, seeing what works in real conditions and what doesn’t. Having some kind of small hand in that, directly, could not be more important at this time. And, can we do it all without shutting down our hearts? Can we protect ourselves and our time, and channel our energies effectively into loving creative efforts, and stay bearing necessary witness, and not going numb to those closest to the pain? I don’t know—it’s a big ask, every day. It’s something I’ve been working on personally for a long time, learning how to keep my heart wide open while also being fiercely protective of my heart, and my people, and the world I love. It’s been very challenging. But I also feel strangely certain that we are built for what we are being asked to learn, and how we are being asked to grow.

And I feel certain that now is the right time to make some sacred vows to ourselves to stay with it, to not abandon ourselves and each other, and to not abandon our own personal dream and soul work for this life. It’s time to replant the seeds or intentions we felt at the Solstice, this time with more feeling. The astrology surrounding this new moon is here to support exactly that. Pisces ruler is Jupiter, benefic planet of expansion, abundance, protection, support, mercy, and loving-kindness. Jupiter is like a direct line to all of our spiritual resources. Jupiter stationed direct last week, and it’s now at 15° of Cancer, a fellow water sign and the sign of its exaltation. In Cancer, Jupiter is especially radiating the medicine of family and nurturance and belonging, both in the direction of the self, and learning to embrace and love all our parts, and in the direction of others. I bet in retrospect we will be in awe of all the mother and father wounds that healed during its transit there. On the new moon, it’s in a near-exact square with our other benefic Venus, currently at 14° Aries. Venus is the planet of love, and beauty, and relationships. In Aries, this love becomes more fiery and direct, more freedom-seeking, more willing to take big risks. So the new moon is receiving a massive infusion of love and energy and support, and Jupiter and Venus will specific boost the power to any intentions or vows or magic spells that resonate with those Cancer and Aries themes.

Uranus is also supporting us, the weird, free, disruptive, revolution-loving planet of intuition, inspiration, and innovation. It’s at 28° of Taurus, in an exact sextile to the new moon. It’s wrapping up its 7 year transit here, so it’s part of what’s giving this moment the “end of the end, beginning of the beginning” feeling. It will be vibe-checking all of our intentions for whether they really serve the growth of the soul, the true longings you came here with, and not just what your mom wants for you, or the culture-at-large, or some other internalized-but-false self.

And maybe the most impactful planet on this new moon is Mercury, magician planet of mind and communication and travel between states and worlds. Mercury has been retrograding through Pisces since February 26th. It’s been asking us to look backward, at the last 2-3 years of Saturn’s transit here, at the last 6 years since the death portal that opened in the spring of 2020, at the last 14-15 years of Neptune’s transit here, maybe even further. Like what are the roots of what’s happening now? How can we integrate that? It’s made an obvious mess of things, and how have I even been able to write this? It’s also been profoundly helpful, making sure that whatever we are committing to bringing into the world, it’s fully and intelligently connected, it’s growing directly out the lessons and the grief and all the life that has come before. The last few days Mercury has been slowing down to stop at 8° of Pisces, where it is now, and where it will station direct on Friday for the Equinox. In the process of slowing down to station, the effect of a planet amplifies dramatically. And to exaggerate this effect further, the north node is also at 8° of Pisces. Mars, fiery planet of passion and agency and fighting and war, the planet we will be working with very intensely this year, is close by at 12° of Pisces—it passed through the north node last week. If we have not been getting the messages and instructions we need to get from Pisces, from the soul, from the collective unconscious, we will be getting them this week.

I know this moon transmission is long, a Pisces moon has no editor, it only knows how to say more, and complexify. And I’m going to try(!) and wrap this up. I hope you are feeling the arrival of this new moon, and the coming arrival of the Equinox, as the life-affirming moments that they are. We are about to cross over that threshold into the territories of rebirth. Spring brings with it the gospel of neuroplasticity. No matter what has happened to you, the gospel says, disconnection is never the end of the story. Neural networks rewire around injuries and generate new paths to get signals where they need to go. Ecosystems restore themselves, and so do we. We aren’t the same of course; we are changed by our experiences, we have scars. But scars can be included and loved on. Old stories can be updated with new meanings. No matter what has happened before, we can decide to be open to having a new experience now. We can decide to grow a new world. And we can put the sunlight of our attention on that new world.

If Pisces had advice for us on this eve of eves, if it could prepare us for coming transition to Aries and spring, it would remind us that readiness is not a thing. If we wait until we are ready, we will be waiting a very long time, we may be waiting forever. Readiness is not a prerequisite to growth; it’s a result of the growth. Action precedes any kind of competence or mastery or understanding. All we have to do right now is not be all-the-way ready, but put one foot in front of the other anyway. All we have to do is follow our loving hearts. Holy fools, driven forward by the call of some wild, wise, ancient part of us. If we do that, and keep doing that, Pisces promises, it won’t matter where we end up; we will want to be there when we get there.

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And now some extras for paid subscribers! First, some links to the archive of writings on Pisces lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now, for those of you wanting to do a deeper dive. Then some facts about this particular Moon, and some journal prompts and ritual suggestions for working with this new moon to manifest your dreams. Then a copy of the poem that I took the title of this email from—”Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know What to Do,” the last poem in my collection Rise of the Trust Fall. And finally there is creative writing prompt brought to you by this astrology and Ray Grasse’s book The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives - enjoy :)

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Tuesday, March 3rd at 3:38am, the moon peaks in fullness near the south lunar node, giving us a lunar eclipse at 12° of Virgo. Virgo is our mutable adapting earth sign, the high priestess of precision and process. It’s the only earth sign ruled by Mercury, the swift-moving planet of mind and language and thought forms, shape-shifting and travel and translation. And so archetypally, Virgo is combining the groundedness and pragmatism of earth, the mutable sign need to adapt and change and evolve, and the gifts of the rational, intelligent, learning and communicating mind. In the northern hemisphere, Virgo governs that late-summer stage in the natural growth cycle when growth and individual expression has peaked (Leo), fruit has been produced, and it now needs to mature and ripen before being harvested and enjoyed and shared. Maturing and ripening psychologically is a process of reflection and integration. How do we solidify all our fresh healing and growth? How do we stop marveling at our insights, stop bumbling their application, stop collapsing into old familiar patterns the moment we meet difficulty or push back? How do we get to the part where we are instead reliably practicing inspired new ways of seeing and living, being in the process of creating, watching awkwardness become smoothness become mastery over time, then enjoying the continuous fruits of that labor?

Virgo knows, and it wants to teach us. The Virgo path to Self-mastery has a lot to do with softening and de-centering the ego, while somehow also honoring the ego and strengthening its ability to do its job in service to the soul. It has to do with creating a more harmonious process in our mundane daily life, and letting go of rigid attachments to specific goals and outcomes. And it has to do practicing mindfulness: that way of becoming aware of your own mind, of how you are seeing, and how that is shaping what you see, then being able to, on purpose, in the moment, change all that. Early attempts at mindfulness are usually pretty harsh. It takes time and practice to develop an inner witness capable of wielding the mind and its awesome powers of attention and observation with loving awareness, and not judgment and criticism. The immature Virgo mind is simultaneously hyper-critical of the self, and hyper-sensitive to any perceived criticism from others. The fully healed, fully realized Virgo mind is able to take in feedback from the self and others, evaluate what’s most salient, and use that feedback to intelligently, lovingly evolve. It’s also able to respectfully discard any feedback that isn’t accurate or helpful. What magic is this, you say? It’s Virgo magic, always setting the highest bar, wielding the most technical of powers. And, Virgo says, it is possible: a healthy, healed, integrated mind, in right relationship with the soul and heart and body, in right service to the world.

Since January 11, 2025, the south lunar node has been transiting Virgo and the north node has been transiting Pisces, and that will continue until the nodes change signs July 26, later this year. So we are two-thirds of the way through the karmic, soul-ordered scouring and undoing and healing of the Virgo part of us (integration, mind, orderly action), with the simultaneous expansion and development of the Pisces part of us (dreaming, feeling, formlessness, soul). In the collective, the south node Virgo transit mirrors a chaotic time of dis-integration and dis-order, the crumbling and dismantling of old systems and ways of seeing and doing things that seemed permanent or were even invisible only a short time ago. On a personal level, there’s a similar, microcosmic project playing out. You may have been receiving opportunities and invitations to outgrow patterns of perfectionism, to further loosen any gripping and clenching and needing to control things you clearly cannot control. Both conscious and unconscious contracts might have ended or be ending. Maybe circumstances have just made it impossible for the default mode way of doing things to continue. In my experience, the south node can operate more subtly and stealthily than the north node, so some of it might be obvious, and some of it might not be. But there has been ego death, transformation, and soul growth underway.

On a typical full moon in Virgo, we’d be trying to actively participate in this healing and liberation. It always arrives in Pisces season, when the mutable water sign is working on melting the frozenness of the winter-state, getting us unstuck and ready to be moved by the upsurge of life-force that comes with spring. Pisces can feel like a lot of emotional chaos, a lot of oceanic swirling and uncertainty, but it gets the job done. Virgo is a mutable sign, too, and it also gets the change-job done, but in a very different fashion. Its full moon often feels stabilizing, practical, like a moment of solid ground in the midst of rising, shifting tides. We might be reminded of the hard lessons of last year that are no-brainers now, and that can be supportive as we face our current growth edge. We might even get some more clarity on what that edge is, and how to stay with it. And then—again, on a typical Virgo full moon—we would get to design and enact some rituals to call in help with going further, especially with dissolving attachments to patterns that have become obstacles to our healing and growth.

On a south node lunar eclipse, all of that is still likely to happen, and more, it just really doesn’t need our directive participation or consent to happen. Eclipses seasons are charged, unstable times. Larger, Fate-like forces have taken over. Life-changing, even world-changing events can unfold suddenly. Soul plots get revealed. This eclipse season has been an especially dramatic one. How are you doing? The solar eclipse in Aquarius two weeks ago arrived in the midst of a perfecting Saturn Neptune conjunction at 0° of Aries, ushering a time where new realities are being born, and the violent, warrior planet Mars would be taking more of a lead. Then last Friday, just as we were feeling more able to process what had happened with the solar eclipse, Virgo’s ruler Mercury, the ruler of this next lunar eclipse, stationed retrograde in Pisces. What could be more destabilizing to Virgo than that? Its ruler is in its opposite sign, the sign of its fall, in a retrograde state of review and reflection, while the south node is activating a big, final phase of clearing. Astrology like this could wipe away any remaining sense of rational, predictable order on this earthly plane. Its effects won’t hit all of us uniformly or personally, but for some of us, this is a wild wild time.

There are a few other conditions worth noting. There is a proper stellium gathered in Pisces, opposing the eclipsed Moon. The asteroid Pallas, as in Pallas Athena, representing intellect, strategy, and wisdom, is in exact conjunction with the Sun at 12° of Pisces. Retrograde Mercury is currently at 20° of Pisces, jamming all mundane communication signals, but opening conversations with the soul. Venus is still in Pisces, at 26°, the sign where she feels most exalted and cosmic, where she has a direct line to the Source of Love. A revved-up and empowered Mars has just entered Pisces, a sign where it can’t take direct or forceful action. At the time of the eclipse, Mars is standing in Pisces’ doorway at 0°. This all feels like we have some clarity about the fight we want to be in, and the action we want to take. But we are being asked to take a beat and consult the soul, and Compassion, and Death itself, the great teacher. A strategy session is underway, and if we want our actions to be aligned and ultimately effective, we need to let that play out. Mercury will station direct on the Spring Equinox, on March 20th, and then it will retrace its steps and enter Aries on April 14th. Mars will be in Pisces soul school until April 10th, when it will finally get to return to its home sign of Aries. So my read is that we will be in a liminal, highly spiritualized transition until then. Mid-April, the picture will fully resolve, Mars and Mercury and the Sun in Aries will punch us hard in the solar plexus, and the spring rise-up/rebirth energies will take off like wildfire. We will want some soul-approved intentions and strategies in place before that happens.

For now, we get to be where we are now. We just need to hear the song this Virgo lunar eclipse is singing. We are, in fact, magical beings with the power to transcend old forms, especially old forms of oppression, victimization, and disempowerment. To activate our greatest abilities to evolve in this way, and to support the collective evolving, we must learn to refine our emotional reactions while not repressing our feelings. We must let our Virgo mind and our Pisces heart and soul be in full, messy collaboration, with Pisces and soul in the lead. This astrology is designed to help us remember and stay remembering our soul song and its guidance at the threshold of a new era. We are being asked to—challenged to, begged to—forsake the particularization of self for participation in the universal dance of life. We are being asked to trust that this is how we actually come fully, all-the-way alive. Be moved by your feelings and instincts, but it’s an eclipse season, so also exercise some patience with the complex, divinely orchestrated process underway. Let an entire, detailed emotional wave play out with all its information before taking any big, irreversible leaps.

Whatever this eclipse season brings, whatever this year brings, we are in it together. Pray to your ancestors and spirit guardians for guidance in this moment, and for sustenance for the long haul, it will be a long haul. As my dear poet friend Carrie Ivy has taught me, as you pray to them, try to feel how they are praying to you right back. There are things we can only do while we are here, incarnated, in bodies, in the mundane, Virgo world; things the spirits need us for. We have opportunities while we are here to be forces of love and compassion, to radically grow, to take direct action to liberate ourselves and each other, to make great works of art with our lives. I feel ready to take this collaboration with soul to the next level, and I suspect you do too.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now the regular extras for paid subscribers! First, some convenient links to the archive of writings on Virgo in In the River of What’s Happening Now. While I don’t offer ritual suggestions during eclipses, I am offering some art-practice-like journal prompts this time, to help us see how our patterns are being interrupted by this south-node transit. And then of course, a creative writing prompt brought to you by this astrology. Enjoy, and thank you for your support of this moon-fueled devotional project.

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, relate with it and adapt it in any way you see fit.)

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Tuesday, February 17th, at 4:01am PT, the new Moon will pass between the Sun and Earth and give us a solar eclipse at 28° of Aquarius, the cosmic water bearer. In spite of its symbol, Aquarius is not a water sign; it is fixed air. In the northern hemisphere, it governs the deep, fixed-air-state of winter, that stage in the cycle when the outer world appears frozen and lifeless, but the inner, invisible world is at its most active. Its archetypal territory is the vessel of the mind, the vessel of conscious awareness, through which all phenomenon flows. It includes our understanding of the mind-as-intellect, and the mind-as-imagination-engine, but it also goes beyond that, conjuring the part of us that can travel through nonmaterial realms of existence, what many call the soul or spirit. Aquarius is like it is the furthest we can get away from the individual self while still being the self, or the most open and expanded version of the self. Because of all this, Aquarius is known for being visionary, far-seeing, future-oriented, operating “outside” the normal bounds. It’s also known for appearing spaced-out, detached, disembodied, and dissociated, and that’s certainly one expression of this archetype. Like someone who is playing a video game and has left their body and the sensate world; they cannot feel or hear anything in their immediate environment because they are so absorbed in this other reality. But at its most mature and developed, Aquarius is, in fact, not disconnected and detached, but hyper-aware and hyper-connected. It’s a portal to this heightened perspective or higher dimension even, from which we can see and feel the interconnectedness of all life; we can glimpse how time itself is not linear, but radial.

This is where Aquarian associations to democracy and humanitarianism come from, this access to collective perspective. But this collectivity goes way beyond the human. It includes all of life, all forests, oceans, spirits, stars. Once we’ve experienced this collective interconnectedness, once we know, we are relieved of some of our ignorance. We are not who we thought we were. We are alive here in the material world of forms, it’s true, but we are of the world of spirit. We are a part of something greater. Each of us is only a fragment of this great diamond of Being, a single wave in the great cosmic Ocean. If we can live our lives remembering this, remembering our wholeness, remembering we are each a part of each other, it will free us from a lot of unnecessary fear, confusion, and certainty. We can stay high on wonder and curiosity and loving awareness instead. We can experience what we came here to experience, learn what we came here to learn. And we can work on imagining and consciously co-creating the world together, again, not just with other humans, but with all of life, with all sentient beings, on this manifest plane and beyond it. That’s what Aquarius wants for us—not a disembodied techno-future, where we’ve put all our resources toward escape, and cut ourselves off even further from life on Earth. It wants a future where we’ve healed and grown beyond the mind-body-spirit split, and the self-other split, and the human-natural-world split. A future where we have evolved to realize greater conscious wholeness. A future where we all know and cherish what we have here on this gorgeous, holy spaceship, this perfect planet for creative dreamer weirdos to live out their dreams.

Aquarius season is a good time to for inner reflection, tending to our mental and spiritual health in the chrysalis dream void of winter, and doing some deep vision questing. New moon contractions in Aquarius tend to amplify whatever our current inner state is, whether that’s harsh or peaceful or both, so that’s what we are usually working with. This is not an ordinary new moon, however; it’s an annular solar eclipse. Eclipses happen when new and full moons occur at or near the nodes of the moon. The north and south lunar nodes are said to be like the head and tail of a great karmic soul dragon, where they head/north is hungry and draws in new energy and growth, and the tail/south releases what is no longer needed. They are currently transiting the Pisces/Virgo axis and will officially move to the Aquarius/Leo axis in late July. This new moon at 28° Aquarius is close enough the north node at 8° of Pisces to make it an eclipse, and that makes this is the first in a series of north node Aquarius eclipses happening over the next two years, the beginning of a new beginning.

Eclipses are, astrologically speaking, like power outages. The Sun and the Moon are our main sources of light, and when that flow of light gets disrupted, it temporarily destabilizes everything. Energies get unpredictable. There are outages and surges. Larger karmic forces takeover more directly and can effect rapid change. This one is practically crackling with Fate. It’s happening the same day as the Lunar New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse, said to portend a high energy year of rapid progress and disruptive change. The co-occurrence of a lunar new year and a solar eclipse is somewhat rare, happening only every few decades. In Chinese tradition, it signals a particularly powerful and transformative reset. Adding fire to that fire, this solar eclipse is conjunct Mars, planet of fire and heat, passion, instinct and impulse, action, anger and rage, and Vesta, asteroid of the sacred hearth fire within, our devotional energies, and the sacrifices we are called to make in service to a higher purpose. They are both at at 19° of Aquarius, degree of the dove, or the promise that peace or spiritual reward will follow a time of conflict. Pluto is also here, the planet of transformation, depth and hidden powers, and soul assignments. It’s at 4° of Aquarius, a degree of ancestral counsel. Uranus, disruptive planet of epiphany, awakening, and revolution, is tightly squaring the eclipse at 27° of Taurus, and this is a degree of perpetual new beginnings. Together, they are all constellating and calling in major revolution in the sign of our collective nature.

This eclipse portal is being consecrated by Saturn, the great Mother of Form and limitation and the traditional ruler of Aquarius. Saturn has just entered Aries (It’s Time), beginning its long-awaited conjunction with Neptune, the Water Father and planet of imagination and dreams, at 0° of Aries, the Zodiac point of reincarnation. I’ve been talking about this coming conjunction for a few years, and will continue to write about it as its energies unfold. Now that Saturn is in Aries, its job will be to bring its forming, focusing magic to the sign of bold, impulsive agency, and it will need to work with Aries’ ruler Mars to get things done. Mars and Saturn together can create a very challenging dynamic, and yes, that’s a clear reflection of where we are at. But at the time of this eclipse they are in what is called mutual reception—they are in each other’s houses—and that’s more likely to create a supportive combination. Imagine Mar’s energy and power get (finally) effectively channeled by Saturn’s discernment and commitment and discipline. What obstacles could we not overcome with these two working together? Adding a final, elegant note to all this hot magic, Venus is currently at 8° of Pisces, making an exact conjunction to the north node on the day of the eclipse. So this is all also being directly consecrated by the goddess of Love, in the sign of her exaltation, in the place she’s closest to the Source of all love, the great waterfall of golden love that surges at the center of the universe. The meaning of this degree of Pisces is a kind of “pull out all the stops” drive to succeed. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate the specialness and potency of this. It’s like reading a particularly beautiful alchemical formula for cosmological metamorphosis. The Sabian symbol for 28° of Aquarius is “A butterfly emerging from its chrysalis,” which reflects it exquisitely.

I recommend pausing for a moment, and letting everything I just said go, except maybe that last image—the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. You already know we are collectively in the midst of revolution. It’s been cooking, it’s already been happening. Occasionally bigger events initiate larger waves, but it’s ongoing. You also already know that you are in the midst of changing and becoming. That might be, in part, a direct response to this outer upheaval and its pressures on your heart and soul and physical safety and security. You’ve likely been working to sense your role in all of this, the people and places you feel called to protect, the values you want to fight for. You’ve been gestating fresh creative responses, shaped by the demands of this time in the collective, and shaped by the gifts you’ve been given in this specific lifetime. I guess I’m saying, everything is changing all of the time, and it’s not a linear process. This is a big moment, it’s true, and it’s going to be a big year. And, it’s just another chapter in the unfolding of this long story. Whatever is beginning for you personally now—and all of us, collectively—it’s been growing its dream roots for awhile. With eventual hindsight, we might be able to see how what’s growing in this moment was seeded in 2020, in that death portal, when Saturn’s transit of Aquarius began. We might see how it’s been dreaming itself up and trying on forms and more actively gestating since 2023, the start of Saturn’s transit of Pisces. And now that Saturn has entered Aries for good, it’s like the seed husk is cracking open, so that this new chapter of life can sprout.

As this new beginning continues to unfold, we are being asked to hold this paradox: that you and your individual life and your personal quest for freedom and becoming matters (Aries), and that the collective well-being and survival and evolution matters more (Aquarius). Your ability to sense what both/either are asking of you is what you have to keep developing and nurturing—your intuition. It will be helpful to let go of any definitions of intuition that require any clarity about the future or the big picture, or seeing the whole lay of the land. The intuition that’s going to help us through this time of rapid change and emergence is very granular, present, in-the-moment. I’ll just speak for myself, I have a lot of planets in Taurus, and I’m built for stability. The times in my life where I’ve had to go through big changes quickly have been so so hard and, of course, good for me, and knowing we are moving into a time of even-more-rapid change feels challenging to welcome. So I’m reaching out constantly—daily for sure, usually many times in a day—to ancestors and guardians and the Earth herself for support and guidance. The messages I’ve been receiving as we’ve been turning into this astrology have all been about spontaneity. Like, don’t focus on the warring and firefighting and speeding fire horse aspects of this year’s energy, and preparing somehow for that turbulence with planning; focus on the playful, spontaneous side of this quality of time, and preparing for that.

Practice not having a clear plan, maybe in smaller, low stakes situations if that really freaks you out. Practice grounding before acting. Practice pausing, listening, and allowing a genuine conscious instinct to emerge, and trusting yourself. The moment of change is the moment when we notice an old response pattern arising, and we pause, and go hmmm, there’s that old familiar impulse again, and we don’t give in to it automatically. That’s the moment of freedom. That’s the moment of change, when we can make a different choice. We can try out others responses and take different actions. You can feel into it — what do you want to try? How do you want to expand your repertoire? And then you just spontaneously try something new, even if you don’t know how it’s going to go. You let yourself learn and find out. Imagine if we could do that same thing collectively. If collectively we all could stay noticing these old patterns we want to interrupt, and collectively we let ourselves experiment with radical change. We are going to learn so much this year! If we keep pausing, noticing, and listening, we will be open to receiving the signals that will move us where we need to go. Trust that you will know what you need to know when you need to know it. Trust that there is an intelligence at work, and you are not separate from it; you are a part of it. Keep this quote from Ursula K. Le Guin close by: “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.” We are the forest. We are going to live.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now, some additional moon content for paid subscribers: a collection of links to the archive of writings on Aquarius lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some journal prompts to ground your reflections about how this eclipse is hitting you personally; an eclipse transmission from the Hanged Man; and a kind of combination ritual-prompt-creative-writing-prompt for those of us who practice writing magic.

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So much of the game we are playing with astrology is about the deep twin mysteries of timing and circumstance — two things we just don’t have control over, ever. You don’t need astrology to know yourself, or to know the archetypes and metaphors that are alive in your life. You don’t need astrology to set intentions for your …

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I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy.

—from Adelia Prado’s “Serenade”

Sunday, February 1st at 2:09pm PST, the moon peaks in fullness and madness and holiness at 13° of Leo, the cosmic fire cat. Leo is the fixed fire sign of the Zodiac, the only sign ruled by the Sun itself. In the northern hemisphere, Leo oversees the stabilization and amplification of the energies of summer, when the Sun is at the height of its solar power and heat, and so much of Life is preparing to bear fruit. And so Leo is intimately connected with the sol/soul purpose each of us came into this life with, the fruit we are here to bear. Even if Leo is not your Sun sign, it’s communicating with it, supporting it, tangled up with it—the Sun rules any house or territory that Leo leads. If it is your Sun sign, then you already know—everything about Leo is tuned the laws of radiance. Leo knows each lifeform has a specific vibration that it is here to vibrate and be and cultivate and share. You have a specific vibration, unique to you, a way you were made to shine, and a story you are here to live and express, and Leo wants to help you feel it and own it and be fearless in expressing it. Should you have lived many lifetimes already, should you have many more lifetimes to come, this lifetime still matters; you have never had these exact gifts and limitations before. This specific, holy, limited body, and the life you live in it matters to your soul’s development and to the development of the cosmic soul. Wherever you are at in the conscious discovery and integration of all of this, rejoice, because you are here! Which means you are already doing it!

A Leo full moon is an extravagant moon, as far as moons go. It can be a loud moon, or a quiet moon, but it goes big in its own direction. It wants to call our attention inward, toward the inner fire, the small sun in each of us that burns regardless of outer conditions. it wants us living and expressing from that inner fire. It comes every year in the heart of winter, during the cold, crystalline, fixed air season of Aquarius, when the external world appears at its most lifeless and frozen, and the Aquarius Sun is announcing the supreme un-importance of the singular Self or lifetime. Aquarius wants us to remember our true collective nature, the great ocean of being that this life is just one momentary wave of; it wants us to stop identifying as singular waves, and start identifying as that ocean. Leo is like, give me a minute though, because this wave!! This life! I’m so in it! Look at me being in it! The tension that arises during a Leo full moon comes from any opposition that exists between the tides of the collective (Aquarius) and the tides our own individual being (Leo). There are times in every seeker’s life when that conflict feels impossible—like what does my life matter? What are my gifts even, how could they measure up? Or how can I possibly make art or dance my dance or focus on myself and my desires when the collective situation is so dire and demanding? There are also times when the tension feels creative and invigorating, like we are discovering and living out in real time the Venn diagram where our personal gifts meet the needs of the world. When it’s less of an opposition and more of a complementary integration, when we stop seeing it as either/or and we feel the both/and of it.

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I’m hoping we can lean into the possibilities of that second option—that the Leo full moon calling us into greater integration between the desires of our personal creative lifeforce and the needs of the collective. Because if we are not doing that, it’s probably going to hurt. Right now there is a massive constellation of energies in Aquarius, a stellium that starts with Pluto at 3°, Mars at 7°, Vesta at 11° , the Sun at 13°, Venus at 19°, and Mercury at 21°. Pluto is the planetary god of transformation and soul work. Mars is the planetary god of fire and judgment and will and what we want to fight for. Vesta is the asteroid that represents the sacred fire within, our committed and devotional energies, and the sacrifices we are willing to make in service to a higher purpose. The Sun is the Soul and Solar consciousness, our instincts to shine, the source of our energy and light. Venus is the planetary goddess of Love, the beauty way, emotion, and relationship. And Mercury is the planetary god of the mind and language, travel and connection and both-ness and between-ness, communication and magic. All of that is constellated in the Aquarius, sign of our true collective nature, our collective consciousness and Cosmic anima, our spiritual and intellectual commons, our instincts to ascend and transcend, the way we imagine and evolve new states and forms and futures. The individual self still technically exists in Aquarius—it doesn’t completely dissolve until Pisces—but it loses all its illusions of separateness. So that is a lot a lot of pressure on us right now, to be tuned in to this collective transformation, to get into this fight to protect each other, to protect our planet and our future, to get clear that there are higher callings than our own life and comfort. What the lone Moon in Leo is listening for and advocating for, standing opposite all of that, is how we can do that and stay with the calling of our personal creative lifeforce, our individual style and way, our personal body and heart, our need for free and full expression, our own story and its importance.

For real, it is a tall order right now. And if there’s something (or many things) in the way of you knowing where and how to channel your love and protection and creativity and fight, or having the physical bodily energy to respond to this moment the way you want to, this is a potent moon for praying and ritually calling in support and healing. Later this year, July 26th to be exact, the lunar nodes are going to move from the Pisces/Virgo axis to the Aquarius/Leo axis. That means the south lunar node will enter Leo, and the next two Leo new moons will be south node solar eclipses, the second one a total solar eclipse. And that means that starting with this full moon, Leo will only be receiving currents of liberation for the next few years, no proper currents of manifestation. The south node releases and clears, heals and liberates and ends all things that are no longer in sync with the soul. It’s a full moon current, but Much-Larger-Forces-Are-At-Work-Sized, Fate-sized. Starting with this full moon, Leo is an active site of healing and clearing and release. Many astrologers are predicting a hard two years for mad kings and billionaires (fingers crossed), and possibly for ordinary egos, too. We can all see and feel how this is playing out in the collective, in a fight between constitutional democracy and fascist authoritarianism or religious monarchy, like the healed and re-empowered Aquarius energy facing off with the dark and unhealed side of Leo. On a personal level, it could signal that it’s time to actually heal the wounded ego in you that feels so insecure about your own worth and your offering, because it hasn’t received the right kind or amount of validation from others, or because life or the world hasn’t turned out the way young-you imagined it would and was counting on. That part of you needs some love, and, it needs to be decentered; it needs to return to right relationship with the whole. I’m getting nervous just writing this. Even though I’ve done a lot (!) of that healing work already, another part of me knows I will be challenged to go further.

This year will be a trial by fire—it is already—but it’s one we can meet together. The people of Minneapolis have just been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and they have shown us and are showing us the way. We are each being called to be creative mavericks and sturdy leaders, while also joining up with our communities and following the lead of others, being excellent collaborators and co-conspirators, playing small-but-mighty roles in the revolution. There will be high amounts of conflict this year, and tower-like conditions where structures shakes and threaten to fall. There will be opportunities to protect what and who you love, to know yourself through your small and big loving actions, to be exalted love, courageous love, Love on fire. If the intensity of what’s happening is scaring you, that’s ok, let it scare you. But also let it purge you of ignorance and spiritual shortsightedness. Feel the arrow of your own soul. Feel anger and grief and fear as they arise, and let the feelings temper you, let them strengthen your heart and your resolve. Feel your convictions getting sharper, clearer. Practice taking loving actions in the direction of personal creative calling AND collective care and mutual aid, starting small, starting imperfectly, building up muscle and capacity to respond and act.

Also - have compassion for the heartbroken and cynical who say that what others or you are doing isn’t enough, that we are wrong to take small or imperfect actions. They come by their critiques honestly, and have a right to their feelings and judgements, and you have a right and an existential need to learn and experiment and create right now, in your own way and style. Ignore them, and defend yourself against any attempts to shame you or shut you down. Go towards the encouraging voices, the teachers and guides, the welcoming energies. Go towards the voice of your own inner teacher, your own soul. Go towards what inspires you to act, what fills you with wisdom and courage. Guard yourself against what drains your spirit. Tend your body and your energies and your creative fire in the ways you know work for you. Rest when you need to. Act when you need to. We are going to stay at this, together, taking turns, as long as it takes.

If each of us does our part, we will be something to behold. I want to close with the words of another poet, our poet ancestor Dianne DiPrima, from her Revolutionary Letter #8:

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down. 

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And now some extras for paid subscribers

For those you who are interested in coming to a live gathering, hang tight. I have been offering my services to some community work, as I’m sure so many of us are right now, and my free-time is spoken for in the month of February. But I do have some plans in the works, and will announce them as soon as I can.

Below are the regular extra offerings: some shortcut links to the archive of Leo writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, a link to my article on how to prepare for eclipse seasons, some journal prompts and specific suggestions for ritually working with this full moon and the arrival of Imbolc, and a generative creative writing prompt in the inspiring key of Leo.

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Before I begin, I want to send love and power to all my friends and kin in Minneapolis, the city under greatest active assault by the ICE agents who “surged” there this last week in the aftermath of the killing of poet and mother Renee Good. Thank you to all of you there who are demonstrating and witnessing, who are not complying, who are looking out for each other and caring for each other in ways that are really not radical at all in a Midwest winter. Thank you to all of you who are making it possible for those people to be doing what they are doing, by handling the child and elder care, tending the sick and injured, de-icing sidewalks, handling the foundational mutual aid, feeding neighbors in hiding. Thank you to all of you who are down for the count, tending to your own healing, but still taking the time to send up prayers. All of your actions in the face of this horror are inspiring a deeper awakening to what is happening in our country right now, and modeling what it looks like to fight back. I know you’d rather be doing anything else — like who the fuck has time for this? Nobody does. But also, everybody does, because there is no other choice. You are doing what has to be done, just as the people of Los Angeles, Chicago, and my home city of Portland have, just as the people of the cities targeted next will, showing them we will not be frightened into silence and inaction while they hunt and gun down our fellow human beings. We see you Minneapolis, and we are with you. I was reminded this week of something poet David Whyte wrote about courage: “Courage is what love looks like when tested by simple everyday necessities of being alive.” Our love is being tested right now. Our love will be tested this year. Courage comes from the heart, it comes from love, and have you met love? While I am sad, and afraid, and so angry, I am also full of love, and so are so many of us, and it’s only growing.

On to this new moon…

Sunday, January 18th, at 11:52am PT, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 28° of Capricorn, the holy sea goat. Capricorn is cardinal earth, third and most-aged and wizened in the progression of earth sign teachers, which are all about practical creating and making life in the physical world. Ruled by Saturn, queen mother of boundaries and form, Capricorn invests us with hardiness and pragmatism, keen instincts for discipline and right effort, sincere desires to commit and follow-through—all that it takes to make things that are solid and real. And in Capricorn what we are making is big, public, collective structures, bodies of work, offerings to future generations. It is the climber of tall and grueling life mountains, the swimmer of deep and terrifying life seas, the builder of cities and governments and libraires and legacies. It’s not a sign we can fully understand and embody until we are in the peak maturity of our adulthood, when we have the most potential agency and power, but are also weighed down by the greatest amount of responsibilities. Many of you reading this are there; you’re raising children, nursing dying elders, leading organizations, teaching what you have mastered. And you will know in your body what I mean when I say Capricorn is a weight-bearing god, a burden-carrier, as the Earth herself is. It speaks life and wisdom and courage into the parts of us that are designed to bear the weight of the world, and designed to give of ourselves and our gifts in service to something greater. Capricorn calls us to our big work, the work we have to get ready to get ready to get ready to do; the work we have to practice with great humility over many years to do well; the work we have to grow into having the skill and capacity to do, over the course of a lifetime. It also calls us towards each other, to do the kind of work we can only do together, sharing the collective burden of our survival.

The Moon, ruler of Capricorn’s opposite sign Cancer, is in her detriment here. I’m sure you could feel it reading that last paragraph. I’m sure you have been feeling it this last week, as this new moon grew closer. Capricorn can be very hard on all the Moon requires we be soft and patient with—our sensitive bodies, our tender feelings, our inconvenient needs, our inner development process. Capricorn is the sign most likely to override all of that, so that it can keep working and doing what needs to be done. It also has a tendency to turn everything into work, even what does not need to be work. If Capricorn is hanging out with kids (or adults?) who are playing spontaneously, “being” different characters and acting it out, it really wants to turn that play into a full-on theatre production, with sets and props and schedules and a 5-year plan for going on tour with it. I’m a Capricorn in my 12th house of spirituality, the immaterial world, and and the personal and collective unconscious, and rather than just doing some personal dreamwork and shadow work, I went to get a PhD in Depth Psychology, which stretched and stressed and developed me far beyond my capacities, took 6 years to do, and even then only delivered me to the beginning of my real work. So a Capricorn new moon is not, in its nature, a relaxing moon. It’s not the kind where we easily rest and reset. But it does invite us to tune in to one of our greatest teachers.

The deep spiritual lessons in Capricorn are, as you are no doubt picking up, about work, and how we can meet the hardships and challenges of life in this world. Whatever our work is, when our motivation to do it is driven by shame, or oppressive forces within or without, or by expectations that family or society or tradition is forcing upon us, we can still do that work. Shame and fear and the need for security in a social order are all effective motivators. But the energy and determination they create in us is joyless, half-hearted, grim, resigned; over time, working like that crushes the spirit, not to mention the effect it has on the body. When we are driven instead by love, and a deep, devotional commitment to the necessary labor of love, we find the work actually feeds the spirit. It is still hard. It still asks too much us. We still feel tired, and may not feel equal to the challenge. A part of us may be longing to rest—but never to give up. That’s what Capricorn is trying to teach us—how to find what and who we love, and then enter willingly and whole-heartedly into commitment to love, so that we can then discover and surrender into the territories devotion. Devotion plugs us in to a larger, loving purpose, and especially to the drives of the soul. When it does, greater forces can move us and move through us. They can even move us out of our own way, and into transcendent states. They can help us tap a deep vein of joy, and buoyancy that actually lightens the load. Effort becomes—if not completely effortless, invigorating, inspiring. It’s no longer “I have to do this,” it’s “I get to do this.” Or, even better—”we get to do this!” At this point, the difficult mountain starts to feel like an actual honor and pleasure to climb. That’s what we will need this year.

The astrology of 2026 is turning point astrology. It’s going to call us out of dreaming and into action. The extremely dissolving energies of 2025, which made getting our feet under us and getting any momentum going not impossible exactly, but extremely challenging, are going to resolve into more decisive movement. This is our first new moon of 2026, and it’s very late in Capricorn, at 28°, a degree of cumulative Capricorn mastery. It’s flanked by Mercury and Mars, both at 26° of Capricorn, which is a very serious stellium. Mars in Capricorn is constellating a lot of power, ambition, and drive, and its tightly coupled with Mercury’s strategic awareness, quick thinking, and ability to integrate new information. Even small moves at this time may be extremely effective. That’s because this is not our first rodeo. This new moon is standing on the shoulders of all the big adult initiations you been through since the Winter Solstice of 2020 and that Saturn Jupiter conjunction. It is resonating back to the intense initiations of 2024, which saw four Capricorn lunations. It wants you to feel how far you have come, how many life mountains you have climbed and summitted, even as you find yourself at the foot of another mountain. It wants you to look around and remember that this world was made. We made this world. And we can make another.

Capricorn’s ruler Saturn is at 27° of Pisces, in its final weeks of its Pisces transit, in a near-exact sextile to the new moon. So the new moon especially wants us tuning in with what Saturn has learned by moving through the dissolving spirit waters of Pisces, which put it in direct contact with our soul dream for this lifetime. That transit was, in part, about getting us to remember that dream and imagine manifesting that dream, for real, by getting real, and understanding the structures, supports, and commitments that it would take to actually do it. When Saturn moves into Aries for good on February 13th, and then realizes its exact conjunction with Neptune at 0° of Aries—the Zodiac point of reincarnation—on February 20th, in the middle of an eclipse season that will be practically crackling with fate, the collective energies will very palpably shift. It will finally be time for the dream that’s been swirling, coming into definition and form, then losing some definition, then reforming, to finally settle into itself, and ready or not, take its first steps into the world. So that may really be in the front of our awareness on this new moon. We might feel called to take some steps or make some commitments towards whatever that is for us.

One other condition worth naming is the trine from Uranus, currently back in Taurus at 27° there, in the earth sign of soil and creative conditions and loving, nourishing foundations. Uranus is the intuitive revolutionary—the tuning fork catching the lightning of the gods. Uranus began its transit of Taurus back in 2018, and its been radically changing our relationship to our foundations and material resources. I’ve experienced it as a direct challenge to the narratives of scarcity that have been driving overwork, over-extraction, over-consumption, and the over-concentration of resources. It’s been transmitting new stories around enoughness and reciprocity. Its transit of Taurus has definitely coincided with bigger and bigger wake up calls from the Earth herself. Having its direct support on this new moon is drawing in those insights and lessons. So this is not a new moon bringing a completely fresh start. This is a new moon for recommitting to integrating and acting on the wisdom and insight that has already come to you, as collectively we stand in an opportunity for radical change.

None of this means you can’t take this new moon moment to just check in with yourself, and do a little diagnostic on your body and heart and spirit. While you’re there, I invite you to also do an inventory of the burdens you are carrying, and how that’s going. Notice where you are taking on too much, or taking on things that are not yours to take on, in ways that are compromising your ability to show up well for what is yours. Perhaps where you are taking on burdens that aren’t human-sized, but collective-sized, planet-sized, god-sized, and you need to hand those burdens over to forces that are capable of carrying them, and supporting you. You need to locate the right-sized burdens, the ones you are designed for, so that you can do your part and do it well. If you haven’t listened to it already, I recommend tuning in with the latest episode from The Emerald—Carry That Weight: On Mythic Burdens and Cosmic Supports. Joshua Michael Schrei has such a good way with words and stories, and he models asking the important, Capricorn new moon question, “What am I, in my current state, actually able to carry?” Even further perhaps, what have I earned the right and responsibility to carry, by going through an alchemic process, by developing the supportive structure necessary within my being and in relationship to the communal being, to properly carry it? That kind of development takes time. Sometimes we are trying to carry what we do not have the support or development yet to carry. He tells the story from the Chinese traditions of a young acolyte, who is eager to have all the mysteries, all the secrets of the cosmos, all the big revelations and insights. The acolyte is like give it all to me now, I can take it. And the master says, “How about this—why don’t you carry a single grain of rice for a hundred days. Why don’t you carry a very small thing, a very long way.” Right.

We are at the beginning of a very big year, where we will all be asked—by each other, by the universe, by our own souls—to step up, and be ready to carry at the very least what we can carry, and to carry it well. We will be served by honoring our real capacity, and taking care to nourish that capacity, and develop more of it, not by being personally individually strong, but through growing our support systems and our root systems and strengthening our relationships. Not a single one of us has to have all the answers, or fix the world, or conquer evil. If only we could! But we do need to follow the call of love, to be in loving and right relationship with the world. We do maybe need to find the small thing that is ours to do, that it is our nature to do, our grain of rice to carry, and then do it, joyfully, and gratefully, for as long as we are here.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now some extras for paid subscribers! First a collection of links to the archive of writings on Capricorn lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now (these archival lists are getting more and more exciting as time goes by, they reveal their own larger stories). Then some reflection and ritualling prompts to support you in working with this new moon, or just understanding how its landing in your own life. And finally, a creative writing prompt for those of us who practice writing magic.

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Just a few days into 2026, at 2:03am PT on Saturday, January 3rd, the full Moon peaks and feels herself fully at 13° of Cancer. Cancer is cardinal, initiatory water, and in every sense, it is the water that we come from, the Water that gives and sustains life. All of the water signs bring us into relationship with this archetype of the Great Water Mother, with Compassion herself, but in Cancer, she feels particularly accessible, embody-able. Cancer is like the water at the ocean’s shore, water you can touch and splash in and swim in, water that ebbs and flows in tangible tides; not the water of the fathomless ocean depths (Scorpio), and not the water vapor ascending and descending from the heavens (Pisces). Cancer is the water that mothers us and tends to us. It’s first-month-of-summer water. Perfect-temperature water. It’s somehow both soft and sturdy, flowing and containing, nurturing and protecting. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so the Moon is in her dignity and full dreaminess and power here. Entering a new year under the light of a Cancer full moon is so special when we get to have it. It’s a very safe and protected feeling, like we are all still little kids, and the Moon is a loving radiant goddess in voluminous robes, and we can hide in them and stay close to her and shielded for a little while from the world. With a year ahead that promises to be a big one, we will take what we can get.

If Cancer could, it would protect us all the time. It knows that no matter how old we are and mature we are, no matter how responsible and committed, we are still incredibly vulnerable, mind-bendingly terrifyingly vulnerable. Our bodies and feelings need constant care and nurture. Others’ bodies and feelings need constant care and nurture, just to stay alive. Cancer is the part of us that knows how to handle that—how to tune in, sense what’s needed, and then diligently, lovingly, steadily provide. It’s the part of you right now that is clocking whether you are hungry, tired, sick, scared—and knows intuitively how to restore well-being, especially if that involves interrupting your self-sabotaging, and getting you to no longer dismiss or override your physical and emotional needs. I hope you are none of those things I just listed, but if you are, that probably makes sense. And the difficult thing about a Cancer moon is that it can make us even more sensitive to any of our unmet needs or dishonored limits. It will exaggerate or amplify symptoms of distress to make a point about where you are really at, what kind of care you need to be receiving regularly, and what kind of behavior change is therefore required.

Most years we get a Cancer full moon sometime in January, and it can deliver this kind of brutal diagnostic—or, equally possible, this rewarding diagnostic, showing us how our deep and diligent care work is paying off, letting us enjoy the wholesome-but-luxurious fruits of that. But if there is tension or conflict between the needs of your body/home/personal life (Cancer) and the needs of your tangible public work in the world (Capricorn), those are likely to be activated and illuminated right now. There really should be tension and conflict there, or at least, there is always more growth and integration work to do. The Moon and Cancer are the Yin to the Sun and Capricorn’s Yang. It’s our need to just be and allow-to-happen versus our need to do and make-happen. The “being” state emphasized in Cancer, however, is not actually just passive. There is a lot of loving, active labor on the being and receiving side of this equation. It is more private and inward directed, and in our current society, of course, this kind of labor—care work and emotional labor—often gets invisibilized and goes unseen. Because of that, we often don’t know its true value. But a full moon in Cancer is a good time to get clear on how essential it is. It is the foundation of all wise action. Even if it is not missing and out of balance in our own individual lives, it is missing and out of balance in our larger collective systems right now—and so we will feel it.

The conditions surrounding this full moon want to make sure we do. First, there is just a lot of planetary energy in Capricorn right now—Mercury arrived a few days ago, and Venus and Mars are both flanking the Sun here, just 1° away on either side. For those that follow the asteroids, Juno and Vesta are here as well. In general, that bodes well for the coming weeks. For once, we get to start off a year without a lot of retrograde-enforced reflection and conditions that are slow grinding halting. Mars is in its exaltation in Capricorn, its at its most strategic, so if we are in a position to take advantage of it, there’s some serious focus and drive and discipline available. Venus is also here softening the hard egoic edges of that with this kind of mature, seasoned, knowing love; Venus in Capricorn love; the kind of love that is ambitious on behalf of the collective. By the time the new moon in Capricorn arrives, Venus will have just moved on, but clear-headed, fast-thinking Mercury will have caught up to Mars and the Sun and Moon. So I’m just saying, there is a lot of good energy constellating in Capricorn right now, and it’s going to be very very good for all the hard adult work we likely have to do. But maybe not right at this moment.

At this full moon moment, all of that energy is in opposition to the Moon in Cancer. The Moon does not love an opposition from Mars, and it’s feeling a lot of resistance to any calls for more hard work and focused grinding. Mars’ energy in an opposition can feel especially aggressive, like its trying to force and push a lot of action. The Moon wants us to pause on taking any outward action, and instead take some time to slow it down, sense our body’s needs and feel our feelings, and allow the completion of more subtle and internal processes, the ones that lead to real insight. It’s gently radiating the wise words of Ram Dass: “The real work you have to do Is in the privacy of your own heart. All of the external forms are lovely. But the real work Is your inner connection.”

The Moon is receiving the epic support of Jupiter, currently at 21° of Cancer and about halfway through its transit (June 9, 2025—June 30, 2026). Jupiter is in its exaltation in Cancer, and though its currently retrograde, it wields a lot of hope and power here, enough to hold some ground against a fired up Mars. Jupiter is like a direct line to the Holy Sky Fathers of Mercy and Abundance, and it has been working on drawing in desperately needed resources to the Cancer part of our lives. It’s been especially attuned to expanding our spiritual resources—the faith we need to meet the difficult challenges of life, the faith that had been receiving blow after blow, the faith we might have been fresh out of. Seven months in to this transit, you can like sense more clearly what Jupiter’s been up to, and how far its projects have come. It might involve some very deep healing and reparenting work, with Great Mother Cancer and Holy Father Jupiter trying to together correct some of the failings and missteps of our early earthly caregivers. It might have made some real progress getting to the root of our fear of receiving real connection and help from others. It might just be helping us work through (finally) some of the effects of 2020 and the pandemic.

There’s so much to potentially work with here. But the most helpful questions of the moment might be more immediate: what do you need to do to wrap up 2025, to close out the last cycle? Emotionally, physically, spiritually? If you spent December in a cold sprint through activity after activity, it’s probably quite a lot. And then what might you need to do to attend to your energy, your well-being, your heart, to start cooking up a state of readiness, a loving and resilient foundation, for the year that is just now beginning? What could Jupiter do for you over the next six months, as this lunar current of liberation unfolds in Cancer? What do you need help getting free from? What allies could it draw to you? What support could it solidify? How can it help you transform the very foundation of your life, and heal you from only seeing and experiencing scarcity, and arrange for your liberation from all beliefs and approaches that are causing you harm?

This year will be one for the revolution books, in ways that we cannot see or know yet. Some brand new paradigms will be taking root and getting some momentum. I might have some time to write about all that in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to just be where we are at—here at the start. If Cancer could impart some wisdom to us here, I sense it would be the basic and familiar: put your own oxygen mask on first. We don’t ever say the next part aloud, but it’s just as important: then, help other people get their oxygen masks on. There’s going to a lot of needing each other this year to help with the oxygen masks. So find a way this weekend to put your own oxygen mask on, whatever that means for you. Be so kind and understanding about your needs, whatever they are, and even if, or especially if, you see them as weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Take them seriously. Treat them as strengths. Really imagine that your wholeness and well-being depend on them being a part of you, granted full citizenship, co-leadership. Let’s go into this year as the needy, vulnerable, next-level lovers that we are, lovers who’ve seen some shit, lovers skilled in granting sanctuary to all that has not known love.

I will leave us with this perfect poem from Maggie Smith, who as usual, is saying it as it should be said:

Rain, New Year's Eve 
        
The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles
you can't shim, the creaks you can't

oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain's plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain's one note
and hear a beginner's song.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

For paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of Cancer writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some specific suggestions for ritually working with this full moon, and a generative creative writing prompt in sync with tides of the current astrology.

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions! Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, relate with it and adapt it in any way you see fit.)

The Cancer archive

Care Is a Doorway - new moon at 4° of Cancer (summer 2025)

Being the Water in a World on Fire - full moon at 23° of Cancer (winter 2025)

Mothering the Revolution - new moon at 14° of Cancer (summer 2024)

Oh Heart, Great Sage of Love, Show Me What You’re Made Of - full moon at 4° of Cancer (winter 2023)

Times are Tender, and Getting Tenderer - new moon at 24° of Cancer (summer 2023)

Open Channel - full moon at 16° of Cancer (winter 2022)

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This Friday, December 19th, at 5:43pm PT, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 28° of Sagittarius. Sagittarius is the centaur and holy archer, the wise one and the teacher; the one that burns bright in spirit, no matter how dark it is, and fires the arrow of hope into the future. In the Zodiac, its our mutable fire sign—the fire of transformation, the fire that changes us and changes the world, the fire that is change. Here in the north, Sagittarius leads us through the final month of fall. It meets us in the deep fixed waters of Scorpio season, in the peak intensity of our descent into the underworld. Sometimes it finds us poisoned by our latest encounters with trauma, illness, and death. Sometimes it finds us exhausted from all our striving, unsure that we have what it takes to keep going. Sometimes it finds us brought so low by our grief we cannot get up. Sagittarius is the part of us that says, “enough.” We can only honor death and struggle for so long; we must also honor life. It dries us off, guides us back to the hearth fire, hands us a hot spicey drink, starts telling us stories and playing us music—warming our hearts back up, lifting our spirits. It helps us to turn our heartbreak into epiphany, about love mostly, and what really matters most. It teaches us how to weave suffering into wisdom, how to broaden our vision so we can see the big picture—the long journey through deep time that our souls are on. And it urges us to rewrite our guiding stories into ones that give us the spiritual sustenance and courage we need now. Because Winter is coming—and we will not make it if we do not fix our hearts, and charge our spirits up, and access a deeper, truer store of meaning and inner light.

This Sagittarius new moon is coming at the very end of its season, when the Sun and Moon are at 28°. Some astrologers interpret the last degrees of a sign as being a bit tired and out of energy—and I think most of us could relate with that right now. I consider the final degrees of each sign to be in the peak of that archetype’s maturity; we are tired at the end of a cycle, it’s true, but also wizened, tempered. The first degrees of Sagittarius focus on helping us see and process the lessons within our struggles—the gold within the shit—and reigniting hopefulness. The middle degrees deliver a more rigorous spiritual training, inviting greater discipline around aligning with our values, putting pressure on us to crystallize a philosophy or life purpose. And the later degrees ask us to live out that philosophy or purpose or spiritual vision fully, to more closely marry our spiritual self with the mundane embodied life, and to consider the offering we want to make of our life—which is the work of the next sign, Capricorn. So we are receiving a new moon renewal at a degree that honors the spiritual work we have already done, the deeper values we have already identified, and the greater or more loving purpose we have already sensed. It wants us to see ourselves as ready to go further in our embodiment of our highest ideals, in living a life where the outer and inner selves are in sync. It wants us to turn our attention towards the offering our souls want to make with this gift of time and life.

The conditions surrounding this new moon are mostly singing that same song. Jupiter is Sagittarius’ ruler, and it’s happily retrograde right now in Cancer, the sign of its exaltation. Jupiter is our planet of expansion, abundance, and wisdom. It’s Santa Claus, but its gifts are spiritual, like loving kindness and patience and mercy. In Cancer, Jupiter has full access to its power to do good—to spread its love and care and spiritual resources around, to be a steady, faithful sky-father. Whatever kind of love and support we need to receive on this new moon, in order to reset, recenter, and begin again, it wants to give it to us. If our Sagittarian inner fire has burned all the way down to an ember, it wants to help us protect that ember and nurture it back to a full flame. Mercury and Venus are both in whole-sign conjunctions to the new moon, in a position to offer their magical support. Mercury is at 10° of Sagittarius, and while it’s in its detriment here, it’s still the fleet-footed, silver-tongued magician. It can still help us find some clarity of mind and good-enough language to carry our intentions. Venus is at 24° of Sagittarius, even closer at hand. She’s the goddess planet of love and relationship and beauty, so she’s not-so-subtly reminding us that love itself is the greatest journey—learning to love ourselves, learning to love each other, learning to love this world, even with all its harsh truths and hard edges. She wants to support any intentions to be epic practitioners of love.

The new moon is also in a tight square to Saturn and Neptune in Pisces—Saturn is at 25°, Neptune is at 29°. Everything that’s been moving through Sagittarius has been receiving a square from this pair for weeks now, a signature that can exaggerate limits, surface obstacles, and sew confusion. They are both moving forward now in Pisces, making their final pass through the last degrees of the sign of the soul and the imaginal realm and the mysterious space between death and rebirth. They’ve been tuning us into the soul dream we came into this life with, helping us dissolve ties with old beliefs and attachments that are in the way of that dream coming into form. Neptune will enter Aries for good on January 26, and be there until 2038. Saturn will enter Aries on February 13th and be there until 2028. There exact conjunction there will happen a few days later on February 20th at 0°45’ of Aries. It’s a major transit at the point of reincarnation. I’ve been talking about it all year, and I’ll be talking about it more in the coming months.

Soon—sooner than we think—it will be time to initiate this new phase of your life, the one you’ve been thinking about and not able or ready to fully commit to. Having Saturn, the planet of limitation, reality, and form, and Neptune, the great spiritualizing force, in the sign of initiation and action (Aries) means there will be a big push to start the real work of manifesting a higher dream for your life and for the world—like leaving behind the gauzy perfect vision of it, and actually getting into the messy, imperfect, on-the-ground experiment of building it. So on this new moon, Saturn and Neptune are adding that pressure and tension. Saturn especially wants us thinking about the possibilities ahead within the limitations of reality and what we can personally take responsibility for. So, not “peace on Earth,” which we cannot be personally responsible for bringing about. More writing that book. Making that album. Starting that organization. Running for that local office. Building that family. Neptune wants us to make sure that whatever that thing is, we will do it in a way that is fully aligned with our deepest values.

Chiron is at 22° of Aries, offering its healing energies in a fire sign trine to this new moon. And we can let this remind us that whatever is coming for us in Aries, we have been preparing for it. We have been healing our relationship with ourselves and our own power and our right to take up space in this world since Chiron entered Aries in 2019. The last six years have been harrowing in so many ways! But Chiron in Aries has asked us to look at how we’ve gotten in our own way, how we’ve wallowed in self-doubt, how we have accepted other’s negative definitions of us. It’s especially shown us how we’ve shied away from expressing our own needs and advocating for ourselves. It’s been taking us to task for all of our self-inflicted wounding, making the consequences of it felt and known. It hasn’t been fun, but it’s been necessary. Because in order to seize the opportunities ahead, we have to claim our birthright to be here. We have to be our whole selves, and love our whole selves, in this exact incarnation.

The timing of this new moon couldn’t be more perfect really. Two days later, on December 21st, the Winter Solstice arrives. The Winter Solstice marks the peak of darkness in the natural world—the longest night—and it’s the moment it all the drama of the balance between light and dark shifts towards the growth of the light. To have a new moon and a Winter Solstice so close together is very special—the moon entering her phase of darkness and renewal at the same time that the seasonal cycle is doing the same. These are very potent conditions for manifesting. The dominant culture has cast darkness as something to be feared and resisted; our collective is oriented around constant light, constant growth. But the power and wisdom of life itself is contained in these dark phases. The darkness is like rich black soil, it’s a field of pure potential. We can plant the seeds of our hopes in this darkness. Then we rest. We surrender to a time of retreat and healing, recharging and storing up our energy, and dreaming the future into being—the secret rites that prepare the way for regeneration.

Whatever wishes and needs your heart is holding, let the new moon in Sagittarius reignite hope for their eventual fulfillment. Let it give you its gift of wisdom and expanded perception. Then let the Winter Solstice give you its magic: freedom from the past, and an ability to simply be happy here and now, full of gratitude for all that you do have, ghost-of-Christmas-present-style, even while its blessings are drawing sweetness and healing into your future. If you feel afraid and full of doubt, if the voice of your own inner teacher is being drowned out by that fear, turn to the teachers that have done you a solid and shown you how to make beauty and meaning from life—the poets, the philosophers, the musicians, the witches and priests and Buddhist nuns, the healers and the caretakers and the wild wanderers. Let their words and their example move you. Let them show you what is possible when you commit to living your life undivided from yourself, and undivided from the world, following the arrow of your own heart.

I know it’s been a dark dark time, and that more darkness lies ahead. I know this world is broken. But we can still be here faithfully in it. The wholeness that individuation promises is not actually a utopian dream; it’s not perfection; it’s truth. It’s the integrity of being all of who we really are. It’s the integrity of holding the suffering and the joy, feeling the despair and the hope. It’s knowing that where we are broken, we are also broken open into new capacity. What will that new capacity be? We have to stay here to find out. I’ll leave us with an end-of-autumn poem from one of my favorite teachers and philosophers, the great poet Mary Oliver, who has done as all more solids than we can count:

When Death Comes 

When death comes 
like the hungry bear in autumn; 
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; 
when death comes 
like the measle-pox;

when death comes 
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything 
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 
and I look upon time as no more than an idea, 
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, 
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life 
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now the extra content and love for the paid subscribers—below the paywall you will find a collection of links to the archive of writings on Sagittarius lunations and Winter Solstices in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some details about this lunation, along with some journaling and ritual prompts for working with this new moon and the coming Winter Solstice; and third, a creative writing prompt brought to you by this astrology.

(Disclaimer: All prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, adapt in any way you see fit.)

The Sagittarius archive (in reverse chronological order)

We Are the Makers of Meaning - full moon at 20° of Sagittarius (spring 2025)

Find the Ember / Fan the Ember - new moon at 9° of Sagittarius (fall 2024)

How Enlightenment Arrives - full moon at 2° of Sagittarius (spring 2024)

How Philosophies Are Born - new moon at 20° of Sagittarius (fall 2023)

The Bright Cord of Meaning - full moon at 13° of Sagittarius (spring 2023)

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies - new moon at 1° of Sagittarius (fall 2022)

The Winter Solstice archive

To Be Sure of the Road, Close Your Eyes and Walk in the Dark - Winter Solstice 2024

The Gods of Winter Retake Their Gorgeous Moody Thrones - Winter Solstice 2023

The Great Work of Alchemy - preparing for the Winter Solstice 2023

The Gift of Contraction - Winter Solstice 2022

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