Broken-heartedness Is the Beginning of All Real Reception

Full moon at 23° of Libra, Venus stations direct

This is “Sunset at Tapestry Lake” by painter Laurie Nye, who painted all the pieces in this Libra full moon issue. Laurie “imagines multiple realities in Venusian weather,” which feels very attuned to where we are at right now, being melted down into colorful, meaningful pools of feeling and time.

Saturday April 12th at 5:22pm PST, the moon peaks in beauty and fullness at 23° of Libra, the cosmic archetype of balance and harmony. Libra is cardinal, initiatory air. It’s connected to the breath, ideas of exchange and adjustment, and all that arises when we seek greater balance in our relationship dynamics: Order, Justice, Equity; Kindness, Diplomacy, Cooperation; Beauty, Empathy, Symmetry. I might also add Pleasing Color Combinations and Sensitive Artists; The Urge to Organize Against Fascism and Throw Good Parties While We’re Doing it. Represented by the golden scales and ruled by Venus, there is an undeniable state of enlightenment promised here. Libra’s like this utopian ideal of right relationship and forever-good-vibes that we may never actually live or live up to, but stay reaching for and knowing is possible. On the ground floor of all that, we have to learn the art of attunement; skillful attunement is what makes right relationship possible. Wherever Libra leads in your life, you might be especially sensitive, aesthetically and emotionally, and you might also have a real gift for creating harmonious dynamics. While solid and secure relationships require much more than all that to develop, Libra’s gifts are foundational to connection and bonding and ultimately building a functional, livable society.

This is our first lunation in Libra free from the south lunar node. The last two years of eclipses in Libra have been exposing our relationship imbalances and shadows—really just hammering us on our gross people pleasing and inauthenticity. We’ve been given ample opportunities to see and heal any unhealthy patterns, especially any tendency towards conflict avoidance. Meanwhile the Aries eclipses have been amping up our Aries-ness, our willingness to use our personal power and fight for what’s right. These eclipses have been preparing us to get into more necessary conflict. But not just from our Aries-power alone; from a healed, stronger, and better-integrated Aries Libra axis. It might just be the light of this Libra full moon, but I can really see this challenging, high-conflict moment in history through her kind of Delphic authority. Libra wants us to band together, to fight together; to use our Aries/Mars power, but stand deeply rooted in the Libra/Venus values of Love and Beauty and Right Relationship. What could be more anti-Libran than individuals who want to concentrate all the power and resources in the hands of a few, destroy the values of diversity and equity and inclusion, dismantle the rule of law and its systems, impose imbalance through violence, and hasten the demise of all life on our planet? What could be more Libran than disempowering all that through the power of love?

This full moon should bring some measure of closure to the dark and confusing multiple-retrogrades-and-eclipses-portal that brought us out of winter and into spring. Like we might finally feel some relief, and a more tangible shift towards the uplifting ascension energies of spring. But it is also momentarily illuminating something tender and painful, as it’s happening in an exact opposition to a Chiron cazimi. Chiron is a centaur—a type of celestial body with the characteristics of both an asteroid and a comet—and astrologically it’s associated with the wounded-healer archetype, and how we transmute pain into power. Chiron has been transiting Aries since February 2019, and while we are in the final years, it will still be here until 2027. I’m sure you’ve all been feeling it in your own special, tortured way, as it has repeatedly activated all our wounds around identity and life purpose. Who am I really? What am I here for? How can I trust myself when I still feel so lost so often? Chiron is going for deep, real, long-term healing in Aries, which looks like getting us to stop abandoning ourselves permanently; getting us to know, love, and trust who we are, and being unfuckwithable in that regard—which so profoundly affects our ability to heal in Libra. When we are secure in our self-connection, and delighted by our own distinctiveness, it sharpens our perceptions of others. We see their distinctiveness more clearly. We delight in our differences, and what they make possible for us to do and be together. We also know what’s right and not right for us, so it allows us to enter into relationships with each other in a much better, much healthier way.

A full moon Chiron cazimi is is definitely an emotional high tide, and it might be bringing up some wounds we would love to be done with. But it will also allow us to get a sense of where we are on that journey, and how far we have come. We don’t just heal and stay healed anyway—old patterns and harsh self-judgments come up over and over again, especially when we are tired and overwhelmed. Over and over, capitalism stirs up our insecurities and fears of being enough. Over and over again, we have to transmute our hard experiences and anxieties into empathy and wisdom and love. As we receive our personal version of the Chiron in Aries transmission so loudly on this full moon, we get the opportunity, again, to meet ourselves and our inner drama around all this with compassion and humor. And we get to choose, again, to do right by ourselves. Are you ready to be done, again, with disempowering yourself? Are you ready to be done with not believing in yourself and your magic? Can you rededicate yourself to your own healing, and to knowing yourself and your needs and getting those needs met, so as to create less emotional labor for others? Can you recommit to recognizing, tending, and offering up your gifts with less fear and self-doubt? Can we free up some more energy for the revolution? The stakes keep getting raised collectively. It would be a beautiful thing over this next year and a half, especially, if we were all coming from a sturdier, more empowered place, and just plugged into to doing our part and using our power together, nonviolently, beautifully, purposefully.

Just as significant as the Chiron cazimi is that on Saturday evening, right after full moon peaks, Libra’s ruler Venus stations direct at 23° Pisces, completing her retrograde journey. She’s been on the ascent for the last two weeks, coming out of the underworld, having gone to the depths of some pain, so you may already have clocked a shift in energies here. It’s like some part of you that’s been going through it is finally coming up for air and coming back to life. If you’ve been doing some heavy lifting emotionally in the last six weeks, there should be some satisfaction coming, and some lighter moods. But! Venus is also stationing direct right next to Saturn, great mother of limitation and form, and the two of them will be basically journeying in tandem together through the rest of April. Venus is in her exaltation in Pisces, and loves to really let loose here, but with Saturn she is constrained. I know we are all ready for the energies to really change, and for conditions to get easier, and for our participation and co-creation duties to get easier. And - our personal lives and work are always in relationship with what’s going on in the collective. The big picture there is that we are in between a time of dissolution and deep dreaming and having beautiful-but-possibly-unrealistic visions (Neptune in Pisces), and moving toward a time of fiery action and experimental work and the fight to make those dreams a reality (Neptune in Aries). Saturn is an integral part of this transition, the path to the actual shape of things to come, and the slowness and steadiness and seriousness she brings is real wisdom. Don’t rush this. As she and Venus confer over the next two weeks, we are being further prepared. And as the spring progresses—Saturn will join Neptune in Aries on May 24th—a lot more will become clear. By June and July, the energies will be dramatically different.

If you’re picking up what I’m putting down, this is a big, beautiful, painful, important full moon, and it’s a good weekend to be with our broken open hearts. It’s also a good time to get back to some moon-timed ritualing. Even just some small gesture of a ritual. A 30-minute cry. A moment with a flower. Writing a short poem. We need it. Or I need it. I have a lot of faith in the power of ritual to help me stay connected to the magic in life that is always there, just underneath the boring and ordinary. It makes life beautiful and enchanting. It’s also how I collaborate with the better angels of my nature, and with benevolent creative forces that are larger than me, to face and balance the destructive forces inside and outside me. And when I have beauty and magic, and I have help, I can keep going. I can stay on the path, and stay remembering that my job is to make more beauty, be a source of love, and keep that path open, for myself, for others, as long as I am here. I am undaunted by the difficulties and impossibilities, unshaken by paradox and not-knowing, unburdened by the stories that I am not enough and I am alone. I am able to carry my grief even, and feel honored to carry it, to be alive still and able to love so hard. I know this is what Libra wants for us—beauty, magic, and help.

The title of this issue comes from a poem by Jack Hirschman called The Path. “Broken-heartedness is the beginning of all real reception” is one of my all time favorite lines of poetry, and not because it’s so beautiful, though it is, but because it’s so painfully true. Jack was an unapologetic Communist. He liked his language strong and clear and medicinal, like shots of vodka; he wanted poems to make people brave, to make them want to rise up against their oppressors. He would agree with Czeslaw Milosz, who said derisively, “What is poetry which does not save nations or people?” Jack died in 2021, and thanks to his poems and his example and his strong spirit, he is still very much here. In The Path, Jack gives us what so often want from poets and do not get: simple instructions. This poem saves me, over and over. I’m going to close by letting it speak, and I hope it takes something hard about this moment in time for you and sweetens it a little.

The 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.

“Tropicalia” by Laurie Nye.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

For paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of writings on Libra lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now, a ritual prompt for working with these full moon energies, and a creative prompt brought to you by Libra, Venus, Beauty, and Freedom.

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

The Libra archive (in reverse chronological order)

The Leap of Faith - new moon solar eclipse at 10° of Libra (fall 2024)

In Beauty It is Ended - full moon lunar eclipse at 5° of Libra (spring 2024)

Shadow Work, or How to Stay Believing in the Possibility of Peace - new moon solar eclipse at 21° of Libra (fall 2023)

What a Beautiful Wreck We Made - full moon at 16° of Libra (spring 2023)

Everything is Vibration - new moon at 2° of Libra (fall 2022)