Go To The Limits of Your Longing

Full moon at 22° of Scorpio

All the art in this issue was created by the abstract artist Bang Hai Ja. South Korean born and based in Paris since the 60s, she aspired in her work to discover light through matter, and to transmit the light within us. She joined the ancestors in 2022, and left us with these paintings she considered to be seeds. The title of this piece is Naissance de la Lumière; it translates to Birth of Light.

On Monday, May 12th at 9:55am PT, on the Moon’s day, the moon peaks in fullness and madness at 22° of Scorpio. Scorpio is fixed water, the deepest water. She is ruled by Mars, the fighter, and represented by the scorpion and its sting. So she combines the qualities of deep feelings, feelings with potency, and the defenses that those feelings constellate. She is Love at its highest intensity. When I picture Scorpio, I picture her as a dark-eyed queen mother, tall and towering, swallowing all the light in elaborate robes the color and texture of midnight. She radiates fury and compassion and terrible knowledge. She demands humility and supplication. Our Lady of Secrets and Sorrow and Sacred Rage. Our Lady of The Most Potent Poisons and Medicines. A fierce, frightening Protectress. She is the fortress you build around everything that hurts in your heart, and your heart itself. When you know her, you know and feel your vulnerability acutely, and the vulnerability of all that you love; the very real fragility of life. You also know the lengths you would go to protect it all—the part of you that would murder to save a child; the part of you that could easily incinerate the lives and works of all who dared to disrespect the Divine Feminine and this holy Mother Earth.

Scorpio’s knowledge and energies and teachings are way way too intense for most of us to stay aware of or embody at length; we cannot feel our feelings at full-strength like that and function. We can touch into them briefly, in contained, sacred settings, where it’s safe to let our guard down and risk falling apart. When we do, she brings profound healing and emotional breakthrough. She helps us to metabolize our impossible-to-metabolize grief. She reopens us to life. She is only telling us the truth, after all, that our powerlessness and our power come from the same source—our ability to attach and love so fiercely in this impermanent, constantly changing world of forms, in a world where we will lose it all. And when we know that, and accept the pain that comes with it, it’s game on.

So a full moon in Scorpio is something to behold. And it’s energy, alive in us, is something to behold. This year, the Scorpio full moon is happening in a loose opposition to Uranus in Taurus, and an even-looser whole-sign-square to both Pluto in Aquarius and Mars in Leo. There is a steadying sextile from Saturn in Pisces, but it’s going to barely counter all that will and force in the Moon and Uranus and Pluto and Mars, all in fixed signs. There is something feral and wild and rebellious in this full moon, explosive even. Definitely honest. If you have felt still-stuck emotionally, if a personal breakthrough is needed, this would do it. It’s also happening in tandem with the earthly force of Mother’s Day in the U.S., which will add some intensity to what for many is an already-intense day of being with their own relationship with mothers and motherhood. It might bring out more of the Scorpion, dark, hidden, or traumatic aspects of that experience. My own mother—who as all of you have been following me for awhile know, died and joined the ancestors last August—would have turned 76 on this full moon. So if you are in it, for all the deeply personal reasons, just know I’m out here very much in it with you. And know this is a perfect full moon for surrendering to whatever is wanting to takeover you, for turning the volume way up on your heart and its grievances and longings—whether that means crying and wailing, screaming and raging, howling with joy and laughter, or letting go of your civility and reserve in some other necessary way.

Collectively, this moon marks a turning of the tide. Six months ago, the new moon in Scorpio arrived on Samhain, in the Days of the Dead. It came just three days ahead of election day in the U.S., when we got the news of what was coming, what we are living through now—the destructive force of a second Trump administration, bent on deranging us and dismantling democracy, the rule of law, and any structures or institutions that could resist or frustrate the efforts of the billionaire techno-oligarch-class to use our public resources to cement their power and advance their insane agendas. The feeling back on that new moon, even before I knew for sure what was coming, was that things were about to get very hard. Harder than we were ready for—or at least harder than I was ready for. The ancestors were telling me to be fearless. The nature spirits were telling me—and had been telling me for months—to reinforce all boundaries and protection spells, to deepen my connection with guardians and guardianship. I was beginning to think about what it would mean to become such a guardian—to make a spell of protection of my life; to go on offense.

As that current of manifestation peaks now, we can see what has grown from that seed—both the chaos and destruction, and our active protective resistance to it. We are mid-metamorphosis. Groundwork has been laid for a massive uprising, and the resistance has been gaining traction. There are big, inspiring cracks in the facade of Trump’s invincibility. I don’t have the time to catalog the gains and losses here, but there are many people out there devoting themselves to it on our behalf, and you could be following and supporting them, just to name a few — Robert Hubbell, Jessica Craven, Heather Cox Richardson, Bill McKibben, Starhawk, Rebecca Solnit. Often on full moons in Scorpio and Taurus, I often feel called to write about the nature of trauma and healing, especially how one of our tasks is to build and maintain a healing vortex, one that is large enough to counter the strength of the trauma vortex. All the people I just named—and so so many more, right? I didn’t even name the people behind Indivisible, and 50501 movement, or any of the attorneys working tirelessly to fight every broken law—they have been crucial in building a counter vortex for our collective, helping to unite every person and organization fighting for racial, economic, and environmental justice, helping us to tie our roots together so that we can properly face this rupture in the fabric of life.

Now, we need to go further in. Now, a Scorpio current of liberation begins. However this full moon is hitting you personally, whatever personal healing you are brewing—and this is a very potent moon for that—please also offer up some prayers for the collective. We still have a ways to go to grow into the guardians that we need to be. We will need to sustain this work of love and protection, demonstrating and speaking out, making art and making sense, growing our numbers and our courage, fighting on every front, from every side—as poet Diana DiPrima would say, no one way works, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. We need Scorpion-level protection and support from all our guides and loving forces to keep building momentum. Many people are imagining and calling for a general strike, as soon as our numbers are big enough, when we hit that magic 3.5%. That’s a best-case-scenario, a nonviolent general strike where we stop the machinery of the economy until our demands are met. While what is happening in the world is heartbreaking, and you would be right to give up your illusions of easy and inevitable progress, what we are seeing now are actual conditions for awakening and massive change. Change we could see in our lifetimes, in our children’s lifetimes. Scorpio would want us to be thinking many generations out. The destruction we endure now, she says, will nourish the soil, and allow for new, healthier forms to be born.

If this is sounding intense, that’s the point. I know we all need to keep functioning, too, and focusing on the everyday, loving and tending all we are committed to loving and tending, chopping wood and carrying water. I know we cannot sustain full awareness of these high stakes all of the time and still do all the things. But there is an invitation right now to stay with it a little longer, and a little longer. Imagine you are building capacity for staying with the trouble, building spiritual muscle and nervous system resilience for more conflict and emotion and intensity. Allow yourself to be changed by what is going on; to be activated and spiritualized; to care less about what really does not matter; to care deeply and searingly about what does. What kind of ancestors are we going to become?

As I was tuning in to write this, and calling upon Scorpio for her wisdom about how to navigate the deep waters of life, I kept hearing Rilke’s famous line of poetry on repeat, “Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” It’s a line that makes its way around on social media from time to time, usually without the context of the whole piece it comes from. And rightly so. Those few lines alone are good medicine. But the whole poem says more; it contains the full dose. I think right now we need the whole poem. So I am going to close with its bright knowledge:

Go To the Limits of Your Longing
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

For paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of writings on Scorpio lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now, a ritual prompt for working with this wild full moon, and a creative prompt brought to you the Taurus/Scorpio vortexes.

(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 Scorpio archive (in reverse chronological order)

You Are A Powerful Protection Spell - new moon at 9° of Scorpio (fall 2023)

How We Heal - full moon at 4° of Scorpio (spring 2024)

The Darkest Hour - new moon at 20° of Scorpio (fall 2023)

The Gift of a Healing Crisis - full moon lunar eclipse at 14° of Scorpio (spring 2023)

Emotional Supernova - new moon solar eclipse at 2° of Scorpio (fall 2022)