How To Be Yourself At the End of the World

New moon at 2° of Leo

Matthew Palladino is both a painter and a sculptor who got into art first as a teenager through tagging and graffiti, art as a risky, communal adventure. He is now known for his playful, psychedelic watercolors, He says he was not interested in traditional painting until he discovered watercolor, which was not what he expected: “the immediacy and permanence of it, the delicacy… It has a bit of a mind of its own. You can guide it but you can never truly control it.” Just like the creative lifeforce itself. To work with it, he says, you have to commit and have faith. Another thing he says: “The world might be doomed, so we may as well let loose and be ourselves.” And thus he is our Leo new moon inspiration. The paintings in this letter are all portraits of San Pedro Cactus, which look to Matthew like old gods, full of wisdom. This first one he named Blooming Pedro.

Thursday, July 24th at 12:11pm PST, the moon goes dark and renews herself at just 2° of Leo, the cosmic fire cat. Leo is the fixed fire sign of the Zodiac. It’s job here in the northern hemisphere is to stabilize and amplify the energies of summer—a time of bright light, hot heat, rapid expansion, and deep outer flourishing in the physical realm. In our human developmental cycle, it’s akin to adolescence, a still-innocent-but-maybe-not-totally-innocent time that emphasizes self-sensing, personal desire, and the development of our individual creative talents. Leo basically wants to advance the creative potential of every unique being, and it likes to do that by firing up the joy engines, getting us in on pleasure and fun, and bringing on a lust for life experience. It wants us out there with our hearts wide open, feeling it all, then telling it all, which is actually very vulnerable. To make this level of vulnerability possible, it gives us plenty of free, unearned courage. It advances our embodied agency, and revs up our healthy and playful aggression and our love of drama, all while putting instinctual pressure on our need for authentic self-expression and our need to be seen and heard and beloved for what we are expressing. That’s why Leo is like what it is like—why it’s known for being like, look at me! Love me! Tell me all about my best features! Leo is ruled by the Sun, and really, we all are on some level; the Sun is the hot fiery boss of all life. And during Leo season you can really feel it—there is part of you that was born to shine, to radiate from the burning, honest, soulful center of your being. We are all suns, here to bring our very specific form of light to the world.

A new moon In Leo can feel all kinds of ways. The Moon usually loves the heightened sensory pleasure in Leo, and the playfulness and ease; it doesn’t always love the pressure to perform or lead. The Sun, however, is in its dignity here, it’s at the full height of its power. So while every new moon is a sweet renewal trip for the Moon into the heart of the Sun, this one can be a little bit extra sweet. The Moon is getting all of the Sun’s warmth and generosity, all of its generativity and molten gold genius. Think of how applying warmth softens and relaxes the muscles of the body. Think of how it increases circulation and flexibility. A Leo new moon can help us relax and surrender, not just to life, but also to our own selves, to our own style, to what feels best for us, to what we know in our hearts. It can dose us with our own life force, which then gets to do exactly what is in its nature to do.

The conditions surrounding this one are complicated and intense, so I’m guessing few of us are finding this moment in time just relaxing and easeful. It’s maybe more like there’s a dance between the parts of us that know how to find ease and cultivate ease, and the parts of us that are really aware of the challenging everything is. Mercury stationed retrograde at 15° of Leo last Thursday, and will keep us looking in the rearview mirror until August 11th, when it stations direct at 4° of Leo. This new moon is at 2°, so just before the shadow zone, and that might be helping a little. But in general, this is the area of our lives getting a little messy right now. Mercury is the writer, the thinker, the speaker. So there might be communication issues. There might be full thought reversals and a need for workarounds and course corrections ahead. There might not be. Mercury is also the magician, and when the magician is in a state of reflection, rather than forward motion, we might want to do the same, magically speaking. It might not be the best time to initiate a brand new creative project, but instead, to review what we are already working on, clarify what’s going the way we thought it would and what isn’t, adapt, rearticulate our vision, and feel from there what we can solidly, wholeheartedly recommit to.

There is also an exact fire trine to this new moon from Saturn and Neptune over at 1° and 2° of Aries. They are slowly retrograding back towards Pisces where they will take one final pass at preparing us for this next big phase of our lives. So this new moon is directly connected to whatever we have been slowly, excruciatingly, lovingly working on there, our own personal drama of rebirth. And finally, the most impactful aspect—the Leo new moon is receiving an exact opposition from Pluto in Aquarius. If there were a power in the Zodiac that rivaled the power of the Sun, it would be Pluto. Pluto is like all the radiant dark matter behind this visible universe. It instills great fear in us, the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, but it also instills fascination. Pluto is all the mysterious secrets of transformation, all that happens between death and rebirth, all the soul secrets. Pluto transits bring changes in life that are total and irreversible, in accordance with who you really are, not who you think you are. As Lao Tzu says, “Darkness within darkness. The gateway to understanding.” So Pluto is deepening the field for this new moon profoundly. Leo and the Sun want to coax us into our true selves through warmth and courage and playfulness. If that’s working, great, but Pluto is here to remind us that we are short on time. It’s later than we think. We have an entire way of life to transform, radically different futures to seed. We need to work through our fears, now. We need to breakthrough anything still holding us back from full throated expression and participation. We all need to be adding our creative energy and personal genius to the group field, contributing in our own way and style. We need to be motivating and uplifting each other, acting and speaking collectively to protect ourselves and protect this green world, and all the holy beings just trying to live in it.

And now that I’ve hit the gas pretty hard, I just want to say—we are doing so good. Really. I see us. I see me. This is a hard, hard time. The dominant tone for so long has been one of grief, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to be fighting evil, greed-possessed, planet killing billionaires. I don’t want to be eulogizing family and friends. I don’t want there to be a ruthless, menacing police state, frightening and kidnapping the best of us. I don’t want there to be war, and starvation, and genocide, happening right before my eyes. I don’t want to be carrying so much sadness and guilt. And none of that matters, except in the privacy of my own heart, where I have to keep working this out, seeing how much of it I can feel and hold, the good and the unbearably bad, both. Seeing how vulnerable I can let myself be. Seeing how to keep coming back to the work creating, and being with what’s happening in that way.

The collective traumas of this moment, not to mention our personal losses, they are bringing about a massive shift in identity for all of us. We don’t get to go back to how things were before, before the pandemic, before the cancer diagnosis, the war, the fascism, the hurricane, the fire, the death. We have been initiated into a new form. There is no going back. The thing that helps me is not carrying any of this alone, and letting myself be really witnessed through this rite of passage, and witnessing as many others as I can. I hope for all of you reading this, I hope you can feel this too, that you are not carrying it alone, that you are not going through this rite of passage alone. I am here. Everyone reading this is here. There is this entire web of life with us, too, and this web of ancestors, and this web of descendants even. I am not really afraid of this Pluto in Aquarius time, because ultimately this is what it’s about, it’s revealing what it is we really are—a tightly interwoven community of beings, a family of lifeforms, connected in ways it is hard to properly see, but that we don’t really need see to feel and understand. As we allow ourselves to turn to this deep collectively more and more, listening for each other’s wisdom, and the wisdom of the mint, the trees, the cactus, the salmon, the stars, we will be guided toward reconciliation with our own natures. We will be guided toward the change and care-work and beauty-making and world-inventing that is ours to do.

We are all officially invited to breathe through this wave of intensity, and, if we feel like it, dance. That would probably be the Leo-est thing to do. Put on some music and dance it out in the kitchen, or on the back porch, or wherever you are. Something upbeat and pop-y and manipulative, maybe a little house-y—like right now in my head, I’m hearing Rhianna and Calvin Harris’ We Found Love (In a Hopeless Place). That’s definitely what I’ll be listening to sometime in the next few days. If Leo had one last piece of specific advice for how to work with what’s happening in its axis with Aquarius, it would be to remind us of our individual power and where that comes from. We are all individual beads in Indra’s net, if you know that myth. We are ourselves, and, we each contain the whole universe, and we are all centers of the universe. Your job is to be yourself, then, on purpose. To receive yourself completely, so you can express yourself fully. To come alive all the way, as alive as you can come. To greet this incarnation that has chosen you, and choose it right back. Forgive all that parts of you that are ashamed, and forgive all the parts doing the shaming. Recognize and welcome all your gifts and all your flaws. Soften around all of it. Be all of it, be whole, be you. That’s where your power is, and it’s a lot more power than you think. As we each do this work in ourselves, we become able to do this work with others and in the world—the work of welcoming, forgiving, repairing, and remembering. Our collection individuation is dependent on all of our personal individuations. So be you, exactly at the stage of you-ness you are at. Trust your instincts. Trust your gifts. Trust yourself to receive the love of others, and the gifts of others. It’s enough. We are enough.

Matthew Palladino - Crested Medusa

Summer Moon School posts still arriving soon + the next live process group

First, as always, thank you for your patience. I believe in letting death and grief interrupt my life and make a mess of things. The death of Andrea Gibson last Monday was like a bomb going off, if a bomb could be made of light and love and healing metaphors. Andrea, our Leo Sun, Scorpio Moon. For a full 48 hours, my feeds had no news of war, no news of further patriarchal evil, just Andrea: photos of Andrea, Andrea’s poems, Andrea’s voice, and tributes from lovers and friends and fans and strangers, so many who had been changed and buoyed in their darkest hours by Andrea’s beautiful work. So I spent the time set aside for writing things for you all here just grieving and connecting with other people grieving. I let all my memories of them sink in, and their extraordinary last four years, and their powerful legacy and example of wholeheartedness. I went back through some of my favorite posts from their Substack—Things That Don’t Suck (which you can still subscribe to! Andrea’s wife Megan Falley will be slowly releasing their unpublished work there, and tending their legacy).

I also pivoted the live process group planned for last Thursday to an honoring of their life. After a little astrological weather report, we listened to Andrea’s poem on the lifegiving benefits of befriending our mortality. In it, they write “Awe is the most powerful medicine in the world. / I have never felt awe and shame at the same time, / awe and loneliness at the same time, / awe and judgment at the same time, / and nothing wakes us to awe more than life’s brevity. / which is to say forming an intimate relationship / with our mortality could not only save us, / it could save our world.” Then we took a moment to look at the last week (or longer) of our lives through Andrea’s eyes—through their practice of awe and amazement—and write a few moments down. And then we shared our moments of amazement with each other. It was profoundly moving for me, to hear all these testimonies, about everything from the big wild synchronicities to the small moments of ordinary beauty and grace—thank you to everyone who came, you know who you are, it was a balm to be with you. I left feeling so full and uplifted, like some of the heaviness of the life had just dissipated.

Now, life continues on, and somehow I carry Andrea with me even more than I ever have. It’s something I’m learning from losing my mom, too, who is now more present in my life than ever. It’s something Andrea spoke to in one their recent poems, writing, “Dying is the opposite of leaving….I am more here than I ever was before.” I am realizing this: if the dead never really leave us, if their legacies linger on in more ways than we can ever fully perceive or understand, it becomes an actual moral obligation to live our lives wholeheartedly, being real sources of love in the world, and leaving legacies of love in whatever ways we can. Every moment of love will endure.

So, onward, hearts bursting. I plan to polish up that next Moon School post on the building blocks of the Zodiac symbols and get it out as next week begins, but I will also just keep adapting to the currents, and trusting the great life river over any specific plan. The anniversary of my mom Lynne’s death is coming up too, on the full moon in Aquarius, so I am just hanging on for this open hearted life ride. If you want to join me at the future live Zooms, I do know for certain those will happen—put Thursday, August 14th, and Thursday, September 18th at 6pm PST on your calendar. All paid subscribers will get a Zoom link in their inbox the morning of, and you just make it if you can and want to.

And now the regular extras for paid subscribers

Below are some shortcut links to the archive of Leo writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some journal prompts and specific suggestions for ritually working with this new moon, and a generative creative writing prompt in the key of Leo.

(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 Leo archive

Oh, Sweet Life - full moon at 24° of Leo (winter 2025)

The Diamond of the Self - new moon at 12° of Leo (summer 2024)

Everything In You That You Don't Need, You Can Let Go Of - full moon at 4° of Leo (winter 2024)

The Fire Under Our Tongues - new moon at 23° of Leo (summer 2023)

Venus in the Underworld - Venus retrograde in Leo (summer 2023)

The Sun at the Center of You - full moon at 16° of Leo (winter 2023)