I Will Not Be Safe, I Will Be Magical

New moon at 20° of Pisces

Sunday March 10th, but just barely, at 1am PST in the morning, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 20° of Pisces. Pisces is represented by the twin cosmic fish, swimming forever in the great ocean of Being, a symbol of mutable, transformative water and the nonduality that includes duality. In Pisces, all boundaries and definitions dissolve, all distinct forms find their end. It’s the final sign of the Zodiac. If we take these 12 signs as describing a development arc of the human life, we essentially complete our life’s work in Capricorn and leave our bodies behind in Aquarius to join the collective consciousness and seek visions of new forms and new futures. Then in Pisces, we become the Mystery; we become the cosmic ocean, the formless chaos that those new forms and futures emerge from. Depending on your nature, you either love this chaos, or you really hate it, and even when you love it, there’s a fine line between emergence and emergency. It’s rough for any decent, loving, hardworking ego to abide. If we want what healing promises, however, if we want newness and rebirth and a different way forward, we have to deal with the Piscean dissolution that actually effects real change.

This new moon in Pisces is announcing the last 10 days of winter, the third act of the third act. The Sun in Pisces, along with Neptune, Saturn, and Mercury, have been busy for the last few weeks here, unfreezing the life force and opening channels and doors to change and rebirth. I don’t know how it’s been for you! I’ve personally experienced an extra chaotic quality of time and the entire range of emotions about it. Nothing has proceeded in an orderly, expected fashion. There appears to be a divine logic to it all, just not one I’m allowed to know or understand beforehand or even in the moment. It’s terrifying one minute, ecstatic the next. I am a natal Pisces Moon, in an exact trine with Venus in Taurus, so I’m more grounded and comfortable than most here, or I learned how to be. I just had to become a poet-somatic-trauma-therapist-astrologer-mystic full time.

The lesson Pisces keeps teaching, on forever repeat, is about trust. No matter how many ego deaths you go through, trust stays a fragile thing; a flower that has to bloom and die and bloom again, over and over. Your body and its faithful ego, once fully developed, are designed for survival, which they largely pull off by controlling a familiar environment, avoiding unnecessary danger, managing necessary stress, staying safe. They don’t trust easily or for long. Your spirit and soul are designed to experience and explore, to expand and go deep, and grow and change. They know the direction you need to go in, what they most need to experience and learn. They are not interested in familiarity and safety, but in love and courage. Ideally, they learn to respect and trust each other, to work together, to integrate their wisdoms through the heart. Ideally, when we reach this Piscean chaos that is also a growth edge/cliff edge, we spend a little time freaking out, and then we use our hearts to tap into this great, soft, golden yellow field of faith, and strengthened by that faith, we jump.

It’s a tall order when you’ve come by distrust honestly; when you’re full of stories, personal and ancestral, about how things go wrong, and how precarious life is. I speak from my own experience here. No matter how often my trust falls are rewarded, no matter how many times I am somehow supported as I take the risks I need to take to be myself, when I am truly seeing my growth edge, and knowing what’s being asked of me is to jump over it, I start panicking and trembling. What I’ve learned to say to myself at these frequent moments is this: “Mindy. Would it be possible to trust just a little more than you are trusting right now?” It’s very important to make this request this small and reasonable. To let yourself check out just a little bit more trust. Be curious and take a sip. And if you like it, you can take another sip. Trust is always possible. I said this to my mother a few years ago, when she was in a full grief panic storm about her terminal diagnosis. And she said to me, “You mean, trust that I will heal?” No. Trust is not trusting that everything will work out the way you wish it would. Trust is trusting that even if it doesn’t, it’s ok. Trust is trusting that life is a great process, that you are a great process part of that great process. You can let yourself be held that great whole.

I’m going to some length about this because we have now entered what I consider to be one of the most potent new moons for manifestation. The winter solstice, and all the new moons of winter, are ideally positioned for seed planting, as winter is that time of rest, fertile darkness, and restorative, generative contraction. But by the time we get to the Pisces new moon, we are coming out of freeze, and the psychic ground is ready; the channels are opening. Seeds planted at this time are perfectly positioned to take advantage of the ascension current of the coming spring equinox. The Sabian symbol for Pisces 20° is “a table set for an evening meal.” This is an affirmation of a bounteous harvest, a symbol of impending fullness and fulfillment. It’s as good of a guarantee as we will get, that if we have a dream of something we should grow and nurture that will feed our souls and the world soul, we should go for it, wholeheartedly, in faith and in gratitude that nature will provide for all of our needs.

Since the full moon in Virgo, you may have been highly sensitive to improper conditions, to what needs to be cleared out or rearranged or re-done in your life, to what beliefs or assumptions or definitions you need to rewrite immediately. It’s been trying to get us ready for this new moon. The next few days, at least through Monday, are the right time to call in what you are longing for. Please consider setting your ego’s agenda aside, and using this moon not for any ambitions for status or fame, and not for security or material abundance for its own sake, but for an expansion of your ability to experience, appreciate, and enjoy all the incredible blessings and gifts already given to you, so that they may multiply, and be given away. Please also consider setting aside dark visions for the world, and instead, and daring to let hope all the way into your heart. Put down the safety and certainty of cynicism. It’s very vulnerable and raw and scary to hope, I know, but that’s what time it is, and if we are to effect change, to meet the madness and pain and emergency, we need it online, blasting us fully. As Rebecca Solnit writes, in Hope in the Dark:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

A brief thank you note for all subscribers

Thank you so much for being here, and opening this when you open it, and reading it. Thank you to all of you who write to me and leave a comment. I actually love you. And thank you to all of you who have become paying subscribers. Your gift to me continues to be received with an inappropriate amount of gratitude. I keep the ritual and creative writing prompts behind a paywall, and most of my writing on other posts behind a paywall, not to withhold, but to give generously to anyone giving to me generously; to activate and be in a kind of gift economy with a community of fellow dreamers and writers. So again, if you are one of my paid subscribers, I just want to thank you so sincerely, and let you know that your act of reciprocity is what makes this possible. Some of you have sent me message, and Substack just invented a way to DM and respond to people, and I will be using that in the coming week. I am also actively inventing new ways to give back to you even more. Audio recordings are in the works, post-moon live chats on how we are doing, and some other special offerings not yet ready to be announced. And! If you do not have enough money to meet your own needs, you should absolutely not be giving me your money. If that’s you at this time, and you would like to still get in on these paid subscribers benefits of regular prompts, extra writings, some of which are like mini courses, and access to the whole archive, please just send me a little love note. I have the power to give away paid subscriptions, and being in community with like-hearted humans who want to be in community with me and talk about the moon is the most important thing.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

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