Ring The Bells That Still Can Ring
Full moon at 24° of Taurus
A few quick announcements:
This full moon Friday I’ll be giving a featured poetry live in Portland at the first slam of the season
Portland, Oregon’s Slamlandia community is gathering this Friday evening at Flour Bloom Cafe on NE Grand at 7pm for an open mic, feature, and slam — I will be the feature, arranged last minute by the powers that be (a full moon in Taurus poetry reading at Flour Bloom?) If you want to come out and hear some of my poetry, or share some of your own poetry, or just enjoy crying and sighing and laughing the company of radicals in a cute cafe with pastries, please join us. There is a suggested donation of $5, and you can get more information here.
I’ll be in the live chat again next Tuesday, November 19th
Next week, on November 19th, Pluto will re-enter 0° of Aquarius, the station of rebirth, and this next 20 years, defined in many ways by those Aquarian energies, the “I” dissolving into the “we,” will properly begin. You’ll hear this advice circulating everywhere, including in the reading below—gather with your people. Personally, physically be in space with others and connect with others. Increase the amount of joining you do and belonging you feel. This is not lightweight advice. This is mycelial wisdom. We need communal embodiment. So just as a gesture to kicking that off, I’ll be starting a thread that is essentially an introduction thread, where we can all introduce ourselves and get to know the people and resources we are connected to through this newsletter. I hope you come by and introduce yourself!
Sunday, November 24th at 1pm PT/4pm ET Amber Tamblyn is hosting me for a follow-up to our live pre-election gathering
Just mark your calendars if you want it! Amber and I held a live Zoom the day before election day for our paid subscribers, when we are all still sitting in the fear of the unknown. She invited me to circle back up and having the second half of the conversation in light of the election results. We would love to have you there.
From my tender heart and tired body and burning spirit to yours, hi. What a hard and terrible time. I am fond of this thing that poet Tony Hoagland wrote, these two lines that I used as an epigraph for my poem “The First Time,” a poem about broken heartedness, and these lines just come to me whenever the shit is really going down: “Some people think the truth is the worst thing that can happen. / The truth is not the worst thing that can happen.” What it means, to me at least, is that even when the truth is awful and painful, even when it breaks my heart, there is something positive and affirming in the telling of it and facing of it. The truth coming out actually prevents the other thing, the real worst thing; the silencing and denial; the dirty pain; the turning away that is the foreclosing of possibility.
Wherever you are at in absorbing these developments, wherever you are at in your response, I am glad you are here, tuning in with me and the Moon, and just being liminal together. The Moon is here for the truth, and here for all of our feelings about it. The Moon is also always reminding us that all truth is partial, all perspectives are partial; that there is wholeness, even if we can’t see it. The Moon teaches, first and foremost, the law of cycles, how we live in phases, how the natural world does change and evolution. Together with the Sun and the planets and the stars, the Moon helps us to orient toward what time it is in that cycle, in the great phasing and spiraling. It tells us what energies are being amplified, and what energies are meeting resistance, so we can better discern where we might best direct our energies and efforts. It holds up a mirror to the bigger picture, so we can see ourselves and each other within it. And it teaches us how to connect with and respect our sensing feeling bodies, how to stay receiving new information and emergent wisdom, instead of spinning out in a-void-dance. That’s why we keep meeting here and doing this.
Listening to the Moon is one of my oldest practices, almost as old as reading and writing poetry, and two are very entangled within me—maybe within you, too. Poetry and archetypal astrology—and tarot, too, can’t forget tarot—all contributed to the development of my symbolic intelligence. And having now formally studied depth psychology, and somatics, and the neurobiology of the unconscious mind, and the neurobiology of trauma, I understand why that matters. Developing our symbolic intelligence helps to inoculate us against the dangers of literalism, which are real and extreme, especially in times like these. Those dangers include unconscious rigidity, certainty, and dogmatism; a tendency to decontextualize, and then to misread and misunderstand; cut-off-ness and paranoia; decreased capacity for wonder and full feeling; and the soul loss and depression that necessarily follows all that. Symbolic intelligence grants us deeper access to imagination and meaning making, widens our channels of perception, and promotes connection and greater flexibility and creativity. It’s how cross-species communication is possible. It’s how we learn to understand the language of dreams and mushrooms and trees. It’s how we receive needed cues and guidance from our own Self, from the Earth, from our ancestors, from the Cosmos itself. We are going to need all of that guidance.
There are so many of us praying for the future of life on Earth. Our roots are a big mess of roots. I am sad right now, about so many things, but if I’ve learned anything from this last two years it’s I can be sad and keep going—in fact, I can only keep going by admitting my sadness. I invite you to join me in letting go of imagining a perfect response before responding, and resolving instead to keep responding imperfectly, from the best parts of us, as long as we can. There are possibilities coming—opportunities to disrupt and repair and even prevent harm, opportunities for defiance and nurture, opportunities to build sanctuary and grow community. We won’t know them until we see them. Charge up if you need to charge up. Deepen your protection practices. The other lines of poetry that keep coming up right now are from Leonard Cohen, these song lyrics of his that just say it:
Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in
That’s us, we are the bells. We are the imperfect offering. We are the cracks and the light. As long as we are alive, and maybe, mysteriously, after. Ok…onto this full moon reading.
This Friday, at 1:28pm PT, the Moon will oppose the Sun fully and peak in her glory and madness at 24° of Taurus. Taurus is fixed earth—an archetype of stability, deep nourishment, and practical generativity. It’s territory is the rich, dark soil. It’s roots, and root systems, their growth and their communion and entanglement with each other. It’s this essential resourcefulness that all life has; how we sense and find and draw in what we need. Metaphysically, the earth signs are all teaching us the art of manifestation. If Capricorn is the public, outer-most part of that manifesting, the big end result of the process, Taurus is the beginning—the sensing of what’s missing. The neediness and desiring. How we know what we want to create and need to create, and then go about actually creating it through raw talent and learning and drawing in the right resources as we go. It’s not “I have what I need,” it’s “I have what I need to get what I need.” Taurus sings of solid foundations and loving conditions. It sings of presence and patience—slow growth is stable growth. Slow growth goes at the speed of capacity. Slow growth honors the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration.
Ruled by Venus, planet of love and relationship and beauty, there is a sensuality to all of Taurus’ teachings. This is not the Saturnian duty and determination of Capricorn, nor the analyzing genius of Mercury and Virgo. It’s messier than that, and more pleasurable. It wants us to create by doing and experimenting, by getting our hands and hearts and feet dirty. It wants us practicing and enjoying it. It wants us sensing and feeling and appreciating, finding ease in our work. Wherever Taurus leads for you, that’s where you will be most supported by slowing down and feeling more; by leaning into your physical, cellular intelligence, your wise animal guide. There is a part of you that knows what you need to do now, and not do now, to be a good steward of your own life force; to gather enough resources; to go and grow at the speed of capacity.
The Moon loves to be in Taurus, she’s in her exaltation here with all this grounded creative pleasure and gentle incremental change. So full moons here can be very rich and sweet and stabilizing. We actually haven’t had a full moon here in years—the last two were lunar eclipses. And while this full moon is a proper one, finally, the conditions it’s in are very destabilizing. Uranus, planet of revolution and sudden change, has been transiting Taurus since 2018, and this full moon is in a tight conjunction with it, sitting just one degree away. While Taurus and the Moon both are about that gentleness and steadiness and slow growth and slow change, Uranus’ energies are Promethean, fire bringing, revolutionary; the thunder-clap and lightning-bolt. It’s big and bright and jarring. It’s rebellion and change. Nervous-system-wise, it is a lot of charge. This is one of the more activating moments in the entire Uranus transit. We want to stabilize, and do our Taurus survival magic, but the ground is shaking and sky is shifting. Forces that are larger than us are on the move.
I know we can all feel this hitting in the collective sense, but it may also be hitting you personally. You may be in a big and sudden upheaval, or just a really hard, painful growing up time. I mean, aren’t we all right now? Venus, Taurus’ ruler, has just entered Capricorn, so she is in a whole-sign trine the Moon. Pluto is still at that last degree of Capricorn, in it’s final days here, also forming a direct trine beam of support. That means that there is help coming through right now, and that help is very earthy, very practical and material, and it’s connected with all of our very hard Capricorn lessons this year. Venus in Capricorn is loving, but very adult. It might show up as feeling a to-do list forming, which you may or may not be ready to look at or deal with, but it’s forming. It might be these waves of feeling galvanized or steely or calm, in between these other waves and other states. You might be noticing competing impulses, like a part of you may be trying to cope by figuring out how to go around what is happening somehow, instead of going through it; and another part of you, the Venus and Pluto wisdom part of you, might be opening up to the clean pain of this, knowing instinctively that that is the way to move through it and choose love and post-traumatic growth.
All of this is happening within the context of the deep waters of Scorpio season. Scorpio wants us to be with what is dying, to honor our grief, and pain and rage, but also to defend ourselves, and to prepare to fight hard and dirty. A Taurus full moon in the middle of that is a shadow work moment, a challenge to ground, settle, and resource—to remember spring, and rebirth, and light, even in the midst of the growing darkness. The last time I wrote about these oppositional and complementary archetypes was for the Scorpio full moon this last spring (How We Heal). I went on at some length about Peter Levine’s favorite analogy for trauma and healing, the stream of life, and how trauma is like a breach in the shore of that life stream, a rupture in its containing boundary. That rupture creates an opening and starts to pull our lifeforce out of the stream, into this swirling eddy we call the Trauma Vortex. I compared the wisdom of Scorpio and Taurus with our intuitive knowing of how to both navigate and heal that Trauma Vortex:
Imagine the Taurus part of you is the part of you that knows how to build up that Counter Vortex. It does it by connecting you with the stability of the Earth and your life in the physical present, and particularly by getting you to savor simple sensual pleasures—it is ruled by Venus after all. Its very nature is resourcing and growing resilience, and it calls you into building and nurturing steady, loving connections and ever more supportive conditions. It wants you to be safe and resourced enough to experience lightness of being. The Scorpio part of you is the part of you that intuitively knows how to navigate and heal a Trauma Vortex. It teaches you to restore safety by fiercely protecting what is vulnerable. It teaches you how to be a bitch, how to armor up, how to set and enforce a boundary—it’s ruled by Mars and is not fucking around. And, when the time comes, it also knows how to soften that same armor; how to create and enter secret, sacred space; how to relax those defenses, allow your raw self to be exposed, and your feelings to flow. It knows that our most frightening feelings, our overpowering grief and sorrow, in the right dose, in the right empathetic conditions, are the agent of healing.
Right now, we are in a collective Trauma Vortex, and there is no way around it. But there are ways we can meet this. I am personally drawing on this foundational idea of the Counter Vortex, and its Taurus-ness. My sense is that this Taurus full moon conjunct Uranus is actually creating some ideal conditions for radically reimagining a Counter Vortex capable of steadying us through a time of much higher charge and upheaval and change. What if it were possible to meet this hour of peril by dramatically resourcing yourself and others? By tending to and strengthening your roots and your connections with others roots? By tending to the “grassroots” work of local movement building? By making, like, a lot more art? What if we recommitted to growing up, moving out of fragility, and widening our window of tolerance for activation and necessary conflict? What if we could stay open hearted and tender and vulnerable, but also be fierce and fearless in defense of ourselves and each other and this world?
One of the many resources and teachers I oriented to last week was trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem. You may have read, I hope, his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. But the book I've been rereading is the one he crafted in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, and published in 2022: The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nations Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. This book is quite literally written for this moment. It is a master class in how to integrate the grounded, embodied wisdom of Taurus and with the high charge and electrifying clarity of Uranus. It offers practical exercises for “reps” we can do to increase our capacity to tolerate activation and stay grounded through conflict and confrontation. It offers anchoring practices to help you stay flexible, engaged, and present. It’s a wealth of information and instruction and practical, actionable advice. There’s also just this powerful reminder throughout—our bodies are not objects, but living, complex organisms of ever-emergent flows and vibrations, dynamic interacting structures and systems. Our bodies have an immense capacity for charge and for resource, especially as it moves through multiple, connected, harmonized bodies. The key to facing peril is tapping our relational, embodied genius.
There is so much we can do when we are present and connected to each other and resonating. And I would add, not trying to show up perfectly. As Sonya Renee Taylor says, “When we liberate ourselves from the expectation that we must have all things figured out, we enter a sanctuary of empathy.” No one reading this is a beginner, by any stretch of the imagination, to the work of healing and revolution. But also no one reading this (or writing this) has it all figured out. So we just get to be in the mud, in the shit together, where humility and listening and willingness serve us. I am so grateful to be in community with you. I am grateful to be alive at the same time. I hope you can feel my roots, and all the roots I am connected to, and all the roots they are connected to, as part of your larger system. Let’s take as much medicine as we can from this full moon. Let’s keep sensing and meeting our new needs, and processing in real time, and orienting towards what is most resourcing, while not turning away from the truth of what is ending.
Ritual & Writing Prompts
For paid subscribers, some shortcut links to the archive of writings on Taurus in In the River of What’s Happening Now and specific suggestions for ritually working with this full moon to call in healing and anchor in more freedom. And as always, a generative creative writing prompt brought to you by my mind in collaboration with 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 Taurus archive
The Myth of Scarcity & the Myth of Enoughness - on an astrology of individuation as taught by all the earth signs, but mostly Taurus
Ooh, Heaven is a Place on Earth - new moon at 18° of Taurus (spring 2024)
The Hidden Wholeness in All Things - full moon lunar eclipse at 5° of Taurus (fall 2023)
Vision of the Machinery of the Universe - new moon at 28° of Taurus (spring 2023)
Fall Back In Love With the World - total lunar eclipse at 16° Taurus (fall 2022)
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