Summiting a Mountain to Discover it is the Base of Another Mountain

Full moon at 11° of Capricorn

The mysterious 4,000 year-old Al Naslaa rock in Saudi Arabia

Monday morning at 4:39am PST, the moon will be full at 11° of Capricorn, the holy sea goat. As with all full moons, a current of manifestation or growth is culminating or coming to a peak, and a new current of liberation is just beginning, making it a time of completion and release. The initiation of this cycle happened on the new moon in Capricorn just days after the winter solstice last year (How To Manifest), and its fruition is happening 12 days after the summer solstice, closely following the natural world’s own manifestation cycle. What wishes did you cast on the winter solstice, and what have you given your attention and power in the last six months? Capricorn’s gift is for creating real and lasting abundance, and its creations take time. It really is the sturdiest of teachers. It helps us learn to climb the mountains of life. Appreciate any moves, any progressions, however small, in the direction of your bigger dreams.

Full moons also invite us into deeper wholeness by highlighting the oppositional or shadow side of things — they want to help see ourselves and each other the world more fully. At this moment, the moon in Capricorn’s cardinal earth is opposing the sun in Cancer’s cardinal water. Cancer is deeply personal, it initiates with love and feeling and tenderness. It seeks to create secure, emotionally nurturing relationships and a protective home for all that is young and vulnerable and learning. Capricorn is broadly collective, it initiates with devotion and responsibility, with steady, practical work. It seeks to create real physical things in the world, lasting monuments and systems of support. So in addition to being a moment to honor the very real growth and progress we’ve made, this moon could be drawing focus onto any way in which our personal emotional needs and the needs of the work we do in the world are at odds, where we need to recalibrate, or else.

Since Pluto returned to Capricorn on June 11th, and Saturn stationed retrograde on June 17th, we have been receiving a kind of profound integrity check, and this full moon takes that to its first peak. It wants to prepare us for the transformative energies of July, as the lunar nodes shift officially to Aries/Libra, Pluto sits in a square to them, and Venus stations retrograde in Leo. Harmful patterns and abuses of power in relationships will be called in for healing. Collective shadow illuminations are intense and challenging, and the collective and personal are profoundly entangled. This moment may be amplifying a crisis for you—I hope it’s not!—but if it is, consider how it might be for your benefit. A healing crisis or spiritual emergency can show you with absolute clarity what’s working and what really really isn’t anymore. It can lead to a proper breakthrough about how to change your life, or the world; how to actually shift conditions that are giving rise to unnecessary suffering.

Whenever I feel stuck in the pain and tension of this kind of crisis, I try to slow down, love myself, and use wonder to climb out of it a little. I try to soften my Westerner mind that has a tendency to split things and see only zero-sum games. Like what if these two opposites were not at war, but in a harmonic relationship? What would happen if they were both accepted and included, if I attended to them both and honored them both? What if they cooperated and complemented each other? This helps me imagine potential paths of evolution. Like what it might mean to enact the relational care, emotional intelligence, and nesting genius of Cancer on a collective, structural level—housing for all, food for all, basic income for all, clean water and air for all, giant literal public nests, soft nests everywhere? Or what it might look like to to bring Capricorn’s practicality and work ethic to my emotional life, to revisit all my tools and recommit to steadily building my capacity to feel it all, to love on and on and on, and to be a living protection spell on the world?

Whatever is up for you, just take some time to honor it soberly and sincerely. Don’t be afraid to celebrate imperfect progress. Don’t be afraid to commit to shedding what is not working, or what you have simply outgrown, even if it’s complicated and hard and will take some time. Mission statements can be refined, values rearticulated, boundaries reset to better serve what’s needed now. Individuation is a long game. As we grow, as our consciousness expands, our needs change, and our structures need to change. There’s new people to become and new worlds to create, and it’s big collective work, and none of us is expected to do it alone alone. This summer is going to be a tenderizing one. Take a break if needed to resource and restabilize. Find the song your heart, then come back to us singing it.

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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.)