The Angels of Our Better Futures

New moon at 9° of Capricorn

All the images in this issue are of a single incredible mountain in West Kazakhstan named Bokty, photographed at dawn by Daniel Kordan. It’s capture was by chance, when he got his car stuck in some mud after a big rain, and needed to sleep overnight next to it. He just, like, woke up to this.

Monday, December 30th, at 2:26pm PT, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 9° of Capricorn, the holy sea goat. Capricorn is cardinal earth, third in the progression of earth sign teachers, which are all about creating and making and the practical callings of life in the physical world. Ruled by Saturn, Capricorn invests us with hardiness, commitment, and a kind of grim determination to realize our goals. It has keen instincts about boundaries and discipline, and what it takes to make things that are solid and real. It is the climber of tall and grueling life mountains, the swimmer of deep and terrifying life seas, and it represents the full maturity of our adulthood really, when we have the most potential power, but are also weighed down by the greatest amount of responsibilities. It’s also the most public sign in some ways, certainly the most public of the earth signs, as it’s guiding us towards the making of a big offering to the collective—something that stabilizes or nourishes future generations. If Taurus governs sensitivity and generativity and the foundations of growth in root systems and soils, and Virgo governs the creation and maintenance of systems that stabilize that growth, then Capricorn governs large and more permanent structures and artifacts that those systems can create over time. If Taurus is the urge to write a poem, and Virgo is the tending of a writing practice to keep writing poems and organize them into a book, then Capricorn is the body of work over time; the life’s work; the library.

This year started with a new moon in Capricorn, on January 10th, hosted two sequential full moons in Capricorn, the first of which arrived with the Summer Solstice, and also saw the final transit of Pluto in Capricorn for our lifetimes, closing out a 16-year cycle, and now it’s ending with a new moon. So I have been writing about Capricorn all year, and we have been working with Capricorn the Great Architect rather tirelessly. All this Capricorn constellating with the constant addition of Plutonic life or death intensity may have given your year a higher degree of difficulty than you felt up for. It may have produced a general mood of hardship, and it may have pushed you to grow up in some ways you were not aware you still needed to grow up. It also likely brought plentiful opportunities to realize how much you have gone through, and how much you have really learned and grown, and then to sort of gratefully integrate that into showing up in different, better, more sustainable ways. Maybe it’s even led to some epiphanies about how to find joy in all this challenge. I hope that’s true. As we are now finally through Pluto’s transit here, this will be the first new moon in Capricorn that is “just” the Moon renewing herself in the heart of the Sun here. It’s still has all the seriousness of Capricorn, but I can feel already there is less heaviness and gravity, some fresh space.

There are some influencing conditions, as always. The new moon is forming a light square to the nodes of destiny in Aries and Libra, while Chiron is stationing direct in Aries, so it may be activating all of those themes of healing our relationship with our own power, and how to be in right relationship, all of that. Capricorn’s ruler Saturn is in Pisces, where it’s still in this long conversation with our dreams and likely the assignments our souls were imprinted with before coming here—and still not able to make a clear and stable form to save its life. But by the time the current of manifestation this new moon initiates comes to fruition—the next full moon in Capricorn will be July 10, 2025—Saturn will be in Aries, in an exact conjunction with Neptune at 0° of Aries no less, which sounds very birth-of-a-new-era to me. Saturn in Aries has a very driven, very independent quality to it, and certainly compared to Saturn in Pisces, we are likely to be able to move a lot faster in our manifestation experiments. Saturn is also currently squaring Jupiter in Gemini, which is still retrograde, along with Mars and Uranus, so there’s an overall need for pausing and reflecting, like forward movement will just grind the gears. All of this is to say, even though a Capricorn new moon loves to manifest, this is probably not the time to put pressure on yourself to formulate a plan and start ritually executing a plan. These are not conditions for force or action. This is a new moon to rest and reset, more than any moon this year has been that for us. It’s a moon for putting on some Miles Davis or John Coltrane or Bill Evans; for just being, and hanging out with yourself and the emptiness, the radiant dark, the blank page. You are potential potential, and you might also be very tired. Just listen to your body, and listen to your life. Be a receiver.

If there were a spiritual teaching waiting to be drunk from in this new moon, it’s got something to do with goodwill, and what radiating goodwill has to do with building abundance. Cycles that generate abundance always begin with a giveaway. We need to give in order to receive, so first we give what we most want to get back. This requires determined faith—Capricorn’s specialty—because it can feel a little counter intuitive, and it runs against all of our scarcity stories and our need to protect ourselves. Like how can I give what I already don’t have enough of? But when we take the initiative and expend our own energy and resources in a particular way or particular direction, it encourages others to do the same; it seeds reciprocity. And while there will always be times of imbalance, and times we may need to correct our over-giving, this is how we establish ourselves, and how we establish the good feedback circuits—by being the first to extend our hand.

This new moon is encouraging us to think of this in terms of goodwill—what the Buddhists call metta. When we extend appreciation and trust and lovingkindness and good wishes to others, we start to receive more of that in turn. This is the foundation of the exchange of nurture that leads to abundance. Good vibes beget good vibes. All life really thrives in an environment of good vibes and welcome and unconditional positive regard. It costs us nothing to begin generating and sending it outward. While we are still in the dark about what will grow in the coming year, and how things will unfold, we can tap this wisdom now, while we are chilling or folding laundry. Whatever our dreams are, for ourselves and the world, the ones we have now and the ones just formulating, we are completely dependent on other beings for the actualization of those dreams. More and more, we can feel our entanglement with the struggles and wins and pains and sorrows of all beings on our planet, and well beyond that.

So if there were anything to “do” right now, while resting and being, it’s fluffing up some fat pink clouds of loving metta, right in our own heart factories, and sending it out to everyone who is in this with us, on every plane of existence. Their success is our success. Their liberation is our liberation. Let’s send some goodwill towards ourselves too while we’re at it, our present self and all our past and future selves. And let’s send some goodwill to the angels of our better futures, should there in fact be angels in charge of that just waiting to be called upon. Here’s what I do know—whatever new structures and paradigms and ways of living will get invented in the coming days and months and years, whatever will make the current way we do things obsolete, whatever will make war obsolete—we can welcome it all now. We can beam love and welcome and gratitude at it. Happy threshold everyone, and happy new moon.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now a little extra love for paid subscribers — a collection of links to the archive of writings on Capricorn lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now, should you be wanting to immerse yourself in Capricorn pathways; some recommendations for working with this new moon; and a creative writing prompt for those of us who practice writing magic.

(Disclaimer! Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. They are jumping off points. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t, adapt in any way you see fit.)

The Capricorn archive (in reverse chronological order)

Being Serious Enough to Live the Life We Are Entrusted With - final weeks of Pluto in Capricorn (fall 2024)

The Good, Hard, Worthy Struggle - full moon at 29° of Capricorn (summer 2024)

The Joy That Makes The Impossible Task Possible - full moon at 1° of Capricorn (summer Solstice 2024)

What We Will Make - new moon at 20° of Capricorn (winter 2024)

Summiting a Mountain to Discover it is the Base of Another Mountain - full moon at 11° of Capricorn (summer 2023)

How To Manifest- new moon at 1° of Sagittarius (winter 2022)