The Great Nonlinear Dance of Being

New moon at 9° of Pisces

New media artist Jason Ting has a coding practice that takes inspiration from natural forces and celestial bodies, fluid dynamics and gravitation. All images in this post are stills from his project “Dream Wave,” which could not be more Pisces.

Thursday, February 27th, at 4:44pm PT, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 9° of Pisces, the twin cosmic fish, swimming forever in the great ocean of Being. Pisces is a mutable water sign. All mutable signs are in charge of change, of moving us out of one season or alchemical phase and into another. One way we can think about the Pisces archetype is that it is fundamentally about how water changes and transforms, both itself, and everything around it, through dissolution and re-solution. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, Pisces is responsible for moving us out of winter and into spring. So a lot of how I understand Pisces energy in a direct, somatic sense comes from how I observe and experience this time of transition in the natural cycle. Like what does it actually take for the physical world to come out of the stasis of winter? For the life force itself to come out of contraction and freeze and hibernation and self-protection? What are the conditions that get us from the death-state of late winter to rebirth of spring, and initiate that growth crisis and its ascending energy—that push towards the light? In the gospel according to Pisces, it takes water. Physically, we can see that it takes the rains of late winter and early spring to unfreeze the ground, loosen the soils, and open up channels for new growth. Psychologically, winter is a state of depression and stuckness, sometimes a kind of numb, dissociated state, and coming out of that requires the restoration of the flow of feelings in the body—so water as feelings. It’s feelings themselves that have the power to melt our stuck mental states and defenses, our tight armored muscles, our positions of fearful avoidance. It’s feelings that move us into new responsiveness, into an ability to rise up, to be up for whatever the challenge or growth edge is. But mostly, Pisces is metaphysical water, moving us from state to state metaphysically, and that’s where any conversation about Pisces gets really interesting.

Pisces is the final sign of the Zodiac, and the Zodiac sequence can best be understood as a pattern of life cycle development. It starts with Aries—the first sign of Spring and the birth or arrival of a physical form or specific incarnation—and it ends with Capricorn, Aquarius, and, finally, Pisces, the winter triad of completion and death. If Capricorn is the maturation, culmination, and conclusion of that individual physical life, and Aquarius is the bardo state after death, when that individual self dies and dissolves back into the great We or All to start dreaming up new forms, then Pisces is whatever happens next—what has to happen for an an instinct or inspiration or dream to swirl itself into beginning existence. So Pisces is a placeholder for The Great Mystery. It’s the dark radiant matrix of possibility that I sometimes call the Great Mother Nothing—that which comes before and gives birth to Something. Scientists might know it as dark matter. Depth psychologists might know as the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, or the collective unconscious and collective subtle body. It’s the real, imaginal, invisible, unmanifest realm of that gives rise to matter, tot the physical manifest world. It hosts ideas and spirits, instincts and desires, deities and other things that language can’t properly name or evoke, but can point to with metaphor.

This is a territory that we cannot know empirically, not in the way of Western materialist science. From that lens, the existence of everything in Pisces is suspect. Think of it this way: if you sliced open a chrysalis to see what was going on inside, in the middle of its process, you would find neither a caterpillar nor a butterfly; you would find caterpillar goo, neurotransmitter goo. And by opening it up, you would have disrupted and ended the process of its rearranging and becoming; now it can’t and won’t exist. That’s what happens when we approach Pisces territory with the knife of Western rational analysis. We can really only enter this territory through feeling and sensing, through indirect and nonrational means, through empathy and telepathy and direct, soul-to-soul, being-to-being transmission. We have to be exquisitely sensitive. We have to be tripping out and picking up vibes, to know our own sensory and extrasensory channels of perception. And for our minds to really work with the information that emerges in that way, we have to relax; we have to loosen our grip on what we think is real and true; we keep one eye in, as they say, and one eye out. It requires trust—the trust of the Great Fool—and a willingness to surrender to a greater intelligence and divine flow.

So Pisces is sacred ground. Those who know how to navigate in Pisces—poets and psychics, dream workers and horse whisperers—are those who can walk through a dark forest of symbols and subtle energies and not get lost, or rather, get lost in the good way—in the way that getting lost is the method for leaving the old, known, worn path behind completely, and entering a time of new possibilities and neuroplasticity. When Pisces season arrives, the energies get chaotic, unstable, and often very emotional; it’s psychic high tide. Depending on your style, you might hate it or love it, and even those of us who love a little chaos also like a little solid ground, so it can be rough on everyone. And it has to be said—this one has already been extreme. Pisces is hosting so much right now, not only the Sun and the Moon, but also Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, and the north node. With this new moon, we are getting one last moment to breathe and reset before the onset of one of the most chaotic periods of astrology I have ever seen, certainly the most chaotic transition to spring—one that sees a Venus retrograde, a Mercury retrograde, an eclipse season, and Neptune changing signs after 14 years, all at once, and all of that happening around the Pisces/Aries boundary of death/rebirth.

Let’s stay with this new moon first. The new moon in Pisces is a special moment every year, a real stand out in the cycle as a whole. Because new moons are moments of renewal, rebirth, and regeneration; it’s the time we plant seeds for what we wish to grow. And is there really a better or sweeter time to plant seeds, or to be a seed, than when all the channels are just starting to open? When spring is about to spring? When you are perfectly positioned to catch a current of manifestation and growth? No there is not a sweeter time! If you’ve been nursing a seed, a vision, or a wish, for a new creation or change or offering, this new moon is always the exact right time rededicate yourself to it. The conditions surrounding this particular new moon are underscoring that rightness. Not only do we have conjunctions with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, and the north node, there is a trine coming in from Mars in Cancer, who just stationed direct last Sunday. That trine is helping. It’s likely allowing you to feel your feet and your fire back under you finally. And having Mercury conjunct this new moon is helpful, too. It’s casting a shiny line from our rational verbal magician mind into the cosmic sea, boosting our ability to communicate with our own unconscious and our guides and to translate dreams into realities. The rest—Saturn, Neptune, the north node—I want to expand on a bit, and thank you for hanging in there with this lengthy reading.

Saturn has been transiting Pisces since March 2023, and will be entering Aries in May—so over the next three months, Saturn is completing its project here, at least its first real complete draft. You can read more of my thoughts about this transit from back when it began (Washing Order into Chaos), or by revisiting the last three Pisces lunation posts, but I’ll just remind us briefly—Saturn is the archetype of boundaries and limits, it’s the mother of form. And so it’s journey into the form-dissolving-then-resolving-into-new-form territory of Pisces has has been so strange and glitchy and shape-shifty and magical. When two opposites come together like this, they initially frustrate each other, or even cancel each other out, but over time they learn to integrate. While I’ve personally missed Saturn’s usual creative sturdiness, and it’s been hard and unnerving having all these good ideas that are only good or solid for a few days or weeks before they change, the forms that have survived this last two years of constant dissolution are special, flexible, Piscean, capable of being many things and moving between many worlds. More will be revealed, of course. But as of this new moon, we are seeing their outlines and truer natures now. They may be ready for our blessing and commitment, in fact they may need that to finish fully emerging—that might be what this new moon is calling for.

Neptune has been in Pisces since 2011 and it, too, is preparing to enter Aries, the sign of physical incarnation, at the end of March—so a few months before Saturn. That means this new moon and Saturn’s final project in Pisces is entangled with Neptune, the closest in nature to Pisces of all the planets. It’s amplifying all the Piscean metaphysical themes, hitting us heavily with this call for our new creations to center our deepest values and promote, in some way, spiritual transcendence—certainly self transcendence, and transcendence beyond the materialist mode. These two planets are headed towards a dramatic conjunction at 0° of Aries that will begin when Saturn joins Neptune there on May 24th. They will be within 12 minutes of each other on July 15th, and then they will both have a retrograde, so we will do this dance again, both of them going back over the final degree of Pisces, and then there will be another conjunction at 0° of Aries that perfects on February 20th, 2026. 0° of Aries, as I’ve said, is the point of reincarnation in the Zodiac. This is a level of activation and support, astrologically, for a massive rebirth, collectively and personally, that I can’t really comprehend, and you can’t either. We are going to live through it, that’s how we will really know it.

The north node—the lunar node of increase—is also here in Pisces now. We actually got our first Pisces eclipse just before the fall equinox, while the north node was still technically in Aries. So in addition to what we’ve already named, there is this overall emphasis on Pisces and its style and ways of being for the next year and a half. With the south node of decrease in Virgo, (and I will talk more about that in two weeks when we hit that total lunar eclipse in Virgo that’s coming), we are losing some access to the part of us that knows how to stabilize and restore a system, how to be orderly and organized and maintain the health of our structures. And we are gaining additional access to the part of us that can fly blind, navigate chaos, orient spiritually, and follow the lead of the soul, the anima mundi. That tracks, right? For the level of chaos and disorder we are experiencing personally and collectively right now. The shit has really hit the fan. Things are coming apart, or have already been undone. Even if this has to happen for some new kind of order to emerge, it’s a time of heightened stress and danger and chaos. The wheel of fortune is spinning, fast; it’s hard to hold a spiritual center, but that’s exactly what we need to do. Having the north node in Pisces is at least opening a strong channel to that part of us, the part of us that might know how to do this.

That would all be plenty to be contending with for a Pisces new moon. But there is really a lot more happening. On Saturday, in the wake of this new moon, Venus is stationing retrograde in Aries, and going on her six week underworld journey, where she will disappear from the night sky and then reappear in Pisces as a morning star. I wrote extensively about this during the last Venus retrograde - Venus in the Underworld - and you can look that up if you want the primer on shadow work and a retelling of the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal. The short of it is that we are entering an extremely potent and tender time. Venus is the goddess of love, and beauty, and art, and relationships. So the next six weeks—March 1 - April 12th—is activating a time of shadow work, healing, and repair in the heart. It’s a time for being with our broken heartedness in a way that makes medicine from it, in a way that brings repair to our own disconnected parts, and repair to the world.

Whatever is going for each us in this Pisces/Aries reincarnation magic, in this Saturn in Pisces creative work, Venus is going to have her say about it too. She’s going to get us to water the seeds of this new thing/world/creation with our literal tears, with our grief and love for all that we have been through. In the middle of that retrograde, Mercury is also going to station retrograde—you guessed it—in Aries, on March 14th, and make its way back to Pisces, where it will station direct on April 7th. And! There are going to be two eclipses—a total lunar eclipse at 23° of Virgo on March 14th, opposite Saturn 22° of Pisces, and then a partial solar eclipse at 9° of Aries on March 29th. I’m going to stop there, and just take a breath, and you can take a breath with me. I will be unpacking all of this live with you over the next six weeks and beyond. But for now, maybe we can just pause and take in that with this new moon is arriving like a prayer, just before we cross a major threshold, a point of no return.

One thing I am orienting toward right now is all the helpers that are out there. This is a Mr. Rogers thing—his mom would say to him when he was a kid, that when you see scary things on the news, “look for the helpers.” There are so many people helping. I do have to look beyond the ordinary sources—the mainstream news—but there are so many of us out here who give a damn about other people. And everyone is modeling that there are so many ways to go about that. So while this is a period of extraordinary chaos, and we will be best served by loosening our grip, and surrendering some of the intensity we bring to our need to be safe and in control, that doesn’t mean we need to be passive or submissive. The right kind of surrender, in this case, is very active, very participatory. These are conditions for relaxing enough to try out some new moves. For pulling tarot cards or throwing coins and being open to ancient wisdom. For finding our way towards being the helpers and helping the helpers; towards taking on more responsibility and making more art and magic; for getting weirder and going deeper into exploring our power and our own style of healing witchiness.

Once, when I was coming to a crossroads in my own healing work, I was granted this beautiful question or intention. The question was this: how do I make it safe in my body for sacred energy to flow through? The answer that came back to me, through the strange machineries of meditation and grace, was that it was time to give up self doubt. That was hard news to get. I had received a lot from self doubt; a lot of safety, and reassurance that I didn’t need to know what I was doing, and permission to wait and stay small. To leave self doubt behind, even temporarily, meant owning my intuition, and owning my power. And that meant taking responsibility for using that power. It meant no longer making excuses. It meant standing with myself, fully, for the first time, and no longer waiting for someone else to come along and validate me, and grant me permission and admission into the world. I did it you guys. I let it go. All my self doubt. And I’ve let it go a thousand times since then, because it can’t be let go permanently, I am a human woman, and I breathe in doubting myself from the culture, and skepticism and humility are also healthy. Now it’s time to let it go again. And I would love if you did it with me on this new moon. Let’s just let it go. What if we knew we would prevail? What if we knew that on the level of the soul, success was guaranteed? What would we do? What would me make? What would we call in, and nurture and steward into being? How would we meet this moment in time?

Ritual & Writing Prompts

And now some extras for paid subscribers — a collection of links to the archive of writings on Pisces lunations in In the River of What’s Happening Now; some extended thoughts and intuitions on crafting a ritual for 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 and reform in any way you see fit.)

The Pisces archive (in reverse chronological order)

Open the Future Effortlessly - full moon lunar eclipse at 25° of Pisces (end of summer 2024)

I Will Not Be Safe, I Will Be Magical - new moon at 20° of Pisces (end of winter 2024)

Love and the Deep End - full moon at 7° of Pisces (end of summer) 2023)

Washing Order into Chaos - Saturn enters Pisces on a Virgo full moon (end of winter 2023)

The Formlessness that Dreams of Form - new moon at 1° of Pisces (end of winter 2023)