When the Going Gets Rough, Turn to Wonder

Total lunar eclipse at 23° of Virgo

All works in this letter were painted by Jane Graverol, a Belgian Surrealist who lived from 1905 until 1984. This piece is called L’Esprit Saint - “the holy spirit.” As a cultural and artistic movement, Surrealism was a response to the horrors of World War I and disillusionment with rationalism and its projects of “civilization.” Surrealists aimed to reunite the cut-off conscious rational mind with the healing waters and creative wellspring of the dreamy imagination and unconscious - which is exactly what this lunar node transit through Virgo and Pisces aims to do.

Late on Thursday night, March 13th at 11:55pm PT—so for many others, Friday morning—we have a full moon and our first eclipse of the season, a total lunar eclipse at 23° of Virgo. Virgo is the high priestess of process, a holy systems integrator. It’s the mutable sign of the three earth signs of the Zodiac, responsible for continuously evolving and improving forms here on the material plane. In Taurus, we initiate our mastery of materiality by learning the art of generativity, and how to make really resourcing conditions and nurture and grow all kinds of new things. By the time we are in Virgo, we are editing and refining all of that, building systems, and raising the overall integrative and interlocking cooperative intelligence of our many creative endeavors. This takes a keen critical eye and a practical heart. Virgo is about staying cool, observing everything in detail, clocking what’s working and what isn’t, figuring out why, precisely, and then doing the work to restore or create a higher level of order. Ruled by Mercury, this all gets very mind-y, and Virgo’s struggles are the struggles of the disconnected, runaway, analytical mind—overthinking and perfectionism, judging and comparing, a tendency to future-trip and focus on potential problems or worst-case scenarios, getting stuck in analysis paralysis, wanting so badly to do something right that we don’t do anything at all. But when we get in loving, right relationship with our Virgo side, when the analytical mind knows its place—in service to the leadership of the heart and soul—we unlock a major secret to both soul success and success on the material plane.

A full moon in Virgo is always going to highlight the tension between Virgo and its Zodiac opposite or complement Pisces, so rational appraisal versus intuitive dreaminess. Virgo’s highest expression or most potent spiritual teachings are about the proper integration of the spiritual and material, and that only activates through strong interconnection with Pisces. In this sense, Virgo is a teacher of conscious embodiment. It teaches us how to anchor our poetic Piscean insights and peak experiences and flashes of enlightenment into grounded, boring, mundane life; how to practice, imperfectly but persistently, actually applying the perspectives of liberation in to all of our ordinary, daily tasks. Because in the end, we are here to be here. And one of the best ways to stop trying to escape or needing to escape being here, is by elevating our routines into rituals; by finding a way of remembering that all of this is a gift, too, not just a hardship; by chopping wood and carrying water, as they say, but mindfully, and with a psyched, glad heart. When we find ourselves getting overwhelmed by the level of fuckery and disorder, or drained by all the admin work and endless practical details, this higher Virgo energy can help us calm down and reground and reconnect with a deeper meaning and purpose. Yes, the world is broken. No, we cannot fix it. And, we have to try. Because we are the glue. Virgo’s singing that teaching from the Talmud on repeat: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

The Virgo full moon arrives every year sometime during Pisces season, during the watery, chaotic, grievey and emotional transition from winter to spring. It often feels like this welcome appearance of solid ground—an island surfacing from the vast and churning Piscean ocean. It’s an opportunity to regroup, remember where we are really it, and commit, one last time, to letting go of anything about the last cycle that we do not want to bring with us. But this is not a regular Pisces season, and it’s not a regular full moon—it’s a south node total lunar eclipse. When the south node transits a sign, its said to facilitate needed endings and clearings of anything that the soul is done with, anything that is ready for release, or is no longer serving and will stand in the way of further evolution. It’s like a regular full moon current of liberation, but amplified significantly. In Virgo, this affects our systems and routines and current ways of organizing and doing things, even our sense of who we are and how we create or restore order. It’s likely seriously eroding some solid ground. Ideally, it will also deliver some powerful and critical healing over the next year and a half, liberating us from some of our more unhelpful Virgo traits and energies—our perfectionism, our hyper-controlling ego, our fear that there is a right way to do something and we need to know it before doing anything—really anything in us that is blocking our creative life-force from doing its thing, or blocking a deeper connection with our intuition or spirituality. It could really supercharge our creativity and adaptability. But in the meantime, we will need to try and tolerate a level of disorder and breakdown and not-really-knowing-wtf-is-happening that none of us is fully comfortable with; a level that’s frankly dangerous.

As I’m writing this, it’s all suddenly reminding me, strongly, of neuroscience’s understanding of how psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca all work to produce a therapeutic effect. One of the things they all have in common is that they dampen—or significantly reduce activity—in the brain’s default mode network (DMN). The DMN is a group of interconnected regions of the brain that are most active when a person is not paying focused attention, when they are at rest, or just going about their ordinary routine. DSM regions are primarily focused on internal cognitive processes like self-reflection and self-criticism, theory of mind (imagining the mental states of others), memory retrieval, time travel and future planning (you’re seeing it, right? So Virgo.) The DMN relies on a lot of old or early wiring, as it develops gradually through childhood and adolescence. When the DMN is dampened on psychedelics, the brain can undergo a kind of “reboot” — and then what happens from there is very individual and not really clinically observable (Pisces). We know that novel neural connections are spontaneously made, often between regions of the brain that may not have been previously connecting well. We know that many people directly experience the mystical nature of reality and its hidden wholeness and interconnectedness. Once the psychedelics wear off, the DMN reasserts itself, but those new neural connections remain, at least for awhile. If the new connections are nurtured and stabilized through regular use, if they get myelinated, we see major changes to the whole system.

So maybe this next year-and-a-half, we are just collectively getting dosed? Oof. Terrifying. I’m so sorry about this analogy, but it’s also working for me so it stays. What if we are being forced, temporarily, to let go of collective default mode, the old order? One that worked but not that well and not for everybody, and certainly not for all of life on this planet. What if in the process of our old solid ground and known-framework going offline, we have the chance to make new connections we would not otherwise have made? What if this is necessary to reawaken our full aliveness and creativity as a species? We can already feel that collectively, this is a time of massive disruption—the kind of disruption can be exploited to change the world, for better or worse—but what if this transit (January 11, 2025 - July 26, 2026) represents the length of time we have to directly influence this change, to join the disruption and forge new pathways?

A few other interesting astrological conditions are worth noting. On Wednesday, the day before the eclipse, Saturn in Pisces makes an exact conjunction with the sun. This cazimi will renew and recharge Saturn just as it stations opposite this eclipse—and it might bring some more things to light. Virgo has always been a direct collaborator with Saturn on its transit through Pisces—its transit began on a Virgo full moon (Washing Order into Chaos) two years ago. While the Virgo and Saturn archetypes are distinct, they are both doing the holy work of the Gateway of Form, directly shaping matter. So if there’s something important about this entanglement between Saturn and Virgo and Pisces we have missed, it might make itself known this week. Saturn and Virgo have been trying to still the ever-moving ever-shape-shifting waters in Pisces, to get them to commit to a particular form or shape; Pisces has been trying to increase the soul alignment and spiritual coherence of the forms we create. If anything is still not in alignment, we will likely be feeling it this next week.

Then on Friday, just after the eclipse perfects, Virgo’s ruler Mercury is stationing retrograde in Aries. A ruling sign stationing retrograde so close to a lunation is a major signal to pause. When that also happens inside of another retrograde—in this case, the tenderizing six-week Venus retrograde that began just after the new moon in Pisces and will go until April 14th—the effects of both are likely to be doubly felt. If an eclipse season weren’t enough to convince you to lay low and loosen your grip and go with the flow, I hope this does. Mercury is going to follow Venus’ lead in a way, stationing retrograde in Aries and then and making its way back to Pisces. They are giving us time (forcing us to take time?) to review what’s been going on more thoroughly, both mentally and emotionally. This is impacting you personally in the houses that Pisces and Aries lead in your chart. The threshold between them is your reincarnation point—it’s where you go through your own renewal every year, emerging from the death and undoing of fall and winter to the active rebirth of spring. What new forms are trying to emerge in your life? What if all that is ending or coming apart in Virgo for you is a necessary condition for that to emergence to fully happen?

I know we are all feeling a lot this month. So much is unravelling and so much is at stake. This messy astrology does not mean don’t do anything; it means slow down, proceed with caution. Definitely do your work, take care of yourself and your people, and keep up your activism. But eclipses are very unstable times. The Sun and the Moon, our luminaries, our guardians of light, are going through some power outages and power surges. In traditional astrology, in the philosophy I subscribe to, eclipse seasons are times to lay down the sword of our personal will. Instead we observe and study the co-incidences and changes and happenings, and learn from that what we can about what is trying to unfold in our lives. Whatever these eclipses will bring for us personally, we don’t need to do anything to make it happen, and we likely can’t do anything to prevent it from happening. A double Venus and Mercury retrograde alone is a strong warning against moving quickly or trying to force anything to go forward. Revisit. Reflect. Remember.

There’s one last thing I want to offer. I have done a lot of work over the last 10 years facilitating safe containers for people to enter nonordinary states of consciousness as part of their healing journey. It will not surprise any of you to learn that some of those involved groups of people taking psychedelic medicines. Virgo styles my 8th house of Scorpion healing journeys, which host my ascendent ruler, Saturn, so I’m kind of built to hold a safe and sturdy container for folks to lose their shit in. Anyway! It’s a wild and wonderful way to meet people. It requires so much vulnerability and trust to let go with other people like that. I consider myself a deep student of and provider of right conditions, and something that has surprised me over the years is how easily and reliably the angels of our better nature can be drawn out under those right conditions. One of the tools I use when preparing a group for this kind of practice is a set of community agreements I received and adapted from Quaker elder Parker J. Palmer’s work with Circles of Trust. Besides agreeing to be welcoming, observe deep confidentiality, and be present as fully as possible—the foundations—the most potent agreement a group of people can make in these circumstances is this: when the going gets rough, we will turn to wonder.

I’ve written about this before, how wonder and curiosity and playfulness are the opposite of the traumatized state. When our trauma and defenses and their survival physiology are activated, we are stuck in what we think we know, what we’ve learned, from past negative experiences. We start to experience and judge everything through the lens of those experiences. We start to re-experience and re-enact our trauma. And then we get very reactive, we may even start to panic, ready to do anything to protect ourselves and prevent it from happening again—even if it’s not technically happening again; even if our reactivity and defensiveness is creating the very situation we wish to avoid. There are a couple of reliable ways out of this trauma state. But really, wonder and curiosity are the gold standard—something Parker would call compassionate inquiry. If in the moment of your fear and stress activation and reactivity, if you can pause and breathe and turn toward wonder, it will help you stay present with what is actually happening, and move away from an old reaction to an emergent creative response. I wonder why I am having this reaction? I wonder what this is teaching me about myself? I wonder what would help? I wonder if I can pour some love and understanding on this? We’ve got a little more than four weeks to go of this eclipse Venus & Mercury retrograde season. Commit to practicing wonder and compassionate inquiry with yourself, even as you lose your shit, even as you grieve, even as you fight the larger reactionary forces out there. We are geniuses of love. And even if we don’t got this, Love’s got this.

Fleurs by Jane Graverol (flowers)

Ritual & Writing Prompts

For my paid subscribers! First some shortcut links to my eclipse season preparation guide and the archive of writings on Virgo in In the River of What’s Happening Now. And while we are taking a break from ritual prompts during eclipse season, I am including a little write up on synchronicities, and then a creative writing prompt tuned to all of this 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.)

How to Prepare for an Eclipse Season

The Virgo archive

The Reliable Magic of Process - new moon at 11° of Virgo, summer 2023

The Ceremony of the Everyday - full moon at 5° of Virgo, winter 2024

We Made This World, We Can Make Another - new moon at 21° of Virgo, summer 2023

Washing Order Into Chaos - full moon at 16° of Virgo, Saturn enters Pisces, winter 2023