Full Moon in Virgo

Saturday, February 24, 2024 05:28 MT

Cultivate Chaos

There is just too much to discern.

Exhausted, we fall upon the bed

weeping— because we have a bed

weeping— because we are powerless

weeping— because we don’t know what to do

with our hands, our words, or our thoughts.

There is just so much to discern.

The contrast between feeling we all deserve to be cherished and the rage — the rage— at the delusion that there may not be enough to go around.

Maybe I’ll sit down, write these thoughts down…

and the letters cascade into ten thousand tasks

ten thousand thoughts

and ten thousand tears

that collect into a puddle, a pond, a lake, an ocean

from all those tears shed and felt of others shedding.

Even the word “shed” has a transmutive quality.

Shed tears, shed skin, shed old ways.

Sheds can be shelters from the pouring rain.

Sheds can be structures where we hand out bread

A stall

on a street

where we meet

and delight over the beautiful wares made by hands more precise than our own.

To pull in all those tears and make space for evaporation

We may find that something crystallizes in the salt.

We may find the source of our fear-desire or come to some clarity over the next steps on the path or what is ours to carry, and what is not.

The PISCES-VIRGO opposition is the axis of service and suffering.

Dark, right?

Also known as the serve or suffer dynamic, these two seasons (or signs) communicate from the dream realm of imagination to the ultramundane wash-the-dishes reality of living. To serve or suffer is to say that when we are not in service we are suffering, and we suffer because we are not in service to others.

Double-edged sword.

Both of these signs correlate with piety or religiosity or churchy stuff and that is not what I mean. Certainly, it feeds into the understanding of where we are today on the evolutionary scale — it would be dishonest to say that we do not live in a society informed by christianity or that our world is free of religious and damning beliefs.

There is a better existence beyond this cruel reality(that sounds a lot like the Pisces/Virgo polarity, amiright?) And we have a choice to check out, space out, resign, or — act, build, and use that vision to build out the reality we wish to exist in.

That feels justified seeing that we look around and it is a fucking MESS down here on Earth. Humans have been mucking sh*t up and asserting control and disallowing the natural forms of chaos that provide evolution.

We cultivate and plant ourselves in one spot to make for domesticated agriculture. We boxed in our crops and we have to figure out how to keep the soil happy since we strip it of its nutrients, and oh yeah, forget biodiversity in our diets and environments...

Yes, we can feed people sustainably. I am not arguing this reality. But what is our definition of sustainability?

Maybe we should have just kept wandering. Humans looking for a promised land where it's all beautiful the soil is eternally rich and the water is untainted…

And then that land gets labeled and fought over and these abstract concepts of possession come into the conversation and then even the lands that we inherit get mucked up with all our weirdo willful human stuff that we do.

Alright, off my soap box.

Pisces = dreams, Virgo= real world.

Both realms are real. I must emphasize that. To those realists — our thoughts supersede the action. To those dreamers — until we can feel and touch and palpate what we imagine, we are rarely satisfied.

Pisces gets a hard time about being flaky, soft, ultra-present, and then totally unavailable. Living in their minds or etheric bodies, needing their space-out-time. Exhausting trying to swim after them.

Virgo gets a hard time with the constant review of lists, accomplishments, and what needs to be done. Perhaps a fixation on details, their ideas of how it should be the bullseye to which they aim. Exhausting to keep up with them.

Hmm.

Pisces: Disappointed that reality does not meet their expectation.

Virgo: disappointed that reality does not meet their expectation.

Pisces is a season of dreams— we believe in our imagination and our intuition because we have survived the dead of winter and we can feel in our bones the hope of spring. We imagine what our garden will look like this year; we imagine all the projects and opportunities we wish to take — sometimes far too many! That is where Aries season comes into prune back what dreams will survive — who has the durability to spring forth from cool soil into the sunlight?

Virgo is the reaping of the dream, the hard work and effort that comes after nourishing and nurturing and caring for and planning for something to come into focus, the vision birthed into reality. It takes work to harvest crops, to discern what needs to be done and in what order and at what time. It takes precision and details to put off lunch until the project is complete. This is how Earth elements do — Earth gets this world, Earth gets physical law, and the constructs of time.

Virgo somehow slips between those two realms of the mental plane and the physical plane. Like sand, it slips, it moves.

Pisces prefers to swim around the edges of both. It is both — that dissolve space between sleep and awareness, that space between life and death, that space between the thought and the word formed.

Other aspects of this lunation include the conjoining of Chiron and the North Node in Aries (opposing the Libra South Node, naturally) and the lovers’ days of Mars and Venus conjoining in Aquarius this week, contacting Jupiter by square.

Lovers day(s) are the integration of the action and externally oriented Mars and the longing, drawing in the energy of Venus. Both in the energy of Aquarius, I wouldn’t call this a hot and heavy type of integration work— I would say it is the collective scream acknowledging the horrors of humanity.

Astrology for me is activism and that means you are gonna get reality checks on the regular because astrology is mirrored here in our world.

As above, so below. As below, so above.

As within, so without, as without, so within.

Aquarius is a warrior. Aquarius stands at the gates and protects the wisdom of this reality: we are all one, and any harm caused to another is harm caused to us all. This humanitarianism is expressed in the mental agility of Aquarius and the sensitivity of Pisces.

I was up late last night thinking about Nex Benedict, the non-binary teen who died the day after a bathroom attack in an Oklahoma High School.

Astrologers can cherry-pick events to dissect through the lens of astrology. It is difficult for me to remove this lens, as it is a language and perceptual filter in how I interpret phenomena. Mars and Venus are associated with gender, and as they connected at the early degrees of Aquarius this week during the news break on this death, it’s a challenge for me not to gather metaphors. What enrages me is that this is a human being with family and friends — they should never have been attacked, and schools are designated as safe places. It sucks that I am using this tragedy as an example of reality’s mirror to the sky.

I won’t tell you “Things happen for a reason.”

Sometimes life just sucks. And just as often, in the tiny moments, there are miracles. Endless miracles.

There is so much we don’t know, and it is too tangly of a web and there are too many variables. Things happen the way they happen because that is how it happened. This and other stories are another in a long line of tragedies — humans expressing their misdirected aggression at other humans.

We benefit by examining our personal experience of aggression within our bodies and beings.

If we are looking at the big picture (Pisces), if we are looking at the little details (Virgo), that telescoping in and out of what is important can be overwhelming. We can become frozen in our analysis, not knowing what the next step is.

Sometimes anger can be that compass.

Sometimes love can be that compass.

Perhaps as hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, love and anger can be directive, and instructive.

Pisces is the ocean of everything where we all belong, where we are inseparable. Pisces has a longing for a world that does not yet exist and faith that it could come to pass. Virgo can discern how creating a new world is possible— by sustaining the plan. By heels-in-the-mud staying on course and focused, come rain or sunburns, it can get the job done and then some.

This Full Moon is about marrying the world’s inside and outside of you. Yoke them together. Write all those great ideas down. Make a plan. Do the thing.

I am the worst planner ever and I look at some of my people and those folks MAKE SH*T HAPPEN because they have figured out some magic formula for calendars and reminder alarms and just do the thing attitudes.

What works for me is accountability.

I’m looking at you, morgan. I need you.

I can do things for others where I have a hard time doing them for myself.

That is the ultimate Virgo/Pisces axis is that suffering in ourselves where we find it so difficult, find ourselves so unlovable or unworthy that we are challenged to book that doctor’s appointment or that hair appointment or that vacation with the savings we have been scrounging away or sign up for that class or rent those roller skates.

This is a moon to see if you can expand yourself into who you are trying to become. Who you imagine yourself to be— just by connecting the dots in your day-to-day life.

Easier said than done. The quintessential Pisces-Virgo conundrum.