Full Blue Hunter’s Moon in Taurus 8:49 am MST October 31, 2020 conjunct Uranus in Taurus opposes sun in Scorpio

Happy Full Moon, Blue Moon, Halloween, Samhain, and All Saints and Día de los Muertos (almost)! (Whew!)

Full Moon in Taurus October 2020

Taurus is the sign of earthly-delight, of deep embodiment, of the willingness to fully incarnate on this planet, in this life—and to revel in it.

While the sun in Scorpio—sign of the depths, the shadows, the repressed, the taboo underbelly, the sexual, death and loss and grief—reminds us that this delight does not come through spiritual or political bypassing—does not come through spraying flowery-affirmation perfume over the pile of shit we’re wading in. But neither does it come through remaining stuck in dark and shadowy underworlds.

We must travel through the deep, the buried, the subconscious—facing our shadows and our shit—shoveling them up, turning them over, roiling and fermenting them into the compost which feeds our earthly gardens.

This full moon reminds us that we have the ability, the responsibility even, to cultivate joy and delight.

Not at the expense of, but rather earned through, our reckoning, our journeys into the deeps of our past, our pain, our dark histories.

The Taurus/Scorpio axis asks us to balance the depths and darkness of the underworld with the golden light of the sun on a wheat field.

This is a blue moon, because it is the second moon in a single month. The October moon was often called the Hunter’s Moon, as it marks the time where we must gather to ourselves the nourishment that will sustain us for the winter to come.

Halloween, Samhain, All Saints + Souls, Día de los Muertos

The many holidays falling on and around this day all mark and celebrate a time of year when the veil is said to be thinnest, when we can connect with those who’ve gone before us, the loved ones we’ve lost, and our ancestors and lineage. It is a time to honor, to mourn, and to communicate with them.

Moon + Uranus Opposite the Sun

The full moon is also holding hands with Uranus (in conjunction). Uranus is a transpersonal planet, an outer planet—and it represents pure thought, deep individuality, the urge to innovate and differentiate, and the need to free yourself from past limitations.

Uranus demands that we up-level to larger and more authentic versions of ourselves; pushes (forces) us to access latent talents and layers of our potential, to break with traditions and habits that hold us back, to dissect and rewrite the stories that hold us in harmful patterns—individually but also as a human species.

When this transpersonal, change-making planet of the ideal of the individual faces off with the sun, representative of the Self, in the sign of deep transformation, we are asked to confront the stories and narratives of who we are—and to release and transform those stories that no longer fit, that no longer serve, lest we be lightning-shocked into letting them go.

This lunation asks us to break and breakthrough harmful or outdated patterns in our behaviors and our relationships—and it’s not here to ask nicely.

If we do not do the work of confronting our own ghosts and shadows—our own false narratives that keep us locked in cycles of shame, self-disgust, and self-hatred—than the world and cosmos will conspire to do it for us.

We can choose to run, and be haunted by the boogeymen through the hall of mirrors; we can try to fight, and find ourselves punching the mirror in the face; or we can stop, turn, and look into the reflection of ourselves, willing to accept who we have been, warts and all—in order to empower ourselves to examine, and then to rewrite, the stories of who we are.

As individual selves, as societies, and as a collective human body.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” —Buckminster Fuller (Taurus rising)

Taking Delight

One of the stories I have been rewriting lately is the one that tells me that I must be ENOUGH (good enough, smart enough, accomplished enough, attractive enough) before I can deserve delight. Before I can be worthy of joy.

It is also hard, there is a sense of guilt, in the pain and chaos of this time, to allow yourself joy. But also, precisely because these times are painful and chaotic—it is all the more crucial turn to the power and strength of pleasure and delight.

It has done very little for me to combat this story with affirmations that “I am enough.” (My mind and body are full of stories to answer otherwise.)

Neither has it worked to do/make/accomplish ever more, in order to reach that elusive, always-receding place of enough.

So what has worked?

I would love to be able to tell you that one day I did “fill in the blank” and suddenly realized I did inherently deserve delight.

That’s not how it worked. For me, it’s been a practice, a daily, often hourly practice, of choosing and committing to being here. To being me.

In this body. On this planet. With all its death and famine and loss—and fat yellow dandelion heads and bright juicy pears. Its warm blankets against the cold of starstruck night.

For me, it has been about practicing sitting with, noticing, all of it.

Noticing when my chest swells with joy to burst at the sound of my son’s laughter. Noticing when a heavy depressive fog rolls over the ocean of my mind. It has come not in asking the questions: am I enough to deserve happiness? Or, who am I to deserve joy, what right do I have to it?

But in embracing this: look at all of this delight.

It is strength, it is resistance and rebellion to embrace joy in the face of a world and systems that tell you, you should not. That tell you, you are not deserving, you are not allowed.

You don’t have to ignore the suffering that exists, that you feel. You needn’t be perfect, or even good, to relish all of the sensations this physical, embodied plane has to offer.

You only need to open to meet delight—and it all rushes in.

Creative Ritual for the Full Moon in Taurus—Earthly Delights

This ritual luxuriates in the sensuality of Taurus—but not without first facing the Scorpionic shadows and dancing with the skeletons in our closets.

1. Read the poem Give Me This by Ada Limón:

Give Me This
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

2. Freewrite on the question: Why am I not allowed delight?

Make a list or journal entry of all the reasons you are not allowed or do not deserve delight.

3. Burn the list and feed the ashes to some plants.

4. Make a list of things, activities, images, people, animals, music, sounds, smells, foods, etc. that bring you joy and delight.

5. For the next two weeks, choose one thing per day on the list and imbibe in delight.

6. When performing or experiencing these moments of delight, allow yourself to relish. Also, allow feelings of inadequacy, of discomfort, of any sort of ickiness to arise, if it does. Just notice it, just allow it to be present—but don’t allow it to stop your moment. Refocus on the pleasure, the sensuality of the experience, on the joy in yourself or those around you. If all else fails, focus on the groundhog, perched on her haunches, tomato juice running down her chin. Tomorrow, begin again.

Creative Writing Exercises for the Full Moon in Taurus

Creative Journaling Prompts

- What are the narratives that you no longer want to keep telling yourself about yourself?

- What are the stories you tell about yourself, about your history and your past that reinforce an idea of yourself that feels small, bad, shameful? That reinforce an idea that you do not deserve happiness, do not deserve delight?

- Where is there room for reimagining those narratives, making them larger, allowing them to contain new truths about who you were then, and about who you are now, and who you are becoming?

- What are the stories you no longer want to keep telling and repeating about who we are and must be as human beings?

- What stories would you like to begin to tell instead?

Creative Writing Prompt—To Other Ways of Being

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society… to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.” —Ursula K. Le Guin (Taurus rising)

Write a myth that describes how a species that had almost destroyed itself, comes back from the brink—embraces all aspects of itself (and therefore stops projecting it onto some “Other”), and saves itself and its world.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash