Full Moon in Pisces Sextile Uranus in Taurus September 1, 11:22 pm MST

Pisces is the fish, fully submerged in the waters of the other realms, the subconscious mind, the oceanic tumult of the body and its feelings. Pisces is boundary-less; Pisces is swallowing, surrendering, the riptide pulling you under and taking you deep.

Pisces is also the sphere of the psychic, the intuitive, the home of the medium, the dominion of the muse. In Pisces we know the beginning and the end; in Pisces, we remember the future. Pisces is the watery womb where all dreams gestate. It is our job to choose which ones will be born.

This full moon in Pisces is sextile (helpful position) Uranus in Taurus, planet of shocks, upheavals and change. In a positive aspect, Uranus can speak of radical transformation, the spark of new structures, and elemental shifts.

In Pisces the muse speaks to us; with Uranus in the mix, she’s not waiting around for us to listen. So get yourself open and ready for those flashes of insight and inspiration. Channel your muse. Call her in.

This full moon is asking us to go all in, to jump into the waters and swim with our dreams, to dream bigger, dream better, to envision new worlds, new possibilities for who we have the potential to be(come).

Venus in Cancer is also opposing Saturn in Capricorn right now, asking us to pay attention to setting boundaries and building structures, especially in our romantic partnerships and creative lives.

These complex configurations are asking us to soak it all in, to dream beyond the bounds, to wish upon the stars—and then to draw in the borders and containers we need to be able to begin building the ladders that will reach to those heights.

Ritual Bath

(It’s a full moon in Pisces—of course we’re taking baths.)

1. Add (plenty of) salt and herbs to your bathwater. (Recommended herbs include: lemon balm, sage, milky oat, passionflower, pine, chickweed, California poppy.) Bring an amethyst to the bath if you have one.

2. While bathing, meditate on the image of the sun setting into the ocean.

3. The sun represents your consciousness, beginning in the sky (superconscious), lowering to the horizon (waking consciousness) and then submerging into the deep waters of the subconscious.

4. Know that the water is your subconscious and your connection to the imaginal and psychical realms, and the home of your muse.

5. In your vision of the water, allow your muse to arise. This may take any form, perhaps another being, a vision of some other version of yourself, water itself, or just a felt sense or knowing.

6. Ask your muse the following questions: What do you need of me? What can I offer to you to better serve you? Do you have any advice or wisdom for me?

7. When you feel you’re finished conversing with the muse (or the bathwater’s grown cold), thank the muse for their visit and their offerings. Come back to the room, the tub.

8. When you get out of the bath, write down any answers from the muse, and anything else from your experience.

Writing Prompts

“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 and its obsessive technologies 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. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

Be the Change

1. Make a list of things, big or small, that you think, sincerely, if enacted would make the world a better place. Not perfect, perhaps, but better.

2. Choose one thing, one change, and write a story set in a world where that change exists, is reality.

3. As you write, really consider and grapple with whatever unseen or predicted problems might arise in response—don’t gloss over them, don’t ignore them, also don’t get lost in them. Allow HOPE room to breathe.

Remember: Nothing exists in the material realm before first existing in the imaginal one. We cannot create what we cannot imagine. It is our job, perhaps our most important job as artists, as writers, to dig into our cultures and bodies and minds, and envision and imagine the possibilities, the WORLDS, which will someday come to pass.

“Great artists make the roads.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

Utopia Rising

1. Write a scene set in a utopian world, or a utopian enclave/community in a world. (This can also be our world.) (Note: this is similar to the above exercise, but a more “whole hog” approach. You may want to begin with that same list, and include several/many of those elements in your worldbuilding.)

2. One of the difficulties of writing about a utopian world is finding where the trouble lies. As Anne Lamott says in the craft book Bird by Bird, “only trouble is interesting.” But utopia doesn’t have to mean everything is perfect (dystopias are each fucked up in their own particular way); utopias can still have problems, in fact they should. The trouble, then, may lie more on the interpersonal level, or, it may not… What is utopian to one may not be utopian to all (especially those who thrive and capitalize on the labor, oppression and/or suffering of others).

3. For this exercise, begin with a world you would like to live in, and allow the complexities to spiral out from there; discover them as you write.

Photo by Steve Rybka on Unsplash