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Welcome to one of the most gorgeous new moons of the year! This is an excellent time for setting intentions and planting seeds for the next month, and the next six months of this lunar cycle. There’s so much yummy, juicy energy to work with this new moon, and hardly any difficult energies—and there haven’t been a ton of moons we can say that with this year—so please, manifest away!
Happy Super Blue Full Moon in Pisces! This moon may bring up a lot of emotion—and asks us to balance our heads with our hearts. A supermoon is when the moon is closest to the earth in its orbit—amplifying its influence and effects. And a blue moon occurs when we have two full moons in the same month—in this case bookending August (8/1 and 8/30). This full blue supermoon brings the already dreamy, emotional, watery Piscean vibes to a crescendo.
This new moon sits with sun at 4º of Virgo. Virgo, mutable earth, marks the time of harvest, the point of the year where summer bends toward fall, and we gather and sort the wheat from the chaff. Virgo carries these energies of discernment and discrimination, determining what is worth saving and what needs to be discarded.
New Moon in Cancer, Cancer, Cardinal Water, the primal waters where life begins and grows, the amniotic womb, the primordial ocean from whence life crawled onto the earth. Cancer is Mother, the principle of mothering, nurturing, bringing into being. Mother regardless of gender or genitals. We all contain the ability and sense to mother, to birth, to bring into being and, further, more importantly, perhaps, to nurture into life.
This full moon glows in Libra, sitting across from the sun in Aries. Full moons are always a time of integration, of navigating the polarity of two opposite signs, of exploding the binary by embodying the paradox of the axis. Aries is the sign of the individual, of the self—it’s catch-phrase is “I am.” Aries is the beginning, the birth of spring, the individuating into a contained and separate self. Libra, on the other hand, is the sign of the other, of relating and relationship, of partner and collaboration and working together.
This is a very powerful new moon and a very powerful time for setting intentions and planting the seeds we wish to grow and harvest this year. This moon is conjunct the sun (as new moons always are) in Aries—sign of the ram, which begins on the vernal equinox (in the northern hemisphere) each year and kicks off spring, season of birth, growth, fertility and virility. Aries season is always a time of action—and, if utilized wisely, of planning and setting goals and intentions to channel its wild energies within. This particular moon, however, is also conjunct Chiron, the wounded healer, and Mercury, planet of our minds, thoughts, language and communications—giving it a slightly more nuanced, complex and somber flavor.
This full moon fattens in Virgo, sign of the Virgin—the one whole unto herself—the devotee dedicated to the goddess—the small, daily acts of service that add up to a lifetime of reverence. It sits across from the Sun and Neptune, along with Jupiter and Mercury in Pisces, sign of the fish—swimming the grand cosmic ocean, the ending and beginning, the place where all of our individual drops eventually return, death, rebirth. The vast, veiled planes of spirit.
This new moon is a bit of a paradox, on several levels. Pisces is the end of the zodiac, the end of the astrological year, the last stretch before the new moon in Aries begins the spring, the birth of a new cycle. Pisces, like all mutable signs, is the brink, the edge, the liminal in-between as one season bleeds into the next. The winter melting, almost without notice, into spring.
This is a big, emotional, POWERFUL full moon, y’all. This full moon is a crossroads, a threshold. Forming a grand cross with the sun and the nodes of fate, and with Pluto in conversation with the nodes as well, the decisions we make now are destiny-making choices. You can choose to stay stuck in your karma and the past—or you can choose let go, step into an unknown future and evolve.
We began the new year deep in Venus’ retrograde through Capricorn—asking us to deeply examine the structures and foundations of everything we value, relationships, love, beauty, art, money, finances, pleasure. As Venus conjoined Pluto, this excavation went deep into the recesses of our past, our subconscious, even into generational and ancestral layers of our psyches and physiology. The good news is, this week begins a major shift in this energy and a big push for forward momentum.
Taurus is fixed earth, the bull—the deep appreciation and pleasure of the body, the earth, incarnation. Scorpio, meanwhile, is everything beneath—beneath the earth, beneath the surface, beneath the veneer of society. Scorpio is the taboo, everything a culture represses and denies. Taurus is the earth unfurling in the height of spring; Scorpio the inward coiling and falling leaves of deep fall.
Now is a season of conserving, reserving and storing, a time of sending the energy to our roots to coil and preserve for the spring—a time of pinpointed focus and release of everything extraneous. So that when we come to the time of growing, producing and extroverting, we have that energy repleted and ready to send out into the world, and into our creative goals and projects.
This full moon is a powerful—I mean powerful—time for release and for transformation. It will also bring a lot of intensity and an impulsive desire to act, and act now (occurring in the action-oriented sign of Aries, with Mars, planet of both aggression and getting shit done, in the mix to boot). There’s a lot of surface-movement energy afoot—but beneath that, the real current, the undertow under-pining all the tumult, is the deep, transformational, evolve-or-be-destroyed tide of Pluto’s underworld.
Virgo is the Virgin, the devotee to the Goddess, cleaning and purifying the temple, ritualizing their devotion, offering themselves in service to something larger than themselves. And while I’ve certainly been feeling the back-to-school, prepare-for-winter vibes to clean out the closets and stock the pantry, I am also feeling, deeply, the call to recommit to my practices of writing, meditating, sitting with the sun each morning, making my bed, sweeping space and time for my own connection with something greater, my own devotion and service to the gifts and talents I must hone and create in offering to the world. My payment in exchange for this one wild world, this one short and exquisite life.
Welcome to Leo season, sun babies! Leo is often known as the drama queen, the performer, the one standing in the spotlight. But what Leo truly represents in its most evolved form, is the deeply individual, unique creative self-expression each of us, and only us, has to offer this world. The challenge here, is that Leo can sometimes come to depend on, to crave, the applause, the attention and approval of others. That’s why (in the lovely symmetry that is the zodiac), it sits across from Aquarius, who, on the other end of the polarity, teaches us to embrace our weird quirky uniqueness and own that authentic individuality without shame.
The moon conjuncts the sun at 18º of Cancer on July 9, initiating a new moon cycle and a moment of pattern-setting for the next two week period—as well as the next six months (until we return for the full moon in Cancer, January 17 2022, closing the cycle). The constellation of the crab spans the portion of the sky assigned to Cancer—the word cancer itself is Latin for crab—and this crustacean spirit animal has much to teach us about the lessons and journeys of Cancer season, and this Cancer new moon in particular.
As is always the case with a full moon, the moon sits across the sky from the sun in the opposite side of the zodiac, staring each other down, and therefore shining the full light of the sun onto the reflective moon. The moon rules Cancer, so it doesn’t fare well in the opposite sign, Capricorn (it’s in its fall here, a debilitated placement). Capricorn is rather dry and harsh for the watery moon. Ruled by Saturn, planet of boundaries, Capricorn is known for rational thinking, rules and structure—quite different from oceanic Cancer.
