Welcome back to Only Connect, a New Moon column by artist and friend of the newsletter, . Today: notes on our New Moon in Sagittarius, exact on Friday, December 19th at 8:43pm ET.

Fission Quest

The New Moon in Sagittarius lands this weekend with a question for scrying: what is “truth,” and how do we come to trust it? To close a year on oh so large and unforgiving a subject: truth, or that which we know by its interior ping. By a ringing of tones fixed within a thing, recognized if unseen, saying yes, X is correct; no, Y is not. Followed by, from theorized causalities to their physical consequences, determined with our bodies, at our external layers, in engagement, decision-making, across relations, speech… So asks this lunation: are such gestures of inscription, or truth’s live-wire enactment, as yet necessary; how do we stay with desire, with what we call or would call “true,” at its cusp moment, in its state of pre-fission? How do we prepare for change in concealed form; how, in silence, do we express our sincerity?

These are all essential, basic Sagittarian themes, coming out to greet us with tenderness and somewhat shakily, amid peak confusion, in “weird times,” at this Gregorian cycle’s final draw. I am compelled by our New Moon precisely because of its fragility, its furtiveness; its suggestion of wisdom swallowed by a woolly, sunken void. Sagittarius is traditionally a sign of the bold and bountiful, its arrow of awareness pointed with questing confidence, open and honest and uninhibited. Here, however, we face a kind of charged delicacy, a quality of null foreboding apt for our moment of calendrical handover, both bracing from recent violences and as a drumbeat signal to forthcoming fissures, testing how much our culture can handle beneath a well-worn cover of progressive, linear time.

What the signal says, exactly, and warning us how, we are unsure, we dwell santoshically in darkness, reading by candlelight or at least attempting to, as our most vulnerable December selves, not quite free from fears, not without wants…hopes nursed and chastened from inside their heavy, heaven-seeking hoods. In Vedic astrology, the New Moon is situated in Mula’s asterism of bundled, huddled roots, of shadow work and spiritual dissolution, of a pause on Venusian representation (she now being gandanta, locked in a karmic knot) in favor of targeted rumination. Associations with south lunar node Ketu further an affect of detachment from material prospects — gift-giving compulsions suddenly rendered less important — and facilitate benevolently clarifying divides, bestowing (with some measure of disruption) a cleaving of voice from dramatics, from surround-sound noise. Sighs of release.

All this, just to carry us forward. To help us see a little more, even in stumbling over our plans, even whilst slurring our last words. To imagine and suspend those imaginings in hover-space, unarticulated. For the New Moon is squaring Neptune and Saturn at late Piscean degrees, and so, will naturally be frayed (not quite flooded) by deep waters, where projections swell, longings sink and suppositions tend to about-face. As swirling emotions keep you thinking you’re in chaos, a focus on truths left mute becomes liberatory: for what is intuited as real will not rest rushed, and the remainder, yes, can be enjoyed, relaxed into, still and secret and by law, only ever halfway understood.

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Moon in Sagittarius reading:

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Welcome back to Only Connect, a New Moon column by artist and friend of the newsletter, . Today: notes on our New Moon in Scorpio, exact at 10:24pm PT today and 1:47am ET tomorrow.

High Water Mark

The past half-decade, famously the last of the Piscean age, has been awash with discourse about time and its quantum mediation; what is time, how does it work, should we believe it exists. Physicists, metaphysicians and cultural commentators now openly swap narratives around a long awaited, post-enlightenment dissolution of linear time as epistemic principle with criticality as well as excitement, as far as whatever is taking its structural place. Mourners of Stiegler or more experiential intimates of time’s plasticity may find these conversations to be a little boilerplate; at least, so habituated are we to notions of diffusion, it seems like any ancient engineer-poet can be read as saying language fails, lags ever-behind. Yet what if we actually aspired to temporal “advancement,” to forward momentum? Perhaps that is why, as a teleological salvo, placing ye big questions in everyone’s line of living, this week’s New Moon in Scorpio is softly compelling: it makes time’s undulatory nature reliable once more by suggesting that tidal turn is also narrative progression, amidst whatever collapsible cycles of rise and fall.

End of October, early November has been a real drag, a month of all-encompassing Scorpionic severity — powered by an approaching 3I/Atlas, five overlapping retrogrades and an emotional shedding routine in keeping with snake year protocols. An extended lead-up to a Grand Water Trine earlier this week put us squarely in our pain bodies, where the hard tissue of congealed thoughts and ill feelings, strung-out fears and root-level despair are shown to be tortuously installed. We know such sentiments by their thick complexity, tightly knit, requiring small stirring movements to release, or often, a full, dramatic unloading. Whereas what is goodness — what is light, love — comes to us in lambent immediacy, as simple wisdom, clear in voice.

With a New Moon of gentle momentum, of time in motion, that simple wisdom feels sparked, like a first match of Sagittarian fire. The immanence of wisdom is a mark of wider late degree maturation: as Sun and Moon in Scorpio conjunct a retrograde Mercury, relievedly cazimi at 28’18 degrees of Scorpio, and oppose Uranus, retrograde at 29 degrees of Taurus, upgrades are in order — or at least some uplift. A strong Uranian influence, also tying back to an Aquarian Pluto, supports insight, connection and unexpected resonances, if not without an ongoing cast of chaos and strife, elements ironically drawn forth by Scorpio’s allusions to secrecy and suppression. The New Moon’s Vedic correlation to Anuradha nakshatra spotlights some symbolic pathways for its navigation: through integrity in friendship, devotion, and communal undertakings; individually, as always, prayer is a strong theme.

There is an energy of jazz police (nonpolitical) keeping things exciting — or a sociological reorganization of heavy mental and emotional activity, what channeler Lee Harris described for November as a ‘fast dislodging of what has been calcified.’ As laws of time guarantee, lotus always rises from mud, and we have been deep in it. The same laws dictate that change occurs once we let go, once we surrender totally to discomfort; this New Moon is a welcome signal that if change has come, so must discomfort be ready to go, so must we have readied for it.

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Moon in Scorpio reading:

With relief, as if only now can something — a whole season, even — catch on, the New Moon shines forth in the later degrees of Libra this Tuesday, October 21st, and to our surprise, perhaps even our resistance, what it augurs really is new. New in the sense that there is no eclipse shadowing its footsteps, new in that any emotional drop-down, or change in temperature, however far you choose to take it, is yours to determine.

This is a lunation that points to you — as one dot in a Yod, a finger in the sky traced out (“cartooned”) by Neptune in Aries (moving shortly), Saturn in Pisces (also changing over), and Uranus in Gemini, as they collectively quincunx a Libran Sun and Moon. In the ancient alphabets, Yod is known to spark or activate: its appearance here is like a pinprick of divine catalysis, a signal of recognition, or motivation: hey, you, Go. That signal is less to do with place, a destination, a clean “where to,” than it is about permission to be in present time as certain pieces — good pieces, other, more discomfiting pieces — slot in. To no longer tarry on the outskirts of a main frame, but to regard whatever frame you’re in as main and yours. We may remain waiting and wondering, our vision pre-blurred by winter’s anticipated enervations, by an approaching chaos or darkening cool. The test, as always, is to actually savor the great, ominous greige.

Besides, the New Moon brings with it a kind of lapping light. On some solar calendars, we have been squarely in diplomatic Libra land for some time, in an energy that is relational, co-creative, ever cycling between. Stationed at its window of pause and pause again. Rewrite, paraphrase. Sensitivity, hyper-attunement, is growing here on earth and Libra, well-expressed, is a consummate mediator: at once natural and defined, self-tethered, of all air signs, the most “liquid bandage.” Yet the New Moon is a much more marked lift-off, a still-blue wave of Venusian optimism, mirage-like in practice (clouded by Neptune), set, beautifully, to a tune of early morning harp song.

Whereas the medicine of recent weeks has been much sterner, no gentle plucking. It has stripped and shorn away and bodied our usual impulses, swallowed and regurgitated as we weave in and out of an ability to engage, Libra-like, with full consciousness. These are and will continue to be hard-pressed months of diamond drilling and polishing. Of profound anti-thrall. Every dimension of each possible self and incarnation path is in question, like a commitment that requires braving. We are soon advancing upon a period of Scorpionic plunge, a genre of deep core work — yes, somehow it goes on! — with which a year inevitably closes (and 2025 a 9, of endings and releases!). So I am thinking about the thousands of angels that dwell within thousands of things, and the inner strength — ours — that holds their voices in balance, as high and low notes resound from inside our actions, desires, words and needs. I want to say less and live more. How are you feeling?

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The New Moon on Sunday, September 21st falls at the 29th degree of Virgo as a rare re-telling: doubling back on a Virgo “Black Moon” that opened our eclipse portal in August and facilitating a partial solar eclipse, in alignment with the Lunar Nodes, and particularly the karmic South Node. This follows on from a very powerful lunar eclipse in Pisces during the full moon earlier this month.

I want to begin our discussion of it backwards from how this usually goes, by starting with a ritual, a quick remedial interlude:

The tinny, frenzied feeling of recent weeks, with their jittery hypersensitivity portending (and delivering) so much random violence and hopefully, elsewhere, kindness; symptoms of phone addiction, mass distraction mechanisms seeming to mount in anticipation of further changes, feedback, a watershed...How do we break rapport with such reactivity?

Drown it out with sound, ideally terrifying, transporting sound. Now is a very good time to listen to loud, sonorous chanting; music of the on-high — the atemporally inviolable — that with compassionate sobriety cuts through, and ferries us from, an anxious, all too lockjawed atmosphere below. Best if it corresponds, somehow, to your birth or adoptive culture, see this, or this, or even this example.

What comes up collectively is a testiness, and with it, a call to slow things down.

Such tonal resetting helps us gather focus after the burnishing of the Virgoan scythe. Some of us may still be experiencing its physical energizing, its speech and belief-level clearing-out, or perhaps even its brand of frantic, cloud-busted compulsion. Others may be completely done in, slack to the ground with creative exhaustion. Regardless, there is some measure here of self-consciousness (this is also Venus and Uranus interacting), a buzzy foreboding specifically around our external representations: how we define our personal being among concatenations of people and values, flotsam of past and future narratives rising to the surface of our habitual encounters. There’s an aura of excited trepidation, when everyone is a little afraid of each other, or afraid of what might happen if we get, conversationally, too close; in a Nico moment of beautiful and alone, as if needing to — courageously — remember and re-remember how we are all already woven and one.

What I am describing here is a general shadow aspect, observable in my periphery, relating to questions of alliances, affinities; who we want to be around, what we belong to. Vedic astrology locates this lunation in Uttara Phalguni, a hammock-shaped sign unfolding between Virgo and Leo, which deals with contracts, agreements, partnerships. World-stage wise, as well: over the weekend, the sky will form a kite-like structure (explained here); the eclipse is not visible over the US, yet will perhaps affect the status of the dollar, the Federal Reserve, the Euro, various governing bodies…Other dimensions of the transit will be more specific to your nature, your tasks; what comes up collectively is a testiness, and with it, a call to slow things down. The New Moon’s impartings are both fresh, heading into an invigorated autumn and simultaneously, bear a familiarly tunneling depth, situated along a Piscean axis with which 2025 began, where Neptune and Saturn are currently drawing us coolly towards an edge. The edge of what?

Of our own outlines, I suppose. Of a full range of human evolutionary possibilities. That is Virgo’s nervine scope, its delicately calibrated circuitry. We have now spanned the sign’s duration, traveling from zero point to final degree. In this life-imaginary, there is chaos, drama, ambition and then there is our sense of needing to respond to it, to resolve something, and what if we didn’t do either, what if we threw our arms up and said no dice. Except to insist, shards of brutality are harbingers of grace. Do you like what you are seeing around you? Do you even know or understand what it is? There are many efforts being made to parse our “strange interregnum” (so powers this very platform!), and still fewer interventions within it. It’s been a half-decade of hands waving not yet, not yet, though almost…The condition expressed here, at this last juncture, is of wanting to meet and to mitigate an event, and instead, as ever, meeting ourselves. A next self, hopefully, for a next era, its blessings already received and asking to be bravely, publicly, borne.

Only Connect is a New Moon column by artist and friend of the newsletter, moselle. Its name cites the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910):

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

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New Moon in Virgo

Every summer passed in New York, even if it’s just a sliver in time, I think about a summer at some point in the future but also in the distant past, a summer spent pregnant city style, glistening with a half-moon hatch. That is how my mother carried me, gracing wet markets and splintered concrete, before I was “evicted” a month overdue, well into Virgoan late August, born against or amidst a will to be forever inside.

Virgo is a very “inside” presence, with its strongest symbolic resonance achieved outside; as the sign of the maiden, in Persephonean readings, stylized as the almost-statue, coolly “alive”; the sign of I am woman, I position, I maintain, I organize, I think, I fix. I do not necessarily roar. Virgo appears this weekend slightly less compact or put-together, by way of being more vulnerable; as a black moon, in zero degrees, a moon of nascency or hold on empty, of taking in, and slowing down to embrace, the discomfiting and restless as-yet-undefined — if you will, the pregnant pause. That pause will redouble in an evolved form, as an out-breath and next inhale, during a rare second New Moon in Virgo eclipse a month from now, on September 21st, amid further transit developments and seasonal changes.

Personally speaking, I have felt a bit like a suitcase on a ship this week, my thoughts all a-jumble yet somehow contained, outwardly gathered, as if my physical form were surfing upright on an oil tanker. A hulking transport vehicle, steered by a higher power and heading wherever. In Vedic astrology, it is a New Moon where Magha (Leo) as well as more serpentine energy offer ancestral guidance, blessings and curses, and a consciousness of intertwining — though what with? The statue doesn’t have to know, each of us an expectant kangaroo (or seahorse) courier, clued in only partly on what it is we are walking with, on inner and outer, emphatically beneficent universal plans. Several astral squares (our New Moon to a wild card Uranus in Gemini, Venus in Cancer to Chiron in a retrograding Aries) background this stage to magnify a sense of isolation from full awareness and friction encountered if trying to organize against, rather than with, targets in time.

What we can stabilize: people love to talk about Virgo and digestion, Virgo and the nervous system, Virgo the righteous, health-conscious over-giving logician, Virgo and the courage to accept the the things we cannot change and the courage to…Virgo is a delicately calibrated compass, a counselor in this not that, supported by a magic bag of tools and skills. That bag has by no means been misplaced, just reset, wound back to baseline amid an ebb of clarity, where, not to call up Gramsci, of all people, things can finally get interesting, when more “morbid,” more question-mark symptoms surface. More possibilities for play — including in areas we may grow shy addressing (money). I always like seeing what happens when little has to (summer, and a city suspended in it); now, there is an approaching want for things to happen, and this New Moon, an opening from incubation. ✭

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New Moon in Leo

The quiet joy of July and its forthcoming shift into August is very music video: sound is introduced to surround, embrace, string together fragments, assert narrative cohesion. On the breeze of the day, and in the spirit of this week’s new moon in Leo, I’ve been engaging with the three canonical Fs — Flashdance, Fame and Footloose, to which a friend of mine added Foxes: classic 80s films populated by poufy hair, long limbs and most importantly, music — movies about how it all hangs, about dancing adolescents and the promise of expression, about aspiration to greatness and waves of emotional release. Their pure sincerity, their thin young skin of jubilant, see-through, naive ‘wildness,’ make these movies good places to be, conducive to wonder and curiosity.

Landing in the 10th house of career, my own natal placement, this Leo moon is similarly steeped in radiance, showing us the bounty of the full channel, not the clean channel; messages from the child-aged heart, born of solar purpose, as new dreams close in. It’s a contradictory time, of contraction and ‘too muchness,’ of retrogrades (Mercury, Pluto, Neptune) and lack of spiritual sheathing (falling within the Kabbalistic calendar during a period of intensity known as the ‘three weeks’), with a strangeness or emptiness pursuant to opportunity, as we choose how to live out the days. Each hour brings some correction to be made, and each time we fail, rather than refresh, feel into motion, being’s believing — the plot doubling back and in possibility, pressing on.

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Have we forgotten the heart, no, who could forget the heart, it’s just that so often we are party to its forgoing — by way of a cold, we don’t need this restraint. Feelings drop off in favor of language, ideas, pinging text messages, easy A’s, quick answers. Thoughts boil over, however carefully, into actions.

The sign of Cancer frames this week’s lunation, on the heels of the summer solstice, as a moment of graceful flush. The down and out tumult of the last few weeks entailed a closing-in on sentiment without supercharge, as a period of emotional egress where dramas, real and serious dramas, materialized through calculating minds and ricocheting mouths, rather than in expressions of heart.

The combined force of a Sun, Jupiter and now, New Moon all in Cancer shuffles us back inwards. Cancer serves as an enveloping mobius, lending permission for soul-parts to be stirred up and cycled through, as well as peacefully resettled; it pauses to encase our tears, and fears, in glass. Those still streaming down will be salty, full of lessons worth licking.

In Vedic astrology, the lunar cycle falls in the ‘moist’ and clarifying Ardra Nakshatra, symbolized by a literal teardrop. Cancer, too, denotes a liquid churn before crystallization — associated with a pursuit of higher knowledge, as well as security and incubation; with religion, truth and truth-telling; maternal wisdom and womb states.

Cancers are thought of as those who are good at holding and who are upfront about their wanting to be held. Ardra, corresponding more so to Gemini, evokes wilding and upheaval, and amid both, persistence, like a star still shining in a storm. Across both readings, there is the possibility for therapeutics at play, this New Moon being one to inevitably work on you; with so little room for word-worship, to purify and anoint you, rather than you, it.

July is going to be busy; it may be, some are saying, the year’s most pivotal month. Not out there, one hopes, but necessarily within. Added to the fact that an exalted Jupiter will travel through the sign over the next year, and that all three now-Cancerian planets are entangled in a pent-up quincunx with Aquarian Pluto, these are days to muse about our homes and horizons, about desires we wish to encircle and stretch past, and what, through the heart, can be evolved.

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The Gemini New Moon this Tuesday is very grammatical; as in, there is a grammatical fixation.

Usually I think of Gemini as a sign of whizzing words spoken at full volume and cross-sectional constellations of people and places; linkage between gears and parts, with a volubility both hyper-caffeinated and boozy. Seasonally, it signals a period energized enough for physical world connectivity and change; travel, transit, zags of input-output stimulation. This particular moon and sky assembly—with Gemini’s ruler Mercury stationed in its natural sign, along with the Sun—does function in that register, in that it encourages an occupation with our own sitcoms: possibilities for fresh stories and narrative rewrites, time spent on new scripts (Uranus is hovering nearby) or a rehashing of familiar ones.

In these explorations, though, there is need for a mindfulness around grammar, an attention to the building blocks of life: its sentence-structures, how we read and reread ‘eats shoots and leaves,’ how we affect or effectuate its understandings—parsing our responsibility in shaping (and not only channeling) words as one would, loosely and critically, a plot. Languaging with care what is said from within our psyches or to each other, and only then, adjudicating speedy materializations of hows and whens. This is a New Moon of speech and speech-acts, of direct-to-video discussions and expressions, ordained with precision. Relatively quickly, it becomes easier to be precise without becoming bogged down, and to translate that precision into a broader fluency with the border-space of cause, concept and situational consequences.

This porousness may come with an aura of confusion, between what is spoken or dreamed of in one domain and transposed upon another. Gemini being twinned, I am reminded of “Soap Gets in Your Eyes,” an episode from That Girl (1966-71) when Marlo Thomas’ Ann Marie, a flailing actress in New York, meets her boyfriend’s mother, who has conflated Ann’s villainous performance on a soap opera with her actual character. That similar stand-in types—celebrities and public figures, pedal-pushed on us with a risibly craven relentlessness—seem to have assumed more cultural potency and buy-in over recent months affirms how we, too, are soaped up, allowing for truth-skating slippages. Across the imaginal realms, we are doing the necessary work of believing and yearning and desiring. Only this labor need not be harvested solely to empower our collective projections—to speak in vintage terms, a media of “halogens”—while individual range is hemmed in. Detaching from installed synchronicities and force-fed limerances, redirecting focus to private grammars: somewhere, we must draw a line.

In this spirit, the New Moon is situated favorably vis-a-vis Neptune and Saturn in Aries, representing visionary processing (hopefully, now personalized) and a going-for-it gravitas. Both feel notable or urgent to prioritize as other variables are arrested, at a moment when a palpable economics is at play for many of us, a sense of scope closing in on several fronts, almost nostalgically Covidian. Yet life, at least in its Gemini interpretation, is about impressions and questions, about vocalizing many overlapping angles of observation. When George Steiner wrote in Grammars of Creation (2001), “we have no more beginnings,” referring to benighted notions of invention versus discovery across Western knowledge traditions, he was, of course, Fukuyama-level early; for, as we are learning, beginnings can also, always, begin again.

Today: M’s notes on our new moon in Taurus, exact Sunday, April 27th at 3:30pm EDT. The Sabian symbol for this degree (7°) is a sleigh without snow. Those with personal planets in the fixed signs (Taurus, Aries, Leo, Scorpio) - especially at/near 7° - might want to pay particular attention…

xo HG

Exiting two months of eclipse season, the Taurus new moon waves hello this weekend, on Sunday April 27th, like an unexpected piece of sheepskin padding — padding for when you may not have expected to land. Taurus is a sign of physicalization, what happens when knowledge collected in a drum of steam can finally set or merge with matter, earthen feedback. Out of planning and perceiving, into real-life’s ruddy humus.

The ground, the base of great nature, awakes rich in mineral information. Stocks to trade, crops to watch, geographies to transit. Relations both corrosive and fecund. How is this information channeled: through those beanstalks swinging up and round your ankles — material variables and values. The vines of family, loved ones, social codes, anchor you in flight as you maintain, interior-wise, a vertical axis between poles below and above. The beanstalks have a kind of stochastic logic, an order, amid the chaos, of: I am confident that someone or something holds me as I climb.

Or rather, ride. One tames the Taurean bull by saddling at a stable, centered position, more noble and steadfast a seat than reaching diagonally for its horns. The bull is Aries instinct in slowed, stately motion. Hearing a sound, he rears his head in one direction; at a different sound, inclined to lumber off elsewhere. Who runs, things, then? Not the bull, but us. His really is a lumbering, just as our reins of desire may touch down from ether with a ‘thud’.

For instance: a new pope, perhaps the last pope, will be chosen soon, a subject not far, in its symbolism, from many minds. As alarms are raised, smoke signals sent up, bells tolled, the heavy simplicity of Taurus serves as a kind of weighted relief. This New Moon, as well as a Taurus Sun, is in a T-Square with Mars in Leo, and Pluto in Aquarius, which are also opposing each other. With such an alignment, like a pulley system of thick rope, all that matters, at present, is what you do by daylight, however much in consternation, sunshine passing over waves of grief. The bull’s ride corresponds to diurnal pacing, to an awareness of, and eagerness to meet, the discomfiture of the world outside.

So easy would it be — so easy has it been — to give up on the world out there, to assent to non-intervention, in trying to forge, within ourselves, a new one. Yet this strategy is now a felled ambition, it has become un-seasonal, not apt, for it is the external that can and will begin to hold much more creation, more peace, more joy. To effort there is to indicate a taste for plenty: for ripened willpower. Taurus evokes our base-level foundations, as far as morals, judgements and how we treat each other. The grazing bull is tall among grass animals like a chummy Hierophant, wise to what’s what and yet inclined to get stuck. In its seventh-degree station, of shy summer feelings early to our doors, it makes me think of fruit juices, shining Ceres, golden grain, but also: a corruption of such bounty by avarice and attachments, Glastonbury rain-boots and people still slinging mud.

The new moon, as always, offers a reset, at a very corporeal level: having to choose one’s own facepalm, to be in mud, making mud-pies, so as to shimmy up and out of it, embracing beanstalk ties, help from nature and friends.

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How can I tell you everything that is in my Heart? Impossible to Begin. Enough. No. Begin.

That is the writer-illustrator Maira Kalman’s diary entry from May 3, 2006, reproduced in her book, The Principles of Uncertainty, a foundational text of my childhood. I often gravitate to this excerpt when I am feeling wedged between ‘impossible’ and ‘enough,’ unsure of where to start. Teething.

To not know is very ‘two weeks ago.’ To not know how to tell you what is now known, to not feel up to conveying a received sense of ‘everything,’ wishing to not speak too soon, is a more immediate and sensitive condition. A swathe of fresh awareness has been downloaded into daily life, as of our full moon and lunar eclipse in the south node earlier this month, during its discomfiting teens. Along with chipped artefacts, pain body reminders. Faster repairs = slower on the next challenge. The outer accelerated, so inner life naturally folds in. We’ve done a good job, these last few days, holding on to horses and hats. Amid an ongoing enchantment, drawn up from feminine volume, and awaiting transmission.

Here, we suppose, it comes. This weekend brings a new moon, a solar eclipse and an epochal transit for Neptune, all in Aries; apace with the sun’s rotation in the same sign, heightening a ready state of ‘action mode.’

Action mode is a surmounting of yearning; a space where a circling of core desires, a circling of questions, falls away. Such that the deed is the experience is the thing unto itself.

Take, for instance, Maira’s principles of certainty and not. How telling is it to have everyone at last in agreement that certainty is what the external world lacks, in the very instant that the volatility of such circumstances, magnified by their growing confirmation, necessitates a total and all-sustaining faith, the faith of the certain. In miracles, and devastations.

The shining man or prince of war, the Aries archetype, moves from an innate certainty, without too much thinking, saving room for afterthought. Jet fuel, turbo sparks. Yet Neptune, shifting into Aries for the first time since 1861 (where it will spend the next 14 years, after a brief return to Pisces later this fall), is a cold planet, as is the moon.

Action, therefore, becomes chelating. What we might anticipate being a baptism of fire — having jumped through so many rings already — will rather be mediated via a secondary tier of molten expression, that of linkage and refinement. This refinement can be staged in real time without too much mood, without the fanfare of overheated emotion, no Malina and her raging library, no more blazes in the sand. Making a brave venture outwards, waves of desert fading. Begin, yes, enough.

To go on offense, Aries style, is a skill of burnishing as much as burning off. It involves collaboration between parts, integration, the passing of the ball from one player to another — before the drama of the dunk.

New Moon Ritual

Melt a candle (white, orange) down to bits, stick a hand into its flame’s wading pool as far as you feel comfortable and begin to shape the wax. There may be something animal to your constructions, it’s good to remember the interior roar. Issue a first tableau, then another, then another. And all of a sudden, you’ve left the nursery, the playpen, you’re back in your life, actor always, and again.

ONLY CONNECT is a monthly series of micro-essays on new moon energies and related thoughts by artist + friend of the letter, Moselle. You can find more frequent dispatches on her blog, Oil on Canvas.

On the afternoon of Thursday, February 13th, in the midst of the Leo full moon, I was in my neighbor’s car, driving to a small town in Germany.

We go from Switzerland every few weeks to buy groceries for cheaper, always with another friend, who on this occasion for whatever reason declined to join in. Somehow knowing already that this would be a formative excursion, I decided that the neighbor and I needed to listen to a podcast, an episode I hadn’t heard before but thought that he might like, on archetypes and heroes’ journeys, wherein a freak car accident is discussed, a moment of sudden lost consciousness that inevitably served as a valuable initiation.

Flash forward to two hours later, on the road, just before a final errand, when a car pulling out of a lot crashes into ours on the side where I am seated, watching in slow motion, no one (the other party, a Tibetan family, also from Zurich) hurt; both cars completely totaled. As my neighbor took charge of pragmatics, what the Theosophist Annie Besant described as one pole of response to such circumstances, I began addressing the event’s emotional register, of shock and overwhelm, but also, euphoria; a shared gratitude for being in body and on ground, wholly alive human beings.

Why that incident transpired as it did, what its messages may be (personally: stop skipping studio, no more cut corners), with all its vectors, warnings, full moon over Germany timing, et al — I set aside for private parsing. I share this story mainly to place in strong relief the themes of the new moon in Pisces this week: a certain vitalism, a stepping into life’s streams, whether small or blown wide open, and also, the notion of divine appointments, relational synchronicities and fateful meetings we are being called to keep, of which my recent car experience was certainly one.

Across such possible meetings, the arrival, or anticipation, of physical death is perhaps the most obvious and “guaranteed.” In that sense, I often think of John O’Hara’s novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), a drunken WASP sendup titled after W. Somerset Maugham’s retelling of an ancient Near Eastern tale about a servant of a Baghdadi merchant attempting to flee death, only to discover death has made a fixed appointment.

Some are observing death’s omens all around us now, its many rumblings, heralds and flares — watch the birds — with an accelerated course of news alternately gamified and grim. We are heading into a Venus retrograde (in Western astrology), a two-and-a-half-year cycle of Saturn in Pisces (in Vedic astrology), and an eclipse season with its own calculus of dramatic rupture.

My interest, therefore, is not in concluding entanglements where fear stalks and broods, but, in living — yes, living! — through the tumult, by reflecting on appointments that, however fogged we may feel, can be committed to in full catalysis, as the very energizing or re-energizing of our existence; what tenor of encounters (planned and unplanned) we want to throw our weight in with, this being the remit of life itself.

As of this past week, Mars is finally direct in Cancer, and all other planets have gone direct, too. Six planets are in water signs, five of these in Pisces. The sun and new moon are squaring Jupiter in mercurial Gemini and trining Mars for amplification. If the past has a role here, it is to show us our Samarras, those places where we hide precisely for life to come and find us, burrowing like ostriches, observing our own scarecrows from the sand.

In my present time zone, the new moon reads as Friday born, that is to say, as a natural exorcist, culminating the week as it does the (Hellenistic) astrological year, Pisces being the zodiac’s last sign. So shadow work remains appropriate, insofar as it can move us, wordlessly, towards renewal.

Staring down March’s waves of foment, it is opportune to remember what our world is charged with, and by. From the “inside-out” (as Pam Gregory puts it), God is alive and magic is afoot! as Leonard Cohen writes in Beautiful Losers, adapted by fellow Canadian Buffy Sainte-Marie, a kind of biopic-worthy Jimmie Durham figure, as song lyrics for a 1969 album (uploaded to YouTube just before our last Venus retrograde from Aries to Pisces, in 2017):

Without wading in too deep here, the song’s language evokes associations of Pisces and the Piscean age (the age that, given Pluto’s transit in Aquarius, has supposedly just passed) with Christ Consciousness and belief systems reliant on emissaries of light, light we are now invited to conduct within us, drawing on self-sustaining wellsprings of life.

And so, peeking out from behind this month’s new moon, we have what is a very old dance between stagnation and flow, density and motion, generosity and want, a dance we might be inclined to map onto an outer orbit. This new moon is stationed at the 9th degree of mastery, of the jockey on his horse, raring to start. But still the roads are muddy, the skies flooded, and so the jockey must retreat for a while, his discipline internal.

Where else can we get excellent, if not in the external? Retreat allows for further options to multiply, in waking hours and especially, in dream. There is a lot more room here to keep time while out of time, to transit stages of creation by foreseeing and feeling into, but not yet closing in on.

Of course, we speak about creation by talking around it, just as divine appointments can arrive at intervals that, until their breadth is understood, may seem too early, too late, or rather happenstance. At least that wonderfully nebulous state known as ‘surrender’, a condition on everyone’s tongues, is designed to preempt the winter worries that these appointments, so necessary, may never come, at all!

Magic in hand, God up and about, we are as on schedule as ever, a schedule with a skeleton key. And for its duration, there will always be more doors to knock on, Samarras, far off and immediate, to run towards.

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ONLY CONNECT is a monthly series of micro-essays on new moon energies and related thoughts by artist + friend of the letter, Moselle. You can find more frequent dispatches on her blog, Oil on Canvas.

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Hello!

Moselle here :) Perhaps some of you know me from a few other contributions to Health Gossip, but as the community continues to grow, it’s especially exciting that Lily has invited me to start a column for the site.

ONLY CONNECT will be a monthly series of micro essays on new moon energies and related thoughts, titled after E. M. Forster’s oft-quoted epigraph to his Edwardian classic, Howard’s End (1910). You would be right to wonder what anything from Forster’s era is doing in a newsletter so resolutely guided by the present, but I find his adage to be of unique application to the circumstances we are now navigating — abstract to us, still, but vital and quickening. To cite it in full:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

Forster advocates openly and yes, with brazen sincerity, for a conscious passage on our part between the all too siloed domains of head and heart as the foundation — the only foundation — of true intimacy, interpersonally and with the cosmos. Through the valve tests of the early 2020s, we came fast to learn how new strains of “connection” take shape: as a kind of breathless, Air Age telepathic communion in clout, easily outstripping the old materialist ways with light-bodied sheen, yet so much transpiring at the level of mind by flying past most other plains of Self as to deflate in short order.

Such dynamics will only ramp up with the proliferation of their supporting technologies — and why shouldn’t they, if we do not meet them with our mirrors; if we do not insist on bringing all parts (especially those secret, wordless parts) online. Writing into a no less fractured society’s grappling with industrial-era transitions, Forster is sympathetic, his language capacious and clear. Indeed it is necessary to work through polarities, and even better — to devise, in as many ways possible, bridges between them.

From that same impulse, this series begins.

Aquarius holds the energy of Everywhere. Ganymede’s water-bearer, abducted by Zeus to replenish his royal cup. Servicing the god in several ways; in human expression, bringing rain, only to later become a constellation, subtle and hard to spot.

Though I am no real astrologer, I have interfaced with enough messaging on dwarf planet Pluto’s watershed sojourn in Aquarius over the next twenty years to understand that its contours are, well, multiple and without bounds; that what is Aquarian is networked plastically, not through speech, in mercurial Gemini fashion, but consciousness. What we think, but foremost, our pathways to thought, are imbricated with those of fellow beings — mammalian and now, also not. That which is encountered as “collective” is a lattice weave of thought-forms: in shadow, through the egregoric forces of overthinking and stirring Wetiko. And in light — remembering Ganymede’s thrust into service (more on its nuances here). What we serve, what we have been contracted to serve, our whys as much as our hows, is for us to examine, question, burn off and re-discover.

January’s New Moon in Aquarius marks an opportunity for emotional exchange with Pluto’s transit, but “emotional” in a cool, preliminary way. In the Vedic system, it falls in Capricorn’s quiet, steady sign of planning and represents the auspicious date of Mauni Amavasya, for silent cleansing in the rivers of all time (more on this briefly, later). Arriving at the month’s calendrical conclusion, on January 29th, 2025, 13:35 CET, the New Moon ushers in the Chinese New Year and with it, the Year of the Snake, the Wood Snake, promising a period of internal revolutions, of shedding and re-inscribing narrative trajectories and bonds.

We are still out on winter’s open road, a road that can feel exciting and shiny and pulsating with renewed confidence but also lonely and depressive, noirishly sexy and Being There-style foolish. The road’s thrumming inner momentum may well render us passive to the life-cycles of our own fortunes, good and bad, like one of Robert Gober’s drawings of a barred arboreal heart. From its cell-portal, Robin’s blue sky peeking in through the rails, grows a thicket of connections, those many tracks of branching and overlapping potentials, and memories shorn from root. Can we drive and navigate and witness, too, without playing back the footage, for once?

If Aquarius deals first in individualism, the single road that suggests so many (perhaps too many) others, it is to give our sense of sovereignty its due complications. To illuminate our mixed ratios of one-to-whole as we pursue a life of holes-in-one, of coursing miracles and everywhere’s we carry and that, we hope, will in turn carry us.

This new moon — as ever, a moon of seeded intentions — coincides with Jupiter’s trine to the Sun. While Mars and Jupiter are still retrograde, it precedes an end to that of Aquarian ruler planet Uranus, which stations direct in Taurus at one degree from where a Jupiter/Uranus conjunction took place last April. All this to say, there may be shockwaves on the way, storms and rainfall of a perhaps familiar voltage, given that the usual seasonal soporifics have already been shaken up.

This past weekend, I took a group dip in lake water, something I had never done before in winter and initiated separately from notions of new moon rivers to come. I let my full body go in, very calm and relaxed, and spent the whole three minutes humming and smiling at the others as we looked out towards a clutch of snow-capped mountains. Few ‘words’ were needed. We were in the experience, and that was all.

Just as this moon is not much for action or languaging, but suspension and motion reduction, as the road’s rhythms take over and we get our shoulders in the game; we are okay with Gober’s temporary barring or with being underwater, not yet defaulting to hardcore response.

Calibration, more so. Of our frame tales and their contents. Heart-windows on the world.

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