Only Connect: Allez Oop!
New Moon in Aries
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.