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 with 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.
Ritual
Asana practice: micro-movement seated cat-cow. In virasana, ideally on a block, work the base of your spine internally at first, going back and forth making gestures so small they are otherwise invisible, build up to looser, more obvious, more flamboyant activity, then back down to zero-proof. Know thy tolerance for showing your world within, for expression across forms.
