ONLY CONNECT: Conscious Passage
New Moon in Aquarius
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.
New Moon Ritual
There is a kind of empty feeling to this week’s energy, as we are meant to sit with cellular renewal. In that process, there are often loud thoughts and feelings around an urge to fill back up. One common technique for seeking advice from spirit guides in times of hush is to write down a question or desire on a piece of paper, place it beneath a water glass and sleep beside it, so that when you drink this water the next morning you also receive an answer. I was always taught as a child to never drink water left uncovered overnight, because in it demons, the wrong kind of spirits, would be dwelling — an old superstition with bacterial validity, to boot.
As a middle way between approaches, for this Aquarian New Moon let’s try to catch a wish in water, first. To see what we’re working with, and in this protracted exhale, to build up some more confidence around agency, choices, forks in the road. Pour yourself a glass of water and read to it a passage from a book, an evil tweet, play a little night music, whatever. Right away, taking sips, observe what the water has been charged with. Do you like the taste? How might you change it? Where do you really want to go?
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