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.
New Moon Ritual
Saunas, hammams, salt baths, lunar and water salutations, all these chime with what is always a seasonal project of working inner waters. But this new moon, with Mars in Cancer gone direct, is also an opportunity to playfully check on our protective reflexes; to review certain armor and cushioning mechanisms, in preparation for the gleeful springtime chaos sure to come…
It’s a chance to add shape to the amorphous by slipping between aquatic dissolution and our proverbial meat-suits. Chewing mastic Chios tears, sipping on Blue Lotus, blowing up SOMETHING just to remember that it’s there (and so are you); or, in more etheric terms, reciting your version of the following:
Please surround me (and/or my home) in the blue bubble of Divine Power, the gold bubble of Divine Wisdom, and the pink bubble of Divine Love.
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.
Gosh, there's nothing like a near death experience to catapult you into the next impending timeline. Pisces in process ~