Only Connect: What a Feeling

New Moon in Leo

Welcome to Only Connect, a monthly series of micro-essays on new moon energies and related thoughts by friend of the letter, moselle. Today: notes on our new moon in Leo, which was exact at 3:11pm EDT this afternoon.

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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.

Ritual

If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life… Time to check wingspan. Stretch your arms open, spread the fingers, fan them, let their pulse move towards you, work its way in. Attend to all extremities, legs, their rhythms. The rest of the body, the heart now seen, will follow suit.