Only Connect: Zero Point Surge
New Moon in Virgo
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 Virgo, which was exact at 2:06am EDT.
New Moon in Virgo
Every summer passed in New York, even if it’s just a sliver in time, I think about a summer at some point in the future but also in the distant past, a summer spent pregnant city style, glistening with a half-moon hatch. That is how my mother carried me, gracing wet markets and splintered concrete, before I was “evicted” a month overdue, well into Virgoan late August, born against or amidst a will to be forever inside.
Virgo is a very “inside” presence, with its strongest symbolic resonance achieved outside; as the sign of the maiden, in Persephonean readings, stylized as the almost-statue, coolly “alive”; the sign of I am woman, I position, I maintain, I organize, I think, I fix. I do not necessarily roar. Virgo appears this weekend slightly less compact or put-together, by way of being more vulnerable; as a black moon, in zero degrees, a moon of nascency or hold on empty, of taking in, and slowing down to embrace, the discomfiting and restless as-yet-undefined—if you will, the pregnant pause. That pause will redouble in an evolved form, as an out-breath and next inhale, during a rare second New Moon in Virgo eclipse a month from now, on September 21st, amid further transit developments and seasonal changes.
Personally speaking, I have felt a bit like a suitcase on a ship this week, my thoughts all a-jumble yet somehow contained, outwardly gathered, as if my physical form were surfing upright on an oil tanker. A hulking transport vehicle, steered by a higher power and heading wherever. In Vedic astrology, it is a New Moon where Magha (Leo) as well as more serpentine energy offer ancestral guidance, blessings and curses, and a consciousness of intertwining—though what with? The statue doesn’t have to know, each of us an expectant kangaroo (or seahorse) courier, clued in only partly on what it is we are walking with, on inner and outer, emphatically beneficent universal plans. Several astral squares (our New Moon to a wild card Uranus in Gemini, Venus in Cancer to Chiron in a retrograding Aries) background this stage to magnify a sense of isolation from full awareness and friction encountered if trying to organize against, rather than with, targets in time.
What we can stabilize: people love to talk about Virgo and digestion, Virgo and the nervous system, Virgo the righteous, health-conscious over-giving logician, Virgo and the courage to accept the the things we cannot change and the courage to…Virgo is a delicately calibrated compass, a counselor in this not that, supported by a magic bag of tools and skills. That bag has by no means been misplaced, just reset, wound back to baseline amid an ebb of clarity, where, not to call up Gramsci, of all people, things can finally get interesting, when more “morbid,” more question-mark symptoms surface. More possibilities for play—including in areas we may grow shy addressing (money). I always like seeing what happens when little has to (summer, and a city suspended in it); now, there is an approaching want for things to happen, and this New Moon, an opening from incubation.
Ritual
Very earthy, very practical: Do out a closet! That is basic Virgo medicine. Just do it. Start with one, in your bedroom, perhaps even a bathroom or kitchen cabinet, take everything out, go through it, clean all around, clear what is not needed, give it away, make piles for donation (not to sell), put things back, do it again, do it every day, do a corridor, wherever you keep coats or outer layers, go for it, until you feel, everything can change, everything can go to zero, I can give it all away and carry all I need, I am okay and I am at work.
