Prologue (scroll down to the end of this intro for your sign):
This is a full moon week in which we’re inclined to feel either a sense of ‘completeness’ to begin with, an internal nudge to synthesize elements back into the picture that we may have left out, or an urge to cut & edit to whatever extent best serves our sense of a complete picture. In my own life, I noticed how when Mercury, the communicator & trickster, entered Virgo, Ana & I were editing my new podcast— an example of the cutting, splicing & rearranging necessary to make something wholly itself. There can be, on the one hand, a feeling of contentment that everything in our lives is complete already, finding the contentment within the simplicity of what is.
And on the other hand, the impulse to rearrange, decompose & recompose, is an integral part of Mercury in Virgo’s instinct…a place where the benevolent trickster is most dignified; most able to hack the interwoven patterns of the universe in a way that serves grounded, tangible, practical reality. This can be a heady week, concerned with discernment (“this, not that!”), health, anchoring, & simplifying. But we can also approach all of these concerns intuitively & viscerally rather than splitting hairs with analytical diagnostics: what happens when we sit with what is, or with a prevailing pattern, and let ‘right action’ reveal itself to us in a nonconceptual way?
Venus in Libra puts another spin on concerns for completeness, where the lenses through which we see right patterns, right order, & whole pictures are those of relationships, which shape the frame in which we think the tapestries of our lives need to reveal themselves this week. An enthusiasm for relationship and a longing for the celebration of how certain relationships make us feel whole figures heavily into this picture.
A counterpoint occurs, though, when Uranus’ station retrograde (8/20) lurks in the backdrop of the week ready to bounce, turning any sense of status quo completeness on its head. Uranus’ retrograde station, occurring simultaneously with the weekend of a Full Moon in Aquarius, favors the “impulse to rearrange, decompose & recompose” side of the equation. Uranus retrograde is like seeing yourself suspended in a floating headstand, supported by all of your comrades, carried out into space where stars shoot through the soles of your feet, transmitting the energy to utter the new thinking that will save our lives. This is a great opportunity to relax into change and to increase the intolerance for discomfort that comes with a growth spurt. How are you innovating past old ways of thinking that no longer serve the present moment & the bigger picture in the same way?
It’s common during a Uranus retrograde station to feel a sense of itchiness under our skin, and to feel that progressive change needs to happen in one or more areas of life. In other words, with this Full Moon in Aquarius synchronized to Uranus retrograde, we may feel the *energy* of change without feeling the *content* of those changes, those level-ups or those evolutions. And that’s okay. It’s part of the process. So how do we relax into change, including the discomfort that comes with it? Well, it may help to consider that in the case of Uranus, change will never mean a return to stale normalcy, to a ‘status quo ante’, so if you feel threatened because you’re worried it will all force you return to a toxic aspect of the past, you can exhale right now…Uranus doesn’t do that! Uranus is interested in helping you inhabit the next shoe size up, not forcing you to keep wearing a smaller shoe size after your feet have grown. So to embrace the new unknown, tap into the mental state of surrender, and of comradeship. Practice giving your weight & letting go. Revisit all the odd, quirky experiments you’ve backlogged in your journal that you’ve wanted to try out for your projects. Breathe through it all and let the chorus of stardust enter you from toe to head so you can utter those innovations into your life, becoming the next octave of yourself. And I’m always available to you when you are seeking support.
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ARIES. Some friends sit in a circle in a secluded cabin, and in your mind’s eye you can’t entirely tell if these are your people or not. They may be your friends, but on different timelines, from generations past, or innovators from all eras who found themselves here through a twist of their soul’s fate or through an assignment. All that speculation aside, the sitting configuration looks as mundane as a committee seated in a circle, with some of the members’ attention on social niceties, others distracted, pacing, and still others with a lilt in their voice that suggests an agenda, or a knowledge of who has all the money in the room & where they’re hiding it. You wake up with pillow marks on your face to this room, realizing that even if you’re unsure of the identities of those present, you’re the one who called this meeting. In a flash, the room begins to lift off the ground, skyrocketing you all into the air as it transforms into a space shuttle.
Gazes & snide thoughts turn toward you in an acknowledgement that you set this ship onto automated control, wanting to send you all into outer space. What was your agenda? This full moon represents a ripening for you, or a climactic reminder of some kind of creative launch, a group takeoff in which you set the controls & the catalysts, that you may be either ready to release or revisit. Mind the undercurrent of distraction or preoccupation with the values, clout, wealth or prestige that certain members of this group carry. Instead of allowing material concerns to sneakily disguise themselves as creative or spiritual concerns, let those distractions & preoccupations make you reflect on what those signposts of power really mean to you.
TAURUS. Standing center stage and feeling the blinding glare of a spotlight, a heroic part of you ready to disseminate all of what you came here to bring to the public eye feels a once exalted & queasy. There’s a part of you holding a glimpse of a moment you’ve long been waiting for: dancing in front of your friends & family, a triumphant celebration of the values held by the energy current that made you all choose to be alive at the same time. You sense that it’s an opportunity to, in the words of Nietszche, “Stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy & afraid,” but at the same time, the light’s glare induces dizziness & a fair share of panic. You can’t see all the onlookers; you can only see a promising reminder of your destiny through the sheer force of the habit of focus you’ve developed, so the attunement & warmth you seek for your channel’s momentum feels as though it’s withheld from your sight.
But trust this reminder that, as an earth sign, you’ve diligently worked toward the ability to conjure up an image of your destiny at will, and you’ve been so faithful to this practice that now the season to step into the limelight to sing the song that eloquently describes human treasure, and the value of the species, is a natural occurence. An opportunity can sometimes feel like a crisis, or as if everything is happening at the same time faster than you think you can handle, especially since you love to plod away in preparation. But in truth, you’ve been working toward this for a long time: your luminous power now envelops you, a halo over your full bull body, and a profound release is afoot.
GEMINI.You may feel at moments a bit like the Fool during this full moon, leaping in every direction while sometimes unsure of where you are going & why. Luckily this is a familiar character for you, as you love leaping across every gap you can find, your aerial risk itself connecting many gaps that others wouldn’t dare risk bridging unless they had all the dense materials. But this time, Gemini, you’re leaping across a full canyon, or a wide gulf, and while there’s a rush that accompanies this big jump, there’s also a mystery. Some magnetic force seems to pull you suggestively, as if a hand of fate making you think it’s all your discovery but gleefully sending nudges & signposts. At times this feels like the hand of a faceless, bodiless ancestor, the phantom limb of a genetic coding you’re destined to either repeat or heal. At other moments it may look like a lover’s hand, or the tug of a desire to discover something new about a place or a person.
The way you relate with the mysteries amid the histories of your deep caves is essential to mind & mine as you make long flights, contemplative jumps & frolicking boat rides across your worlds. You’re undergoing an initiation into a sense of yourself as master navigator, and part of this navigation is the journey of the jump between shores in which you can translate what those phantom hands mysteriously pulling on you are trying to say, without fearing that they’ll bind you to anything. This is a key component of your power and on this full moon, it’s reached a time of full (Fool) exposure.
CANCER. In one version of your nocturnal full moon life this cycle, your domain appears as strong as a fairy tale tower with plenty of whispered taboos waiting in its corridors. Bats in a diamond formation fly through the windows, and when they shroud your marital bed, supporting you & your beloveds, or spouses, or the other you, or the partner you imagine next to you, their proposal of feral support causes a stir. You consciously know yourself to be a wild animal sharing in ecosystems with other wild animals, and that your inner lair of fantasies shaped by all of your favorite stories supports this ecosystem. Still, something about these dark guests crashing the love party, or disturbing your beauty sleep, awakens the mad destroyer in you.
The funny part of it is that once they enter, they’re actually supporting you, your circadian rhythms, your cycle, your longings and the periods of touch & distance. This is a time to realize that the community you’ve longed for, and the home you’ve tried to make, also includes unexpected organisms. The planetary support system includes not only those you habitually focus on and who catalyze familiar feelings of creative energy within you, but also the ones who awaken the madness to start a genuine conversation about support. As Rumi once said, “meet them at the door laughing and invite them in, and be grateful for whoever comes, because each guest has been sent as a guide from beyond.” You can do this while also remembering that it’s still your house!
LEO. A part of you may feel that an illusory enemy seems to chase you while you’re unaware this full moon, kicking up dirt in an old country western or a cranky bald trickster in a cartoon. Doctors’ instruments may be used as an overlay on your relationship, or onto your fantasies of partnership: the scalpel, digging and extracting the relational gold, has the potential to sever you from your autonomy and turn you into one long piece of metal on the hospital bed of the one-on-one connection to self, subject matter or beloved. The frustration of the open mouths at the two ends of dentist’s chair, both receiving treatment, is that neither of you truly need each other, but are wondering where the pleasure lies in accompanying the other out of desire instead of need.
These tools of balancing and relating, when they’re melted into a gel, into a silvery liquid instead of trapping an energetic love loop with their hard penetrative boundaries, can become allies for your personal expression & ability to feel yourself if you do that work of melting them. Even the gaze of the rival, of the pesky Other, trying to trip you up, possesses surgical tools that you can melt with your seductive charisma. Remember that the only way you truly trip and injure your body is when you take those binding inquiries of the other to be solid realities, rather than potent metals you can mutually dissolve with your curious gazes. Mind your mane & your scalp, and when you realize that you *desire* rather than *need* the other, the hygienic tools cease to bind you to anyone or anything; you cease to merge into dependency, and you instead melt each of your inquiries into the deliciously volatile curiosity between you and everything you partner with in life.
VIRGO. Just before you wake up this morning you have a liminal glimpse of what it’s all going to be. Nurses from old lives sit beside your bed. Smells of ancestors in colonized environments fight over who had the spotlight and who had physical & spiritual well-being. Stars hang over open-roofed monasteries creeping with earthly bugs & underworld parasites alike. In an effort to give some levity to these landscapes you reach for coffee, or tea, or your morning ritual, taking care not to miss the insight from your dream life, still left over as residue.
But as you’re waking up there, you realize you once feared those landscapes, and you also feared that the moment before you woke up, all those who only cared about making their voices heard would take away your agency. And you realize that instead of continuing to fear them, you now relax into the lack of control over knowledge, instead tasting the articulateness of each distinct flavor of the mental states on the journey toward waking up: the psychedelically colored water of dream, the sleepy seed around the eyelids when the daily brain rises, & the contentment of your smile sitting at the table. You renounce control over your image and reputation because, despite the inner critics telling you that you must remain always the one who cleans up after the party, you come to a renewed awareness of yourself as the master articulator of each geographic territory of knowledge. Since you release the control over what you know, nobody else can articulate each wakeup call, and each state of vision & inner knowing, the way you now can.
LIBRA. The temptation of the party tugs on your adolescent heartstrings that remind you of those first yearnings for horizontal, non-hierarchical relationship. The shining punch bowl potion, which contains generations of bro vomit in disguise, calls you as a possibility of entering the world in the slinky outfit of your charisma. As you swirl it around your mouth (with the same voracity of the passersby in Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” when they eat as if possessed and then turn into pigs), all the partygoers yell & cheer you on toward your transformation. But who you’re transforming into, in all its glory and its ‘feeling itself’, for you, cries out for a balanced attitude toward the grotesquely base part of the new you and the refined feline in that same new you.
What part of you demands more, becomes a conduit for pleasure, and uses your friends as conduits, even though you may deny these parts of yourself? In what way can you bring your subterranean secret love of the power structures of taxes, financial relationship dynamics and secret online sexual affairs into this punch bowl circle; the ceremonial passing around of the elixir in which everyone becomes a never-before-heard-of version of themselves, or else experiences a return to adolescence? Can you transform your middle school friends and frenemies into a circle of comrades and give space to all your raging hormones, letting them roar and scream and moan in the delight of transformation’s expression itself?
SCORPIO. What couples in your family tree were unable to have a fulfilling sexual and emotional relationship? In the recesses of your memories, or gossip about what might-be memories, a crying infant seeks affection & attunement in the middle of a house with no light that’s been sexually sterilized. You’re invited to pay attention to this infant who might announce itself anonymously—it could be an aunt, or a grandmother, or a fragment of you. The part of you that wants a hug seeks to reconcile its shame over coming so far, creating a world for itself in which that’s finally possible, against the background of a childhood full of city sewage where everyone needed to labor against disease and refrain from hugging. A patch of fabric, tainted with waste & excrement from brushing up against dad’s leg in spite of itself, or herself, or yourself, when you weren’t allowed to hug but yearned to—opens its secrets to you.
The range of expression, and compassion you can bring to others, over challenges like these, has reached a climax. You can now talk to those dead fathers as well as the people in the here-and-now who are struggling without knowing why. The barriers against affection, and the cold fears that once tried to sabotage the unfoldment of your personal sexuality, have a direct impact on the connectivity of your one-on-one relationships, but the difference is that now you’re transforming the experience with your awareness. The sounds of the undeniable craving of love, and the openness of those fabrics that couldn’t deny the pervasive appetite for attuned touch at all costs, await you with reflections you are finally ready to assimilate.
SAGITTARIUS. Messages come through to you on scrolls of paper that you’re not sure are real, and from anonymous senders. It’s as if there’s a meta paper trail of messages that seem meant for you, but you’re unclear if they’re good-willed, empowering or disempowering. You may suspect that they’re rife with gossip, given that there’s a switch in you that goes off saying, “I don’t accept the messaging of the old.” This reveals a deep concern that the onslaught of new communications coming toward you will force upon you a return to the past. Even the good spirits of kind-hearted messages from brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors & friends dissolve into dark calligraphy, neutralized into the illusion of a demand to do something you don’t want to do, or to hold your breath for as long as you can as you venture forth onto a horizon that’s a copycat sunlit orange, with the postal delivery worker as the only distinct ‘Other’.
But deep down, you know yours is the innovation of the messaging, and that the dissolving of all uplifting spirit into a charcoal ambivalence on these scrolls is linked to an old habit of trying to moralize every communication of each day. The new change to embrace lies in seeing that there’s actually a person behind each of these messages. And part of the horizon of enlightenment toward which you walk is about exploring these persons who reach out to you, love you, wonder about you. So in place of requiring a dogmatic stamp of approval before each message and interaction, direct that spiritual integrity toward the degree to which you absorb the content of the message, and let each person coming to you find their unique place in your daily life without you charcoaling their singular spirit first.
CAPRICORN. Realizing that some form of currency—a dollar, a coin, clout, a kiss—did *not* bring you into the realm of the gods leaves one version of you seated, sulking, with your back turned to the heavens. The irony is that an incredible urge overcomes you to let all your currency fly out of your hands, out of your reservoirs of safes wherever you’ve buried your gold deep into the earth, and release it orgasmically, with plenty of curiosity about death, toward the sky. It’s useful to reflect upon how the underworld, in some mythologies, is the place of both bliss & torture, Elysium & Tartary, and your erotic holding-and-releasing power over your currency makes you receptive to both of these expressions of the chthonic realms if you become conscious of it.
The placement of the currency itself and how it works for your momentary happiness or struggle on this horizontal plane is not quite the point— and you know this deep inside, but there’s still sometimes an over-focus on the possessed & possessive object. As it flies toward the open-mouthed heavens, don’t let your back turn to them for too long. Messages about joy await you. Instead of throwing your head down & forward in disillusionment, you now throw it up & back, offering out your disappointment in the rejections of what you had to offer, of the gifts you thought were only yours, to some elated celestial place. In this gesture of surrender & offering, your connective tissue is suddenly decorated with lightning, knowing the ephemeral quality of worth in your life, but equally able to tap into your place of origin, where you can return to at will.
AQUARIUS.Your chance to strike out and proclaim the emotional climax of your self-discovery may feel as though it’s reached a crescendo in its time of initiation. The environment is strange, though: the home feels like a shoebox, one in which you already packed your luggage and moved away from deep in the past, or with frozen pictures of your parents & siblings surrounding you constantly. You’re trotting over your sleeping sisters’ heads toward some kind of horizon where you expect, once you’ve broken past a certain moldy wall of this box canyon full of those you deem too complacent for your taste, you’ll find the ultimate charismatic partner. It’s not so much a “grass is greener” syndrome that’s caught you, but a process of the proclamation of finding your creative capacities within a house populated by a sleeping crowd going into hibernation. The perspective easily waffles & baffles, where alternatively, that horizon you go toward includes a center stage spot *only* for you, your agency & your accomplishments, so thirsty are you for your freedom that any idea of a partner at all disillusions you. Or, the bodies that ambiguously support your movement through space, in their slumber, suddenly wake up, agitated, their latent emotional conflicts with you reaching a climax that hollers you out on your journey.
It’s the instability of the nature of the situation’s climax, and how it relates with your autonomy, that triggers this sense of the horizon’s promise—whether that promise means for you a partner, an artistic spotlight, or a vacation full of delicious melancholy all by your lonesome. You will do well to remember that all is not what it seems, especially when your perception goes every which way. Deep in those walls that have temporarily appeared to you solid & frozen lie organisms that conspire with all their might to assist you in your freedom—and that freedom does, indeed, start with your social & planetary consciousness, acknowledging that those persons & beings of all kinds are present to you.
PISCES. If you’ve been saying things lately such as “What a nightmare!” you wouldn’t be at all alone. In many ways, you’re the one who has needed to do the heavy lifting, or holographic walking-through, of bringing the conceptual expressions of collective togetherness into a more emotional place of genuine empathy. You’re the one who knows that without the fluidity, warmth and literal fluid that comes with the connection of the emotions to spirit, our attempts to live together as a species would be in vain, drying out into dehydrated vanity. This additional translation of ideals into emotional gestalts with which you’ve been tasked has forced you to travel to the moon and to extract all kinds of feelings, even nightmarish ones, in order to relocate tenderness & distill experiences to their heart essence.
There seems to be an opportunity during this full moon wherein instead of you feeling caught inside of the nightmare, you glimpse yourself going to the moon and catching pieces of the silver pie, reflecting on all dream components including the nightmarish. Your elderly soul, your adeptness at expressing ineffable realities in ways that transcend words, capably transmits the necessary words of caution to all your social circles: if we can’t learn to live with the nightmares within ourselves and each other, and gently begin to explore their nuances, then we will continue to struggle to shift the paradigm. Yours is the wisdom hidden within the previous recent millennia, and while on this full moon people may think they’re coming to you for information or guidance they can apply right away, it’s time to show them how it really works to take a homeopathic dose of silver from the moon.
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