Full Moon 28º Pisces September 20 5:54 pm mt
Happy Full Moon in Pisces! Before we dive into the full moon deets, I have a happy announcement:
SPARK! ENROLLMENT OPENS TODAY!
I’m very excited to announce that poet Ansley Clark and I are opening up another round of Spark!—the course on accessing creativity, the erotic, and radical pleasure, today!
This 8-week course will meet LIVE weekly on Zoom, Sundays 4-6 pm MT beginning October 3rd—and we’ll record the lessons in case you have to miss any!
This inclusive course and community combines writing, art-making, breathing and movement practices, activism, and more—focused on centering the deep and powerful connection between creativity and the erotic, our visions and our bodies. It’s a truly unique experience! Ansley and I designed it as the course we always wished we could take and felt like the world truly needs.
For me, right now, Spark has been a big part of my communal honoring of grief and pain, and also of celebrating and centering pleasure and deep experiencing of life—in spite of, in the face of, even because of, that suffering.
I do hope you can join us! For more info on the course—or to sign up if you know you’re ready—visit our page here! If you have any questions, you can respond to this email and I’ll get back to you. Really, really hope to see you there!
Full Moon in Pisces
Pisces is the end of the zodiac, the final sign where everything, including the self, dissolves back into the cosmic soup from which it came, and from which it will again be birthed into form (in Aries). Pisces is boundary-less-ness, oneness, totality—and also dissolution and sometimes disillusion.
It is a deeply emotive and creative sign, and as mutable water, can leave us feeling lost, unmoored, and drowning in the ocean of emotions.
But—as you know from my new moon post, we’re in Virgo season, season of harvest, of sorting and organizing and ritualizing and making plans—and the full moon in Pisces is here to bring balance, to remind us that there is more to life than our to-do lists, and that, much as we may want to catalogue our way out of anxiety, or categorize our creativity, or make life fit into our standardized boxes—the generative impulses of life and art are just too big, wild and unruly to always follow our whims.
Sometimes we have no choice but allow ourselves to be pulled out to sea—and to realize that adrift does not always equal lost. Sometimes we need to spend time being passive, receptive, listening to the tides and transits of our internal landscapes.
Sometimes—not always and not forever, but sometimes—we need to surrender to the sensations and feelings that are surfacing—perhaps that we’ve been trying to push away or run from, maybe for years—and let them win. Wallow in them a bit, and hear what it is they need, what parts of ourselves we may have abandoned in the past and how we can show up for them today, make a new choice.
This is one of those times. Use this full moon to go inward and to listen, deeply, to the whooshing of your own inner waters.
The Pisces full moon in the midst of Virgo season reminds us not to lose the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, the sun moving through Virgo can help us balance—ground and contain—the watery self-less-ness (literally) of Pisces.
Mercury (retrograde shadow) trine Jupiter and square Pluto
The cosmic intensity we’ve been experiencing (since, oh… 2020…) doesn’t really let up these next two weeks, but there is some support to help balance it out.
Our communications are about to get a lot of attention/go through the ringer as Mercury squares Pluto, but it’s also trining Jupiter, a yummy aspect with Grandaddy Santa of the solar system.
You’ve got help here to smooth communications and connections—but Pluto doesn’t ever let us off easy. If there are conversations you’ve been avoiding, now is the time to start planning how to have them—with empathy and maturity, but without abandoning your own feelings or needs.
And since Mercury is in its shadow, right on the brink of retrograde (which begins September 27 and goes to October 17), whatever material is being dredged up now will ask to be reviewed and potentially revised over the next few weeks, so just keep in mind that whatever comes up to be grappled with is here for awhile.
I was having a conversation recently with a dear friend, and she told me about some graffiti she saw that said, “The same, only worse.” And how deeply that hit right now. This pandemic is not over—and yet we’re being asked, expected, to act like it is.
There has been no collective mourning for this time, no time, space, ritual or acknowledgment to even begin to reckon with all the grief, all the fear, all the anxiety. And the specter of what will happen next and what will happen next time, hovers.
What has been dredged up from the depths is sitting here, floating at the surface—and meanwhile the powers that be ask us to carry on like we don’t see it. Climate change is clearer and realer than ever. Racism and racial inequity has only been highlighted and exacerbated by the pandemic—medically, economically, in schools and homes… Houselessness is a huge and growing issue almost everywhere.
It’s heavy and it’s hard and we’re all carrying this invisible load and being expected to act like we’re not.
And to me, what this full moon chart advises is: to take what has been dredged up (by Pluto), what iteration is coming to the surface in your own personal life now, the pain of the present and the past (as Mercury approaches its retrograde)—and to go quiet into ourselves and our deep interconnection (Pisces) and listen, intently, passively (yes, that can be a powerful word!)—and then to use our (Virgo) rituals and practices to process, to mourn, to surrender, to release.
Linger here, wallow, stay as long as you need. But pull it outside of yourself, through your conversations, your writing, your art-making. The world needs your grief, your pain, your mourning, your honesty—as much as it needs your joy and beauty.
Full Moon in Pisces Writing Ritual
1. Light a candle, white, black or orange would do nicely.
2. Make a list or freewrite on what you need to grieve, mourn, or just feel right now. What has been coming up the surface from the deeps, both collectively and personally?
3. Now close your eyes and imagine this grief, these feelings, the old losses, the selves we abandoned along the way—imagine them contained in a living form, a baby, perhaps an animal, something you can hold in your arms, something you can nurture. Hold it, sing to it, pet it, kiss it, nurture it. Cry and wail if you need, this baby is not fragile.
4. When you’re ready, you may lay the baby in a cradle in your imagination, and let it sleep.
5. Now I want you to take what you’ve been feeling and channel it into some artform. Write a poem, paint a watercolor, make up a song, mold some playdough into a shape—I don’t care what you do, just put these feelings in some form in the world, outside of your own body.
6. Make a copy of it or take a picture and—this is important—share it with someone. You can email it to me if you want. Or post it in the comments. Just to remember, you’re not holding this alone.
And here’s a song for this full moon in Pisces with a Mercury-Pluto square and (oh did I mention?) Venus in Scorpio vibe from PJ Harvey: