Yesterday I met with a colleague of mine to practice our respective ways of working with clients. As I played the role of client and she the practitioner, I found myself bringing forward the topic of “What do I do next ”, with its unspoken ending trailing behind “(in order to accomplish my goal?)”

As this question began to articulate through me, I felt the potentiality of the space begin to collapse and to flow through inherited grooves of ambition, assumptions of linear causality, time scarcity, a tired / tiring game played by questionable rules.

So I stopped myself. And, supported by that restraint, I returned to where I was and remembered who I was with.

Sitting in front of me was this person who consistently approaches our sessions with an adventurous spirit of Where are we going today? She’s someone who is game to play with me, to visit the seashore, enter the dark woods, get lost, invite in support, see what we see, meet who comes, be available to the way of Spirit and the movement of Eros.

She also comes accompanied by fear and doubt, and I trust her more because of this. I don’t entrust my system to her support through liminal spaces because she emanates some unfaltering, unwavering confidence of a Master; I trust her because she is confident enough to be a student of the field and companion to the journey. She is confident enough in her capacity to maintain connection to her inner witness as she steps in, becomes implicated and, to some degree, altered herself. Given that she gets involved and doesn’t pretend to be some untouchable guide, alongside her confidence she does feel fear in her work — the honest admission and allowance of which communicates to me an ethical and respectful approach, without which I would not journey with her the way that I do.

Because, when you cast the circle and authentically make space for Hermes as psychopomp to bring in (or up) guests, you do not get to control who comes. Yes, you get to be seated in your authority when you respond to them. But no, you don’t get to control emergence or the creative process. Here, with the primordial, there is nothing to “do”. You don’t get to always know what is happening. An honest relationship with fear here is a sign of respect for the primordial.

No matter how intuitive and penetrating her awareness is into patterns, I don’t detect any presumption of knowing how Life should unfold in this unique moment. She doesn’t stun nocturnal creatures with a head-lamp and attitude of “let’s help get you / this in order” or even “let’s help you feel this feeling”. She meets creatures with a soft bioluminescence and quality of inner listening born of her own initiatory journeys. She is someone who is able to recognize when we’ve dropped into the underworld, and moves slowly, with humility, as a human close to the humus of dark Earth. There is an honoring of Demeter’s grief, Persephone’s descent and the mysteries that are at the heart of true education, but that cannot be ‘taught’ in any way that fits modern definitions of teaching or codified paths of learning / transformation.

Relaxing into this relational container that we’ve built over the years, and the knowing that things can unfold more wildly here … a different, more open-ended question bubbled up from the field.

Simply:

What is supportive for me to tune into, in this moment?

And with that, I could feel the aliveness of the conversation continue.

As much as I do want clarity in my life, I don’t want it at the expense of a collaborative, inter-penetrating existence. In other words, I don’t want to enter into a moment as if it is an empty, inert or a blank slate for me to impose my idea, or my question onto or into. As if it is a land that is “pristine wilderness” and not already being tended and inhabited by many presences. I don’t want to enter into a moment with settler consciousness.

Each moment has its own texture, its own intelligence, healing center, field of vectors, webbing of relations that are constellating.

When we enter into the moment without attuning to what and who is already here, it contributes to the experience of separation and eventual rupture (albeit with potential opportunity for repair, re-attunement and a strength that is stronger than before — so if that’s what happens, well then that’s what happens and it can be potentially beautiful, healing and exactly right. But often, we just keep going and fighting against other things the mind blames for its experience of separation.)

Even when an astrologer writes a really poignant article on current transits, it can still be something imposed upon the Earth, the body and all her untamable, fleshy material existence, as if it is inert and not the primordial mother of and partner to the Sky.

With experiential astrology, we practice spending at least three rounds on Earth, to really ground in our lived experience, cycles, seasons and ancestral relations, before looking up to the Sky. From there, the practice of astrology becomes more in service of invoking and crafting-with the cosmic currents that we are inside of, rather than your CEO at the top of Mt. Olympus explaining something about yourself to you, as well as what to do about it.

So, back to yesterday’s session, I did give my system space to attune to the moment and tune into what was most supportive in this place. And, as is often the case with such an open-ended inquiry, there was first a pause and the uncertainty of whether anything would actually happen. There was a void and the mind feared its blankness, potential coldness, emptiness. But, perhaps because of the trust my colleague and I have built and the relational field we’ve tended, the pause turned out to be brief.

What came through the space created, was the image of a river and its snake-like course through granite-shouldered banks. Its body wearing away smooth curves into the stone.

What came was a sensuous Yes and a give of my own body to the granite. A gravitational pull to its solidity, weight, the texture of its speckled surface, its mica and veins of quartz glinting in sunlight. The way that it holds the coolness of shadow, the warmth of the sun, and algae-filled puddles.

Granite is formed by the very slow, underground cooling of silica-rich magma. As magma rises, it can be trapped beneath the Earth’s surface instead of erupting. This reminds me of Mars in the Fixed Earth sign of Taurus, the place where the red planet recently traveled and departed just yesterday. Perhaps the gift Mars in Taurus left us with, and that could resource this Capricorn Full Moon as well as its own time in Gemini, is the symbolic gesture of granite.

granite, a midwife to the world-building competencies of Capricorn

Upon entry into the Mutable Air sign of Gemini, Mars meets Uranus. Keywords around this transit include: impatience, irritability, restlessness, volatility, innovation, upheaval, disruption, lightning speed. Mars conjunct Uranus can spark a mental interest in something that brings with it a sense of novelty, engaging mental energy quickly and intensely, like a switch has been flipped. It might feel creative, exciting, energizing, potentially highly productive but to the detriment of more earthly, bodily, mundane things like eating, sleeping, laundry, dishes, parenting, tending relationship.

I think about Prometheus as a Uranian figure, having stolen fire from the gods, delivered it to the humans and then, as a consequence or as a re-balancing gesture, was chained to a rock.

Perhaps it was a granite boulder.

Perhaps what our minds (with all their forward-thinking capacities, moving faster than the pace of the body or the Earth can sustain) really long for, or would benefit from, is to be anchored to a hefty granite boulder. To feel contained and embedded in the cycles, seasons and creatures of Mother Earth.

I think about how Mercury (the ruling planet of Gemini where Mars and Uranus are conjoining) stationed retrograde in Cancer today, the day of the Full Moon. With Cancer, I think about the Crab and its shell, as well the seed and its seed coat. How both the crab and the seed crack open in similar ways: by absorbing water, swelling, generating internal pressure to burst through a once-protective, now-constrictive outer layer. This happens in the early stages of molting, where the crab drinks and absorbs a lot of water, causing its inner body to press up against the old shell until to cracks along a pre-formed seam and opens up like a lid. Similarly, when a seed is placed in a moist environment, it takes in water through its outer coat, the embryo expands, forcing the coat to split open. The crab and the plant are liberated to grow into their next phase of life.

And I think about how Jupiter, the planet of growth and expansion, has spent his past year in Cancer. Absorbing, absorbing, absorbing, expanding, expanding, expanding with water. All inside of a shell. And as I write this, he is entering the sign of Leo, home of Hercules, the hero who steps on and breaks open Karkinos the Giant Crab, whose brief life we see memorialized in the constellation of Cancer. Perhaps with this ingress, the pressure of all the water that we’ve absorbed, the past year’s feelings, longings, memories and dreams will crack open the shell of some past identity or iteration of a role we’ve been holding — and we will be able to crawl out anew. Like a crab. Or unfurl like a baby plant. Perhaps that Herculean move of stomping on the crab doesn’t have to be a patriarchal-heroic gesture of crushing what’s in our way, but a natural part of the cycle that can be consciously surrendered to and co-creatively woven in.

As Mercury begins to retrograde through Cancer, may you bring your deep listening and love to this rich moment in time, remember your HIDDEN TAIL (more on this soon), and hold open the possibility that the void is not cold and empty, but fertile with creative possibility.

Full Moon in Capricorn: On humility & granite

Ambivalence & forward movement