New Moon in Capricorn
image credit: Rachel Caauwe, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia CommonsIt’s nearly pitch black where she swims. Other than the bioluminescent glow of anglerfish and dragonfish, and the subtle contrast, movements and shadows made by small crustaceans and marine snow periodically detected by her large eyes — she doesn’t see that much. Or, more accurately, there’s not much that’s given to sight, in the perpetual dark of the ocean’s midnight zone.
She cannot tell that she’s moving by visually referencing what she’s moving past. Nor can she tell that she’s moving by the feeling of water moving across her scaleless skin. There’s no sensation of really going anywhere through the water, as she’s more being carried by and held within it. “Swimming” for her is a passive experience. The ocean currents carry her along. She bobs effortlessly just above the ocean floor.
Without a swim bladder, she’s still buoyant, her gelatinous body being less dense than the water around her. She floats and she drifts, only actively moving when her lateral line — and, really, her entire soft and sensitive body — detects pressure changes in the water that tell her prey is nearby. Then, with one swift motion of opening her wide mouth, she creates enough suction to take in her food.
She is the infamous “blobfish” or blob sculpin, Psychrolutes marcidus. An animal uniquely adapted to living in the extreme high-pressure world, 4000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface.
I know that I can’t and that I’m not meeting this moment, these times, alone. I would be crushed beneath the pressure, the weight of all the water above me, the weight of so much grief.
I also believe / know that humans can’t meet this moment alone. From my perspective, we will exhaust our energy and our hope if we don’t continue to radically re-embed ourselves (and our very perception) back into the endless field of wildly creative instincts that have been gestated, birthed, held and stewarded by other-than-human people.
On this New Moon in Capricorn (conjunct Mars-Mercury, sextile Saturn in Pisces, trine Uranus in Taurus and square Chiron in Aries), I feel one essential invitation here is to pay attention to our animal kin through our own sentient dreaming bodies. To feel into their unique ways of being and then listen with our whole selves (felt-sense, emotions, memories, impulses, imagery) for how their instinctual bodies respond and guide them through their particular conditions and challenges. So that if we find ourselves inside similar conditions, facing similar challenges, this instinct might be re-membered by the living library of our body as another available option.
More options, possibilities and paths forward can emerge / be perceived that would not otherwise have been seen, had our thoughts remained encased inside our individual human skulls.
In other words, what had previously seemed decidedly and fixedly impossible … becomes more fluid.
What was once a hard wall, has crevices to slip through.
“Attention is the currency in which relationships are forged and rejuvenated.”
-Martin Lee Mueller, Being Salmon Being Human
When we pay attention to our living animal kin, our ancient animal ancestors and the great Sky-Animals of the Zodiac (e.g. the Sea-Goat, the Crab, the Fish), when we acknowledge and intentionally and experientially work with them as sentient thought-partners and contemplative allies, we have an opportunity to access, nourish and expand the range and aliveness of our own animal-like parts of self and instinctual intelligences.
More creative energy and creative responses open up and become available.
For example, there are creatures of Earth’s deep dreaming who can and do survive the unimaginable pressure of deep-sea living.
There are animals that have evolved to thrive at depths where our own human lungs — our capacity to breathe through and process grief — would collapse.
If the blob sculpin had a skeleton, it would be crushed. If they had a swim bladder, it would collapse. And so, it is with loose gelatinous skin, minimal bones and minimal muscle, that blobfish have come to successfully “swim” the ocean’s depths. Their jelly body is actually held up and held together by the water around them. Water, at these depths and at this pressure, is a structural support for their form (hi Saturn in Pisces?) Their shape has somewhat merged-with, become-with their surroundings.
The blob sculpin is evidence to me of the immensity of Earth’s imagination (of which we are a part) as well as her creative response-ability to, and creative fulfillment within, vastly different conditions.
When we turn our attention to the blobfish genus (and genius), we also are feeling into and turning our attention to (this feels strange to say, but here it is) the blobfish-like aspect of ourselves.
The part(s) of us that carry the instinct to be very, very very soft, allowing, flowing, floating, drifting, receptive, utterly … “passive”.
Now, this instinct to simply drift along can feel ugly, unwanted, monstrous … horridly droopy to other aspects of ourselves. Such as those longing for change, revolution and resistance. Those longing a sense of agency and choice.
At least, I feel that.
And also —
Where does this instinct have a place in us? In our world?
Under what conditions does this instinct help bring more Life … and Love into the system?
What happens when we make a monster out of this instinct?
What kind of world would we create if this instinct is repressed?
What if this instinct doesn’t threaten the system when it’s held and balanced within a wider whole?
What if allowing this instinct paradoxically also allows for sustained action and effort?
Where you might go with this inquiry — and what instinctual response you might re-member within you when you think-with / consult-with / dream-with the blob sculpin around a personal or collective life question or dilemma — I don’t actually know! There is no right, static answer. There are as many answers as there are people.
What it means to float and to drift and to be held up by the water around you as you navigate deep-sea-like situations, is a meaning that can only be made or revealed in the moment — and your heart will recognize it by its aliveness and resonance in your body.
In other words — don’t force the meaning (especially with this one); let it drift in, as it does.
Saturn, Uranus, Monstrosities & The Birth of Love
This New Moon features the current sextile between Saturn in Pisces and Uranus in Taurus. And whenever we have a direct conversation between these two planets, we can ask ourselves how we might be finding ourselves inside the myth of Aphrodite’s birth. The birth of Love.
From Hesiod’s Theogony, we have the story of Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (Sky), and how they came together to birth the twelve Titans, the hundred-armed Hecatoncheires and the one-eyed Cyclopses.
Ouranos reacted to the latter creations as monstrosities. Too strange, too ugly, too repulsive to allow up, he shoved them back down into her womb, causing great pain.
After this had gone on for a while, Gaia enlisted Cronus (our astrological Saturn) to help her rebel against her husband Sky God. So when Ouranos came to Gaia in the night, Kronos lay in wait, ambushing him a sickle fashioned by Gaia. He cut off his genitals and threw them out into the sea. As they landed, there was a bubbling-frothing-foaming of the sea out of which Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, Beauty, Pleasure, Procreation was born.
Now, circling back around …
The blob sculpin— our so-called “Mr. Blobfish” — is only “blobby” and voted World Ugliest Animal, after we drag him up and out of his native watery depths. The picture of him that went viral and that turned into memes, emojis, plush toys, even a TV character, was taken after significant tissue damage was incurred by de-pressurization as he was pulled up onto land.
And if we leave it at that — at our reaction to a land-based perspective of a fish that belongs 4000 feet below the ocean’s surface — then we become Ouranos, shoving the real story of Gaia’s blob sculpin back under the surface and putting in its place this weird iconic image of what’s actually a distorted picture.
If we do this, we’ll never actually let our own sense of ourselves and what it is to be human, be nourished by the otherness of Psychrolutes marcidus in their own agency. We’ll never actually feel, and somehow recognize, the weight of water at those depths. We’ll never feel, and some how recognize, the buoyancy of this particular fish body. And how they have creatively responded to their particular conditions by letting go of what wouldn’t serve (e.g. swim bladder, heavy rigid bones, muscles) in that particular context, learning to ‘swim’ by becoming the ocean current.
So, my advice on this New Moon in Capricorn, is to not neglect the “Sea” part of the Sea-Goat. Because, if you’re only left with the land-locked goat
— or the land-locked perspectives of what is “worth one’s time and energy” (yours or another’s) —
you’ll end up layering judgment and criticism upon instincts that live in you that are … just that. Instincts. Instinctual life. That need a container, a place, a held-space for them to live. To play and learn. To have conflict and learn. To make mistakes and learn. To mature. To be woven in with the many others. And, eventually, hopefully, have a chance to reveal their unique perspective and genius.
Because, at this point, we really need everybody here. And you need all of you. All your instincts. Even the weirder ones. (… says, Venus in Aquarius as she approaches Pluto on this New Moon). Even the blobfish-like aspect of self. They don’t actually want to steer the ship (the blobfish especially don’t!!!). But they do want to be here.
Make space in your heart for more life. What we have called and shrunk back from as monstrous (dragonfish, gulper eels viperfish, anglerfish, sleeper sharks and black hagfish), may just be fish defining their own form of beauty in relationship and response to their environment.
As Neptune passes through the final seconds of Pisces and crosses the cusp into Aries, may we also courageously reclaim our unique and fluid shapes of beauty, genius and Love — even if we fear they’ll appear ugly to land-locked perspectives.
A Return to Our Senses
If you want guidance and support through this process of recognizing your inner beauty and genius, and your creative participation in the myth of Gaia & Ouranos in the current transit of Uranus in Taurus, you can sign up for A RETURN TO OUR SENSES, a ritual container where you can:
— let your inner animals lead
— re-connect to and nourish your instinctual wisdom
— collaborate with your Circle of Animals
to interrupt patterns of oppression and birth more Love into the world.
from my inner oceans to yours,
Nicole
