New Moon in Pisces

pulled by centaurine sea-beings

mosaic in the Gaziantep Zeugma Museum, featuring fish-tailed centaurs that support Aphrodite's cockleshell, named Aphros ("Foam") and Bythos ("the Deep")

image source: Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear friends,

Included in this New Moon missive is:

• A disclaimer for this newsletter: Mercury is in Pisces :)

• Ichthyocentaurs & echolocation

• Pisces and the limits of language

• Jupiter, the Gemini-Pisces square & Womb-Time

• The Sea in Our Veins (excerpt from Being Salmon Being Human)

~ * ~

Disclaimer:  Mercury is in Pisces :)

Mercury, the messenger between people and realms, is now traveling through Pisces, the sign of both their debility (fall) and detriment (exile).  Communication looks and works really different here. It’s an invitation into other ways and dimensions of communication that are invisible/inaudible/imperceptible to the ways we are accustomed to defining and comprehending communication. 

I think about Venus, the exaltation ruler of Pisces, and how she’s not just depicted in myth as being pulled in her chariot by a pair of doves … but also by ichthyocentaurs, sea beings with the upper body of a human, the forelegs of a horse and the tail of a fish (see above image).

This obviously isn’t a creature you’d see with normal modes of perception, but if you feel into the ways that you move/are moved through the world by your instinct, imagination, intellect, felt-sense, emotional body, memories, urges and so on, your might see how your Venus — your Love, your knowledge of Love and your unique ways of Loving — really is periodically (re)-birthed from the sea and pulled forth by these beautifully weird embodiments of multiple intelligences that reflect our ancient origins as well as our current potential as humans.

It’s quite a flickery, eccentric and at times/often overwhelming path that Mercury travels in Pisces. So if you too are having trouble getting your head on straight to (hear and) say the thing you (think you) mean and (maybe?) want to say … I want to offer that right now this effort around orienting yourself, communicating and connecting is likely less of an on-land, heady project and more of an underwater experiential education around how to make the kinds of sounds (clicks, cries, wails, hums, songs) that help ~you~ drop you into your heart and echolocate, navigating by feeling your own vibration and noticing-receiving its return echo from the environment.  

Pisces is a place of many colors, but it’s also Jupiter’s Night domicile. In darkness, we might not be able to see the colors the usual way and so we learn to loosen our dependence on the visual and begin to strengthen our “seeing” with sound — exploring, getting to know, and finding portals in and out of the emotional waters we are always amidst, but especially with these retrogrades and eclipses upon us.

Here, we’re invited to sing our song and then learn how our song sung out loud constellates the field of play.

and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love–

do you think there is anywhere, in any

language,

a word billowing enough

for the pleasure

that fills you,

as the sun

reaches out,

as it warms you

as you stand there,

empty-handed–

or have you too

gone crazy 

for power, 

for things?

excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem The Sun

~ * ~

Pisces is a place where human language does not suffice. 

Pisces is where we need so, so many other languages and perceptual modes to assist the new stories (i.e. story-hearing capacities) that have been stirring within us, through the birth canal into expression.

We need the imaginal nourishment of a banana slug's skin, the warble-coo-croaking-bell song of sandhill cranes, and the rain shining on a smooth spill of manzanita bark down its trunk.  We need to feel the crumble of sidewalk beneath our feet and smell the hot rubber rising from old tires re-formed into the floor of a playground.  We need to notice that somehow our body already knows the incredible buoyancy of a beaver without having ever touched a beaver.  We need to notice how we can watch goats browse through a wooded area and “remember” the feeling of oak leaves crunching between our own teeth as if it’s something we’ve ourselves done in our own distant past. 

We need to return to our animal senses and feel-hear the cry of Persephone beneath the names of things, so that we can also then turn our attending from the outer thing, back towards the place inside where our own hunger lives and watch ourselves reach out from there.  If we bring Love to this tender ache and consciousness to this urge and this vibration, we may eventually learn how to hear the song of Persephone’s handmaidens turned half-bird sea-nymph Sirens, while staying tied to the mast of our ship headed Home.

Jupiter, the Gemini-Pisces square & Womb-Time

Jupiter stewards this New Moon, as the domicile lord of Pisces. Though Jupiter is the Greater Benefic and is better-known for his blessings, abundance and good fortune — the New Moon does form a square from Pisces to Jupiter in Gemini, reflecting a subjective experience of challenge, conflict, crisis or point of needed change.  

With this New Moon in Pisces, healing may come through change in the nature of dismantling, creatively changing, and/or detaching ourselves from a Gemini-related form (e.g. label, name, way of languaging or communicating; foundational education particularly with respect to reading and writing; sibling or sibling-like friend relationship; social contract, societal role, cultural agreement) that can no longer serve its seed intention in its current shape.  It has fulfilled its original vision as best it could in this form and in this life cycle, and has been in a process of depletion, decrease, diminishment, dying, returning to the root, seed or source.  May we forgive ourselves for “failing” to maintain these forms forever, and practice assisting the phase of completion or the metamorphosis that’s unfolding.  May these forms gently return to the ground — at whatever level, dimension or body they are shifting — liberating energy from old, limited interpretations and making it available to new forms, reborn from and refreshed by an expanded imagination, sense of wonder and embodied empathy.

~ * ~

Looking at it from the other direction, Jupiter may potentially be able to draw Piscean experiences of overwhelm into its current place in Gemini, and help by breathing air and bringing space to our emotional experience through storytelling, language and articulation between embodied minds.  This is helpful because Pisces is a place where we can experience something akin to putting our hands in cold water for so long that we can no longer feel where our skin ends and the water begins. Until we take our hands up out of the water and allow the currents of air across our skin remind us of our boundaries.  

… The challenge however is that Pisces is connected to the womb.  And in our parent’s womb there wasn’t the option of pulling up and taking a break or a breather from that water. Mercury can have trouble doing their work of keeping the pages of our story turning in Pisces, because the messages carried in that water, in that early womb-memory, imprinted our perceptual lenses in ways that keep broadcasting that message like a fog, in diffuse and all-encompassing ways. 

With Neptune conjunct the North Node, there’s an increased desire to return to a state of merger or fusion where our individuality dissolves into a larger dream, mission, relationship, sense of unity, cosmic womb.  At the same time (and maybe because of this intensified longing for unity) there’s an increased turbulence around and foregrounding of the personal womb-memories that pattern our lived experience and reality-creation. This can lead to more free-floating anxiety and an inability to pinpoint and articulate what exactly is troubling us so deeply (everything seems troubling). It can lead to the sense that the object of our desire or the other person we’re talking to, as being a mirage or un-graspable (is anyone there? is anyone on the other end of this line? is anybody listening?) and a confusion around what I’m supposed to do (what can possibly be even done here?).

Yes, there is an overwhelming number of real events and situations that give reason to feel fear, anger and grief. And also, there are ways that our womb-times are influencing our creative response-ability to these situations — our ability to hear the voices of our allies, to feel and know their availability, and to notice the ways things can get organized around our being who we are. Around our songs sung out loud.

There are ways that we’re being invited, nudged, prodded inward to more deeply connect and anchor in to our core Self, and to hold onto that reality as we encounter and move through the subtle echoes of our gestating parent’s body chemistry, the fight-flight-freeze signaling and patterning that transferred through the womb waters of our pre-natal experiences into our bodyminds.

On the other side of clearing this messaging and bringing our nervous system into the present moment — there is still the sea in us. But it includes more allies, guardians and re-sources than maybe we’ve ever known before. 

“My astonishment drifts back in time. The blood that flows through my girl’s veins, where are its headwaters? …

If her blood flowed from mother’s blood, must I not also trace back the flow of her blood? This would take me upstream to her mother’s umbilical unity with her mother. And so I follow the watershed up through the generations, upstream and past the point where I know their stories, their faces, their names. The bodies begin to metamorphosize before my eyes, until the upright walk of distant grandmothers cowers forward and downward, mother by mother by mother, into a four-by-four tread, past all her mammal grandmothers and even past all her reptile grandmothers, until limbs reform into the fins they once were, and body parts as separate as breasts, teeth and hair all grow back into the early skin of ancient mothers from whence each emerged. The mothers inhabit the brackish water of Pangaea’s primordial shoreline. They are called Tiktaalik. They have all the bones of my girls upper arm, her forearm, her wrist and her palm but they also have scales and fin webbing. they have large, heavy heads and even larger, powerful tails. They are fish on their way to colonize land.”

Being Salmon Being Human, Encounter the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild, by Martin Lee Mueller.

~ * ~

Thank you as always for being here.  May you have a magical New Moon full of synchronicity. May you sing your song out loud so that we can hear, gather with and support you in unexpectedly just-right ways.

May we all release what we don’t need, what doesn’t serve and what’s ready to go, to make more space to receive.

to the sea in our veins and the centauric sea beings that pull us,

Nicole