New Moon in Scorpio
‘Allowables’
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened
by Nikki Giovanni
water trapped in a funnel web spider’s nest
Noticing and being honest with ourselves when or where core fears have trapped our mobility, creativity, patience, heart-sensitivities in some way, might be the shortest route to where we most want to be on this New Moon.
In felt-connection. With ourselves, with others, with ancestors, with the web of life …
And the emotional sense of security we find through this felt-connection.
At this moment, be alert to (and truly so gentle with yourself around) those times and places where you find yourself chasing the mind’s empty promise of being able to gain emotional security in a way that doesn’t involve touching the fear of heartbreak or the uncertainty around how we’ll come through something if we allow this fear, this risk, this unknown to exist. The unknown of whether a particular feeling might come. The unknown of when a particular feeling will end.
The mind can take us on all kinds of detours around confronting our core fears, which often become mazes or impossible fun-house mirror-navigations of projection and power-struggles, shame and striving, not-enoughness and hiding. Your reality or my reality. Heroic battles against the monstrous Hydra, where cutting off one head leads to the growth of two more.
Before continuing on, I really want to affirm that there’s no set, one-size-fits-all correct way to respond to the radical vulnerability of this moment. If there is one thing Scorpio teaches us, it’s to let shit be complicated. Which includes, leaning into allowing the risk of opening our hearts to love, to exist — this risk and vulnerability as the thingthat keeps us human and in felt-connection.
And also to notice when the feeling, the emotion, the sensation is too big for us to hold individually. (I think we’re generally there?) And to seek, steward, co-create relational containers that lets us be with it together.
surface tension
The beautiful thing about astrology is that it can help you let what you are responsible for attending to and companioning with, come to you,
priming your perception to recognize it
and supporting you with a living field of story, ancestors and many other allies — in other words, an expansive and a benevolent containing consciousness — that makes it more possible for you to more fully stay, and be-with it.
That said, just because it’s become your responsibility to attend and to companion a feeling (be it Joy or Sorrow or Love or Shame) doesn’t mean its yours, or that you’re wildly succeeding or wildly failing at your healing or maturation because it’s here. The compassion and generosity of Jupiter in Cancer often comes through a personally-felt remembrance. A Jupiter Retrograde in Cancer, the sign of its exaltation (as we have now) can mean that your own emotional body becomes even more available to being re-minded of and to re-playing the emotional times when your inner child experienced something akin to a feeling that’s here-now in the relational field … so that you can offer resonance, recognition, embodied empathy to a creature (or archetype) that’s asking for space to be here.
To exist.
To have a conversation with you/us.
With Black Moon Lilith part of this New Moon stellium in Scorpio (where we have the Sun, Moon, Mercury Rx, and Lilith all within a couple degrees), the creature wanting space to exist is likely one that’s been demonized, cast out, exiled.
And, when this creature shows up, the risk is that we react and replay the story of squashing and rejecting (or fixing and saving, or identifying ourselves as this) — projecting it out and inducing others into playing this relational pattern with us … until eventually we let what we’re responsible for attending and companioning, to exist. To name it, in the moment if possible, and move through it.
And I come back to Nikki Giovanni’s words …
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened
The challenge I feel Jupiter Rx in Cancer inviting us into, is just how much saturationour consciousness can take on of a particular feeling, while maintaining enough detachment for it to not have to mean something about us as individuals.
But, of course there’ll be times we do fall in. Where we do begin to make it very much about ourselves and our worth/unworthiness, lovability/unlovability … and go into relational patterns from that place. But if we can notice ourselves there, fallen (and I’m thinking now of the Moon in Scorpio in its fall), and bring our deepest honesty to that place, some really powerful forms of Love become possible. Honesty in that moment, can be a way to extend compassion to the hurt creature in the collective psyche, that’s coming up now, asking to be held. A hurt creature that’s meant to be acknowledged together — vulnerably and personally felt, though not individually-focused or attributed-to. We attend to this collective creature (and the health of the whole ecosystem through its inclusion) through how we attend to ourselves and each other.
Which is tricky to remember in a paradigm of individualism where we face the double (triple quadruple…) whammy of believing these feelings are about us, and that we’re feeling them alone in a kind of closed system, and that we have to figure our way through them on our own.
beads on a strong
Artemis & Actaeon
The touch of two animals recently awakened my senses to (i.e. helped me ‘make sense’ of) the themes and invitations of this New Moon moment in Scorpio.
— And, as a quick but relevant side-journey, I wanted to say that replacing “making sense of” with “awakening my senses to” has significantly helped with calling my energy in from the internalized patriarch and judgments of the rational mind, according to whom so much has to be so clear and come through in such a way, for it to be ready and worthy of sharing or inclusion. That inner Critic/Editor/Judge (whatever facet is showing up in the moment) can turn my attention away from the juice and wisdom of my own felt-experience, to a constant scanning of …
Do I make sense? Am I coherent? Was this thing that I just said worth air-space?
While these questions are fine — i.e. they can exist, they’re allowed to be there, we do not have to kill this self-doubt or kill the fear of judgement or rejection — it can help lead them towards balance, right relation or right proportion with other perspectives and creatures in our ecosystem. For that, one thing I’ve found helpful is shifting the phrase ‘making-sense’ to ‘awakening my senses’ (and, also, shifting ‘making sense together’ to ‘awakening our senses together’). It turns my attention and energy from fearing, scanning and protecting myself against feeling the shame of incoherence, to tracking how it feels to me in present-time to be sharing my perspective or story. Tracking where there’s life and connection. The eros of the conversation. The textures of the relational field. The various hungers and hesitancies, sweetnesses and vulnerabilities around more authentically being in participation.
If this question “Did that make sense?” tends to follow closely on the heels of speaking from your heart — first, that’s normal. When this question arises, within ourselves or another, may we see it as often coming from a tender place and from a genuine desire to hear the answer. May we practice noticing and responding to this question with presence and care. And may I also invite you to explore this offering: A Return to your Senses, which was created for Uranus’ last leg and final retrograde in Taurus. It’s an experiential astrology container for expanding our tolerance around something that maybe doesn’t yet make sense at first to the rational mind, while attuning our sensitivities to what does awaken the senses and the heart … giving space for those kinds of “misfits” in our verbal and nonverbal communications to exist and unfold, through the uncertainty. And to see what happens next, when they’re allowed …
But back to the animals.
These quite small and humble relational encounters were made notable to me by something akin to a scent that’s carried and suspended in the moisture of humid air … causing it to linger and vibrate longer than usual within my awareness, directing me down the trail of what soul-growth and soul-depth this New Moon is inviting us into.
One of these moments is this —
As I drive to drop off my daughter at kindergarten, my dog stands with his shoulder pressed against my shoulder so that our eyes are perfectly in line, sharing the same horizontal plane, looking out at the road ahead. It’s a moment of co-regulation for my nervous system, sure. I am so soothed and so comforted by this animal who is here with me. But it goes beyond that. As I’m seeing and feeling the world through our four eyes together, two minds, two muscular bodies attuned, human and animal … I’m taken to Artemis, of how she might have felt with her dogs. (And with Orion, for a moment.)
The other -
A stag has been visiting the pasture by my home and, each time, I am held, captivated by the shape and weight of his antlers, the curvature of his muscles, the glisten of rain on his hair as he pauses between each step. Another of Artemis’ creatures.
Stag
The subtle scent carried in by the particular feeling of these moments - with the dog and the stag - lingers
combining with the emotional milieu of Scorpio season our various places of deep wounding the particular potentials and possibilities we’ve learned to scan for
the creativity of our perception contoured to the shape of that scan
armored
Altogether, it’s drawn up the memory of a moment in myth where Artemis is bathing in a hidden spring. She is alone with her nymphs, when the skilled hunter Actaeon - lost and confused, separated from his hunting crew and dogs - accidentally stumbles upon her. And, in that moment of vulnerability, caught seen by a mortal in her nakedness, Artemis responds in a rage, unleashing her goddess power, turning him into a stag.
Actaeon, in the form of a stag now, runs through the woods and is eventually found and hunted down by his own dogs.
What happened? Why did she do what she did?
What else is possible?
I wonder if our deepest vulnerabilities and sensitivities, the places of our personal hurt and tendency toward vigilance … could be the thing that helps us recognize, early on, the appearance of a similarly hurt or a lost creature, who is asking to be re-woven into our web of relations?
A Return to Our Senses is a 1:1 experiential astrology container designed to support the last chance that Uranus has to be influenced by Taurus before it speeds up again in Gemini in the era of Air and Fire. We will dream into the origin story of Gaia and Ouranos, with the intention of resourcing ourselves as astrologer-humans who want to take the leap from our apogee as Thinkers, into a radical remembrance of ourselves as also carriers and potential stewards of an ancient instinctual awareness, felt-sense and emotional intelligence, intuition and imagination.
Through guided felt-sense inquiry and creative prompts with clay, we’ll provide material and shelter to Gaia’s children, protecting the offspring of the dreaming Body from the conditioned mind’s response to suppress what desires don’t readily lend itself to the sense-making of a dis-embedded Sky. We’ll hold ample space for the animal body to reveal its multi-dimensional genius, while simultaneously honoring the mind and its capacity for awe, wonder, openness, curiosity and play — empowering the ways the Sky gods can be in service of relatedness and Love.
Three Options:
Sensing into Your Year Ahead: A ritual space for receiving visions of the Year Ahead, from a place of radical self-kindness and a grounded participation in the sensuous present moment. You’ll come away with a felt-sense of the upcoming year, so that you can companion and collaborate with the various currents of creative energy coming through.
Sensing into What’s Emerging Now: A ritual space that supports what Life wants to emerge from within the contours of the sensuous present moment. You’ll come away with a deepening trust of your inner wisdom as well as an embodied understanding of your natal and the current skies.
Sensing into The Houses: A ritual space to walk contemplatively through the Houses. You’ll come away with refreshed and deepened intimacy with both your body and the living landscape of your Starry Sky.
With so much love,
Nicole
Without shyness it is not possible to apprehend the new. Total confidence at the beginning of a new phase of life means we are misinformed, that we are deeply mistaken, that we think we know what is about to occur and who we are about to become. Shyness is an invitation to a particular form of beauty, to qualities that are meant to be both practiced and cultivated; shyness is our friend; the annunciation that we are just about to walk through the door and through all our difficulties, attempt another beginning.
Consolations, by David Whyte
