on the new moon in aquarius and what trees can teach us

plus, a sale

This week marks the Astrology for Writers newsletter’s 6th birthday. I could never have imagined, when I started this newsletter as a hobby back in January 2019 after getting laid off, that astrology would eventually become my full-time job. All I knew then was that my writer friends seemed to enjoy my tweets connecting an observation of the stars to a creative practice, so maybe I should formalize them. What a difference a few years makes. It’s one of life’s great gifts, how things grow and unexpectedly develop when given enough time and attention.

Attention is, after all, a form of devotion — and perhaps even a kind of prayer.

As longtime readers might have guessed, the newsletter’s birthday heralds the Annual Birthday Sale. Year-long subscriptions to Astrology for Writers will be on sale for $49 (30% off) for the next lunar cycle.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your thoughtful comments and for your generous shares. Thank you for making this space what it is. I appreciate each and every one of you.

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I love trees, natural wisdom-keepers that they are. Big, old trees with roots I have to climb over — the bigger, the better. Trees have been here and seen things, and I like to say hello, to say thank you, to express my appreciation and awe. I have climbed up trees, sat in trees, and embraced old trees across the world from Cambodia to Spain. My father often derided “tree hugging liberals” when I was young. Oh, how things can change.

It is my belief that nature reflects every principle we have back to us, and one thing trees exemplify is community. A buzzword, these days. The antidote to fascism is community, I keep seeing everywhere. But what does community look like?

On this New Moon in Aquarius, exact at 7:35am Eastern on January 29th, trees can help show us how to move forward.

What structure do we bring to community? How do we do community? These are key questions of the Aquarius New Moon, which looks for us to initiate new ways and/or depths of being With Each Other.

Cue: trees.

You’ve probably heard of, if not read, The Hidden Life of Trees by German forester Peter Wohlleben. In it, Wohlleben offers a total reframe for how we understand not only trees, but also their woods and forests: that it is not a “survival of the fittest” competition, but that trees are communal creatures.

In the midst of climate change and rampant deforestation, trees can teach us something about building and maintaining community in hard times.

1. Trees share resources because they have allowed their root systems to become interconnected and communal.

This isn’t just about volunteering at your local food bank (although that’s awesome) — this is a mindset shift. A mindset shift that says, we are, none of us alone. What impacts me, impacts my neighbor. What impacts my neighbor, impacts me. Our wellbeing is interconnected. We are part of the same fabric.

Trees recognize this. Wohlleben writes,

When trees grow together, nutrients and water can be optimally divided among them all so that each tree can grow into the best tree it can be. If you “help” individual trees by getting rid of their supposed competition, the remaining trees are bereft. They send messages out to their neighbors in vain, because nothing remains but stumps. Every tree now muddles along on its own, giving rise to great differences in productivity. Some individuals photosynthesize like mad until sugar positively bubbles along their trunk. As a result, they are fit and grow better, but they aren't particularly long-lived. This is because a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.

This is the stuff of “First They Came,” the poeticized form of a prose confessional from German priest Martin Niemöller. His background is, I think, prescient for our current moment. Niemöller supported Hitler in his initial rise to power, only to later retract his support and lead an opposition group of German clergyman. He was, of course, imprisoned in concentration camps, including Dachau. He survived, and later wrote this:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Trees do not abandon each other. We don’t, either. This Aquarius New Moon, find ways to show up concretely for your beloveds, especially those who are being targeted by the current administration.

2. Trees communicate.

Similar but different from the point above: trees are able to communicate who is doing well and who isn’t. Maybe you, like me, grew up in a home where an exhausting amount of effort went into protecting the family image, hiding what was under the surface. Don’t let anyone at church know that we aren’t sure if we can afford the mortgage this month. Don’t tell your friends at school about Mom and Dad’s fights. Ignore the fact that everyone in town can see Dad’s impossible-to-miss truck parked in front of that dive bar every weekend.

Acting like we have it all together when we don’t keeps us from real and authentic connection. Trees can be honest about what they need and how much they have, about who is struggling and who is well resourced, because there is no ego, no concern about how it “looks” to have more or less than their neighbor. They have something; their neighbor needs it — look, now we both have enough resources.

Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance. When thick silver-gray beeches behave like this, they remind me of a herd of elephants. Like the herd, they, too, look after their own, and they help their sick and weak back up onto their feet. They are even reluctant to abandon their dead.

This New Moon, embrace transparency with your chosen family, with your neighbors. Lay down the painfully ineffective “let me know if you need something” and offer something concrete, especially to those in crisis: here, let me come clean your house. Here, let me pick up your kids from school. Here, let me cook some food for your family so you don’t have to while you have COVID. Here’s some gas money.

3. Trees form alliances with trees of other species.

To get resources for themselves, to get help for a sick friend. Trees understand that cooperation gets you further, and they are often willing to work across species lines to do so. The left could take note.

In this, trees also understand that the individual does not have to start something that another group of people is already successfully doing. You don’t have to start a new organization; check out the food bank, legal aid, or domestic shelter in your neighborhood. Former Dem staffer Celeste Pewter is regularly sharing scripts on IG that you can use for phone calls and/or emails to protest — for example, this new script for protesting the 45 administration’s freezing of federal aid, which includes Medicaid and SNAP.

This New Moon, I won’t ask anyone to form an alliance with those who actively wish/vote for harm to come to you and your people. But I will gently ask that we on the left be more patient with each other: many of us want the same thing.

4. Trees mourn and tend their dead.

Perhaps it is strange to discuss death and mourning in a letter about community building. But if we make space for our needs and wants, for our hopes and desires, then we also must make space for the inevitable loss and grief, which comes for us all. Because so much of what is uniting communities across this country right now is loss and grief: from the wildfires in Los Angeles to the avalanche of executive orders targeting immigrants, trans folks, and the impoverished.

It is too easy, in this day and age, to distract ourselves by dissociating and doom scrolling on our attention-sucking phones. But in order to process what is happening, it is important to — at some point — feel the feelings.

In this, ritual can help. Many people more knowledgable than me have written about the the detrimental effects of the West’s aversion to death. My wife has also written extensively on grief in our current climate. I would humbly offer that grief gets to be a part of this process of community care. Sitting with each other; holding each other; feeding each other. It’s all part and parcel.

The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive.

Humans aren’t quite the necromancers that trees are, but I think there is something to keeping the Memory of a person, a former iteration of a movement, alive. There is power in venerating our dead and fallen.

It is also, on a very basic level, community care to care for our dead, especially our recent dead whose lives have been lost to horrific brutality. Those who are comfortable with ancestor work might consider introducing more charity for the unwell recent dead as part of their practice. This Aquarius New Moon, co-present with psychopomp Mercury/Hermes and lord of the underworld Pluto/Hades, is certainly a rich time for such charity.

Community building, like root-growing, is a slow, sometimes arduous process.

It is the work of knowing, and of being known. It is the work of divesting from a worldview that would see some as more deserving than others. It is vulnerable; it is heart-filling. It takes the scales from our eyes:

When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with larger machines.

Moving at the speed of root growth is slow movement; perhaps too slow, it seems sometimes, to be a silver bullet “antidote.” But don’t let that discourage you. It is movement: toward each other and a better future.

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