the full moon in pisces for writers
with writing prompts
TONIGHT! My first-ever donation-based lecture, The Astrology of Book Bans, is at 7pm Eastern. If you’re broke and on a budget, it’s only $1 to sign up. If you have steady income and can afford more to offset and cover others’ entries (with $10 and $25+ tiers), it’s an honor-based system. I hope to see you there!
I’ve reopened for 3rd house writing routine readings on a few select Saturdays in September. There are a few spots left! You can book your reading here.
This one… is a little different. A little weird. Rock with me.
The New Moon in Pisces earlier this year saw the closure of beloved literary magazine Catapult, a protest to the NYT on its coverage of trans issues, and the ratification of the Harper union. Six months later, Catapult is still closed and Harper employees are back to work, but today’s Full Moon in Pisces finds us reckoning with similar themes. There are ongoing creative labor strikes from WGA and SAG-Aftra, which are projected to continue into the fall and possibly even into the holiday season. LGBTQ+ equality continues to be a national headline, especially around trans issues, from book bans to legislation; just last week, a trans healthcare ban took effect in Alabama.
Meanwhile, student debt repayment is set to return (you can join the Student Debt Strike here), inflation is rising, and the Republican primaries are off to the races, with book banner homophobe Ron DeSantis still somehow trailing the now-indicted former president.
This is the climate that the Full Moon in Pisces arrives in. Here in the US, the chasm between the decision-makers with power and resources and the laborers who create their products is ever-widening. But exploitation — of labor, of resources — only works for so long before people catch on and unify. Before the individuals realize they are more powerful as a collective whole.
Late stage capitalism’s chickens are coming home to roost, reaping their Virgo harvest, as it were — but the people. The people. The laborers. The students. The marginalized. The people, now, look up from their toil in the fields, at their desks, in their classrooms, their homes, the trucks they drive cross country, and are invigorated by the Piscean waters — by the knowledge, not intellectual but felt in the body and soul, that our fights are connected.
Why, in such a time as this, would we only fight for ourselves?
*
Wednesday’s Full Moon arrives at 7* of Pisces at 9:35pm Eastern. And this moon tells a story. Not only through its lunar phase, and how full moons often indicate a peak or pinnacle, a moment of completion or a major turning point. And not only through the Virgo-Pisces axis of healing: how in Virgo’s season of the harvest, where we can be so consumed with particulars, with assessing what has gone right and what is failing miserably (if you, like me, are prone to over exaggerating small setbacks), a Pisces full moon heralds a major moment where we look up and are awash in understanding of how what we have been working on for so long fits into the greater whole.
Jupiter and Saturn are both involved in this story, in this lunation, and that tells us something not only about what in our own lives is coming to a conclusion, or to a turning point, but also about where we find ourselves collectively, societally. Before the moon is full, she has a conversation with our dyke daddy Saturn, who is also in Pisces. And after the moon is full, she sextiles Jupiter inn Taurus, also the ruler of this lunation. Here’s another way we might consider this:
Picture the moon as a femme in a flowing white gown, walking along a beachy coast with a favored queer elder.
This has all happened before, says Saturn, whose memory is long. He pats Moon’s arm, which is tucked into his. But it doesn’t mean it has to end the same.
Saturn walks Moon to the dock, where her boat awaits her so that she can make her appointment to be Full. Even now, Saturn’s influence cannot entirely stabilize her; she grows, she swells. The ocean’s influence pulls on her. Don’t forget what I told you, Saturn says, seeming to not care (for once) how the waves crash about his ankles, soaking the hem of his suit as he helps her into the boat.
Moon smiles, serene. Her boat, driven only by emotion, is destined for the middle of the ocean. There is no anchor thrown, for Moon, in the Piscean ocean, rejects the idea of anchor. Moon, in the ocean, is not alone. She dives down, the boat merely a nice idea, so that she can swim with the teaming life below. The oneness of the world.
Here, in the depths of the ocean, as night falls, Moon turns full. Nearly bursts apart, her body swollen with everything she has been creating, only for the energy to find a breaking point, the water soothing, the schools of fish dancing around her creating a vortex that allows the fullness to feel manageable rather than painful.
And it is here, in the depths of the ocean, that she hears a familiar voice call, little sister?
Finally. She swims up, up, up. Pulls herself up over the boat. Directs it toward the nearest island, where she knows there will be a newly sprung garden.
She cannot walk in the garden. Not right now. Not when she is Ocean. But she knows that Jupiter loves her like this. She always knows when he is close, even when they cannot walk hand in hand like she can with Saturn on the beach. And so she abandons her boat and dives back into the water, swimming around the island while she can see her tall, strong brother off in the distance, crouched in his garden planting. She feels the warmth of his delight even here. They are contented with each others’ presence, knowing that their nearness inspires the other. She swims faster. His plants are hardier.
She thinks of what Saturn said, that the terrible things have all happened before. But that the ending does not have to be the same. And she knows the seeds Jupiter plants in his garden, and she thinks of how she walks between all the worlds, connecting all the family who cannot always speak to each other. Carrying the messages and the hopes and the dreams. And the seeds.
Today, she carries them in the water, on the waves.
Tomorrow, in the fire.
In the air.
To the ground.
Again, and again, and again.
Writing Prompts for the Full Moon in Pisces
What is coming to completion for you at this moment? What turning points are you reaching? Or: What are you letting go of, or releasing?
What feels especially emotional for you right now? What feels locked up or stuck in the body? What kinds of somatic practices might be especially helpful over these next few weeks?
What fights or struggles do you feel connected to? What feels engaging, inspiring, frustrating, or even defeating about this? Where do you feel help or assistance coming from, from both within your community but also perhaps outside of it?
We are also in Mercury Rx as well as the tail-end of a Venus Rx. How have these transits been impacting your relationship to your art, creativity, and/or creative practices, and/or creative community?
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I've been playing Hadestown for three days straight -- this writing of yours jumped out at me because I had been mulling over a resonant refrain there in that music:
"This has all happened before, says Saturn, whose memory is long. He pats Moon’s arm, which is tucked into his. But it doesn’t mean it has to end the same."
It also resonates with my favorite Isabel Allende quote: "At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously."
Gorgeous piece of writing. I'm feeling every layer of it so deeply. Thank you.