the full moon in sagittarius for writers

on apartment hunting and land offerings

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And now, for a bit on the full moon, and apartment hunting, and also on developing a spiritual relationship with one’s home. 

Xx,

Jeanna

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It is a Full Moon tonight, and I am tired. 

Over the last few weeks, my partner Meg and I have traipsed across Brooklyn and Queens looking at almost 20 apartments. Which is nothing, in the scheme of things. I walked by a woman on Franklin Avenue just the other day who was complaining bitterly to her friend that she and her boyfriend had seen a whopping 40 and had yet to find one in their budget that worked. 

The thing about an intense apartment hunt is that it becomes another job. It eats energy. It eats time. In the demanding New York City market, where realtors insist you come that day, or at least tomorrow!, to see a place, the stress is high. I have canceled more client appointments, issued more refunds, and lost more writing time in these last few weeks than I can recall ever happening in my years living here. 

For us, the stress is multi-layered. Our apartment is not entirely safe to live in for reasons too numerous to recount here; it’s been a full year of involving housing lawyers at various points, occasionally withholding rent, and having ongoing fights with management. In spite of the building only being two years old, it seems to be in a constant state of drowning. Our apartment floods almost every month. We’ve had water running down the walls at various points throughout the year. A pipe burst on the top floor in January flooded the entire building so badly they came in and literally took our walls out.

So, we are moving.

And here, at the culmination of our search for a new home, it is a Full Moon.

*

Tonight’s Full Moon arrives at 13* Sagittarius, exact at 11:41pm Eastern. Here, completion. Fullness. And also: release. Realization. Oh, this — not that. What if this direction, instead? A moment of marking. A moment of turning. Reaching one peak only to descend, or to find another on the horizon worth reaching for instead — and so, the descent must happen, still. 

There is a philosophical mood to a Full Moon in Sagittarius, a desire to ask what it all means. Sagittarius is often memeified as a party animal, but in practice, this is more often the explorer, the zealot, the believer, the lifelong student, the perpetual seeker of wisdom. Whether such wisdom is found in historical tomes or through mind-blowing highs: that’s up to the person. But really, it’s all for the sake of discovery and, ultimately, meaning-making.

*

For months, I hated that this apartment, Meg’s and my first home together, both felt and did not feel like home. That every time we start to settle, something horrible happened. What initially felt like a comedy of errors quickly turned into a horror show.

I like to talk to my house, you see. I think houses are, or become alive — even apartments — and I nurture them, and feed them. I suppose this practice is spiritual. I’ve certainly accumulated more ritual around it in recent years. 

My studio that I had for a few years before moving in with Meg felt very sacred — the Barbie Dream House, my friends called it. It was a warm, welcoming space that wrapped you up in a hug and that, to me, felt like stepping from the bustle of New York into a kind of Narnia.

the barbie dream house, which for a time was graced with keats’ presence (RIP)

It was there that I solidified a Friday/Venus Day practice for investing in my home (I have a Venus-ruled fourth). Where I first set up a proper ancestor altar. Where I first had the experience of sensing neutral-to-helpful (albeit occasionally mischievous) spirits hanging about my house.

And so it was interesting/frustrating/strange to move and invest in a space that simply would not respond — or, rather, did speak, just through loads and loads of property damage. For ages, I felt like I could not talk to this house. Or that when I talked, there was no response. Or, rather, worse than quiet: a void. As if there had been a forgetting, a forceful wiping of the slate. And underneath it, a kind of rampant hostility. 

Different homes need different things, and much as I enjoy Venus Day rituals for myself, this house, Meg’s and mine, was going to need something a little more. 

*

The thing about full moons is that they tend to be the culmination of the last six months’ of effort — in that way that, wherever you put your attention/intention grows. 

Which is to say: what rituals were you beginning, or what seeds were you planting, around the New Moon in Sagittarius on November 23, 2022? 

The New Moon to Full Moon timeline reveals all.

*

My frustration with the building and simultaneous desire to know more about why it was the way it was pushed me to research more about the neighborhood, and the borough, and the land — which consequently brought me deeper into relationship with land offerings, something that had skirted at the edge of my awareness but had not been something I had ever consistently engaged in. 

Land — and building — offerings. So simple. And yet also not.  

That was what this home needed. And that is what I’ve done for months now — incidentally, unintentionally, since around the time of last fall’s New Moon in Sagittarius — in an effort to mitigate the spiritual fallout in the home and to help nurture the connection between us and our home for the duration of the time we have left here: direct, daily offerings to the spirits of the land, the city, and those that are attached to this building. 

For years, my own hang ups as a country girl living in the city have got in the way of how I conceptualized land, and being in relationship with the land, and bringing offerings to the land. So, too, did a lot of my really unhelpful white guilt, frankly, coupled with transplant imposter syndrome — this idea that since I was not “from” New York, even though I’ve been here for nearly a decade, I didn’t have the right to build a relationship with the city itself in a spiritual way.

It took a number of conversations over several years with friends (most notably Diana Rose Harper) and my teacher Bri Saussy to get my head on straight, and for the final “rural vs. urban” barrier in my head to fall. “It’s all land, Jeanna,” Bri said to me one day last fall, and something in me finally clicked. You don’t have to be able to feel the dirt beneath your feet to feel what’s going on. You can pour an offering over concrete and leave a glass of water on your windowsill just fine. 

I know that offerings alone are not going to fix incorrectly installed HVAC or the fact that this building was built on wetland or salt marsh, that it is clearly disrupting something it shouldn’t be disrupting. But they are an outstretched hand. An, I know you’re there. I’m sorry this is happening. Here is some succor. Also, please remember that we are corporeal beings. 

me in my current apartment / photo courtesy of michelle agins at the NYT

While my resentment towards our management company remains an ever-burning source of fuel, my relationship with the home itself has flourished. Even now, as we prepare to move, I am more in tune with the house than I have ever been. With what it needs, with how it feels, with the spirits and the rhythms of the city that we can feel pulsing from the street through the floorboards. Sometimes, it’s an annoyance. But more and more, I find that it’s a gift. 

The flooding hasn’t been as bad, either. Small mercies.

*

My goal is to — spiritually, at least — leave this apartment better than we found it. I know that my singular offerings do not in any way make up for the fact that the the vast majority of tidal salt marshes and virtually all of the freshwater wetlands that once made up this place have been destroyed, and that many of the unsettled spirits of this place are, consequently, of the nature of water (as Amaya Rourke reminded me). But I leave my offerings, and donate to organizations like the Billion Oyster Project, which is restoring oyster reefs in New York Harbor through public education initiatives, and I hope that, in some small way, the land knows that there are many of us who are still listening.

And I have hoped, and prayed, that the city will help Meg and I find a new home, one where we can put down roots for years and years to come. 

*

This house doesn’t talk back. Not like others I’ve lived in. But when I lean in, I can feel its energy tick up ever, ever so slightly — as if gently inclining its head, an old grandmother waking up from her nap, ready to listen. 

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