There is an unusually large tree in one of my neighbor’s yards. Unusual, because you usually don’t see trees this big in New York City. From my balcony, I can observe at least ten discrete backyards or building patios, and all the incumbent gardens, grass, shrubbery, and tree line. It’s a nice view for a country girl, and The Tree is the star of the show.
It was like she knew spring was coming, like her roots were having a conversation with the other trees, planning the branches’ first bud. Shall we ripen exactly on the spring equinox? Yes, we shall.
Every day of the last six weeks, I have spent some portion of my day watching The Tree. Her buds have held my rapt attention. She was the first tree in this little nook of Brooklyn to bud, as if by collective agreement. Never, when living here, have I paid such close attention to one singular tree’s process — but never before have I been so solitary, as if a grounded pilot, in my own space.
According to my plant identification app, The Tree is most likely a hedge maple, perhaps a horse chestnut. I’ve sent a photograph to one of the app’s purported botanists for further clarification. It feels important to get this right, to not play WebMD for nature. Back home in Iowa, it is easy to identify a towering oak from a pine tree from an elm from a birch. But then, there’s the place that makes you, and the place you choose. I have chosen this city, and she requires more effort in getting to know her, and her land.
When The Tree first showed signs of life (on Ostara, no less), I burst into tears. Spring had come again, as Hermes sings at the end of Hadestown — and, after months of being cooped up in my apartment, not seeing anyone but my girlfriend, it truly felt like some kind of hope arriving. Soon after The Tree’s buds were visible from a great distance, the birds returned. Mx. Cardinal and Mx. Bluejay, who make this particular patch of land their home, came back, returning to their old routine of chasing each other through The Tree’s branches. Fighting or flirting, I don’t know which. But watching them from my desk, I shrieked, stomped my feet, clapped my hands with childlike glee.
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Today marks our annual Full Moon in Scorpio. Full moons always occur in the opposite sign of the current zodiacal season, and it is Taurus time. Taurus is an earth sign, the middle sign of spring: known for manifesting, for stabilizing what we are growing, for working the soil, for the moisture and fertility it brings to the ground.
But the Full Moon in Scorpio also asks us to contemplate what we have lost. Scorpio is the water at the bottom of a deep well. Scorpio honors the dregs of life’s hardest, most transformative lessons; it refuses to wipe the slate clean, preferring the methodology of the artist who uses found objects. Scorpio isn’t about starting fresh. Scorpio wants to take what we’ve learned in order to start over.
It's a love song
(It’s a love song)
It's a tale of a love from long again
It's a sad song
(It’s a sad song)
We keep singing even so
It's an old song
(It’s an old song)
It's an old tale from way back when
And we're gonna sing it again and again
We’re gonna sing it again.
— “Road to Hell (Reprise),” Hadestown
The Full Moon in Scorpio, arriving a few weeks before the New Moon in Taurus, asks us to take a beat — or several — to reckon with what we have lost. To really feel the grief of this last year. To also, on a personal level, consider what we are processing, what we are holding onto too tightly. What is rotting and decaying around us: Individually, collectively, systemically. What needs to go into the compost pile in order to make space to let some new growth in.
An important note: This moon cycle connects to the Saturn-Uranus story in your life, as the sun is currently sitting with Uranus in Taurus, and the moon-sun/Uranus opposition is loosely square to Saturn in Aquarius, thus connecting to the year-long story that we are all involved in, collectively and personally. The Saturn-Uranus squares invoke tensions around order (Saturn) and freedom (Uranus), around the disruption (Uranus) of systems (Saturn), around rebellion and revolution (Uranus) in order to set down new rules and boundaries (Saturn). But the planets are themselves quite neutral, and this energy is not intrinsically charged toward a specific direction or moral principle: it is up to the freewill of those consciously attuning to the energy to channel it toward the ecosystem they want to grow.
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Throughout my day, I hear a continual track of birdsong as a backdrop to the JFK flight path and the circling NYPD helicopters attempting to intimidate my neighborhood, always a stronghold of local protest. Here, spring sounds like Mx. Cardinal and Mx. Bluejay and also the cops and also my neighbors leaning out their windows to cheer and let out cathartic, soul-resonant screams when Derek Chauvin was actually convicted.
In some ways, watching a singular tree bud is like waiting for the water to boil. It’s getting there, getting there, getting there, and then, one morning — hello.
Taurus season teaches us that patience is a practice, and observation is a study. Would I have noticed that The Tree began to bud precisely on Ostara had I not been watching her barren branches so assiduously throughout the winter? I’d like to think yes, but the answer is probably no.
The Taurus-Scorpio axis can be uncomfortable, in that it is the zodiacal axis that most highlights the relationship between life and death, between manifestation and the natural decomposition we all will experience over time. Capitalism is very keen on the manifestation and growth cycle, but would prefer to not honor cycles of death and hibernation, which any casual observation of nature teaches us are essential.
And yet: death (metaphorical and literal) and its incumbent transformations come anyway. There is, at the beginning of spring, the hope of a kind of emergence from a particularly harrowing underworld journey. As folks start to come up out of the gates of Hades, one by one, the Scorpio Full Moon offers an essential opportunity for reflection and contemplation: for honoring what has been, who we’ve lost, how we’ve changed, and what we want to carry forward.
Writing Prompts for the Full Moon in Scorpio
How has your relationship to your environment changed this year? What have you become more observant about in the world around you? (The human, the other-than-human, the natural world, etc.)
What are you grieving? Who are you grieving? What rituals are available to you in this moment to sit with and honor this, rather than to brush it off as an inconvenient emotion? (Writing letters, lighting candles, saying prayers, etc.)
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