Hi friends,
I’ve been writing this newsletter for two years now (its solar return was earlier this month — she’s an Aquarius!). I truly cannot express how grateful I am to all of you for reading, and for the conversations that these missives spark.
As a belated birthday celebration, I’m launching a new series next week: interviews with authors about how they utilize astrology, tarot, witchcraft, and more in their work. Can’t wait for you all to read the first installment. It’s delicious.
To continue to support the newsletter’s growth — and to get the detailed, day-by-day breakdown of every month’s astrology, the next of which is coming on March 1st — make sure to subscribe!
Xx,
Jeanna
I don’t know about you, but personally, this month has been one pandemic wall after another. Teaching my class has helped me stay grounded in one of the deepest depressive dips I’ve had in the last year. Over the last few weeks, the purposeful routines I had built up around yoga and meditation collapsed in on themselves. My writing, which is typically a steady stream, dried up to the barest of trickles.
I am what my doctors and therapists, past and present, refer to as “high-functioning.” It’s a family skill, you could say: I’m the child of a highly functional alcoholic who always had a job and provided for our family, modeling a distinctly Protestant work ethic, “always show up for work, no matter the personal cost” mentality. “Prove your worth” was something of a family motto, a phrase that was repeated to me on a near-daily basis growing up. This is to say that, in addition to society’s emphasis on productivity, I am both genetically and temperamentally inclined toward an ability to continue to function at “normal” levels even when my system is overloaded and on the verge of collapse.
But the thing is, the collapse does happen.
*
The Virgo/Pisces opposition is sometimes called the “axis of healing.” When we have a Full Moon in Virgo during Pisces season (occurring at 3:17am ET Saturday the 27th), we are invited to consider particularity versus universalism, criticism versus empathetic acceptance, the practical magic of Virgo’s harvest versus the snow-melted, muddy ground where Pisces ushers in winter’s transition to spring — a new fertility made possible through a season of contemplation and rest.
Virgo is associated with the archetype of the virgin, but not how we think about virginity in the modern sense. Rather, Virgo is virginal in the Vestal Virgin sense of the word, where the concept had little to do with sexual purity and everything to do with belonging solely to one’s self. Pisces, conversely, is where we dissolve into the liminal space between the conscious self and Jung’s collective unconscious; where we take our Aquarian concern with transforming humanity’s systems into an appreciation for and prioritizing of the emotional and spiritual well being of the collective. Pisces is the sign that epitomizes Jesus’ admonition to “love your neighbor as yourself” — a useful idea that, regardless of creed, foregrounds radical empathy. But connection doesn’t happen without mindfulness — and this Virgo moon offers the discernment needed within the porousness of Pisces’ pathos.
When I think of writers and teachers whose work embodies this axis of healing, I think of Brené Brown, the social scientist and academic who was catapulted into the spotlight a decade ago after giving a TED talk on the power of vulnerability. Her honesty about her public discomfort with her own vulnerability, the very topic on which she is an expert, smacks of the particularity of Virgo that can border on perfectionism — unsurprisingly, she has a very prominent Virgo moon. But she doesn’t only bring the critical eye of the Virgoan researcher, publicly appreciated for the ways she can parse information and share it with the public. Brown also has a deeply dreamy Sun/Neptune conjunction in Scorpio in the twelfth house of the collective unconscious, which deals with how we make manifest that which runs subliminally beneath the surface. Her investigative Scorpio sense of purpose is thus channeled through the twelfth house — a part of the birth chart that is traditionally associated with the sign of Pisces.
Brown spends a lot of time talking about the way our fear of vulnerability takes us out of the game prematurely. Self-rejection and self-protection are key phenomena to consider when talking about Virgo and Pisces. Self-rejection: rejecting your own desires and dreams before they can come to fruition, because of fear or insecurity or uncertainty about the public reception. Self-protection: hiding from real and honest connection with others, the fear of being too exposed. Of being, as it were, too vulnerable — the trick, of course, being that, as Brown says, “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”
For writers, there are distinctly public ways these fears manifest. How do we share stories and pieces of ourselves that we wouldn’t necessarily even share with those closest? How do we write with the Twitter mob mentality in the background? How to be real with ourselves and our readers when we also want to avoid being the Villain-of-the-Day on social media, when we are afraid of causing the wrong kind of public stir? How to apply for grants and residencies — how, even, to pitch editors! — when the worthiness of the work (and ourselves) feels so wildly tenuous?
In her book Rising Strong, Brown says,
“A lot of cheap seats in the arena are filled with people who never venture onto the floor. They just hurl mean-spirited criticisms and put-downs from a safe distance. The problem is, when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect. But when we’re defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable.
Therefore, we need to be selective about the feedback we let into our lives. For me, if you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.” (emphasis mine)
Whose feedback are we accepting and letting ourselves respond to? How is that feedback encouraging and affirming self-rejection and/or self-protection?
What old, old stories are impacting our creative courage and, perhaps most importantly, our sovereignty?
*
Vulnerability is not comfortable. Much of my own work on myself over the last ten years has been devoted to shortening my own leash — the leash says, “you must produce at all costs”; the leash that says, “ignore what your body is telling you; ignore what you’re feeling.” The leash that, when long and unfettered, has me getting daily migraines and falling into depressive swings for months and even years at a time without seeking help, normalizing and dissociating and ignoring my own experience, because to slow down would be to notice that something is deeply, desperately wrong. To feel would halt my steady production.
Emotions disrupt capitalism, after all. As adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy, the only disruptions that capitalism tends to welcome are those that further its own profit.
This last decade, my project has been learning to let my feelings disrupt and puncture my reality. The axis of healing invites me to observe when my body and heart are telling me that things are out of alignment, that something is wrong, that a part of my life needs attention. That the body always, always keeps the score.
The moon is associated with our emotional lives, but it’s also representative of our physical bodies. It connects us to the complicated legacies of the people who have raised us and birthed us, who created the initial material reality that we were exposed to and formed by.
This Full Moon in Virgo, during Pisces season, reminds us that we don’t have to prove our worth. You — and everyone around you — is already worthy. It reminds us to get in the arena and stay there, prioritizing connections with others who are fighting their own battles rather than those who have fled for the rafters. This season asks us to temper our insistence on purification and production with mercurial discernment, by prioritizing what is worth doing and, perhaps most importantly, when and how.
This moon knows how to identify the capitalist insistence on work that would threaten the sovereignty of self.
Writing Prompt for the Full Moon in Virgo
Where are you self-rejecting and/or self-protecting in your work/creative life? How do you feel that this is helping you? How is it also hindering?
What dreams and existing projects in your life could use a dose of Pisces’ belief and buoyancy or, on the flip side, Virgo’s discernment and grounding? What creative relationships, income streams, community commitments, and ideas about artistry? Thinking more expansively, is this tendency toward criticism or fantasy part of a trend?
grateful for you!
Jeanna! Thank you for your brilliant thoughts on the Virgo/Pisces axis--it's EXACTLY where I am right now.