the full moon in virgo for writers
Some quick announcements: My next 3-week seminar, How to Write a Book Proposal, is now open for registration!
Nonfiction writers who are in the early (or stuck) stages of your proposals: this is for you. Class starts April 17th.
ICYMI, I interviewed Melissa Febos about her wonderful new craft book, Body Work, and how writing is itself a spiritual practice.
And now: the full moon!
Xx
Jeanna
Memory is a strange thing. It can’t be captured perfectly; it is the recollection of an experience inherently biased by our point of view of the event. Some researchers say that memories can change every time they are remembered, rather like a game of telephone.
And yet, our experiences — and our memories of them — shape our actions, our beliefs, our desires in the present. Instinctually, intellectually, we are, each and every one of us, a network of neurons that lives and trusts and acts on the basis of what has come before. Memory doesn’t just live in the mind, after all. It lives in the body, too.
How do we, as writers, metabolize memory and experience and trauma — even what we’ve forgotten, buried, denied ever happened?
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Full moons shine a bright light on something that’s long-avoided deadline has come.
Arriving at 3:17am Eastern on March 18th, the Full Moon in Virgo would like to sit down for a practical conversation here at the tail end of Pisces season. Virgo and Pisces, themselves opposing signs, are what some of us call the “axis of healing”: Virgo cleans out the wound, purifying through ritual, and Pisces pours its healing waters and dreams back in, offering hope for the future.
Full moons are times of completion, it’s true, but they’re also when the bill is due. When it’s time to address the wound that has been festering.
This moon is trine Pluto, adding an extra urge to bring up the bodies. Pluto knows, better than anyone, the transformative power of hitting rock bottom, the necessity of looking in the mirror.
The healing power of confronting the truth.
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“Many people find it helpful to critically examine the past, particularly childhood, to chart their internalization of messages that they were not worthy, not enough, that they were crazy, stupid, monstrous, and so on…. However, this process alone does not ensure self-recovery,” bell hooks writes in All About Love. “It is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”
How, then, do we process?
We write.
And then we write some more.
Writing Prompts for the Full Moon in Virgo
The full moon is exact at 27* of Virgo. Folks with personal planets or points (e.g. your ascendant) within 24-29 degrees of Virgo, Gemini, Sagittarius, and Pisces will most feel this particular lunation.
What are you metabolizing right now? What is coming to a feeling of completion, of essential recognition or fullness? Is it something in your creative life, your spiritual life, your personal life? How does that feel for you?
Does this connect to what was happening for you around last year’s New Moon in Virgo, which was September 6, 2021?
Choose an affirmation — I am ____ (worthy/loved/full/enough) — and write a paragraph based on it.
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