the new moon in capricorn for writers

on rest and health

Yesterday, I awoke with a bad migraine, one of the worst of the last month. I spent most of the day resting. Later in the day, I felt, well, I really need to get this New Moon newsletter out.

You woke up with a really bad migraine this morning, babe, my partner reminded me. That’s why you’re wiped.

Oh, I said. I already forgot.

Because chronic illness is like that: you just carry on. 

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Yesterday’s New Moon arrived at 5:16a ET, occurring at 1* of Capricorn. The moon, so fertile and lush and, in a new phase, desirous of tenderly planting seeds to see what springs up, is not always so gentle in Capricorn, which can tend to rigid structure, especially in Capricorn moon natives. It is easy to find comfort and security in the familiar, even if the familiar is pain. Harder to cultivate the gentleness that requires openness, vulnerability. Showing that soft underbelly. 

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I remember many of my illnesses, but few of my migraines, even when they have just occurred within a 24 hour period. You just carry on. If I dwelt on every bad migraine I’d had in my life and the things that the sometimes 15+ episodes a month prevented me doing, I would crumble under the collective weight of everything I haven’t achieved. Of all the plans I’ve ever canceled. Of the work missed; of that one boss at the tech startup in 2016 who liked to ask what else I could be doing to manage my migraines during our weekly check-ins. Of all the days and nights lying sick in bed with nausea, my body coping with the pain by vomiting; of all those ER visits in my 20s caused by my inability to keep even water down for 12, 24 hours, and the resulting severe dehydration.

I was lucky; I was the daughter of a migraine patient who started splitting her own Imitrex pills into halves and thirds to give me some reprieve as my episodes worsened in middle school, years before I was old enough to get a sumatriptan prescription of my own. I can vividly recall the years before, when Imitrex was primarily prescribed as an injection. The image of my mother wincing as she gave herself shots in the thigh in the morning before work is seared inside me, a memory that lives alongside my own river styx of pain trauma. 

You might be horribly sick, invisibly sick, but you still push through and go to work: this is the lesson of growing up working class with chronic illness. 

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My own natal Capricorn moon — and a natal Capricorn new moon, at that — tends to measure its worth by what it has achieved, rather than by what it has nurtured, by what it has allowed to come into existence. I am working hard to change that definition. Yes, I can see the irony in using that phrase. 

“Hygeia” by Gustav Klimt

Rest is a practice; this last year has made that more evident than ever. And this moon does, too: this particular New Moon is exactly conjunct the asteroid Hygeia, which (as you may guess by the name) indicates that we are, all of us, called to set or at least consider new patterns around our health. In this go go go capitalist world that has trained so many of us since birth to be good little consumer-producer cogs in the wheel, what does it mean to divest from that content cycle and rest? Or play? Or focus on pleasure? Now seems like a good time to do a reread of adrienne marie brown’s PLEASURE ACTIVISM, if you are so inclined. 

This New Moon is also square Jupiter. While so much internet astrology talks about Jupiter in terms of expansion and luck, when we consider this moon’s story with Hygeia and thinking/feeling about our relationship with our bodies and a more holistic kind of health, we might think consider Jupiter as the healer in that healer-teacher archetype I so often call him here — how Jupiter shows up as the priest, as the medicine worker, as the guide, as the one calling us to have more faith and hope, whatever faith and hope mean to you specifically. 

Jupiter support the systems that Capricorn very much would like to put in place, but less in that rigid way and more in the sense that organization — however it looks to you — is proven to help make life more efficient. It’s helpful to sort out how certain things get done. It’s helpful to examine what is and isn’t working. Where that Capricon moon energy can go awry for us is when we apply what we think we should be doing to our practices. The “shoulds” and “oughts” have no place here. 

This is about tending your softness. 

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I’m learning how to rest along with you. Practicing what I preach is challenging, but my life is becoming the better for it. 

This was a New Moon newsletter about rest, and about tending your body, and about health, and it is also the holidays and at the very least (hopefully) some time off, so I am not going to include writing prompts, as is typical for a New Moon newsletter. Your homework, should you so desire it, is to rest, or to play, with no creative or “productive” goal — or, if journaling is a regular part of your mindfulness practice, journaling about rest and seeing what comes up for you. 

I will leave you, beloveds, with a benediction from Mary Oliver: 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

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