the new moon in pisces for writers

a wave in the mind

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There is a New Moon at 20* of Pisces this Sunday, March 10th at 5:00am Eastern. 

This lunation, the last before eclipse season and the start of the new zodiacal year, finds us free diving for molluscs that will hopefully yield pearls.

There is an uncertainty to any new venture. An excitement, yes, but an inherent risk, in the unknowing. New moons are for planting, we are told, but how long will it take, before you yield results? 

Some pearls form in as little as six months — incidentally, the length of time between a new moon and full moon in the same sign. Others will grow for four, even five years before being ready to harvest. Some oysters only ever produce one worthy pearl in their lifetime. Others will grow two, three, even four. It is unpredictable, which oysters will produce quickly and which will take their time; which will have the endurance and capacity to grow many pearls and which are worn out after a singular push. All a pearl farmer can hope to control — much like any creative person — are the conditions. 

So much of magic isn’t active doing doing doing. Planting planting planting. Ritual ritual ritual. Yes, we make intentions. Sure, we make plans. But then we execute. And then we live. So much magic happens in the maintenance. In the cultivation and keeping and care. In ensuring right relationship and right conditions in everyday life. 

The mindfulness of astrology, and the magic we can make with it, is profoundly antithetical to capitalist striving.

It’s as Theresa Reed and I spoke about recently; you do the thing, and it’s a sort of “set it and forget it” in the way that you continue the magical maintenance of living in integrity, continuing your routine, and doing your good and honest work — and watching results eventually sprout. 

You can’t push an oyster to make a bigger, more perfect pearl faster, even if it would be good for the farmer’s bottom line. 

As astro-mage Kaitlin Coppock wrote in her most recent essay for Sphere & Sundry’s Thema Mundi line, 

Speaking as someone who is almost 8-months pregnant, the only key thing I/our duad did was plant the initial seed… at the right time… and under the right conditions. The rest has all been responsible stewardship, adaptation, and waiting. Material and magical processes mirror one another almost exactly. Following a successful trigger pull, the process is MOSTLY waiting, holding faith, and controlling conditions, more than anything else. By magnitudes of 100.

This is not to say that patience is doing nothing. But any writer will tell you that there is a lot of time (usually) between The Inception of the book and The Completion — itself a complicated, and often ever-moving goalpost. The patience is in the practice. The patience is in the daily word count. In the backburnering. In the stewarding of that creative energy that is churning inside you. 

In a letter written to Vita Sackville-West nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf called this experience of internal churning “a wave in the mind”: 

I [sit] after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.

There is friction in the creative process — even Inspiration. Even beginning. Even as we initially dislodge the words from the body. But friction is essential to make a pearl in the first place: an irritant, like a grain of sand, is the Initiatrix that ultimately yields a pearl of great price. As responsible, boundary-keeping, beloved cosmic irritant Saturn sits heavy with this lunation, the ballast of reality to our romantic Piscean hopes and dreams. 

Our job, no matter where this moon finds us, is to be Creative Stewards. To tend and care for our good and honest work, no matter the state it is in. To be gentle with the ideas, and with ourselves, as we, perhaps, await the rhythms to be dislodged from the body. And to trust that Time itself is the great sieve that will help to sort the story out. 

That if we keep showing up to the story, the story will — eventually — make itself Known to us, as a pearl gleaming.

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