the new moon in virgo
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Xx,
Jeanna
Not every culling is intentional. I’m in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city that is very precious to my family, and the last few days of driving around have been marked by tree stumps on this side of the road, tree stumps on that side of the road, enormous old trees stripped clean of their branches and yards still not cleared of debris. It’s been a year since the derecho, the category four inland hurricane that hit northeast Iowa last year, and the land is wounded. Nothing compares to seeing it in person.
I’m at my parents’ house. My far right, conservative dad who is anti-vaxx, who everyone I’m close to knows that I didn’t speak to for the last two years — but who I decided to break my silence with in order to talk about the memoir — has just finished singing you’re beautiful, and I love you to our 19-year-old cat orange tabby cat Puck, who is tucked up in his lap. Puck, the one cat who scratched me at the Humane Society when I was 15 years old and who I consequently decided was exactly the right cat for our family, is dying slowly, in that way old animals do. This would make a hell of a scene in one of those rustic films purportedly about the working class in Middle America that Hollywood so enjoys: my tattooed, grey haired, emotionally closed off father tenderly cuddling a bony tabby cat near the end of his life.
The night before I flew back to the Midwest, the last gasps of Ida flooded the city I call home and killed a lot of people.
I do not believe that everything happens for a reason, let alone that everything is on purpose.
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Virgo is the last sign of summer, the season that transitions us to autumn. It’s the time of harvest where we often reap what we sow — pending random chance and cruelty, although the increasing volatility and dangers of climate change are, in fact, reaping what “we” have sown on a systemic level.
It’s been good to be back in the land that raised me, to be surrounded by stalks of corn reaching for the sky and lush fields of soybeans that are ready for plucking. But there’s also an irony to approaching this particular New Moon, that here in the time of harvest, we are also spiritually ready to plant a seed.
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Growing up in rural, farm country Midwest, it was tempting to believe that as long as you did everything right, as long as you planted the right thing at the right time in the right field, and watered your crops, that every season would be a success. But any farmer knows this is anything but the truth.
The whims of the season — the precipitation, the sun, the intensity of tornado season (living in tornado alley as we did) — had as much say as anything else. You planted what you planted, put in the effort you did to help things grow, and left the rest to God.
Growing up, I remember so many crops devastated by bad storms, so many tornadoes, so many unexpected droughts. Last year, Iowa lost more than half of its crops to the derecho. Half. Also last year, I saw so many friends launch books in the middle of a world-changing pandemic, sometimes to less-than-desirable results.
Not every culling is intentional.
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There is an absolutely radical trust necessary in planting seeds during times of great uncertainty. I always wondered how farmers did it — how Randy, one of my dad’s lifelong best friends who ran his family farm across the highway from us, kept doing his work year in, year out, through good seasons and seasons of absolutely devastating losses.
It’s the same way writers keep writing without any assurance of success, I think. It’s faith — not in God, but faith in yourself. Virgo is the sign of the virgin, although not how we think of the word. To the ancients, virginity was the concept of belonging to oneself. It was the quality of self-possession. How few of us get to truly belong to ourselves, whether because of family ties or the constant mirrors of systemic oppression — laws like SB8 in Texas that would like to enshrine that no, your body is not your own.
Arriving on Monday, September 6 at 8:52p ET with rebellious Uranus, the New Moon in Virgo wants to do things differently, wants us to consider how we might belong to ourselves — commit to ourselves — in new ways. To sow seeds and plant patterns that will stir some shit up. Disrupt the status quo. If you’ve got this far in this newsletter, you know that how we are living in this country is unsustainable. But in order to belong to each other communally, humanely and without exploitation, we must also know how to belong to ourselves.
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My dad tells me that Cedar Rapids and greater Linn County lost more than 1 million trees in the derecho. I have been thinking about the necessary resilience of the ones that are still here — of how the trees of the same species must be strengthening their root systems to reach out, communicate, and support each other now more than ever. Trees talk to each other. They coordinate and cooperate and negotiate for sunlight, for resources, for nutrients. How devastating, to have lost 1 million in the wake of such a storm.
But did you know — new trees are still being planted.
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'New trees are still being planted'. Yes, to this!