Long before I produced the first iterations of my musings on the new and full moon for community radio back in the day, called the StarGarden MoonWatch, I stumbled upon a print calendar (remember those?) in a bookstore in which each month was not a row of squares, but an ellipse similar to my drawing that began and ended with the new moon and the dark of the moon. I would learn that the word “month” derives from ancient words for “moon,” as does the day “Monday,’ the first day of the week after the “rest” on Sunday.
This way of keeping the time captured my heart. As an adjunct university writing instructor, I was all too familiar with the regular grid of calendar days: in fact I often had a large tear-away one the size of a desk blotter sitting on my desk at the university so I could chart out the semester with dates for giving assignments, peer editing, offices hours, student conferences and final papers. But this set of swirls with the days shaped like moons appealed to the timeline of my soul. It hung on the side of my kitchen cabinets, and when I was tired from teaching and being a single Mom I could look at it and know things were growing or brewing or emerging or it was time to release and examine within, and that the whole process would start over again the next cycle so there was never an absolute endpoint to growing and releasing.
Though our calendar is actually based on these cycles, we have mostly forgotten and instead have been swept into the more linear demands of time passing. We often view time like the sand in the hourglass in The Wizard of Oz: as a deadline ticking away until there is no more, which can fill our attention with deadlines and dread. But the moon reminds us that when the top of the hourglass is empty, we can turn it over and begin the process again. In this way the moon is very much about our habitual and instinctive processes.
In astrology, the sun represents our creative will and the spark of our being, a frequency on which we come here to learn to how to express ourselves. The moon reflects that creative purpose back to us through the style of our habits and emotional instincts, our memories, the way we nurture and have been nurtured, our intuitive connection to public feeling and sway. It’s waxing and waning cycle reflects back the message of the sun throughout the year from many different vantage points, even when they are so close the moon is absorbed into the light of the sun. Those times in the lunation cycle teach us about the fertility of invisibility and even darkness.
I love this ever repeating renewal, and how we are offered, time and again, the chance to discover how to use our instinctual toolbox in order to create the lives and world we want to live in.
Because of the dynamic of the moon being ‘always never the same,’ when I write the horoscopes you’ve been reading they also resonate with the entire lunation cycle. Each chart I use to write the horoscopes shows me the exact time of either the new or the full moon. That snapshot in time, though, projects out at least through the next half of the cycle. So when you are reading your horoscope from the new moon chart, it’s like a roadmap for how to begin and grow or emerge through emotional habit and instinct toward the fulfillment of a creative purpose peaking in some way at the full moon. Sometimes this peak is a crisis and sometimes it’s a promise or a manifestation. Always it’s a gift that helps us grow. In the second half of the lunation cycle from the full moon on as the moon wanes, we are given the opportunity to disseminate, give, or release that which has come to a peak at the full moon. Our attention moves inward so our consciousness can shift in response to what we have learned and for our efforts to begin to change form. It’s a time to prepare for the magic of invisibility and the next new beginning at the next new moon.
Those of you who know your sun signs can follow along that way to very good effect. And for those who have their birth chart and can read the basics, it’s also interesting to check the sign of your ascendant and your own moon for further perspective.
So although these new and full moon horoscopes are dated for the chart of the new or full moon, they also describe a theme that may play out for you over the next couple of weeks. When there is an eclipse at the new or full moon, the time period of influence lengthens from anywhere between 3 to 6 months, sometimes longer, depending on the type of the eclipse.
Like the crab that symbolizes the sign of Cancer, the moon’s home, I like to think about how the moon’s “progress” through the phases moves sideways, like a crab, in one direction toward more light until the moon is full, and then sideways in the other direction as it wanes, until we reach the dark of the moon once again. It reminds me there are many ways to move “forward” that aren’t necessarily linear, and many ways to reflect light from different facets or vantage points. Correspondingly, in the powerful metaphors of astrology, the moon gives us lots of perspectives from which to “see” our emotional instincts and habits, that we may engage with them in ways that best nurture us and others among us. into the light of our genuine purpose.
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