On the moon's phases and her feelings.
do you know your moon's phase? do you care?
The Sun enters Leo on 7/22: It truly is summer time. The Sun is just about to enter his home of Leo, the place where the Kings and the Queens are comfortable, where the performers find their spotlight and the rest of us are just thrilled to be involved.
We have until August 4 for the Sun to be hanging out with Venus in Leo, so be sure to take advantage of that, especially for those of you with Libra and Taurus risings. While the Sun is at home, hosting Venus and also giving her enough space not to burn her up in his heat, there might be some good opportunity to shine. Don’t be afraid to take those chances.
Feelings aren’t facts and the Moon’s phases don’t last forever.
This morning I did my first session with a new therapist. TBD on how it goes over the next few weeks, but I am optimistic because he’s queer and from the south and pagan and seems to have a good amount of experience with ADHD. I decided to look for a therapist once again because there have just been a lot of life events taking place lately that I might attribute to my Saturn return, but that doesn’t mean I ought to just go with that flow. Especially since that flow is in fact feeling less like a flow and more like a choppy, craggy, swirling leg of Saturn’s journey through Pisces.
As a standard part of the intake, we went through the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). If you’ve ever had any brush with the mental health apparatus in the U.S. then you’ve run into this one. It’s not the least meaningful questionnaire I’ve responded to in my life, but it was funny to walk through today. By the end of it my new therapist offhandedly said I “got a good score” which I thought was funny, mostly because of course I did. I answered earnestly, but we all know it is very easy to answer these things with the answers that verify you’re a little off your rocker but not so off that you’re getting picked up for observation.
Because I’m drafting this newsletter up to the last minute1 I’m struggling to come up with a better segue than this: I was answering the survey questions and wondering whether or not I was feeling more tired and had less energy than usual or, like, the standard amount. I considered if my hopelessness was on par for month ten of my country funding the unchecked mass murder of Palestinians. It is very hard in the moment to know how differently I feel today from ten days ago or fifty. It is hard to know what is a normal feeling. While I weighed these questions, I noticed the print out that I have taped to my office wall from Bernadette Brady’s The Eagle and The Lark.
I got the printout in one of the classes I’ve taken with Kelly Surtees, a wonderful astrologer and teacher and person, in which she walked us through a few approaches to understanding moon phases, mostly within the context of a natal chart. You can see in the printout that there are some general concepts or themes associated with different phases. As I verbally ran through the form with the therapist who lives in my computer, I rested my eyes on that taped up piece of paper and decided this week would be a good chance to talk about the Moon and mood, both in the birth chart and in our day to day experience.
I wrote a little about the Moon and her birthday and her rarified space in the sky a few weeks ago. She’s the mirror we all share, the one responsible for diffusing the aggressive light from the Sun and bringing it to us when we need it the most, late at night. Whatever glow she gets, whatever she is able to catch from the Sun who casts his light from below the horizon, she immediately tosses to us. Call your own mother and thank her for all the times she gave you what she herself wanted to keep. Or, if that’s not good advice for you, say thanks to the Moon when she’s full in Capricorn at 6:17AM ET on Sunday, July 21.
So, how does this responsibility of passing along the light of the Sun to us on Earth connect with the meanings behind the Moon’s phases? Why does it matter for an astrologer and, if you’re just astro-curious, why might it matter for you? Because understanding the Moon’s phases colors how we understand her messages.
As it almost always is in astrology, understanding the Moon is about light and it’s about angles.
When the Moon and the Sun are conjunct, when there’s no visible distance between them, the Moon is new. She’s at 0° and invisible. This is a quiet place, but as soon as she is at 0° she is also full of potential. With every minute that passes, she’s gaining light, even if imperceptibly. This is an important image to remember when you feel empty, when you feel completely drained. There is work that takes place to bring the Moon to visibility, movements made before there’s ever any evidence of this.
When the Moon is 90° away from the Sun, she is “square” to the Sun. As you might remember from other times I’ve written about relationships between planets, we think about the square as being tense, like two cars pulling up to an intersection at the same time. They cannot move forward at the same time so they have to negotiate. A decision has to be made. This active energy, an intentional movement, is what interpret in the First Quarter.
At 180° from the Sun, the Moon is full. She’s staring down the Sun and reflecting back to us all the light she receives. Similar to a square, this opposition carries tension. What’s different is that there is no negotiation that allows one to go and the other to wait. This is a confrontation or an action that might feel in some way less in our control. Energetically, this is a peak.
At 270° we are just about to tip over into the Moon’s descent back from being predominantly alight to predominantly dark. Consider this as the negative of the 90° square. While earlier in the cycle we saw this moment of tension and pushed ahead, perhaps expending more than we ever thought we could, here we take a different tack. This is a Moon who sees the writing on the wall and accepts that rest is (thankfully) an inevitable part of life. Struggling against that is at most a delay and at worst a risk that does not pay out.
Before long, you’re in the last moments before the Moon once again aligns with the Sun at 0°. It’s at this point that whatever decomposition occurred is ready to feed into the next cycle and nourish the next round of growth and change.
There are several other ways to divide the Moon’s cycle into phases. For instance, I just shared a simplified version of the common eight-phase cycle, honing in on the most dynamic moments. This isn’t to suggest the rest of the phases are less significant. (Maybe we’ll look at them in a future newsletter.) But understanding the basics of how the Moon’s light grows and how her light fades is an essential part of understanding how stories are told in the sky and therefore in the chart.
I probably could summarize a whole lot of what I just said with the phrase: what goes up must come down. That’s the gist. A common refrain from an old friend of mine was “feelings aren’t facts” – said another way: “what you’re feeling right now won’t be forever”. The Moon’s movement, her dance with the Sun and the way that flows from pure darkness, through phases of potential, to a peak of brilliance, and back, is a perfect moving image of that same idea.
Hopelessness will give way to restlessness will give way to despair will give way to satisfaction will give way to rest will give way to calm will give way to unease will give way to concern will give way to optimism will give way to action will give way to reaction and so on.
So, what do you do with all that? What questions do we see rising to the top?
What’s changed for you recently? It’s harder to look into the future than it is to look into the past, so it can be useful to reflect on how your life has changed in ways you might not otherwise notice. Anne Lamott once said, “You can’t logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.”
In your own birth chart, how much light does the Moon carry? Is she full of potential? Has she released the the light from her cycle? How does the answer sit with you? How much of your life has been spent wishing for something else to be true?
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I am afraid to commit publicly to this, but my internal deadline for sending these newsletters is 7PM ET on Wednesdays. When life is more stable then I am usually more ahead and it’s just edits on Wednesdays. Not today, which is probably not a surprise considering the need for a new therapist!