Throwing away memories.
Capricorn New Moon and I can't find my yearbooks.
Upcoming Astrology:
There are plenty of week ahead resources out there (the CHANI podcast is a good one), so I thought it might be more fun to read a focused interpretation of one dynamic in the sky.
New Moon in Capricorn early Thursday morning, about 7am ET: A Capricorn New Moon can be bitter sweet. It’s a lonely place for the Moon to sit, far away from her home in Cancer. Capricorn is less emotionally receptive than Cancer, a dry earth sign, Saturn’s cold winter home.
That being said, it’s still a new seed, the beginning of a cycle that will culminate with the Capricorn New Moon this summer. It’s an interesting one because we have that lack of ease that comes with the Moon’s discomfort coupled with the presence of a very strong Mars. If we look at the journey that Mars will be on during that time, from the start of the cycle under this New Moon to the peak of the cycle under the Capricorn Full Moon on June 21, we see a story of a Capricorn Mars that moves from power and discipline to a Mars that loses its way somewhat, becomes a little less confident and a little more internal, more uncomfortable in Taurus.
What’s that mean? My interpretative stab in the dark: this Capricorn Moon cycle is going to be colored by rethinking how you let aggression and assertiveness influence whatever your Capricorn house is. Look at that house and its meaning and consider how you exert control there and how you let others lead. Anything new you want to try?
Throwing away memories.
I might have thrown away my high school yearbooks. It’s possible that I’ll find them stowed away somewhere weird and completely unintuitive later, but for now I’ve looked everywhere in my house that I can at all imagine them being and they haven’t turned up.
This is not that surprising to me. Even if I later do find them, the fact is that I am the kind of person who on occasion throws away things that are important or sentimental because in the moment I am considering it I think, “it’s stuff. it’s just stuff.”
I did this with my Facebook (very happy to say goodbye, but I actively didn’t back up my photos), my first laptop with a handful of attempted novels, countless art pieces I’ve loved having on a wall in one home but that didn’t make the move to the next, and scraps of paper that I wrote poems or notes on that I decided “would come back to me if they were important.” I have never had a memory box in my life and if I had one I probably would throw it away.
On the other hand, there are specific journals that I’ve moved with me for over a decade now. Some that I’ve typed up to be sure I never lose them. Some that I have re-read and reflected on so much that they are almost secure in my head, approaching memorization. I don’t know what I’ll do with them if anything, but for some reason these stand a much better chance of maintenance than so many of the other artifacts from my life. I don’t think it’s because they are specifically sentimental to me.
I think there’s something about these journals that I can tell need some sort of active reworking. I use them, on a semi-regular basis I use these random notebooks which keeps them relevant enough that it never even enters my mind to toss them. One comes to mind that I kept from New Year’s Eve in 2010 to New Year’s Eve in 2011. That was the year that I started coming out to people in earnest, the year that I started to really accept that my sexuality wasn’t going to change, a year when I began to conceptualize that there was a “future” that included college and the time after that I needed to consider.
It’s a notebook full of cringe, full of sweet and circular thinking, irrational fears and playing it cool even though no one was ever going to read it, even though I was going to be the only audience. In a lot of ways it’s the kind of thing that I should have considered throwing away shortly after I wrote it. I am sure that it didn’t take me very long to understand that it was embarrassing, but I still kept it, for some reason, even as favorite books got donated and pictures got thrown away and even some letters and cards got lost in the shuffle.
Now, possibly this bias toward keeping my own navel-gazing safe and secure while throwing away the memories that aren’t centered on myself is just reflective of a personality defect. I am someone who writes a newsletter that is more parts self-indulgent rumination than it is incisive analysis or critique.
But I also think very much of the stuff that I keep around is more reflective of the perspectives/ideas/misconceptions/illusions that I have not figured out how to sit with than it is reflective of what is important to me. Kind of like instead of keeping a “memory box” I am someone who would keep a “lasting problems box”. It’s easier to keep the confusions close by than it is to let them go.
I could still find my yearbooks somewhere. Maybe I dropped them off with family and forgot about it or maybe I really did drop them in my trash bins as I frantically filled up my moving truck in August. I’m not super concerned, but it does leave me thinking about my memories and how I keep them, especially as so much is automatically saved, automatically backed up now. The things that we keep again and again mean something to us, are kept within easy reach when they could be stored on a server for much longer and with much less risk of loss.
Something I’ll be thinking about. In the meantime, if I knew you in high school and you have pictures of me from that time, send them to me please! I will keep them safely in my email inbox where they’ll never get deleted.
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.
