To exist is to change,
to change is to mature,
to mature is to go on
creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson
The New Moon on November 1, 2024, at 9 Scorpio
occurs at the midpoint between fall and winter, when the veils between worlds are thin - when the living and the dead, the imaginal and the real intertwine and dance together. This is the season of transition and transformation; the mysterious realm of darkness where we encounter the deep self that makes itself known through feelings and powerful desires that can overtake us. Encountering the deep self can bring us face to face with core fears and powerful yearnings that we successfully sidestepped when the days were long and full of activity. Memories now stir, skeletons we thought were closeted away arise to be greeted, fed and loved. We grieve what is lost and let our tears nurture the seeds of the new life to come.
The New Moon arrives with a great depth of feeling (6 planets in water signs) along with the experience of intensity, and perhaps conflict, that can shake us to our roots (Mars oppose Pluto). We are to ground ourselves, bring attention into our bodies, and work with our emotional nature. It is beneficial to give space to the intensity of feeling that is there to be engaged without shutting down, giving into fear, or dissipating the feeling by lashing out at another. Feelings may occur as physical aches, incredible fatigue or exhaustion, or as intense emotion. Giving ourselves permission to feel, the feeling will carry us to the release, the healing and the desired transformative change.
The New Moon Post Contemplates:
Saturn trine the New Moon
New Moon CoRulers: Mars and Pluto oppose each other
Water Grand Trine: Mars, Mercury, Neptune
Kite Pattern: Apex Pluto with Minor and Grand Trine.
Pluto trine Uranus
Mercury oppose Uranus
and
Post Helene Update #3: Personal Reflection on the Scorpio New Moon
The New Moon is the optimal time each month to set an intention for what we want to manifest over the next month. There is 24-hour window after the exact moment of the New Moon when the Moon is still dark and not yet visible in our night sky. This is the time to plant the seed that we will nurture and grow in the weeks that follow.
The house in our natal chart where 9 Scorpio resides offers us clues as to the area of life where we are ready to bring a high level of honesty, focus, and intense engagement to catalyze healing and growth. It is the area of life where we can expect to experience deep feeling, conflict, or loss as part of a larger transformational process.
The only way to make sense
out of change is to plunge
into it, move with it,
and join the dance.
Alan Watts
Scorpio is bringing attention to what is buried deep in our bodies. Scorpio is the water that resides at the bottom of the sea, the deep waters that the sun’s rays do not illuminate. It is the realm of secret, hidden things. It is the place of the secret self, where our deepest desires, fears, yearnings reside. It is the realm where we have buried experiences or feelings we hoped to forget.
We are invited, maybe even compelled to sink deep within. We are to trust and let our feelings guide us. It is the very parts of us that were abandoned, hidden or shut away long ago that are ready to for the light of our awareness to shine on them. In our private inner sanctum, we can trust the emotional messages, the intuitive flashes, and wisdom that is contained in the realizations we have at this time. Root motivations and patterns that have run us can shift as the light of our attention shines on them.
The Scorpio Moon gives us great willpower and focus to stand in our strength and meet the truth. We can turn to face the fears that have been driving us. This is not a time to surrender and go with the flow, but of taking the reins and addressing what is emerging to be addressed. Areas of Scorpio concern that can surface can include issues around: death and dying, surgeries, and money (especially investments, inheritances, mortgages, debts and shared holdings). We may also encounter issues related to sexuality, intimacy and the deep bonds of relationship.
Transformation within a Larger Cycle of Transformative Change
The New Moon takes place at a well-honored time of year. The Celts called this time Samhain, when darkness increases, and days shorten. As with Halloween or Hallowmas, we recognize a thinning of the veils between worlds and of boundaries. We feel permission to behave out of character or become someone different through a costume or custom. Catholics celebrate this as All Saints’ Days when our prayers for those who have passed away will be best heard. In Mexico, our ancestors walk amongst us on Dia de los Muertos, and we honor, feed and interact with those who came before us.
The Scorpio season plunges us into the changes happening beneath the surface of daily life and routines, customs and habits. The season drops us like leaves that drift to the forest floor. Or perhaps it wraps us like caterpillars into a cocoon where we wait to let go of everything we know and give ourselves over to what we will become. We meet our fears and seek ways to trust the process of something we cannot control as we become immersed in the deep Autumn mystery that marks the dying process for the recent year.
We recognize through customs of this time period that the form can die, but the energy, the essence lives on. For instance, with a Halloween costume, by changing our clothes, we change our form. The form can inspire different behaviors, but our essential awareness of who we are is unchanged. It is a ritual that celebrates transformation as well as gives airtime and permission to the shadowy sides of our nature: We can become a pirate, a witch, a barmaid, a pimp, or a shark. There is a freedom in the thinning of boundaries and permission to put on the mantle of different forms, roles, characters. We can have fun with the idea of transformation.
This year, there is an added power to the Scorpio season because it is occurring within a larger cycle of endings and completions (Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, Pluto and Uranus at the last degrees of a sign). Things we thought would endure are disappearing. We may be reckoning with a dream we have been nurturing for years as one that is not viable. Big things we never imagined would end, are ending. It is a time where we can feel loss, exhaustion, and confusion. Grieving can help us to honor and say goodbye to what has reached its expiration date. As we release the old, there is an opening for the unprecedented new that will dawn in the spring of 2025.
Strength and Maturity
Saturn trine the New Moon
Saturn is at 12 degrees Pisces for most of November as it completes its retrograde cycle and readies to go direct on the November full Moon in Taurus. As Saturn stations, we are synthesizing what we have learned this year. There is a new strength and maturity emerging in us that has us feel capable to meet and handle what comes our way.
In Pisces, Saturn is announcing 2023-2025 as a time where dreams and ways of living are ending. We are reminded that everything on this earth has an expiration date. We are to let go and connect with what endures. We are to bind ourselves to and trust in what never dies. It is our relationship with eternal realm of spirit that will give us the perspective and strength to move with a measure of ease through this time of great change.
Life is 10% what happens
to us and 90%
how we react to it.
Charles R. Swindoll
Right Use of Will
New Moon CoRulers: Mars and Pluto oppose each other.
Pluto at the apex of the Kite Pattern
Both Mars and Pluto are at the final degree of a sign and exactly opposing each other, forming the spine of a Kite pattern. A small and grand trine form the outlines of The Kite, bringing gifts and talents that support resolution of the Mars/Pluto intensity. We are being challenged to navigate conflict and anger as energies that do not need to wreak havoc but can be harnessed to enact creative resolution and generative revolution.
Mars in Cancer amplifies insecurities and a sense that we are not safe. Childhood memories are stirred that have us encounter nostalgia, old wounds, and core emotional patterning. We become aware of attachments to the past that it is time to release.
The impulse is to defend and protect what our home, family, country and what we love. Mars opposing Pluto amplifies issues of power and powerlessness and catalyzes issues concerning authority. It is a highly contentious and explosive energy, potentially arousing rage and acts of brute force. For each of us, we are to practice mindfulness around intensity. If we become reactive to something, we are to curb the impulse to fly off the handle or pause before we speak something we may regret.
Mars oppose Pluto will be in effect through April with three exact oppositions - the first one occurring on November 3. This opposition is the primary astrological alignment that indicates the U.S. election may go less than smoothly.
Mars is in it shadow zone, meaning that when Mars goes retrograde (December 6, 2024 - February 24, 2025) it will revisit the same place in the sky where it is currently traveling, and we will revisit issues, feelings or conversations that we are having now.
Water Grand Trine with Mars, Mercury and Neptune. Emotional energy is further emphasized as the vehicle for finding our strength and our way. The rational mind is taking a backseat to the intuitive mind and empathetic heart. We are supported in efforts to heal trauma and karma we carry with us. Speaking from our heart and communicating honestly with those we love can help to strengthen the connection and bonds in our relationships.
Pluto at the Apex of the Kite. Pluto is in its final weeks in Capricorn. It will not return to Capricorn in our lifetime. We are seeing how we have grown in our capacity to hold responsibility and be accountable. With Pluto's presence prominent at the New Moon, we are reminded that there is a much larger story unfolding beyond the lunar cycle that is generations, even lifetimes, in the making. There is a lot we are digesting and synthesizing beyond what our cognitive mind can grasp. The depth of energy coming to the surface is real. It is up to us commit to a daily spiritual or exercise practice that serves to ground ourselves and give permission for the intensity of what we are feeling.
In the Water Kite pattern, Pluto is the only planet in an earth sign, helping to ground and contain the abundant feeling (all other planets in the Kite pattern are in water signs). We will find our strength through our feelings. Our reactions to circumstances can shift by listening to and honoring our feelings. In this, we can find an inner strength that does not meltdown or act out in the face of intensity. We recognize we are enough to engage the transformative heat that is destined to change us. The form of our lives will dissolve, and a new form will take shape in the months to come. But the energy of who we are, the soul essence, will simply move from one form to the next. The success of this relies on our attunement and understanding of our feeling nature and our ability to hear and trust he messages our feelings give us.
We think that the point is to pass the test
or overcome the problem, but the truth is
that things don't really get solved.
They come together and they fall apart.
Then they come together again and fall apart again.
It's just like that. The healing comes
from letting there be room for all of this to happen:
room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
Pema Chödrön
Post-Helene Update #3
A Personal Reflection on the Scorpio New Moon and how the Season of Transformation is part of a larger cycle of Transformative Change.
The Reality of Life on the Mountain Evokes Deep, Unsettling Feelings. The raging waters have subsided, and are left with the mud, debris and toxicity it left in its wake. The majority of rescue crews from communities around the country have headed home. With their tremendous support, roads were rebuilt, trees cleared, bridges repaired, new poles and power lines erected across the mountain, cell towers fixed and running water (though in many cases untreated and/or toxic) coming through faucets again. Now that we can drive from town to town and there is the basic infrastructure in which to function, the true scale of the destruction and what is ahead of us becomes apparent.
It is difficult to wrap our heads around the sheer magnitude of what happened in our mountain communities. With this there is grief and fear, hope and despair. Making room for the deep emotions is part of the recovery process. There are grieving rituals being offered in the various towns. Designated locations in the center of towns have been set up for people to go where they will find a volunteer therapist or citizen who will listen to their story and sit with them. And beyond listening, there is a responsiveness to meet the need of what is being expressed. People continue to volunteer and give of themselves to those who lost the most.
Scorpio is the secrets, the truths buried just beneath our everyday thoughts that have us concerned with getting bills paid, deadlines met, birthdays celebrated, laundry done…beneath the tasks of survival, there is the task of transformation and the soul’s evolutionary journey that tugs at us in the quiet of the night when we cannot sleep, or when we are driving alone on a long highway, or when we ae sitting on the back porch looking up at the moon. When activity subsides and busyness quiets, the secrets of who we are and what we hold and what we dream come forth to be aired, felt, remembered and acted upon.
One of the big secrets of life is that at some point everything we have will go and we will die. It is human nature to forget this or to at least believe that this eventuality is a long way off. And then someone we love dies or we attend a funeral, and we find ourselves suddenly looking metaphorically down the barrel of a gun. For some on the mountain, a family member has died. For many, they mourn the loss of their home. Others are facing a life-threatening operation. For me, it became a time to honor the lives of my parents.
Honoring My Parent's Life. This last week, I stepped out of the story of what is happening on my mountain and traveled to California to honor my parent’s final wishes. I joined my brother and his family as we took a boat out into the Pacific Ocean to spread Dad’s ashes on the open water. The following day we drove two hours south to a cemetery where we witnessed Mom’s ashes lowered into the family plot next to my brother Joe's ashes. These two days gave us the opportunity to celebrate my parents' lives, their love and what we received from them. The rituals helped us release and find completion. With this came a sense of freedom that happens after letting go.
Last week, I was in the city where I grew up. I had not been there in 35 years and so I was flooded with memories of my childhood. My parent’s lives were prominent in my thoughts and how all that is left of them now lives within me. In my mind, my parents have always been alive - always there to love, rebel against, talk to or push up against – and suddenly, they are no longer here. I have not known a life without them in it. Life has moved forward and there are few external signs that they ever existed at all.
A lifetime of their belongings and all the things they had cared for disappeared as the liquidators swept through and cleared out the house a few years back. After Mom passed, I brought Dad to North Carolina to live near me. The last couple years I was repeatedly reminded of the losses he endured in a few short years: first his wife, then his home, his friends and neighbors, his sense of place, his work and then his legs, his bowels, his independence, his mind, and his memory of himself. The mighty oak of his indomitable spirit was felled by the storms of age and time.
Walking on the beach in California, I contemplated how the lives my parents had had built over decades, all that mattered to them, all that they had fought for, strove for and loved no longer existed except in my memory and my brother's. I asked my brother if he could name our great grandparents. He struggled to name his grandparents. So, in the end, we completely disappear. In a100 years, even if someone can remember our name will they be able to say anything about who we were?
In the Scorpio season, we face life’s truths, such as these. We face them in their starkness and in the wisdom they offer. Deep feelings or fear can arise with this. We can then realize the truth of what is truly important and what is not. What is not essential is exposed for what it is: a distraction. The Scorpio season brings us to the true transformative journey that our soul is undertaking and what we are to next heal, feel, forgive or address.
No place is safe. After returning to North Carolina, I immediately become immersed in the collective trauma that permeates the mountain. What I have heard over and over in one form or another is “No place is safe.” There is nothing we can count on to remain and not leave us. There is the stark reality of what was lost, the incomprehensible devastation and the long road to recovery. Beyond this, something has changed within us in how we know ourselves, life and the definition of things. There is a recognition that we have been irrevocably changed by the experience.
With climate change, NOAH scientists declared that the Asheville area was one of the safest places to live. We felt safe on the mountain. I keep encountering people who moved up here from Florida or the coast, saying "I thought I was safe". A mountain is solid. You cannot move a mountain. You cannot destroy a mountain. A mountain is solid. It protects us. Well, it turns a mountain can be brought low and reshaped in the blink of an eye. The first-hand knowledge of this has changed us and changed our perception of mountains.
In our little town, we have utilities and internet again. Stores and banks have opened. Doctors are seeing patients, mail is being delivered, trash picked up, and drug stores are filling prescriptions. Those of us who have not lost our home are finding our way back to a kind of normalcy. Yet, we are still in a collective shock. Nothing is the same. We are not the same. We can feel that we are just going through the motions of a day or of a routine. At the root of the disorientation is the thought, “There is no place that is safe.”
If with little or no warning, our neighbor’s house and everything they owned can be swept up by a raging river that appeared without warning, will my house go in the next storm. We are told that this was a once in a thousand-year flood, but in the time of climate change, we are also told that we can get another once in a thousand-year flood in another few years. We all know people who lost their homes. Many know people that were washed away with their homes. If the terrain of the mountain can be reshaped and the rivers reroute themselves within a few hours, it means that the mountain is not as solid or as safe as we thought.
If the forests of trees that sheltered and protected us can be reduced to kindling by a raging wind or sudden river, then what will be swept away next? And it's not like any other place on the planet is any safer. They all have their risks. Every place is vulnerable. In this Scorpio season, we are faced with the truth that life has always been fragile and precarious. We are not in control and we each are looking at how to live in a world that is inherently impermanent. The storm didn't change this truth, it simply removed the blinders so we can recognize the truths that have been there all along. And with this, great transformation within our soul's evolution becomes possible.
In Conclusion
The Scorpio season occurs within a larger cycle that marks a several year period where profound change will take place. We each are experiencing endings, encountering loss and the release of something we once held dear. The New Moon gives us the inner strength to undertake the transformation process, the process where we move from one form to another form, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, a tadpole to a frog, from wearing one mask or role that we have played well to donning a new role or new approach to the world. If we can swallow the life and death truths of this human existence, embrace a larger spiritual perspective, and move in step with where our feelings guide us, we can find the strength and inspiration to give shape to the next chapter of our life.
Nothing is lost,
nothing is created,
everything is transformed
Antoine Lavoisier
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Journey to New Beginnings
The Next Five Months
A 75-minute Webinar
Sunday, November 10
7 pm EST
$30
The webinar looks at the end of November to the middle of April and the pathway revealed by the planets we are to walk that will prepare us to embrace the changes and new beginnings of 2025 and 2026. We will look at the upcoming Retrogrades of Mercury, Venus and Mars coupled with the two eclipses in March as a blueprint for the journey we are to take to discover something we don’t currently have that will assist us in meeting the future in a good way.
Note: Make sure to select November 10 in the calendar that is displayed on the registration page
Thank you Olivia for all the thought you put into your astrology offerings...and in particular for sharing your personal journey of transformation.