Hi friends.
Welcome to September! Wow, this year has flown by, eh?
The winds of change are upon us- I write this as I sit in my front yard listening to the breeze swoosh through the giant pine tree above my head and ring the aspen leaves like bells, and feel a chill deep in my body for the first time in a long while! I’m recording this on Friday, as this Sunday we’re planning to throw a little party and I need the weekend to prepare.
My daughter has wanted to have a fun summer party for the past couple of months, with a kiddie pool and a bubble machine and watermelon and pink inflatable flamingo floaties. I thought she might forget about it- she’s 5, and moves on from things quite quickly- but last week she got very sad that we had ‘missed summer’, and she wouldn’t take the promise of a pumpkin-patch or Halloween party in it’s place.
So I said ‘it’s not over yet!” and we blew up all the pool floaties and inner tubes in the living room, and proceeded to make summer decorations for our “Summer Forever” shindig. We went to Party City for paper plates and their front display happened to be 50% off everything summer, so we added boingy flamingo headbands and flower leis and colorful paper garlands to the mix.
We invited new kindergarten friends and old preschool friends, neighbors and friends visiting from out of town and family members, and got a lot of smiles at the pink flamingo invitations that serve as bittersweet reminders of a season’s end. As the cool wind blows in a change of seasons, we’re ready to squeeze out the very last drop of summer before we settle into the mystery of what the transition to the darker months will bring.
This episode is called “Trust the Mystery”, highlighting today’s Virgo New moon in the Gate of Aloneness & Liberation, followed by my birthday gate, Gate 64: The Gate of Confusion & Imagination. Both of the Gates this week have a similar theme of stripping the fat, letting the dust settle and trusting in the infinite potential of the mystery…. let’s get into it.
This week’s highlights:
Monday, Sept 2: New Moon in Virgo (in the Gate of Aloneness/Liberation/Resolve)
Labor Day
Human Design/I’Ching:
Mon-Tues: Gate 40, the Gate of Aloneness/Resolve
Tues-Mon: Gate 64, the Gate of Confusion/Imagination
Sunday, Sept 8: My birthday! :D
This week’s themes:
Simplifying life and trimming the excess
Setting intentions for health, wellness, routine for the next 6 months
Meditations on imaginal cells, on the potentials for the upcoming seasons of winter and fall
Our Place in the Wheel of the Year
Medicine Wheel Direction:WEST (Water, Adulthood)
Wuxing Cycle Element: Earth
Pagan Season: Lammas
Zodiac Season: Virgo (August 22-Sept 22)
Moon Phase: New Moon in Virgo
I Ching Hexagram/Human Design: Gate 40 (Wed-Tues), Gate 64 (Tues-Mon)
40 = Thunder over Water (Jie: “Deliverance & Liberation”) or The Gate of ALONENESS
64= Fire over Water (Wei Ji: “Before Completion/Not Yet Crossing” or The Gate of CONFUSION
New Moon in Virgo in Gate 40: Aloneness/Liberation
The mutable earth sign Virgo has her annual full moon on Monday, September 2, where the moon meets up with the sun in the sign of the discerning harvest goddess. This year, the new moon in Virgo is in the Human Design Gate of Aloneness, Gate 40. I talked about this gate a bit last week, the gate of Thunder over Water, the gate of going inward like the Tarot’s Hermit Card, the gate of feeling the exhaustion of the activity of the summer months, the gate of pruning the excesses so you can focus on your inner resolve, your inner connection to the divine.
In the I’Ching, this new moon’s Gate of Aloneness is known as Liberation, and in the Gene Keys, the gift and siddhi are known as Resolve and Divine Will. By taking the assignment of this micro-season of aloneness, which highlights this new moon and continues through tomorrow (Tuesday), we are able to find our inner resolve, our connection to the divine, and feel liberated from having to do it all. Surrendering some of our endless activity, we can settle into the changing season with a renewed sense of balance, like the fresh air after a thunderstorm has settled.
Jungian analyst Esther Harding wrote of Virgo:
She is essentially one-in-herself…Her divine power does not depend on relation to a husband-god, and thus her actions are not dependent on the need to conciliate such a one or to accord with his qualities and attitudes. For she bears her divinity in her own right.
Woman’s Mysteries by Esther Harding
Last week began in the Gate of Sexuality, the first gate of Virgo season. After a hot, self-expressed, heartfelt end of Summer in Leo season, that first gate of Virgo allowed us to connect the internal heat that we generated over the summer and begin to share it with those around us, through intimate exchanges and dissolving of boundaries between the self and the other.
Then, right after getting intimate with our surroundings, we returned inward to discern what is really important, to align with a higher purpose that will guide us through the rest of fall and winter. That’s what the Gate of Aloneness, and the manifestations of this New Moon in Virgo, bring about. Trimming the fat of summer and listening deeply to our inner knowing. Not adding anymore activity to our lives at this point in time, but instead deciding what to focus in on, and also what to let go of.
This spring we planted a little stick of a peach tree to mark a grave for my in-law’s peachy orange cat who passed away. To my surprise, there was a bounty of little peaches fruiting this year already, making the thin trunk bend over with their weight. Some of the peaches have been ready to pick and eat, while others are eaten by birds and some fall to the ground. We can be reminded by the peach tree in Virgo season that not all fruits are for our taking - some must be reserved for others, like for our animal neighbors, and yet others must fall to the earth and return to the ground as compost. The season of death is not yet immanent, but in Virgo season we are starting to recognize that we must conserve some of our energy, share some of our bounty, and let the parts of life that want to die off, die off.
Gate 40 in My World: Decluttering the House & the Burning of Zozobra
Last week, a couple of things personally tapped me into this energy. First, in the spirit of the Gate of Sexuality and intimacy, my partner and I energetically continued along with our home projects, organizing the art studio and the garage, setting up the backyard for our Summer party, cleaning out our closets.
In cleaning out and organizing my messy closet and my collection of art supplies that I’ve moved around with me since I was in college, I felt the Virgoan power of letting go of some things, releasing them back into the compost. I took several bags of clothes to the thrift store, tossed out more than several tubes of dried up paint, and recycled stacks of old papers. I thought this would clear space to be able to go replace the supplies or buy new clothes, but instead, the process of decluttering and clearing allowed me to see what I already had in a new light.
In my closet, I realized I didn’t need to add any more stuff, and instead saw new outfit combinations that felt exciting, or noticed certain items that would make great hand-me-down gifts to specific people in my life. In my art room, the process of taking note of what I had and streamlining it allowed me to set up stations for different kinds of art-making: a sewing spot, a table spot for collage and drawing, and an easel area with paints nearby. The analysis, discernment, and releasing of Virgo season, in Gate 40’s gift of Resolve, allowed me to feel intentional and purposeful as I move forward, without as much excess to consider and get bogged down by.
In the same vein (but psychically rather than materially), last Friday was a special celebration for me, and for the entire city of Santa Fe. It was the 100th anniversary burning of Zozobra, a 50-foot tall puppet known as “Old Man Gloom”, a tradition that began in 1924 when artist Will Schuster burned the first version in his backyard. With it’s origins preceding Burning Man by over 50 years, this giant white-cloaked animatronic puppet that flips off the audience and groans and moans through loudspeakers burns in late August/early September each year. Prior to the burning, anyone is welcome to write their grievances and glooms down on a piece of paper and stuff them inside his head and body, So when he burns, in a huge public display, the gloom and sadness of the populace also goes up in smoke along with him.
Back in 1983, I was born on the day of Zozobra, and my parents lived at a rental house next to the park where the celebration happens. They were new to Santa Fe then and didn’t know much about it, but as they brought me home from the hospital they heard the groans and moans and firework sounds of the burning effigy. And ever since then, Zozobra has felt like my own personal new year celebration. I never got my birthday to myself, but instead shared a wild fiesta with the entire city of Santa Fe as we shouted “Que Viva la Fiesta!” and “Burn him” to an increasingly agitated puppet. It always felt SO good to be able to yell, scream, and let out whatever felt stuck in our psyches, and then, after a bit of drama and suspense, have them burned away in a cloud of smoke.
Growing up, Zozobra happened on my birthday week (the weekend after Labor Day) as a part of Santa Fe’s historical Fiestas. As we’ll talk about in a moment, this was in the Gate of Confusion, known as Imagination in the Gene Keys- quite an imaginative celebration! Several years ago they moved Zozobra to happen a week earlier, and so Zozobra this year happened during the sun’s transit through Gate 40. Again, this energy is all about releasing and liberating ourselves from the excesses and overwhelm that have collected over the past seasons, allowing us to find inner resolve as we move forward.
The new moon today is in the same gate, and new moons are wonderful times for resetting, manifesting, and setting intentions for the next lunar cycles. It’s also a good time to set intentions for the next 6 months, when the corresponding full moon occurs- in 6 months from now, we will be in Pisces season’s full moon in Virgo, which will also be a lunar eclipse. This makes this new moon all the more powerful for bringing changes and upgrades into your life, and the best way to do it is to tap into Virgo’s organizing, analyzing, and discerning qualities. It’s time to eat some juicy peaches, give some peaches to the birds (and your neighbors), and let some peaches rot on the ground, feeding the soil and sowing the seeds for next year’s harvest.
The Burning of Zozobra, the Summer Forever party, the manifesting New moon: check, check, check! And it’s only Monday!
The rest of the week, from tomorrow (Tuesday the 3rd) through next Monday the 9th, the sun is entering Gate 64. My birthday is Sunday the 8th, so this is my sun gate, the gate the sun was transiting through when I was born! It’s known as The Gate of Confusion, “Not Yet Across” in the I’Ching, and in the Gene Keys it’s gift & siddhi are Imagination & Illumination.
Stay tuned- maybe this next bit will illuminate a little bit about me, and why I do what I do (Cycles of Time, etc!)
Gate 64 > Confusion, Imagination, Illumination (My birthday sun gate!)
So in addition to all the decluttering, planting, writing, podcasting, and partying I did last week, I also made some time for a few yoga classes (thanks to procrastinating on my class pass that’s about to expire, I really have gotten back into yoga- yess!)
One beautiful class was all about setting intentions of gratitude, and as I flowed through my vinyasa, I kept meeting up face to face with the person in front of me’s water bottle, which had a sticker of the night sky above some cacti that said “Trust the Mystery”. Perfecto.
Another class I did was a yin class, where we held each posture for about 10 minutes. Rather than holding an active pose with muscle and strength, the teacher encouraged us to let only Gravity and Time do the work in these poses. “Release, relax… let gravity and time do the work”. On repeat. And, tbh, it felt sooo good.
These are themes of Gate 64, in this week where the energy leads us from Confusion to Illumination through the path of Imagination. After a lot of contemplations on my birthday gate, I’ve come to love it and resonate with it in a big way. But it hasn’t been easy path!
The Bad News about Confusion
I remember picking up a book on a friend’s coffee table in my 20’s called “The Secret Language of Birthdays”, by Gary Goldschneider, and flipping through the pages to find my week. “September 3-10….. The Week of the Enigma. Enigma? Awwww dang. That doesn’t sound fun…. thatsounds…confusing,” I thought. LOL. And here I am years later looking into Human Design and the I’Ching and finding that my birthday is in the Gate of Confusion too!
In my birthday week chapter, Goldschneider writes:
Those born during The Week of the Enigma (Sept. 3-10) are not always easy to figure out. Puzzling and often paradoxical, their remarks and attitudes can leave one wondering what they actually meant. Their emotional depth is belied by a matter-of-fact exterior and a reliance on intellect. Dealing with their own emotional problems is usually their greatest personal challenge, one for which they are not always well equipped. This is complicated by the fact that they are more needful than most of the approval of others. Extremely valuable to any group or organization, they can become the mainstay of demanding projects and rarely if ever quit before the job is completed.
During The Week of the Enigma we would all do well to go inside and deal with our own personal problems. By confronting our internal demons we will be in a better position to function well in our daily lives and to help others, particularly friends and family members. Aiming for transparency should be a particular goal to strive for during this week, which means being emotionally honest with those close to us. Tendencies to be secretive and withdrawn should be opposed in favor of sharing and openness. Taking the time to explain ourselves to those who do not understand will be a good first step now.
Even better, I flipped to my birth DAY page, and found: “The Day of the the Puzzling Purist.” Total facepalm moment. Really? Here’s that entry:
The enigmatic individuals born on September 8 are by no means easy to figure out. In their own minds they are interested in cleaning up shop, straightening things out and generally improving the lot of their family, social or national group. Yet if and when they go off on the wrong track, they are likely to maintain the absolute belief that they are acting reasonably or responsibly. Whether their efforts turn out well or badly in the end, there is no denying that September 8 people impact greatly on their environment.
Those born on this day are often misunderstood by others, not in the least because they tend to be secretive. They are supreme actors on the stage of life, capable of playing many parts, but usually content to play just one very well. Most September 8 people see the world in terms of black and white. Their chosen role is often as protector of the faith against the enemies of family, state, party or church. How ironic that they themselves can prove to be the principal enemy! Therefore, it is extremely important that those born on this day spend time examining their values to see if they are as pure as they believe.
September 8 people are often able to control others through their masterful role-playing and sense of humor, but also through their weighty seriousness. Indeed, they are rarely taken lightly by anyone. Many born on this day earn great respect, while others instill fear. Having them for a parent, mate or lover may be quite a challenging proposition in itself. They can be incredibly demanding, inflexible, even tyrannical, but at the same time supportive and dependable. A mass of puzzling contradictions, September 8 people will at the very least be fascinating to those who are involved with them.
September 8 people generally like to be at the very head of their group whether public or private. Politics in particular may hold an attraction for them, and even if they do not take an active leadership role socially, they usually have a marked interest in the crucial issues of their times. Their views on these subjects may not be particularly tolerant. Most often they are in favor of upholding the status quo and opposed to all ill-considered or undermining (as they see it) forms of change. Those born on this day may not easy people to get along with, per se. They do not, however, depend on the opinions of others but firmly hold their own course, knowing in their hearts that they do what is best for all.
Enigma. Puzzling. Confusion. Oh my, when I think about it… how these words have haunted me! I do believe that reading these descriptions of my birthday personagram in my 20s gave me a bit of a negative self image, and a lot to be concerned about regarding my fate. I took it with a grain of salt, but once some things are said (or read), they can’t really be un-said. There are certainly truths within the text, both harsh and empowering. And, that being said, I also believe that the tone of writing is a bit dictatorial and inflexible, which can be dangerous in looking at systems of personality! I prefer the I’Ching, depth astrology, and the Gene Keys in their methodology and openness to interpretation.
I do have to wonder, though, about the other correspondences between Goldschneider’s Birthday book and the Gates of the I’Ching/Human Design. Have any of you listeners or readers looked your birthday up in The Secret Language of Birthdays? What did you think about yours? I’d love to know in the comments!
From Confusion to Illuminated Clarity… by the path of Imagination
As I get older, I have really learned to embrace my sun in Gate 64, to see beyond it’s enigmatic qualities.
Learning more deeply about the I’Ching (and it’s interpretations through Human Design & the Gene Keys) has helped me clear up some of my personal insecurities that the Secret Language of Birthdays imbued in me all those years ago.
The I’Ching has 64 hexagrams, and thus hexagram 64 is the last hexagram of the I Ching. The first hexagram of the I’Ching is known as heaven over heaven, the creative, and is made up of 6 solid (yang) lines. The second hexagram is known as earth over earth, and is made up of 6 broken (yin) lines. From heaven and earth, yin and yang, are born all of the other 62 hexagrams.
“The 64th Gene Key, along with its Programming Partner the 63rd, are such an extraordinary pairing. The whole I Ching can be reduced down to four Gene Keys – the 1 and 2 and the 63 and 64, the bookends which mystically contain all other Gene Keys.” – Richard Rudd, 64 Ways
It’s pretty cool…
In the I’Ching, hexagrams 1 through 61 are the chapters of the book of life, manifestations of yin and yang combinations. Hexagram 62 is known as the Gate of Details, and it is like the Glossary at the end of the book. (If you’re a longtime listener, you might remember that we discussed Gate 62 back in Cancer season with my partner Jackson, as it is his sun gate).
Hexagrams 63 and 64, then, are like the epilogue to the book, the chapters that come after the glossary. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Hexagram 63 is the epilogue to the book, and Hexagram 64 is the prologue to the following book, the next cycle of the book, the next cycle of time.
In the I’Ching, Hexagram 64 is known as “Not Yet Across”, “Before Completion”, or “Nearing Completion”, interchangeably. This suggests that the ever-spinning wheel of life never reaches a final conclusion. The 2 trigrams that make up the hexagram are: Fire over Water, which visually looks like alternating solid (yang) and broken (yin) lines (solid, broken, solid, broken, solid, broken.)
The previous gate, Gate 63, is located directly across the wheel from gate 64, in Pisces. It is known as “Completion”, and is represented by the reverse trigrams, Water over Fire. It, too, looks like alternating solid and broken lines, but reverse of Gate 64 (broken first, then solid, broken, solid, broken, solid). Both 63 and 64 are Fire and Water, which indicates cooking, integration, and transformation.
Water over fire, gate 63, indicates the completion of a cycle- the fire under water means the water is coming to a boil. In human design, Gate 63 is known as “Doubt”, indicating the doubt and questioning that naturally arises after we finish a book and read through the glossary: “Is that it? Is that everything?” Those with gate 63 have the fuel to move through this uncertainty to completion.
And then comes 64, the final hexagram. After the gate of completion, we reach “before completion”. This is inherently confusing, just by the nature of our linear minds. We want to reach a finality, find some closure. Or… do we?
Fire over water, unlike water over fire, is not boiling, not cooking. Fire, by nature, reaches upwards with its flames, while water, by nature, draws downward, with gravity. Just when we think we’re finished, contained, cooked we reach the final hexagram, where we are shown the true nature of the world: expansion. In an ever-expanding universe, up keeps going up, and down keeps going down. The image of Fire moving upward portrays how you can lose your sense of connectivity to your current situation, looking for answers in the skies, as if your fate is in the hands of something arbitrary. Water is releasing its profound wisdom below, observe how life is speaking to you daily, in a thousand different ways.
In the Gene Keys, the shadow of this Gate is Confusion, the Gift is Imagination, and the Siddhi is Illumination. This gate reminds us that confusion is not a state to be avoided, but rather embraced as an integral first step on the path towards making discoveries through our imaginations and thus gaining new insights, illuminating the expansion of the universe and also our consciousness. Trusting the mystery encourages us to stay in the energy of possibility and curiosity without trying to force clarity prematurely!
From /www.onlineclarity.co.uk:
Hexagram 64 is called Not Yet Across – the embodiment of incompletion and imperfection, an ellipsis in hexagram form. It’s a very large-scale, oracle-sized joke about our expectations of tidiness and order. The original Chinese character shows a small fox crossing a frozen lake.
Not yet across, creating success.
The small fox, almost across,
Soaks its tail:
No direction bears fruit.’Hexagram 64, the Oracle
However, this isn’t only about hesitancy: the fox is in real danger. Here’s an unusual story of a fox that came to grief crossing a frozen river – unusual, because the fox was rescued. There are plenty of reports of foxes dying in frozen rivers: getting stuck, falling in, frozen into solid ice. (And also plenty of folk tales of animals – foxes included – trying to fish through ice holes with their tails, and getting stuck.) If the fox gets his tail wet, it will be weighed down and drag along the ice – where it may freeze on and hold him fast. Then no direction will bear fruit.
So crossing this river comes with real risk. You can be almost there and still get stuck, ‘not continuing to the end’. You want to be very, very sure of the state of the ice before you commit yourself, and you need to keep your ears pricked as you make your way across.
This is one of those cases where ‘no direction bears fruit’ could have a double meaning. If you get caught by the tail, you can pull in any direction and won’t get free. But if you moved without a set direction, always responding to circumstances, perhaps having no direction would bear fruit in a successful crossing.
Just as hidden sadness resides in the heart of true euphoria, and just as seeds of amazing achievement can sprout from a caldron of adversity, no end is ever really complete without a new beginning stirring inside it. We may divide life into categories to understand and manage it, but experience itself is seamless. The Tao’s sixty-four-spoked, timeless wheel of change is ready to spin onward, ever evolving, ever staying the same.
63 marks the end of the balancing act, and 64 marks the beginning of the next. The last line of 63 show how easily what is complete may fall back into being incomplete if one is not guarded at the end. This is like the young fox nearly making it across, only to get the tail wet at the end.
The Imaginal Cells and Infinite Potential of Virgo
It’s interesting to me that this gate falls in Virgo season- it seems more Piscean, almost, with its ethereal, nonlinear, and expansive nature. But a couple of the big lessons found in this gate are so Virgo. Firstly it hones in on one of Virgo’s main character traits: discernment and differentiation.
From
‘Fire dwells above water. Not yet across.
A noble one carefully differentiates between beings, so each finds its place.’Hexagram 64, Image
‘Differentiating’ (something the noble one also did in Hexagram 13’s Image) means distinguishing between, discriminating, clarifying, and hence managing, governing. And here, she differentiates carefully – 慎 – a character that includes the heart radical. The qualities of water – emotional flow and depth – are engaged, too.
What does it mean to ‘differentiate between beings’ with emotional care? I think Balkin put it exceptionally well:
‘You have to understand the elements of the situation and all the forces at your disposal. You have to get people working together rather than against each other, and you have to get all of your resources working together in synch rather than randomly and haphazardly.’
Jack Balkin, The Laws of Change
And secondly, it reminds us of the immense potential that the sign of Virgo, in its original meaning, encompasses. Virgo, rather than being Virgin in the sense of pure and chaste, is a Virgin in the sense of a “virgin forest” - one in herself.
Marion Woodman wrote in “The Crown Of Age”:
The virgin is the being-ness in us, the I-am…One-in-herself. Use the word as you would the word “virgin forest” where the forest is untrammeled, there’s nothing foreign in it, it is clear to be itself, but it is full of all kinds of seeds so that there is immense potential.
The Crown of Age, by Marion Woodman
Drawing on this immense potential, an apt metaphor that I see for Gate 64 is that part in the life cycle of a butterfly when the caterpillar is in the chrysalis, and completely dissolves into goo, before some of it’s cells - known as imaginal cells- transform into a completely new animal, the butterfly.
This story is beautifully told by evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris:
A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. This confused biologists for a long time. How could a different genome plan exist within the caterpillar to form a different creature? They knew that metamorphosis occurs in a number of insect species, but it was not known until quite recently that nature did a lot of mixing and matching of very different genome/protein configurations in early evolutionary times. Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disclike aggregates of stem cells that biologists call 'imaginal cells', hidden away inside the caterpillar’ all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly!
Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes globalisation, in the sense of world transformation, is bringing about., as Norie Huddle first used it in her beautiful book Butterfly. Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many 'imaginal cell' humans who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.
If you want a butterfly world, don't step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other imaginal cells to build a better future for all!
When a butterfly is in the process of metamophosis, changing into its being for the next cycle, you don’t want to pull him out of his chrysalis. The memo here is that waiting within in the seeming confusion allows the imagination- the imaginal cells- to do their work.
Working with Gate 64 this week
People with Gate 64 active in their charts, I have read, get huge downloads of chunks of information (coming from fire above and water below, perhaps). And then, with so much raw information about the past and premonitions about the future, they feel a distinct pressure to make sense of all of it as quickly as possible. This could definitely be the energy of this week- stripping away the fat and finding resolve about what’s important.
With this energy, there is a particular emphasis on trying to make sense of and find meaning in the past, as well as pressure to know “how” things are going to work out or unfold. I definitely see this coming up in my life- I get big epiphanies and downloads, often times in the middle of the night, and I can’t sleep because I want to see all the puzzle pieces coming together. I want to know how everything is going to work out. But often I wake up exhausted and don’t end up truly doing anything with the information.
A quote by Cullen Hightower sums it up:
We sometimes get all of the information,
but we refuse to get the message.
The big lesson here, which I am continually making effort to implement in my life is: taking this into consideration:
You are always on the threshold of change; how you approach it will determine your success.
Embarking on a journey from confusion to clarity demands understanding, patience, and a focused mind. Since nothing can reach completion, the trend moves toward the opposite condition: renewal. Regeneration. Life reveals its enormous power to sustain and strengthen its creatures to those who would follow its ways. Although disorder ends the Book of Changes, we know that it is a necessary pathway to renewal.
Disorder increases energy and innovation. In Before Completion disorder or a lack of security and ease can become quite pronounced but given time, energy will dissipate and uncertainties will gel into a clear picture of the way forward. We can say anything that can go wrong will go wrong but just as easily say that anything that can go right will go right. The Book of Changes is always teaching us that what we experience is a matter of perspective. The rules of the game that we can measure are what is observable in nature. Since disorder and uncertainty are its thrust into a purposeful future – trust that all is unfolding perfectly and the unexpected may still be on the horizon. Don't give up just yet.
For a long time you have sought the end of confusion and a dawn of new clarity. This is your higher purpose, and the way to accomplish this task is to lead yourself out of confusion first. The world is a reflection of your state of mind and understandings. All outer change begins inside you. Oppositional forces stand no chance against those who are secure in their inner purpose. Step forward knowing that everything required for this mission is within you.
Everything is possible if you wait for the right moment.
(From Hexagram 64, iFate.com)
Continuing to trust the mystery in my 41st year
Funnily enough, creating both my Astrosomatics Substack and the Cycles of Time Podcast were downloads of information that came to me in the middle of the night as ideas, saying “This is what you should do and this is what it will be called!” In my younger days, when called by an idea like this, I would usually try to ration it out, make sense of it, do an analysis of time and cost, and most of the time throw an idea out. But as I’ve gotten older, and learned some of the language of my Virgoness and Gate 64, I’ve leaned into trusting the mystery a bit more, and not having to “figure out” the why and how of something that comes to me. It’s not always easy to explain or to justify to myself or others, but it’s amazing how much more in-flow my life feels when I give myself permission to be the type of Virgo that is based on both infinite potential, imagination, and service to the greater whole, rather than the exacting, tidy, and nitpicking version.
Thank you all so much for coming on this ride with me as I learn more about myself and the world through writing and talking to you! On my 40th birthday, I wrote an article about 40 feeling like a total rebirth (read it here: The Goddess of the Stars/Peaches for Everyone). The rebirth draws on the number 40’s magic:
40 weeks is the duration of a human pregnancy, the time from conception to the time of birth, the 3 trimesters in the womb.
40 days is the approximate amount of time after giving birth that it takes for the wall of the womb to heal in the place where the placenta had been attached.
40 months is 3.33 years, which has always been a magical number for me. At 40 months, children are in the babbling stage, with a great leap into blossoming imagination, communication, and vocabulary, exploding with possibilities and desire to connect their rich inner worlds with the world around them.
So now that I’m turning 41 I feel like a wisened one-year-old, putting that imagination to use as much as I can! I’m heading up to Oregon for my birthday to see my 98 year old grandmother, attend my cousin’s wedding, and get a good dose of the Pacific Ocean.
I hope that you have a gorgeous new moon and a beautiful week ahead, soaking up the mystery, while letting your imaginal cells, gravity, and time do the work. Please consider sharing, subscribing, and commenting- all of your engagement helps me extend this work to more people, and I truly love hearing from you!
All my love,
Alison
Trusting the Mystery: The New Moon in Virgo (& Happy Birthday to me!)