You Contain Multitudes: The Pisces super-moon reflects the Virgo sun
Plus: a sad playlist to lean into your emotions & an affirmation ritual to lift you up
Happy Full Moon, homies.
Tonight’s moon opposition to the sun occurs at 8:37pm EST. It’s a blue moon- meaning the second full moon in a calendar month- AND a super moon - meaning that it will appear larger than most full moons because it is at perigee, the closest that the Moon comes to the Earth in its elliptic orbit.
This particular super-blue moon is lighting up in the part of the sky known as Pisces, the sign represented by the ethereal fish. These sultry fishies are tied together with a ribbon, swimming in opposite directions through the dreamscape of the primordial soup, the afterlife, the before-life, the Upside-Down, the great beyond, the empathetic, imaginal realm. In the midst of the back-to-school, get-your-shit-together vibes of Virgo season, this full moon promises to draw you away from your to-do lists and spreadsheets, at least for a moment, and drop you in with your body, emotions, spirit, and dreams. Full moons are times of culmination, things coming to the surface, and release, so don’t be afraid to let the cauldron bubble a bit today.
Full moon conjunct Saturn
If you look up at the moon tonight, you’ll notice that she’s hanging out with Saturn, who is moving slowly through Pisces over the next couple of years. This influence of the great regulator, the lord of time, on the tender moon will certainly be felt today.
Saturn has a sobering effect on the moon’s feeling nature, and in Pisces it adds a dash of specificity and realism to your nebulous dreamworld. With this aspect, you may desire solitude, feel a stronger-than-usual ability to be emotionally self-reliant, or even be able to look at your life’s journey from the POV of a wise elder.
While it might not be the most playful lunation, you can take advantage of this Saturnian container for the watery Pisces moon by taking it slow, making space, and showing yourself care and nurturance in the way a (good) parent would a child. The moon represents the maternal figure and Saturn represents the paternal figure, so it’s a great moon for reparenting work.
The moon and Saturn are opposite the Virgo sun, which may increase your energy for getting stuff done, but like I said, the spreadsheets will still be there when the moon moves along to Aries in a couple days. There is a potential with this moon- Saturn aspect for feelings of loneliness and heaviness to arise, so grab a cup of chamomile, your favorite weighted blanket, and a box of tissues and settle in for the evening. Take whatever sadness comes up for you as a healing message for how you can better take care of yourself. By taking responsibility for your feelings and clearing out the dark places you don’t go very often, you’re creating space for new dreams to materialize into reality.
The Virgo/Pisces axis: sovereignty vs interdependence
”I am large, I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman in ‘Song of Myself, Part 51’.
Today’s full moon in Pisces reminds us of this truth, a welcome message of amidst the analytical & categorical nature of Virgo season.
And at the same time, Virgo season shows us the power that categories & labels can have to help weave us into deep interconnection (Note: it all depends on who’s labeling who).
To me, astrology is awesome because it allows us to access a personalized understanding of archetypes, the products of collective storytelling across humanity’s journey through time. Archetypes are simply labels or categorizations of people that have come into being through the beautiful artform of myth-making over the course of thousands of years. I think it is such a treat to be able to participate with that collective conscious directly.
I also love the study of astrology because it grounds us into a deeper understanding of cyclical space-time. A birth chart is a circular representation of the stars and planets around Earth at our time of birth. Information contained on the chart, like where the sun, moon, planets and asteroids were, and what constellation was rising over the horizon when we popped out of the womb, gives us a sense of which archetypes might be highlighted in our personalities. It helps us understand which areas of our lives might be have concentrated energy. Astrology, when practiced ethically, presents us with information about the dominant archetypes in our charts, and then we can use that as a filter to self-identify with what feels true to us.
This is the power of Virgo: To take what resonates, and leave the rest.
Virgo is the sovereign and independent maiden of the harvest. As she gathers the fruitful bounty that comes out of Leo season, she judiciously separates wheat from chaff, judges healthy fruit from fruit that’s rotted on the vine, and labels everything accordingly so that it can be useful to others, now and in the future. In the body, Virgo rules the digestive system and the intestines, which are responsible for absorbing, filtering, and separating out nutrients from waste.
This labeling and separation is a necessary part of the harvest- otherwise we’d only have multigrain bread, multi-fruit jam, and everything might taste a little bit rotten :) Accurate labels make communication and connection easier- they’re essentially for existing within the realm of others, ensuring that knowledge can be transmitted easily for the health of the community. But of course, labeling and separation can be horrific if in the wrong hands, leading to violence, genocide, and war.
Labels hold such power. And like all power, they need checks and balances. That’s where Pisces comes in.
Pisces, the natural ruler of the 12th house, is opposite from the Virgo-ruled 6th house. This axis represents the healing power of the mundane within the spiritual, the details that make up the big picture, the realization that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Pisces, represented by the deep sea, the composted soil underground where seeds are planted, represents Everything is Everything, Everything Everywhere All At Once, the Primordial soup.
In true Pisces fashion, I want to emphasize that everyone “has” everything in a chart. We all have every sign, every planet, every house. Although your sun might be in Aries and your moon might be in Cancer, you are still influenced by each of the signs and each of the houses in the chart. Even if we don’t have a planet or celestial body in an area of our charts, there is always a celestial body orbiting through the solar system, giving energy to where that archetype lives for you.
Look at which houses contain Pisces and Virgo in your chart for clues as to which areas of life will be influenced by this lunation.
The questions during Virgo season, and especially during this Pisces Full Moon, are: What labels are you using? How do you label yourself? How do you label others? And, who gets to decide on the labels that society uses? How are these labels used in law, business, and government to determine human rights, animal rights, environmental rights, and beyond?
I’ve been using these questions as prompts for my moon-Saturn reparenting and self-care work over the past couple of days. Read on for my personal musings on the subject, as well as an affirmation exercise to help you claim your own labels to co-create your own story.
Or, stop here, put on your favorite emo playlist (I made you one to make it easy), and take a nourishing nap. You deserve it 🧡.
“Oh, she’s just shy… “ (The power and the pain of being labeled)
People like labels because they’re terrified of uncertainty…. Part of why we’re so terrified of the unknown is because we’ve forgotten how to create.
- Karen Curry Parker
I’ve never been a fan of labels, and have been pretty averse to categorizing myself or others. As I get older, I realize it’s probably because, from an early age, I was the one being labeled by others, rather than creating a label for myself, and it never felt very good.
Anecdote # 1: Early Childhood
As a little kid, my parents traveled with me a lot, road tripping through the Western US and stopping at friends’ and family’s houses and businesses along the way. Being brought into lots of different environments as a toddler, I didn’t talk too much, and I remember early on being labeled as shy by one adult to another adult. As a kid, when someone labels you, it’s hard not to adopt that label, to integrate it with your selfhood, and this was definitely the case for most of my life, at times to a debilitating extent.
When I became a mother to a kid who has also had to adapt to a lot of new environments, and thus is also quite sensitive, I’ve deliberately done my best to avoid the “she’s shy” label. Admittedly, it’s been challenging- “shy” is an easy thing to say as a disclaimer in a social situation when I feel uncomfortable with her behavior. But I try because I know what an impact it can make on a person to be labeled without consent.
Even if I could protect her from that label that hurt me, it’s impossible to limit how other people will label her out in the world. She came home from preschool last year and told me “I’m the shyest kid in my school”. We can’t control how people label us or what people call us. If we don’t have a safe home base where we accept ourselves, become aware of ourselves, and yes, even label ourselves, it’s all to easy to allow the labels of other people to seep into our self perception, to define it.
Oftentimes, we begin to have Stockholm syndrome with these labels. even if they feel bad in our bodies, we create stories about how we actually DO identify with them (“I love being shy”). Sometimes they become filled with false-pride (“I’m shy because I’m deeper than everyone else”). Or, we just become apathetic and say we don’t care about the labels placed upon us.
This Saturn-Moon conjunction in Pisces encourages us to be real about the real embodied feelings inside us, and take responsibility for them. Rather than saying “I don’t care”, or “I actually LOVE the label that you gave me”, it’s time to be honest about how you truly feel, where it hurts. Only then can we begin to hand the wrong labels back to the label-makers, and in doing so make space to create our own labels, for ourselves.
These days, I frequently talk with my daughter about the difference between “feeling shy” and “being shy”- “feeling” as a temporary response to a situation, “being” as a personality trait or defect that may stay with you… forever. She can own “shy” to label a feeling on a given day, but doesn’t need to associate shyness with her ever-evolving personality.
Oooieee, Hippie! (A label’s meaning is in the mouth of the beholder)
Anecdote #2: Junior High
In elementary school, after learning about the Vietnam war and the anti-war hippie movement, I asked my mom if she and my dad were hippies. “I don’t know… not really… I don’t really believe in labeling people,” she told me. I remember my embodied sense of disappointment with that answer. At that time, I thought hippies were cool, and I wanted my parents to be from that ilk. “Moommmm”, I remember saying. “Come on! Just admit it. I saw pictures. You had bell bottoms and tie dye. You had a VW van. Just admit that you were a hippie!” She never did. :)
Funnily enough, when I entered junior high, it was I who was labeled a hippie. “Hippie” was name calling, it had derogatory undertones, and it definitely wasn’t a welcome label. In Santa Fe, where I grew up, relations between ethnicities are incredibly tense (and quite different from the rest of the US because of the history of this place.) “Oieee, Hippie! Watch out!” was thrown around in the hallways with anger, directed from kids of Spanish descent to non-hispanic white kids. This label of the hippie wasn’t the peace-loving, antiwar activists that I learned about in grade school, but the white folks who moved to New Mexico in the 70s and caused gentrification/displacement of traditionally hispanic communities. As a 12 year old, I had no clue about this part of recent history, and felt thoroughly confused and hurt.
I remember one time, one of the other kids who was called a hippie retorted “I’m not a hippie, that was my parents!” to which the name-caller said: “Yeah, they came here and took our land!” Then the defense: “Well look who’s talking - your families came in here and took the Native American’s land!” And then a fight broke out in the hall. Whew. 7th grade was tense.
Eventually, my hippie friends an I started to adopt the label. Sure, we could be hippies! We sat cross legged and pretended to meditate under the desks in class (just like hippies do :), and threw up peace signs up as we walked through the halls. This didn’t seem to make it any better, though, so by 8th grade we changed course. We dyed our hair pink and purple with Manic Panic, wore dog collars and spiderweb shirts from Hot Topic, and increased our fierce look with dark eyeliner and piercings. We still didn’t have our own label for what exactly we were, but we definitely weren’t hippies.
Before long, though, the next label struck: “Skittles”. It had the same derogatory undertones, but with a little less historical relevance. Colorful delicious candy isn’t so bad… right? From then on, we were Skittles. I think my dad was disappointed that his little girl was now pink haired and goth-presenting, but at least I could own the less-shameful identity of being a Skittle at school.
Fast forward to 2023, and not much has changed, except that my junior high school has been closed down, and tensions based on labels of race, ethnicity, gender, and beyond have come out into the open in a much bigger way across the US and the globe.
Just this week in Santa Fe, there was a huge city council meeting to vote on a proposition to remove the Fiesta Court from touring schools in Santa Fe. Santa Fe Fiestas is a long-running celebration that happens here every September. Fiestas celebrates the re-conquest of the city of Santa Fe by Don Diego de Vargas and his Spanish conquistadors after the Pueblo Revolt, an uprising of indigenous Pueblo people against the Spanish colonizers in 1680.
Each year, a Fiesta Court is chosen from the community, with a Fiesta Queen and a Don Diego de Vargas and a whole royal crew. There is also one “Indian Princess” chosen to walk with the Court. Every year growing up, we would be taken out of class to go see the Court sing and dance and parade and be crowned in the school gym. It was a festive time with great mariachi music and traditional songs, but there was rarely much education about the meaning of the event presented along with it, and I always felt a little concerned about the Indian Princess who walked at the end of the line.
Many people from Santa Fe say that Fiestas and the retelling with the Fiesta Court is a symbol of unity between the Spanish and Indigenous communities. But of course, history is told by those in power, and many voices and truths are left out of that view. In years past, and just this past week again, the city council has proposed that this reenactment is not suited for public schools due to a harmful, one-sided presentation of history. However, the backlash from the community here to the proposition was rampant, and the Court will still be allowed to come into the schools, at least for one more year.
Scrolling through the highly-agitated internet forums about this debate yesterday, I saw the word “hippie” come up again, more than once. One post stated that back in the day, hispanic people and their native neighbors lived in peace, celebrating that unity with the Fiesta until “woke white hippies” moved in and started retelling history. Several indigenous folks immediately negated that idea, and several less-traditional hispanic folks jumped in with their support, highlighting the truth about the violence of the colonial past and giving credit to the fact that many people have not been safe to use their voices against powers-that-be.
Growing up as one of these white folks in a place with such a long history is incredibly complex and challenging, especially since I was born and raised here and have never called anywhere else home. I know that I certainly didn’t like being labeled a hippie by my classmates. People with generations of family in this state don’t like being labeled colonizers, especially by relative newcomers to this place. And I’m sure indigenous people don’t like being labeled friendly neighbors when they don’t resonate with that being true. I, for one, want to do better than getting defensive about my place here, starting by listening to the real pain that other people are experiencing.
We can’t choose who our ancestors were or what they did, but we can choose how we respond to hearing, directly from the source, about the real pain of people who historically have not felt safe to speak. We have a lot to feel, a lot to reveal, and a long way to go in creating a new dynamic so we can live together in true unity, not just “unity” as labeled from the ones in power. This process takes the power of Saturn and the Moon together: feeling as a pathway to healing, listening compassionately to other’s experiences without getting defensive, and creating space to architect new histories, better ways of interrelating.
Even ‘good’ labels can be bad (when they’re not… yours)
Anecdote #3: College
Friendster, the precursor to Facebook, was an online social network that came out in the early 2000s. Like Facebook, users created profiles and uploaded their pictures and basic information, but and instead of being able to post things on your own “wall”, other people (friends or not) could visit your profile and post about you. Testimonials, they were called.
“Say something about Alison!” it prompted.
I still remember how strange and weird it felt to be given a testimonial by people I just met at a college party, publicly labeled on the wall of the burgeoning internet.
The first 3 posts that people made about me were:
“Alison is fun!”
“Yeah, Alison IS fun!”
“Alison is deep. She talks about really deep and philosophical stuff, even at parties.”
The Friendster wall was supposed to be a compliment wall, I think, at least that’s probably how the UX team at the company thought of it. But being labeled without soliciting it, I think, is even worse than unsolicited advice.
“Fun’ and “deep” were not bad things to be called, per se, but… the lack of prompting that feedback was incredibly confusing to me at 18 years old.
Was I too fun? What does fun even mean? And then, deep? Come on, what does that say about me… Pretentious? Boring? Is that ALL that I am? Ahhhh!
As problematic as today’s social media is, I for one am glad that the Friendster label wall didn’t make the cut!
Creating our own labels, for ourselves: Gender Pronouns, Neurodivergency, and Self-Identified Identities
These days it does seem like there are far more labels in common use than ever before. A whole spectrum of gender, race, ethnicity, body-image and neuro-types, all with new verbiage that feels unfamiliar (and uncomfortable) to some.
Some people, who “don’t see color”, “don’t believe in identity politics” or say they don’t care about labels, refuse to use people’s preferred pronouns or other signifiers. “We’re all human!”, they say. “Why do we need more labels?” But think about the people who have been forced to internalize the labels that were put upon them by others as kids (especially with the common derogatory slang of the 80s and 90s): “That’s so GAY”. “You’re Retarded”. “What a weirdo.” “She’s shy.” “Hippie.” “Slut.”
The ability to release those labels and give them back to the labelers, to say “Nope, I’m not”, and then choose which labels feel accurate and true for us as individuals, is a major shift from the world I grew up in. These self-identifiers are generally about the unique, sovereign identity of a person and likewise how they choose to interconnect with the larger social world. They are not about putting binary labels on others in order to disempower them, which is what we’ve been trained to see as normal behavior for so long.
I recently visited Site Santa Fe, a fabulous museum of contemporary art, and saw a few great exhibits. The thing that stood out to me the most, though, was their bathroom door signage, which simply read:
M (self-identified) and W (self-identified).
Self-identified: it’s so simple, but not something I’ve seen elsewhere, yet.
Inside the stall was this sign:
The way I see it, to be able to claim labels like queer, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, asexual, nonbinary, multiracial, body-positive, sex-positive, highly-sensitive, and others is to identify with the complex and unique nature of each of our identities, without being boxed in by the existing, limited labels that have become codified in society-at-large.
The more specific we can be about aspects of our identity - our sexuality, our ancestry, our gender, how our brains work, how we view our bodies, our families - the more we are recognizing that, as Walt Whitman so eloquently wrote: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
Our parts can be defined and labeled in the way that the Virgo archetype defines and labels the wheat from the chaff, the ripe from the rotten. But, as the Pisces archetype reminds us: We are so much greater than the sum of our parts.
You are sovereign AND interconnected. You are whole.
And your wholeness, too, is a part of something larger.
An Affirmation Ritual for the Full Moon in Pisces: Who are you? And what are you a part of?
For this ritual, you’ll need 2 pieces of paper and a pen. Optionally, you’ll need a lighter and a fire-safe metal bowl.
We’ll start off with a shedding, a release, a giving-back of the labels that have been put upon you by others. Labels that don’t resonate, labels that don’t belong to you.
Write a list on your piece of paper of the words or phrases that people have used to label you, or words you have used to label yourself, that you no longer wish to influence you. Write at least 3, and as many as you feel called to release.
I am not….
I am not….
I am not…
I am not defined by the labels others place on me.
If you feel called, you can take a moment to either rip this paper up into little pieces, or (safely) light it on fire in a metal bowl, releasing the grip these erroneous labels have had on any part of you. When you are finished, you can bury the ash/pieces of paper and let the earth hold the energy that is no longer yours.
Next, take your second piece of paper and write at least 3 “I am” labels/statements about yourself. You can think back to the “I am not” paper and write down the opposites of those ‘nots’, or you can come up with your own self-identifiers. Remember that your “I am’s” do not have to be set in stone- they can change and evolve with time. remember that you contain multitudes, and that your contradictions are more than welcome here. :)
I am…..
I am…
I am…
I am unique. I am sovereign. I am valuable.
When you feel complete, turn the paper over and write at least 3 statements that start with “I am a part of” or “I am interconnected with”.
I am a part of…
I am a part of…
I am a interconnected with…
I am a interconnected with…
I am a part of the interdependent web of life. I am one with everything.
To finish, take these pages of your self-identified sovereignty and self-identified interconnectedness, and hold them to your heart. Close your eyes and take 3 deep breaths. Remember that you are greater than your labels, greater than words, and that your self-identifications weave you into an integral part of the beautiful fabric of life.
Keep your pages with you over the next week, as reminders of who you are and what you are a part of. Feel free to edit and change them as needed.
Thanks for reading, listening and ritual-ing with me on this watery moon. As always, much gratitude for your likes, shares, and subscribes.
See you next time, when the moon’s new in Virgo <3
xoxxo,
Alison