The New Moon in Virgo and the portal to the Days of Awe
How we can edit sweetness and light into the fabric of our grief
The New Moon in Virgo is exact tonight at 9:40 pm ET. Can you sense into the ways the light has shifted in your world in the last few weeks? Here is what I wrote about the next few days in my September forecast a few weeks ago:
We get another cosmic hand-off in the Virgo arena of our charts as the New Moon alights on the 14th, just a day before Mercury stations direct in the same space. Those perplexing questions that came up during the last week of August? Answers should begin to flash on the screen of your mind now. Give it a minute, because the Mercury Retro-shade lasts until the end of the month, but you’re definitely getting yellow lights now instead of red ones.
Virgo season, for me, is the ideal editing season. People with Virgo placements are often excellent editors, because they are magicians who can take unfinished art and give it what it needs to be something meaningful in the real, lived world — by paring and peeling away what’s not needed. That is where Pisces mysticism becomes Virgo’s material — a true manifestation, not just an imaginary fancy.
I’m deep in edits on my book now, keeping the printed manuscript on my radiator’s decorative cover in front of my south-facing window next to my desk. Sometimes when I’m searching for a word or turn of phrase or honing a concept, I look over at the white pages as the Sun dapples and dances through the tree branches, making that reflected light shimmer for a moment on my work. I turn the edited pages over and use a journal to weigh down the yet-unedited pages, still to be purged and pruned. The morning Sun is beginning to reach more deeply into my living room now and perfectly framing my book as it’s being born, and in my imagination, blessing my pages with the careful precision and protection that only Virgo season solar energy can provide.
I’m also, perhaps not incidentally, recovering from what I’m 99 percent sure was Covid, yet not confirmed with a positive test as is so often the case. (I tested three times.) As I’ve mentioned here, I still mask religiously, but I suspect that I caught this while masked on a train to Cold Spring on Labor Day weekend with hordes of unmasked. One-way masking does work, but who knows, maybe when I stuck the wand of my lipgloss under it, I let some of those particles in. I’ll never know, and that’s part of what I feel moved to embrace now — making healthy choices even in the midst of the unknown.
Virgo season is also healing season, and this one, for me, recalls the early fall of 2019.
This was when I attended the massive UN Climate March and the Sex Expo in the same week, went to an inspiring brunch helmed by an inspirational talk by Bill McKibben, and promptly got desperately, horrifically sick in a way I had never been before, on the second night of Rosh Hashana, after I’d been to the river to do tashlich and witnessed a houseless man saved from drowning in a miraculous water rescue. I remember being in my bathtub that night and thinking to myself, “This is the worst sore throat that I think I’ve ever had, huh.”
I was down with that illness for about ten days, feverish and aggressively coughing, using my neti pot 3 times a day, eating plates of fiery garlic, onion, and cayenne pepper-drenched veggies, and inhaling the entirety of Fleabag and the first season of Succession. I thought it was a bad early flu (this was six months before Covid broke the world in March of 2020). It was only in retrospect that I considered that I may have had one of the earliest cases of Covid in New York City. Of course, I’ll never know.
We’re about to enter the turning of the year as the autumnal equinox arrives about a week from now. But first, we let go of what we no longer need to carry. We can and should use this New Moon to manifest, but it also requires a careful edit. After this, we head into eclipse season, a time of unalterable change and unpredictability. If you can, use this Virgo lunation to write out precise plans, set careful intentions, and allow yourself to taste some sweetness even as you pour honey into jars for safekeeping — because you’ll need to taste it again, and again, again during the next six months.
I wrote the following during last year’s Days Of Awe, on the eve of Yom Kippur, as I contemplated the threads I would cut and those I would aim to weave:
Anhedonia, defined as “the absence of pleasure,” is a concept that’s been on my mind a lot since the pandemic began in 2020. We’ve mostly cast off our masks now and accepted “the pandemic is over” as a cultural norm, despite Long Covid, even though the virus is still greedily mutating and still killing our elderly, despite the millions of immunocompromised people unable to safely return to “normal” life.
This is in part because of how we ached for pleasure when it was inaccessible to us (it’s also because of capitalism, but that’s for another essay). In the almost three years since we were locked down and denied human contact and other pleasures, I’ve noticed that many clients and friends have a broken, halting relationship to their own pleasure. From inability to orgasm to low desire, there is a lot of work for a clinical sexologist to do right now. Collectively, we’ve forgotten how to feel good, but a lot of us are adept at faking it. So many don’t even acknowledge their trauma, and there is an epidemic of dysregulated nervous systems out there. What’s good for that? Pleasure, of course. That’s the hamster wheel we’re on.
I’m rushing to finish and post this before sundown, so I’ll be brief as we enter the holiest day of the year for my ancestors. As a mostly secular Jew, I participate in the high holy days in my own creative way. One of my favorite rituals of this time of year is called Tashlich – which translates to “cast off.” It involves throwing your ‘sins’ (you can substitute ‘sins’ with regrets, harms, or anything you want to leave behind in the previous year) into a body of water. As you throw pebbles or bread into the river or sea, you meditate on what you’d like to let go off. It’s typically done on the 1st day of the Jewish New Year, but I try to do it sometime during the Days of Awe – the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when our objective is to get written into the Book of Life for another year.
At this somber, reflective moment, I’m thinking about what it means for our relationship with pleasure when we pause it with intention. For hedonism enthusiasts like me, for those that experience the divine in states of sexual ecstasy, for those who recognize pleasure as a kind of medicine for the mind, soul, and body, the idea of purposeful restriction can be confusing.
Mercury is direct, and soon Pluto and Saturn will follow. People are talking about the flirty state of sweetness and light inherent in Libra Season, and sure, that’s here for us on the surface. But October is a far more complicated month than we’ve seen in a while, with a searing Solar Eclipse in Scorpio on the 25th and Mars stationing retrograde on the 30th. (I wrote a bit about Mars in Gemini and the retrograde here). Our human instinct is to see a green light (the end of a retrograde) and rush into the breach without having contemplated the nature of our pauses – whether they’ve been forced by circumstance (like a pandemic) or intentionally taken, like when we choose to take a social media fast or observe a spiritual fasting ritual.
I invite you now, as I step away at a sundown, to pause for a moment and let that pause inform how you feel the next time you experience pleasure.