If you follow me on social media, you already know that this witch worships most meaningfully at the New Moon. Each New Moon brings new opportunities to go deep and invites fresh intentions for deliberate engagement with my life. I’m always excited about a New Moon.
This month, I practically tingle with anticipation: the December 2017 New Moon in Sagittarius is huge.
On its own and in partnership with the upcoming Solstice and New Year, the New Moon in December 2017 represents a powerful turning point. Since I’ve been eagerly awaiting its turn–and actively exploring its potential impact–I’ve got more than a mere meme to share on this one.
This one warrants a whole post.
(Also, some more colorful than usual language…)
You will find lots of beautiful insights curated from inspired astrologers at mysticmamma.com–and there are many other astrologers sharing their thoughts on this one. Since none of them reflect the interesting metaphor I’m playing with, I’m sharing my metaphor and broader thoughts here in the hopes they will empower you as they are empowering me.
First, let’s restate the obvious: the waning year has been uncommonly challenging.
Lots of us have eagerly embraced every chance we’ve had to leave some of the old, bedraggled garbage behind and create something new, magickal, and positive. Many of us have been exhausting ourselves organizing our energy, intentions, vision boards, calendars, journal thoughts, rituals, and psychic machines to get the eff through this.
So I know I’m not the only one coming at this New Moon, the Winter Solstice, and the New Year with wide eyes, open hands, and an eager, even anxious, heart.
And that’s perfect.
Because together these three events represent the three doors we will need to go through to forge ahead with new plans in Capricorn.
Before we all dive through the doors and race boldly to the wild, uncharted territory ahead, though, I want to share the metaphor with which I’ve been grappling; it’s one that has resonated deeply with my astrology friends and one that has helped me immensely as I’ve been preparing for these three doors. So as not to trigger anyone, I’ll keep it in the first person. If you are able to pick the metaphor up and try it on as your own without triggering complicated feelings around the metaphor itself, I encourage you to do so.
For quite some time, there has been an underlying feeling that things that once were simple are hard.
Things I once knew how to do with ease and grace feel complicated, unnatural, bungled, and messy. Automatic responses from places that once served me are not merely ineffective now, they’re painful. Passive patterns of how I am in the world–patterns I once wore as easily as my own skin to protect me–are actively conspiring against me.
Dialogues, both internal and external, have focused on how things need to change, how some parts of me no longer serve me, how they are, in fact, not a part of the me that is here, now, and becoming.
And so for months now, I’ve been saying it’s time to let things go. And for months I’ve been coming at “letting go” thinking I could lose each thing like I might pull something from my purse: RECOGNIZE IT, RUMMAGE FOR IT IN MY BAGGAGE, GRAB IT, THROW IT OUT. Easy-peasy?
NO.
These things have stuck like chewed gum to the shoe of every new step I tried to take. In spite of my best efforts to put things behind me, I saw the same things coming up over and over again, not just for me, but also for friends, family, my community, my world.
So in meditation at the last New Moon, I asked gently, honestly, and earnestly: what the fuck?
The answer I got has brought me more comfort, peace, and purpose than I could have imagined–it’s “the metaphor” and it is saving my ass right now.
THIS TIME, NOW, IS PALLIATIVE CARE.
Yes, these parts of me are dying, but they aren’t dead yet.
My patterns, my old stories, my old ways of being served at one time to protect and empower me. We have been in intimate relationship for most of my life. They will not fall away like leaves from the tree of me, blowing weightless into the wind. They had real substance and real gravity. Somewhere, once, we were friends.
So I have to sit at their bedside and grapple with the pain of watching them atrophy and seeing them lose their power.
We must sit together in stillness to actively reminisce about our best memories together and forgive the slights and pains left between us.
Yes, it’s time for me to let go, but this isn’t breaking up and ghosting. This is a powerful transition, a real death and dying, of parts of me once beloved. It’s time for compassion, authenticity, patience, and courage.
Because the head on the pillow is mine and the hand I am holding is my own.
With this knowing in my heart, my sense of urgency has dissolved. The plans I am making for the December New Moon surround not how to abandon and avoid the things that are dead in me by running to something new, but rather how to facilitate a peaceful transition and how best to prepare so as to reduce the chaos that will come on the other side. Because when this tips over once and for all, new feelings will surface. I can expect to embrace some relief that the active suffering of my old patterns is over. I can also expect to face the terror that I really and truly don’t have a clue how to live without them.
So for this December 2017 New Moon, I am opening my time and protecting my energy to be available at the bedside of my Self.
I am readying and steadying myself.
I am preparing to say goodbye and let those pieces of me rest in peace.
I am preparing to do the work that will allow me to move on powerfully with what needs be done at and in their wake.
I am setting the intentions that will mark my Winter Solstice and inform my focus for 2018 with a keen understanding that the “me” that will execute them will be new, fragile, and inexperienced–AND curious, moved, determined, and motivated in ways I can’t yet begin to know.
And I am sitting in gratitude for my old friend, my dying Self, even as I feel new possibilities quickening.
NOTE: If you have NOT actively been engaging the parts of you that no longer serve you, if you have NOT been confronted by repeated patterns in yourself or in the world that frustrate you, if you do NOT already have a sense of knowing that it is time to give up on some fight, if you have NOT been actively trying to build some new truth for yourself, the next few weeks might be unsettling.
Staying with the metaphor, these weeks could bring a moment that feels like a phone call from out of the blue letting you know you unexpectedly have to say goodbye to someone beloved, someone with whom you are no longer close but with whom you nevertheless have an intimate history.
This time might propel you into deep introspection and uncertainty.
One last note for all of us…
Honestly, these three doors are opening to uncertainty for everyone–individuals, communities, and the collective consciousness alike.
We will each and all be grappling with major change in the next three weeks.
As I so often say: here, again, be gentle with yourselves.
Begin to build the peace you want to sit in at the Solstice now. Respond to calls in your body, heart, and soul for healing now. Reconcile unspoken feelings between you and you now. Bring tenderness, compassion, grace, and comfort to your own experiences today–and release both you and others from any responsibility to old, dead, unproductive, and previously painful things in all your tomorrows…
Mercury will set direct and the fog will lift. Soon we will be in precious, possible, perilous, and beautiful territory. See you there soon.
