Tonight, the moon is new in Sagittarius and Mercury is direct, and finally it feels like we can breathe. This new moon comes only ten hours after Mercury’s station, with which all three personal planets (Merc, Venus, Mars) are direct for the first time in months. With expansive Jupiter lending its benevolence to its home sign of Sag, this new moon feels like the first sunny day after a season of fog. Sagittarius’s buoyant, optimistic, adventurous energy, which has been dampened by the Venus and Mercury retrogrades, is finally kindling. I can feel it rising in me like a warm glow, slowly, gently. Today, hope feels . . . easier. Natural. Uncomplicated. Do you feel it?
The Sag new moon, for all its optimism and fire, always comes at the darkest part of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, directly preceding the Winter Solstice. In this moment of maximum darkness, the night growing towards its longest on the 21st, this fire moon arrives. However, the moon, too, is cloaked in darkness. The fire moon reflects no light to Earth. But still, it’s there, its warming presence invisibly radiating, gently glowing our bones, bringing us faith through the dark. There must be some divine design.
Many of us have been floundering recently. We’ve each been separately drowning in the voids of our individual unknowns. But this new moon is a shift, I hope. A shift INTO hope. Maybe we don’t know what we’re doing. Maybe we have no fucking clue. But let’s be optimistic that our arrow will find its target, even if we don’t know what the target looks like, even if we’ve misplaced our quiver, even if we don’t know how the hell to use a bow. That’s okay. That’s perfect. Let this moon’s hope and zest for discovery fill you up, up, up to the brim. Have faith that somehow, someway, you’ll find your mark. You will.
With the moon square to Mars and Neptune in Pisces, the weather isn’t ripe for strictly defining that target. It’s not time for refining goals and laying plans (yet—Capricorn season is a-comin’). But the stars ARE ripe for dreaming. For thinking and imagining. For casting the net of our desires into the starry void and seeing what we catch. With Mercury direct, we’ll soon be synthesizing the lessons we’ve learned over this long retrograde season, but at this moment of stationing, not everything is clear yet. This is the moment of stillness when the arrow reaches the apex of its arc, when it hangs in the air, floating for a breath before speeding down to earth. So don’t force answers tonight. Don’t expect to know what it all means, what it’s all for. Allow yourself to float, to flow, to dream the possibilities. Sagittarius rules the tarot card Temperance, after all—the alchemist, the synthesis, the liquid fire. Temperance teaches us to be fluid instead of rigid, to defy the boxes, to exist instead of define.
New moons are times to set intentions, and here, in this last new moon of 2018, as we slip out of retrograde season, let’s set an intention to be hopeful. Set an intention to be okay with not knowing. Set an intention to be open to possibility, to welcome expansion and fluidity, to follow the dancing flame of your radiant heart into the dark.
The unknown may seem scary, friends, but we only fear the dark because we can’t see what’s there. Maybe there are monsters. Maybe there are disappointments. Maybe there’s pain. But maybe there are gifts, too, and opportunities, and love, and knowledge. Maybe there’s change, and comfort, and achievement. Maybe there’s everything you’ve always fucking wanted, or something better.
The unknown is full of profound discovery, friends. Don’t you want to find out what’s there?
THE CANDLE SPREAD
For hope. For faith. For not knowing. For opening to discovery.
THE DARK: the wild unknowns that surround you.
THE MOON: how to be okay with those unknowns, how to trust in the void.
THE CANDLE: your core values and passions, the fuel for your expansion.
THE MATCH: how to welcome exploration, curiosity, possibility.
THE FLAME: how to nurture hope, faith, and optimism.
THE GLOW: the vast discovery that awaits.
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