The dark Moon is in Aquarius today. New Moon tomorrow evening.
Under dark moons there’s always a bit of magic in the air. In the fixed air sign of Aquarius we should watch for the spirits of air to surprise us. The spirits of air are the spirits of invention, talkativeness, and progress. They are so much a part of the online world we live in…the grand visions of utopia and slick digital advertising, ideas moving like particles in higher and higher definition, streaming news like jetstreams and gas clouds rising up here and there as images and concepts “go viral.” What’s going viral in our lives right now? Sometimes we get so enamored by a new idea that we don’t realize the idea is the background not the foreground. We’re so quick to generalize and abstract from an image it’s usefulness or application. But if we look in the foreground more clearly, we might recognize the actual focus, the living image of what’s rising in our lives.
For example, recently I’ve come up with many new ideas for my astrology practice. Specific new offerings or services came to mind one after another during our recent mercury retrograde. It’s very easy to mistake these new action items for the foreground (the focus) of the psychic shift that is happening, when really they are the background of a more specific (and paradoxically broader) image.
Reflecting more carefully what I’ve been able to see is that the real focus has been on slowing down and spending more concentrated time with all the different aspects of my work. In the background of this focus, this image of a slow man thinking, the various ideas for my new services have risen. The reason it’s so important for me to reverse the placement of these images is because the services I want to offer are based in the slowness and not the other way around. This follows on a theme that began for me last winter and spring when I was hitting a road block with my new book. I did an IChing reading that essentially said, “make faster your slowness,” or “quicken your slow.” Which is another way of saying, “make slowness a more exciting feature of your work.” At which point I stopped writing my book, set it aside, and started focusing on my daily horoscope writing and the concentrated reading and research of archetypal psychology.
All of this is to say, when airy new ideas come into our lives it’s easy to miss the larger and more specific image and make it into a handful of cheap action items. It’s easy to miss the foreground begging for our focus. An easy exercise right now is to look at three or four new ideas, plans, or action items in your life. Can you see a broader or more specific image that they are all reflecting?
New plans suffer early if they haven’t been nourished deeply enough before implementation by this kind of reflection. The longer we sit with our ideas and let them breathe and move around naturally the more likely we are to see which god they belong to. How can we offer our ideas to the world if we don’t know to which god the sacrifice is being made or from which god the ritual has been requested?
It’s a good day to look at all of this both because dark moons tend to generate spontaneous combustions of insight and inspiration from the unconscious, especially now in the inventive sign of Aquarius, but also because around new moon times we get stir crazy or trigger happy and we don’t take our time at the outset of the new cycle.
Prayer: today is for the god in the foreground
Under dark moons there’s always a bit of magic in the air. In the fixed air sign of Aquarius we should watch for the spirits of air to surprise us. The spirits of air are the spirits of invention, talkativeness, and progress. They are so much a part of the online world we live in…the grand visions of utopia and slick digital advertising, ideas moving like particles in higher and higher definition, streaming news like jetstreams and gas clouds rising up here and there as images and concepts “go viral.” What’s going viral in our lives right now? Sometimes we get so enamored by a new idea that we don’t realize the idea is the background not the foreground. We’re so quick to generalize and abstract from an image it’s usefulness or application. But if we look in the foreground more clearly, we might recognize the actual focus, the living image of what’s rising in our lives.
For example, recently I’ve come up with many new ideas for my astrology practice. Specific new offerings or services came to mind one after another during our recent mercury retrograde. It’s very easy to mistake these new action items for the foreground (the focus) of the psychic shift that is happening, when really they are the background of a more specific (and paradoxically broader) image.
Reflecting more carefully what I’ve been able to see is that the real focus has been on slowing down and spending more concentrated time with all the different aspects of my work. In the background of this focus, this image of a slow man thinking, the various ideas for my new services have risen. The reason it’s so important for me to reverse the placement of these images is because the services I want to offer are based in the slowness and not the other way around. This follows on a theme that began for me last winter and spring when I was hitting a road block with my new book. I did an IChing reading that essentially said, “make faster your slowness,” or “quicken your slow.” Which is another way of saying, “make slowness a more exciting feature of your work.” At which point I stopped writing my book, set it aside, and started focusing on my daily horoscope writing and the concentrated reading and research of archetypal psychology.
All of this is to say, when airy new ideas come into our lives it’s easy to miss the larger and more specific image and make it into a handful of cheap action items. It’s easy to miss the foreground begging for our focus. An easy exercise right now is to look at three or four new ideas, plans, or action items in your life. Can you see a broader or more specific image that they are all reflecting?
New plans suffer early if they haven’t been nourished deeply enough before implementation by this kind of reflection. The longer we sit with our ideas and let them breathe and move around naturally the more likely we are to see which god they belong to. How can we offer our ideas to the world if we don’t know to which god the sacrifice is being made or from which god the ritual has been requested?
It’s a good day to look at all of this both because dark moons tend to generate spontaneous combustions of insight and inspiration from the unconscious, especially now in the inventive sign of Aquarius, but also because around new moon times we get stir crazy or trigger happy and we don’t take our time at the outset of the new cycle.
Prayer: today is for the god in the foreground
Image by courtesy of Ape Lad, at creative commons image licensing
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