Tonight's New Moon Is A Reminder Of Your Capacity To Love

Tonight is the night of the Taurus new moon and I'm in a car with a cracked dashboard; a Pisces is bumping me along the highway to a new moon gathering in New Lebanon, New York. The CD player is unleashing Cesária Évora singing love songs made of earth tones, and the backseats are littered with what one Aries-passenger assures me are the fluffy seedlings of London Plane trees. There's a lot of fire and water in this car, but none of us are without our spiritual practices, our pre-car hip stretches, and small moments of meditative silence. "This car is a safe space," we joke to each other, intoning the impossibility of such a thing as we pass around dried mango from the co-op, chips we're assured are "really good." We imagine what modality might spark a sense of safety within us, a hypnotist? A therapist? A somatic meditation involving blindfolds and perfectly ripe tomatoes? We are, we agree, open to the simulation of safety, the imagined sense of it.

Imagining safety, it seems, is not unlike a looking at a picture of a black hole. There's information there and yearning too. But, what else? Dread. Knowing that whatever the infinite is, we are always just outside of experiencing it on this Earth of very real material and emotional limitations. Safety isn't something Taurus is after, though, since safety and security are not the same. As for security, no matter what you've read, be assured that a Taurus knows the difference between what circumstances promote security and the refutation of life's precarity. Once a Taurus pledges their time to anything, they work hard and tirelessly. To quote a documentary about pandas, they are not lazy, they are energetically efficient. Devotional drive aside, when a Taurus senses that their labor doesn't line up with their highest good or their financial well-being, they walk away—definitely, firmly, and with no regrets.

this we were, this is how we tried to love,

and these are the forces they had ranged against us,

and these are the forces we had ranged within us,

within us and against us, against us and within us.

Devotion does not refute precarity, to stand still doesn't mean to stay safe, and sometimes the familiar ways that promise to be tried and true are anything but true for the unfamiliar terrain of our recovery. Healing demands a new presence, a different way of showing up. You might imagine the time of the new moon on the week of Beltane as a kind of new chance.

Imagine, instead, that this new moon is not a new chance, but a gathering of the old understandings. It invites the gods of war, dreams, and fortune to a fire sparked by the gods of love and discipline.

In the old ways, the revelers ran their herds through the smoke to purify them and protect them from illness—illness of the body and illness of the spirit. The revelers jumped the fire, prayed for fertility, and pledged themselves to each other. What devotions do you aim to make to these sacred entities and what devotions fall from you; are no longer your will or your way? The night is without moonlight, the fire like a puncture in the tapestry. In the black night, may you grow fertile with hope and creative spirit. May you feel yourself wed to the divine purpose of all things. Here is your black hole, your infinite capacity for love, the Earth weds the sky in consummate darkness.