Tonight as I scrolled through my socials, the first thing that caught my eye was an excited somatic practitioner’s reel about how science recently ‘discovered’ a new organ called Interstitia. The connective tissue that holds our bodies together and that used to be thought of as simple filler is actually a fundamental part of our bodies, the fascial network, a living, fluid-filled lattice that generates it’s own electrical signals.
The second video I stopped for was about a new 3D map of the universe, which was made by over 900 researchers worldwide over the course of 5 years. Using a high-tech instrument in Arizona with 5000 fiber-optic eyes, they were able to see a whopping 47 million galaxies and quazars and 20 million stars, thus creating the most high resolution map of the universe ever made. Through this project, they hope to learn more about dark energy, the stuff that makes up 70% of the universe. (My guess: it’s probably like fascia is to the body).
The third post I clicked through was by my teacher and friend Britten La Rue in a musing about Matriarchy. She writes:
“Your self-trust is the disobedience that is already ending the patriarchy. The self-trust that you will not abandon yourself, ever.
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One by one is how it will go. The matriarchy won’t have a single leader. It won’t have a singular hero. It is all of us.”
What struck me deeply, as we approach this Full Moon in Scorpio, is that all of these posts were about the exact same thing. There is a fundamental truth that underlies them, which feels so on-point for this Uranus in Gemini * Pluto in Aquarius era we’re just now in the beginning of.
That truth is:
The next “big thing” is a whole bunch of small things.
The next big thing is a network of interconnected small things.
Interstitia and galaxies and matriarchy, hooray! But how does that relate to the full moon in Scorpio?
Glad you asked.
TL;DR: Because Scorpio rules the compost, the season when cellular boundaries between life forms begin to break down and merge with eachother, where what once was singular becomes intimate with the plural.
The full moon on Friday, May 1st, is in Gate 44, the gate of Alertness in the Human Design Mandala. This is the gate that the sun transits through at Halloween, the cross-quarter day of Samhain, the time of the thinning of the veil. This gate is all about recognizing that we are not alone in the universe- we are part of a deeply rich web of relations.
Gate 44 lives in the Spleen center in the Human Design bodygraph, and is one of the many splenic gates of Scorpio season. The Spleen is one of the oldest centers, the most primal awareness we carry, the animal part of us that knows the truth wayyy before the mind does. The spleen is immune intelligence, great at pattern recognition, where your body reads the vibe instantly, without a single word being exchanged.
And across the sky from Gate 44, the sun is in Gate 24, Rationalization. This gate sits in the Ajna, a frequency of the mind doing loops to make coherent what you body already sensed. Gate 24 is one of the many throat center gates of Taurus season, evoking a blossoming into your true voice. Gate 24 is the place where the flower opens to the bee and says: here I am, in all my glory.
These two gates, from Taurus to Scorpio, form an axis of instinct and reason. The spleen knows something before the words are there, and the mind does its work to translate that knowing into something understandable.
The full moon in gate 44 is the Halloween gate, a splenic energy that sees through walls, that knows that the universe is more than what we can see and touch in the tangible realm. The Gene Keys calls the shadow of Gate 44 Interference, and I think that word is worth sitting with. The invisible spirits that are moving through the veil at Halloween, the ones we might tend to avoid or ward off, along with the ancestral patterns we’re always trying to not repeat - these are not actually interference, if we don’t look at them that way.
If we look at the Gift frequency of this gate, Teamwork, we can see that they are a fundamental interstitial, galactic infrastructure- a connective tissue that holds us together, that creates it’s own electrical charge. The spirits that emerge at this full moon are made up of the accumulated cellular memory of everyone in your web of relations who had to survive something in order for you to be here. Your grandmother’s particular way of going quiet when she felt afraid, or the way your great-grandfather knew before anyone said a word that the harvest was going to be lean. Instead of seeing these as curses, we can see them as messages from our spirit team. Dispatches from the deep root system that you- your beautiful, radiant self- are the flowering tip of.
Coming to Meet is the I’Ching name for hexagram 44, and I see the meeting it describes not as an encounter between two strangers on a road- but between you and the whole interstitial web of life that has been reaching toward this very moment from below the soil. This full moon in Scorpio, pay reverence to the mycelium. This full moon in Scorpio, give gratitude to the compost. To the ones who sang to the bonfire before you. To the more-than-human realm that speaks constantly in pattern, in the language of seasonality. Gate 44 is the gate that knows how to read all of what’s beneath the surface- the roots, the relational web. It is a primordial alertness in the service of recognizing that we are not alone in this, and we never were.
Full moons are mirrors. That is always true. But this one in particular is asking: what root system is trying to communicate with the spring blossom that is you right now? And are you considering it interference, or letting it come through as part of your team?
A moon of speaking from your roots
I’ve been practicing this a lot myself lately. In the Magician’s Table, a container I’m part of that I’ve spoken of here before, we share readings with a partner and then vocalize six or seven minutes of feedback and love and appreciation to our reader. No notes, just speaking from the heart, from the gut, from the spleen. And I’ll tell you, for someone whose authority in human design is G Center, meaning I make sense of things by hearing myself talk, this has been an edging practice. My voice cracks a little in the places where I still don’t believe myself, and I go faster through the things I’m not sure I have the right to say.
Taurus rules the throat in medical astrology. This whole season is a season of speaking, letting your voice move through your body the way a blossoming flower lets the sap move up through its stalk when the warmth returns to the earth, allowing whatever wants to move through move. This podcast episode, if you choose to listen (in the player above or by searching for Living the Spiral anywhere you find podcasts), is a practice in sap moving up through my stalk. I normally have notes to follow, but this one was an exercise in free speech :)
If you haven’t tried this, I recommend giving yourself a voice note today. Say something out loud that you’ve been thinking to yourself. You don’t have to post it anywhere or make it beautiful. The full moon in Scorpio is asking you to go under the surface of yourself and bring something back up to the bright sunshine, where Taurus season’s Mayday is asking you to speak it into the world as a blossom.
A Mayday/Beltane Invitation
Beltane is one of the fire festivals in the Wheel of the Year. Historically in the Celtic and Gaelic world, at this time of year all hearth fires were extinguished in the home and then re-lit from a central communal bonfire. That practice feels so nourishing …. the idea that you would let go of the fire you’ve been tending privately so that it could be renewed from something shared.
With Gate 44 holding this full moon, take a moment to remember that we are at this crossroads, the Taurus-Scorpio axis. Between deep intimacy with what is alive and blooming and a deep intimacy with everything that has gone into the compost to become the soil.
I’m weaving all of this into a course that’s been living in me since January, when I was sick and my world was filled with so much dreaming. It is called Your Heart Is a Compass, and it follows the eight gates of the G Center through the eight holy days of the Wheel of the Year, woven with the story of Inanna’s descent to the underworld. It’s on Tuesday evenings Five weeks, starting May 19th on Zoom. Early bird pricing at $222 is open through May 6th.
I know the thread count here is high. The Pagan calendar, Human Design, Sumerian myth. But when I look at the compass I painted in January, when I hold all of these threads together, I see that same interstitial, fascial, matriarchal web, and know they are not tangled. They are woven.
This course brings together different lineages of the same knowing: that your heart is the most reliable compass you have, that the earth’s seasonal pulse is always there to orient you when you’ve lost the thread, and that we have to descend deep into the soil in order to grow the most colorful blossom.
If you want a taste of what the course will be like before you commit, come to my Blossoming into Beltane ritual on Tuesday, May 5th from 5 to 7pm Mountain. It is a two-hour Zoom ritual, and it is free for paid subscribers/Embody the Revolution members with code EMBODY (hey, if you’ve read this far and you’re not a paid subscriber, I invite you to use the code for a free ticket too!)
Register here:
Happy full Scorpio moon, y’all. It’s time to go deep, pay reverence to the deep fascial web of the cosmos, and rise up to speak your most flowery truth.
Questions about the course or the ritual or anything else?
Write me at alison@hearthandspiral.com.
